The Poet King

by Ilana C. Myer

  Seething, she let him draw her close. He held her tightly. He smelled of forest, she thought; of pine needles and winter.

  His head pressed to hers, he said again, “I missed you.” He stroked her back. Differently now than earlier. This time as if he tried to confirm she was real. His hand moved up to the nape of her neck, to her coiled hair. To the cleft of her jaw. Feeling his way like a blind man. “Everything’s better now that you’re here,” he said. “You seemed so long away.”

  She circled the room with him, faster and faster, to a melody she had never heard. The musicians labored hard: they sweated in the lamplight. Even though the hall was cold.

  No way to gather her thoughts. Elissan was no help; at the moment he looked like a handsome, vacant doll. A mannequin king. She had hardly had time to register what she had learned far beneath where they danced, in the heart of the tunnels. The creature that consumed the Fool.

  Each time their dance took them to the edge of the room, there stood one of the Chosen, motionless, with that intent stare into the distance. Certainly not looking at her. Nor at any of the dancers. And yet—she thought, whirling around again in Elissan’s embrace—she saw a difference, in the customarily blank expressions. When she looked closely.

  As if they waited for something.

  CHAPTER

  12

  “ARE you ready?”

  Julien sounded as if she asked herself as much as him. They stood on a stone outcropping on the western shore. It was not yet daybreak; grey sky met grey, tossing waves. The winds were biting. Julien’s hair tangled and flew, but she was composed. Awaited his reply.

  Dorn hefted the Silver Branch in his arms. “As I’ll ever be.” She had told him he must be the one to carry it. “Do you think … Is there too much fog? To be doing this?”

  Beyond what they could see of the water, the mist was white and solid as a curtain.

  “We’ll let him be the judge of that,” she said, cool and distant. Unlike herself.

  Dorn shivered a little. Him.

  “All right,” he said. “So it’s to be now, then.”

  “Yes. Now.”

  Dorn inhaled some of the chill air and sighed it out. Now. He began to wave the Branch in his arms, slowly, back and forth. A strange motion; it brought to mind a ritual. The red-gold apples, which until now had not stirred, shimmered with movement: released their song. It was low, yet not drowned out by the winds and water; seemed instead to join with these. Once more Dorn found himself filled with a yearning for things bright and gone. As he waved the Branch, felt he released this feeling to the wind and inflicted it on himself with the same act. It pierced him like a kind of grief for nothing he could name.

  Julien kept her eyes on the water. The torc from the groundskeeper’s nets was clasped at her neck.

  When she placed her hand on Dorn’s arm, he took it as a signal. He ceased the motion of the Branch. The apples trembled once more, then fell still. And quiet. Now there was no sound but wind and the crash of waves. Yet the music had left its imprint on him; he felt an inward tug, that longing.

  A gasp beside him. Julien was pointing into the mist. He saw the outline of a shape. A shape that soon resolved itself: A boat that rose and dipped with the waves; a man who paddled it. As the two watched, the boat pulled toward the rocks where they stood. Came to a stop.

  Dorn released his breath, slowly. Now he could admit it to himself: He had not expected this to work. Was disturbed beyond words that it had.

  Julien led the way. As she had led throughout, ever since the day of the white wolves’ attack. The ferryman, standing in the boat, watched her approach. A face white as the mist, eyes dead blue. “Payment for passage,” he said.

  Julien unfastened the gold torc from her cloak and held it out. “Will this do?”

  The ferryman paused, as if in thought. Or more—as if he listened for something. Then said, “It is acceptable.” He took it from her. “You may enter.”

  Julien turned to Dorn, then, with a tremulous smile more like herself. “So we’re for it, then.”

  He forced a shrug. “We always seem to get into one scrape or another.” Together they climbed the rocks to where the quayside gave way to pebbles. The boat waited, unnaturally still; impervious to currents and waves. The ferryman waited too. He looked straight ahead.

  As Dorn climbed aboard, he thought of how this was the same boat that had brought him to the Academy all those years ago. That boy of thirteen who’d turned every intent in childhood to reaching this place, to the treasures of knowledge and art that lay within.

  And now…?

  “What do you seek?” The ferryman, toneless.

  Julien had seated herself across from Dorn. She said, “Take us to the lost Isles.”

  Without another word they were pulling away from shore, gliding toward the mist. When it enveloped their boat Dorn could see nothing but white, not even his own hand, but they slid steadily on and through.

  * * *

  SHE had told him of the plan the morning after the white wolves’ attack. She’d had a dream, she said. She’d had several. She didn’t want to go into detail—it had something to do with Seers coming to her. To teach her things.

  “I think it’s supposed to be secret,” Julien had said. Looking regretful. “Something every poet goes through, once they become a Seer. For a while I didn’t have to talk about it, I thought. But one—the eldest, and wisest, I think … he helped me see what to do. How to get out of here.”

  They had to get out, of course. Dorn couldn’t imperil the couple on the Isle with his presence any longer. It made him sick to think he had done so at all.

  Whatever was coming for him, it should have him. No one else.

  There was still Julien’s safety to consider, but for now it seemed he must rely on her—she was a Seer. As for the rest of what she told him …

  “Hidden islands?” he’d murmured. “Gods.”

  They were in the herb garden that morning. The plants in their great pots slick with dew. The light was grey, as it was so often on this isle. So often that it had become a part of his life. He had not noticed, not really, until their journey to a white-lit desert far away.

  He recalled her face upturned to him, oddly canny. She had asked, “Are you really surprised?”

  “You’re not?”

  She thought a moment. Then, “It’s not that I knew. Of course not. But … there are things I have felt at times. I can’t explain it, but you’ve been here longer than I have. You may understand what I mean.”

  He thought it over. “I didn’t know right away, not when I was very young, that I was in a place of strangeness,” he said. “Later, I blamed it all on Elissan Diar. Perhaps I became too much of this place to see it clearly.”

  “And I was always outside.” This sounding shy, and downcast.

  “Not quite,” said Dorn. “Outside and in, is what you were. No one saw you. But you saw things. You still do.”

  She looked grateful, with a hint of tears. Dorn felt, alarmingly, that the girl’s need was strong, and he could do nothing about it. What she needed, he was not even sure. Certainly he could not assure her of her value. He didn’t believe anyone could do that for another. They all knocked about the world, he thought, trying to find their place, to feel as if they belonged.

  That the Branch would summon a boat to them—the boat, the lost ferryman—seemed too bizarre to credit; and yet. So many strange things had happened—what was one more?

  They’d told Owayn and Larantha of their plan. The two had accepted it without question.

  Larantha had set to work preparing packages of food for them. Bread, oat cakes, dried fish, a jar of sloe preserves—things that would keep. And she worried. What would happen when they ran out? “Here’s some money, too,” she said to Dorn, pressing a pouch into his hands. A provision if they reached a place where there were people … where life was ordinary.

  “I can never repay you,” he had said to her, and it was cle
ar he wasn’t referring to the coin she’d thrust into his hands.

  “Just stay safe,” she said. Late that night she baked special biscuits for them. The smell, of cinnamon mainly, crept into Dorn’s sleep and made him hungry even in his dreams. A biscuit with butter was the first thing he ate that morning. The morning they set out to the western shore, loaded with their packages, and the Branch.

  Owayn saw them off at the front gate. “If it goes as planned—if the ferryman comes for you—tell him he owes me a card game.” Then grinned crookedly, as if he knew very well neither of them would say that, in the unlikely event that the ferryman, lost to sea, answered their call.

  * * *

  THE night before they were to leave Academy Isle, Julien visited the Hall of Harps.

  It had been an evening like the rest, with music and stories, no one speaking of their departure. As if there were an unspoken pact to make this last night count against all the rest to come. Julien knew that short as the time had been, she’d miss them both. She and Dorn had been privileged to get to know them, beyond the limited interactions of the past. Beyond what students usually got to know.

  There were more stories of Archmasters. But there were others, too, that Owayn shared through pipe smoke. Of spirits of the sea—Singers, he called them—who resided in the wilder currents. They were blue and green, like the water. The Singers would catch a boat in their watery grip, and sing a verse: The sailor would only be allowed to live if he could supply a verse to match. So the game went on, back and forth. A sailor who succeeded would be borne safe to his destination with the Singers’ voices surrounding them; those who failed were drowned.

  “It would be simple for you,” said Owayn to the two of them with a fond expression. “The two of you living and breathing verses as you do. But you won’t encounter such things if you’re with the ferryman. He knows all the secret routes. Ways to avoid the Singers.”

  So despite their plans for the morning they went to bed late, stretching out their last night on the Isle as far as they could. By the time Julien went to the Hall of Harps it was the middle of the night. She wanted to be alone there once more. For the last time? A thought that was either reasonable or self-indulgent in its drama; she wasn’t sure which. They were going into danger. But wasn’t there a presumption that to worry—to envision the worst outcome—was self-indulgent? Perhaps that was simply how she’d been raised.

  The room was changed now that the Silver Branch was gone. That was one thing she had wanted to see—the difference. With its enduring source of light removed, the Hall was dark; even the gold harps dull by light of the moon. The wall carvings left in shadow.

  Julien Imara lifted her flame to the new carving, the one with the king enthroned. The skull spirals. And in one corner, a poet on a boat.

  A thrill went through her. Were she and Dorn Arrin already part of something foreordained—a story?

  She wanted to turn inward, to ask that white-haired Seer she’d come to love. She wanted to reproach him. You abandoned me. And I don’t even know your name.

  Tonight Dorn slept with the Branch by his side … in case. If there was any chance at all that, for a time, it might afford protection.

  The carving reinforced for her their other purpose. It was not only to remove Dorn Arrin from the Isle. She’d had to piece it together alone, with the aid of books and hints such as this carving; the Seers in her dreams had been oblique. The central image of the carving was surely a sign of the Poet King. The skulls … those were as dire a sign as she could imagine. That they made the shape of the spiral seemed even worse.

  The coronation was to take place any day. The turn of the year. A time of significance for poets. Julien knew that, without knowing how she knew, or anything more.

  It was perhaps too much to hope that they might stop a ceremony in Tamryllin from here—the edge of everything.

  She thought of Valanir Ocune giving her his mark of the Seer. Perhaps there was a purpose to everything, and what seemed impossible could by ingenious means be overcome.

  * * *

  FOR a long time they saw nothing but the white of fog. The movements of the ferryman at the oars were steady. He neither faltered nor spoke. Once or twice, Dorn tried to engage him. He did not answer.

  It was cold, bone-deep, on the water. Winter had come. Julien huddled in her cloak. Across from her, Dorn seemed not to feel it, so lost in thought was he, though the winds battered at him, too.

  When the sighting of land was upon them, Dorn called out to her. Julien looked over her shoulder and saw a vastness: black cliffs rising from the mist. She felt frozen, and not from cold. This boat had signified a between-time where she could do nothing, make no decisions. That was about to end.

  “There are a number of lost Isles,” she said to the ferryman’s back. “Which is this?”

  He did not turn. “The first.” The deadened quality to his voice unchanged. “That which is nearest the border.”

  The border. She shivered uncontrollably now.

  “And its name?” Dorn Arrin, sounding stern. Perhaps a cover for unease.

  The ferryman turned. His face still lifeless. “This is Labyrinth Isle.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  IT would be a long night, people liked to say. The solstice, the turn of the year. It was rung in with songs, as if these were weaponry against frost and dark.

  This year there would be songs for yet another reason: to celebrate the crowning of a king. A man who shone like the sun. It would take place in the hour before twilight. Eve of the longest night.

  Rianna paced in her room. No one was allowed in—no maids, no servants to attend to her. The carved-oak double doors of her chamber barred against intruders. She had to think.

  She had failed. A thought implacable as a boulder.

  Soon she would have to descend. It would be a day of festivities, of display. All of Tamryllin would turn out in the streets to watch the king’s procession. Their new king.

  It was a day remarkable for other reasons. It had snowed the night before in Tamryllin. Not heavy snow—no more than the width of four fingers coated the sill of her casement. Still, it was unusual. Rianna had seen snow only a handful of times in her life.

  Elissan Diar would likely regard it as an omen. A benediction on his reign. Silver-white like the hart he’d shot, like the queen that visited his dreams.

  Rianna knew the path of his mind. She had been as intimate with him as with anyone in her life. Yet she had not killed him when she’d had the chance.

  The night of the winter ball she had thought to take her courage into her hands, despite that she very much wanted to live. She had planned to lure him to her room and investigate the wound in his abdomen as he slept—his weakness. It was likely she would be killed, but what did that matter? Or so she told herself, knowing it mattered to her very much; would matter to her father, her daughter, to Ned. If she’d been willing to die, truly willing, she could have put an end to this long ago.

  She had finally gone against her desires, her nature, the day of the ball. She had arrayed herself in finery and planned to die. But that night, after she had returned from the tunnels with Syme, the king had turned strange. He’d retired to his room with a close guard of Chosen all around him. Rianna had tried to follow, even to use her wiles on those men. They’d blocked her path. Elissan Diar had not even seemed to notice the interchange, appearing lost in thought. There had not been another chance to get near him since. Always, the Chosen clustered around him. They even surrounded his bed at night, a measure Elissan would have scoffed at weeks ago. A living wall, chill and silent, between the king and the world.

  Protecting the king, once their assignment, had become their obsession.

  She had hoped uncovering that weapon in the underground tunnels would lead to something. But all it did was recall the cruelty of the man who loved her. To safeguard a magical weapon for his use, he had sacrificed a living boy. And it was through the Ifreet, and Sym
e Oleir, that he had tortured Marlen in that cellar.

  And so this day had come, the one that would doom them, and Rianna had not even managed to give her life to kill the king. She was ashamed, relieved, and furious.

  A rap at her door. Rianna knew she could not afford to ignore it. She slid the bolt, nearly fell backward, when Etherell Lyr charged inside. “The king wants you.” His voice clipped and cool. “And you, my lady, are not dressed.”

  “Is that your business?” she shot back. She was done being sweet to this snake. “Why are you here?”

  “He sent me.” No need to say who. “He trusts you, even though he shouldn’t. I told him, you know. That you aren’t to be trusted. But the king has made himself more a fool than Syme Oleir when it comes to you.” Etherell looked as if he smelled something distasteful. It made his appearance all the more elevated; a highborn lord in the presence of rabble. “You are to dress and come down.”

  “I take orders from you?” said Rianna. “I think not.”

  “From him, you do,” said Etherell. “Be grateful it’s me here, not one of the Chosen. You won’t be so lucky next time.” He turned away.

  “Why? What do you think one of those boys could do?” she called after him, mocking. Her face and neck were hot. He strode on. She added, “How did you win Sendara back? I’ll bet you had to work for that, more than you liked.”

  He turned. The fury that crossed his face a match for her own. Only a moment, before his features relaxed. He grinned. “I always, always get my way, Rianna. Best remember that.” He turned once more and went off down the hall.

  She stood there fuming. A useless spat, that was. Her pent-up rage expended, impetuously. But she didn’t see how it mattered anymore. Perhaps all she could do was see how things went, and try to save herself. If Elissan Diar attained a sort of enchanted power today, that might be the most she could expect to achieve: escape, retrieve her family, and seek a place where enchantments would never find them.