The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  “I think we should leave.”

  Kirila strode across the muddy yard and pushed open the inn door. It gave onto a gloomy taproom half as large as the whole building, furnished with a few splintery stools and a single long table. A fitful fire of improperly-cured wood blew gusts of gritty smoke into the room, some of which blew out again with the wind sloughing through the chinks in the wall. The rest of the smoke eventually settled, covering everything with sooty ash. Two men sat by the fire, scowling at each other. Both were big, dirty, and roughly-dressed in leather tunics and leggings that carried the persistent smell of goat.

  “Who owns that brown mare, and might she be for sale?” Kirila asked in her assumed boy’s voice. In the shadows Chessie rolled his eyes deprecatingly.

  One of the men spat into the fire. “Who’s asking?”

  “I might be willing to buy her, if the price is right.”

  The man squinted at Kirila’s slight figure. River mud caked his boots, flaking off in dried gray dandruff onto the floor. “A bowl of ale,” he growled at the other man, who lumbered sullenly to his feet and left through a wooden door, slamming it behind him.

  “Now, boy, what’s your price?”

  “I want the saddle and harness, too,” Kirila said firmly. A strange exhilaration tingled down her arms and legs, as though she were growing taller. “In exchange for this.” Slowly, her eyes on the man’s bearded face, she unwrapped a square of cloth and held it out. In the center of the soiled gray wool lay an emerald, precise and cool, darkened by the smoky light to sea-water green.

  The little eyes in the bearded face opened wide, and then the lids abruptly shot down to half-mast. At the same moment the irises also dropped, so that they could be seen completely under the drooping lids. The effect was disconcerting, as if a candle flame had slid down its taper to avoid being snuffed.

  “And where might you have picked up a pretty like that ‘un, boy?”

  “It’s mine,” Kirila said, flushing a little despite herself. She added in a sharper voice, “Take it or leave it!”

  “Oh, I’ll take it, wherever it be from,” the man said softly, “and the rest of the pretties too!” His hand lashed out and grabbed Kirila’s, knocking the emerald to the floor.

  He spun her toward him and clamped his arm across her throat, while the other hand fumbled at her tunic for the exposed hilt of the dagger, a corner of which had worked its way from its makeshift concealment and gleamed dully in the firelight. Chessie sprang at the free arm and sank his teeth into it. The man howled and kicked out at him, keeping a firm hold on Kirila but lunging with the other hand, fingers forked, at the dog’s eyes. His heavy boot connected with Chessie’s taut body with a sickening thump, but before the stiffened fingers were halfway to the purple head clamped onto his bleeding arm, Kirila gripped her dagger and thrust it, back-handed, behind her.

  It slid in above the soft belly with shockingly little thrust, parting the fatty flesh like a well-ripened cheese clear to the gaily-jeweled hilt. The goat-smelling arm across Kirila’s throat jerked sharply, then let go gently as a lover. He looked at her from a dirty face full of uncomplicated surprise, then crumpled heavily to the floor, Chessie still locked on his arm. Kirila stood over him, panting.

  “I saw that, lad!” The second man stood in the doorway, a bowl of ale in his hand. He stumped across the floor, not spilling a drop, his face twisted with sly, triumphant glee inexpertly cloaked with an unaccustomed look of pious justice. “I saw it all, and he asked for it, he did. Jumped you first.”

  Kirila reached over and pulled out her knife, not thinking about it beforehand. The body, which had lain in a tidy if dirty lump, was suddenly covered with blood. Chessie staggered to his feet.

  “Swear to it in front of the Laird himself, I will,” the innkeeper added in the same triumphant voice. “They won’t make you no trouble either at the Castle, lad. Be glad enough Egan’s setted, or I miss my guess.” He slapped his knee with his free hand, chortling soundlessly, careful not to spill the ale.

  Kirila looked again at the body. Fine bits of blowing ash had already floated serenely onto it and stuck to the drying blood. The eyes were open, still surprised. She stumbled out the Inn door, standing in the muddy yard, staring at the night. Chessie limped after her.

  “You couldn’t help it, Kirila,” he said gently.

  “I know that,” she said, whirling around to face him, speaking more loudly than necessary. “Nobody expects to find the world free of Evil. I know that. I’m on a Quest, and even if it’s not a Quest to overthrow Evil in the classic manner, that doesn’t mean I won’t ever encounter it! I knew that!” Her voice rose in shaky fury. “I’m on a Quest, and sometimes that happens, and he attacked first! I had no choice, and I’m on a Quest, and that sort of thing happens!”

  She wheeled away from Chessie and stared straight ahead, her chin lifted defiantly. Then abruptly she turned and threw up into the bushes.

  ●●●

  No one at the Castle did make any trouble. The Lord, whose name was Kelgorn, held a perfunctory inquest at which everyone looked quietly satisfied, and afterward he presensed Kirila with the brown mare. She shuddered a little and refused it. She had been having nightmares when she slept, and during the inquest she often broke into puzzled frowns and shook her head in profoundly sad wonderment at points in the testimony that didn’t seem to warrant such behavior, as during a lengthy discussion on the name of the blacksmith who had married Egan’s only known relative, a sister long since dead. The general opinion was that the lad was a little odd.

  Lord Kelgorn, however, insisted that she take the mare. The rogue Egan, he pronounced ponderously, had no known living relatives, friends, or business associates (here the innkeeper looked determinedly at the floor), and the mare would be useful to a lad traveling alone. He himself had, he added modestly, five lads of his own, although none were permitted to travel unaccompanied, without even a squire, but of course in the position in life to which Providence had been pleased to call him... Kirila accepted the mare.

  Kelgorn also invited her to winter at Castle Reyndak, but this she politely refused. The weather was now wet as well as cold, settling grimly into the three-month winter rains, and it was obvious that they would have to lodge somewhere until the spring. However, she was anxious to leave behind Castle Reyndak and the growing talk of her brave exploit. In addition, she was finding it more difficult than she had supposed to keep up the pretense of being a boy. Already one beak-nosed elderly lady had spent most of the inquest squinting over the top of her knitting at this lad’s hand gestures and the way he balanced his weight on one foot, becoming so absorbed in watching these simple actions that she dropped several stitches. Another lady, considerably, younger, had gazed at Kirila sideways as they passed in the hall, then tossed her head so that her blond curls danced and the scent of rose petals drifted languidly toward the astonished Kirila. The Castle seemed crowded with visitors, and she grew aghast at the complications of sharing a room. Chessie, too, was tired of acting like a dog and of keeping to shadows deep enough to turn purple to black.

  They discussed Egan only once. Kirila stopped in the middle of braiding her hair and said suddenly, “The Kiril family motto is ‘Never Look Back.’”

  “Sounds like a limited precept to me,” Chessie said. “If no one looks back, how does anyone learn anything?”

  “And my mother’s family, the Mareschals—theirs was ‘Never Falter.’”

  “’Was’? Isn’t it still?”

  “When my Great-Uncle Emol was on his Quests, he killed two wyverns, twelve knights most foul, and three demented giants.”

  Chessie said nothing, waiting.

  “After the giants, there was a celebration that went on for three days in the Great Hall, and Rill the Harpist wrote a new ballad about it. They still sing the ballad in Kiril. An escutcheon was added to Emol’s arms, gules, with a brandished mace, and all the ladies wept with joy when he danced with them.”

  She
was holding her braid, half-plaited, stiffly over one shoulder, as though she had forgotten what to do with the rest of it. Her eyes were deep as wells. Finally she whispered, “The knife went in so easy.”

  “Kirila...”

  “And I didn’t even know his name.”

  “Kirila...”

  “I should have at least known his name, if I was going to kill him.”

  “Oh, for—” Chessie said. Pity for her scalded his throat and stomach, but some instinct told him that exasperation would be better. “You don’t know my real name, either, but that doesn’t stop you from associating with me.”

  “Associating? Associating? I killed him!”

  “Yes, you did,” Chessie said, as matter-of-fact as he could manage. “And so he’s dead. When you kill somebody, that happens. He was your knight most foul, your wyvern, your demented giant. So do you want me to write a ballad about it?”

  “No!”

  “Well, then,” Chessie said. But Kirila went on holding her half-braid tautly to one side, and he added, “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Still she didn’t move.

  “Kirila, listen,” Chessie said, though he wasn’t sure what he wanted her to listen to. After a moment he found it and sat up straight on his haunches. “Listen. What was your Uncle Emol questing for?”

  “For?”

  “Yes, for. What was the goal of the quest?”

  “Why—to kill wyverns and giants.”

  “And what’s the goal of yours?”

  “To find the Heart of the World!”

  “Not killing?”

  “No!”

  “Well, then, there you have it. What doesn’t fit, hurts,” Chessie said, and held his breath. Minutes went by. Then Kirila nodded, and he let the breath out. Holding it was turning him grey.

  “I’ll be glad when we’ve left here,” he risked, gulping air. Kirila nodded again. Her eyes still looked at something he couldn’t see, but she finished her braid.

  They left in the middle of a storm, riding through freezing rain for two days, not able to sleep more than a shivering hour at a time. Chessie caught cold, so they took lodgings at the next settlement. This was the small town of Klee, at the eastern edge of the powerful and far-flung Duchy of Tothis. It had been recently discovered that the exotic spice titil, previously imported from across the southern sea at great trouble and expense and so available only to kings, would grow in the soil near Klee. The town was bustling, what with titil seeds being sold and re-sold for expanding amounts of gold, yeoman farmers being made fabulous offers for their hay fields, and emissaries from the Duke of Tothis himself strolling about in dignified parties trying to levy tithes on everything. As a result, Klee had the boom town’s self-absorbed incuriosity toward strangers. Kirila and Chessie stayed the winter in an austere, clean religious house run by an order with no interest in making converts, and were patiently bored.

  She exercised the brown mare, purchased supplies for next spring, and had a local seamstress make her serviceable tunics and divided skirts of brown wool. Another ruby had been pried out of her dagger—it was beginning to look pock-marked, like a survivor of scarlet fever—to pay for everything. Outside, it rained steadily. Chessie taught her several ballads, but he couldn’t help wincing at her erratic sense of pitch, and they very nearly quarreled, not speaking to each other for two days. Outside it rained steadily. Kirila played chess with herself until Chessie grudgingly agreed to play, mostly, he said, because the sight of Kirila congratulating herself on beating herself was driving him crazy. To his own surprise, he discovered that when he didn’t have to play, he liked to play. Within a month he had invented a tricky gambit he called the Purple Defense, and by the end of the winter Kirila, who couldn’t resist a wager, owed him three hundred rubies, forty horses, two castles completely equipped with liveried footmen, and her soul. Outside it rained.

  Three wet, cold months dragged by, but eventually, after a few false alarms when an afternoon of tentative sunshine abruptly turned back into grey storm, the rains stopped, and again it was spring.

  Thirteen

  Kirila and Chessie rode out from Klee on a sharp, clear morning, early enough in the year so that it was still cold until nine o’clock. There were crocuses splashed about, and a few anonymous white flowers that only risked themselves above ground for a few inches, but generally the spring was still brown and muddy and raw. Kirila was sensibly dressed in brown wool instead of bottle-green velvet, she set out at a trot that was easier on the mare than a headlong gallop, and her eyes pinched slightly at the corners, partly from weather lines and partly from a cautious thoughtfulness whenever they approached a new settlement or talked to a stranger on the road. The Quest was a year old.

  Chessie looked exactly the same, enchanted Labrador retrievers being exempt from aging.

  They rode northeast. To the west lay Tothis, populated with small farms, trade-centered towns, numerous manor houses, one university with no scholars of real note, the usual collection of monasteries and convents and abbeys, and the castle of the politically powerful Duke Calentel IV of Tothis. Casual questioning during the winter had convinced Kirila that no one in Klee had ever heard of the Tents of Omnium, or was interested in them once it was clear that no titil was grown there, and she thought it unlikely that the more inhabited regions to the west would know more. Border towns always put more belief in travelers’ tales than did the centers of civilization. To the south, across the great river, lay the lands of her childhood stretching away to the distant sea, and due east lay the forest and Rhuor.

  For nearly two months they traveled on a hard, well-used road with frequent inns or prosperous yeoman farmers willing to put up lodgers for a night in the small, neat bedchambers of their ancient stone farmhouses. Generally they avoided the richer manor houses, where Kirila’s clothes and unaccompanied travel was more likely to raise carefully plucked eyebrows. At first Chessie kept to the shadows, but, as the farmhouses became poorer and further apart, he and Kirila discovered that again people began to accept a talking purple dog as a fact of life, one of those misfortunes that could befall anyone, and Chessie began to join the groups gathered around kitchen fires after evening chores were done to tell his tales and sing ballads. Most of Chessie’s ballads were new to the farm folk, and after a while Kirila and Chessie began to offer them in payment for their lodging, presenting themselves as wandering troubadours, and so conserving the silver coins she had purchased in Klee with yet another of the dagger’s jewels. Kirila was delighted with this play-acting, even though Chessie had forbidden her to do any of the singing, and invented for herself numerous past adventures as a widely-traveled minstrel, some of which made even the credulous farm folk look a little skeptical.

  “Do you ever feel odd about this?” Chessie asked her once, after an evening of mournful, dead-lover ballads for the benefit of a peasant’s three heavy daughters, who had listened with their mouths open and nudged each other with thick elbows.

  “About what?”

  “About pretending to be troubadours.”

  “No—why should I? The folk get a show worth a night’s lodging—you sing really well, you know, Chessie—and the performance is as good as the ones troubadours used to put on at Castle Kiril.” After a moment she added, “Even if I can’t sing.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Well, what, then?”

  “We are not penniless minstrels,” Chessie said with sudden intensity. “We are not troubadours. We are not jesters. You are a crown princess, on a True Sworn Quest, and I am a prince. We are royalty.”

  Kirila stopped what she was doing, which was cleaning her boots, and looked at Chessie closely. He stood by the one window in the tiny chamber, looking out at the dark cowshed behind the cottage. Instead of glass, the window was covered with a stretched, oiled membrane, perhaps a stomach casing, from some large animal, and through it the outlines of the cowshed looked vague, as if it might decide at any moment to become something
else. The membrane smelled faintly rancid.

  “Singing for our supper makes no difference to the blood royal,” Kirila said, her voice puzzled. “A princess may become a jester, or a beggar, or even a murderess—” she winced a little, “—and still be a princess, always. Royalty goes deeper than that, deeper than...than bones, even. But you must know that, Chessie.”

  There was a little silence, and then Chessie said, “Yes, but...” let that trail off, frowned in deep purple ridges, said, “Even so, it isn’t...” frowned again, and gazed out the membrane. Finally he asked, “Did you see that the boy fed the mare?”

  “Yes, I did. Chessie, is something bothering—”

  “Then we’d best get some sleep. There may not be many more nights indoors, anyway.”

  “But is—”

  “Good night, Kirila.” He crept under the bed, put his head on his paws, and closed his eyes, leaving her puzzling over her left boot, which was as caked with mud as that of any plowboy.

  As they traveled, the small farms became farther apart and changed in character. Stone farmhouses gave way to thatched cottages, and then to one-roomed wooden huts daubed with mud and wattle. Dinners of roast duckling and dandelion wine became smoked pork and ale, then rabbit and a strong, sour mead. The road narrowed and became more erratic.

  As the country became wilder, the summer bloomed with showy flamboyance, like an adolescent girl newly over acne and bony knees and eager to flaunt her despaired-of beauty. Morning glories and sunflowers grew as high as the brown mare’s neck, and under her hooves she crushed tiny, heavily scented wild strawberries. When Kirila dismounted to drink at sun-warmed ponds, there sounded dozens of small plops as sunning frogs and turtles dived into the silvery water. Dragonflies hummed by her wet face as she lifted it from the pond, and their long bodies under onionskin wings were bluer than the sky, greener than the one emerald left in the hilt of her dagger. At night the summer stars were huge and soft, blurred by all the pollen in the hazy, heavy air.