by Nancy Kress
“Ma,” Larek said, without real hope.
Kirila flushed a little, considered desperately, and finally said, “I have had a little trouble with apple tart. The timing, mostly.”
“Then your oven’s not hot enough; you have to use a hard wood for tart. Cherry’s good; you should use cherry. I have a good recipe for tart pastry, an old family recipe, do you want me to give it to you?”
“Please!”
“Fine,” Queen Tackma said, nodding her head vigorously, a tomato vine in a hurricane. “After supper, then. Fine, fine.”
King Otwick finished his boar, pushed back the greasy pewter plate, and grinned at Kirila. He had a professional grin, like a fight manager, but there were two bewildered lines across his forehead—the forehead extended clear to his crown—that he didn’t know were there. Half of the silver trophies on the wall, the older half, were his. “So what does your father do, Princess Kirila?”
“He’s a king, my Lord.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Big place, Kiril?”
Again she considered. “Well, not as big as, say, Glebis or Ramyth—they lie to the south, too, toward the sea from Kiril—but larger than, for example, the Duchy of Loudwater. Actually, I guess I never paid too much attention to the specific square mileage. We just coexist with our neighbors, regardless of size or wealth or...or anything. Kiril is pretty democratic, my Lord.” She smiled charmingly at Otwick, who frowned back.
“Don’t know as I approve of too much democracy, Princess. There are class differences, after all.”
Kirila raised her chin a little. “Yes,” she said quietly, “there are.”
“Get much hunting in Kiril?”
“There’s the usual small meets, and a grand boar chase on Boxing Day, and in the autumn we do a Dragon Running.”
“Do you?” King Otwick said, sitting upright. “Now there’s something I’d like to see. Haven’t done one around here in years. Larek, I’d like to see you ride to a Dragon Running! Show ‘em all up—if you remembered not to show daylight at your seat, that is. Many ride last year, my Lady?”
“About fifty, I think, rode two years ago.”
“Fifty—you hear that, Larek?”
“Actually,” Kirila added modestly, “I rode in it myself.”
The king blinked at her. “You hunt, my Lady? I never could get Mamma here to learn—no seat, and very bad hands. Can you take your mark?”
“Sometimes,” Kirila replied. For the better part of the last year she and Chessie had been living off game she had shot.
Larek shifted beside her, and, without even looking at him, something new and unexpected within her added quickly, “Of course, hunting is exciting, but I imagine it can’t compare to what it must feel like to joust. I used to watch my cousin ride at quoits and rings by the hour.”
“It is pretty exciting,” Larek said. He smiled at her, his green eyes darkened in the twilight to the color of willow leaves.
“So you don’t have any brothers, Sweetheart?” the Queen asked.
“No,” Kirila replied absently. She was watching Larek’s long brown fingers play with his goblet, rocking it gently from side to side. The ale in the cup slid in tawny circles near the rim, and a few drops splashed out on the short golden hairs on his wrist. They glistened wetly in the candlelight. “I’m an only child.”
“Ah,” said Queen Tackma. “An only child. Ludie, finish your pheasant.”
“Let me tell you about the tournament we all attended in the spring,” Larek said. He looked at her questioningly, and she nodded. Her tunic felt tight again. The tournament was a lengthy one; the recitation of it lasted well beyond the boar and pheasant. Larek described the colors, favors, and armour styles of each contender, together with a complete description of his falls. Once Ludie interrupted to say dreamily, “Larek had a favor, too—the Lady Mary Allison’s,” and there was a brief scuffling under the table, after which Ludie was sent off to bed in the charge of the serving girl. Larek related the preliminary scores, median scores, and final scores for each knight, and explained what each low-scorer had done wrong. Occasionally King Otwick added an opinion on this. As Larek talked, he looked at Kirila, who listened earnestly and asked intelligent questions. The young prince had just begun to evaluate the work of the smiths who made various types of armour, with special reference to fitting the coulter so that the elbow could still bend easily, when the drawbridge creaked and Chessie sauntered into the hall.
“Chessie, hello,” Kirila said. “My Lord, this is Chessie; we’ve been traveling together. He’s enchanted.”
“Hello,” the king said distantly..
Chessie barked, a very doggy bark, and headed under the table. Kirila looked embarrassed. “I don’t know why he...what...actually, the enchantment comes and goes.”
“Heard of that kind,” Otwick said, even more distantly.
There was an awkward silence. Then Kirila turned back to Larek, two spots of color high on her cheekbones. “You were saying, my Lord, about the coulter...”
Larek smiled at her and made a little deprecating gesture toward his father, a slight conspiratorial movement of his long tanned fingers. Suddenly, he and Kirila were allies. “The important thing, my Lady, is to make sure the cuisses don’t bind or jar when you change the lance’s angle obliquely...” Kirila listened raptly to the warm, musical voice with its slight northern accent, no longer hearing a word he said, until long after the serving maid had cleared away the last crumbs from the gooseberry tart.
●●●
Kirila and Chessie circled the whole subject warily, like two rivermen paddling around a whirlpool and trying not to lose an oar. They were sitting on a fallen log at the edge of the practice field—it was located in yet another clearing a little way from the castle—watching Larek ride at a ring dangling from a post on the other side of the cloth covered tilt barrier. Otwick was coaching him. It was a few days after they had first arrived at Talatour; until now Chessie had kept pretty much to himself, away from the castle. All around the log grew springy little violets.
“No, no!” the king shouted irritably at his son. “Not like that! How many times do I have to tell you—not so wide an angle! Your lance will slide too far to the left and swing crosswise!”
“So how long do you plan to stay?” Chessie asked neutrally.
“The Queen didn’t specify a length for the visit.” Kirila said, even more neutrally. “But, of course, I understand that you feel a need to travel on.”
“I do, yes.”
“She’s very hospitable.”
“So it would seem.”
“I wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings or anything.”
“Good, good!” Otwick called. “Keep the bridle arm braced a second longer, and lean again just like that!”
Larek trotted back to the top of the list; he was not wearing his helmet, and his fine hair whipped cleanly around the beautiful taut planes of his face.
“Have you told him yet that you are on a True Sworn Quest?” Chessie said. With one paw he began to tap small pieces off a shelf fungus growing sideways out of the log.
“We talked about it, yes.”
“What did he say?”
Kirila hestitated the barest fraction of a second. “He said it was rather unusual for a woman.”
Chessie flaked the fungus more rapidly. The torn pieces accumulated in a pile the color of old eggs. “And how did you feel about that?”
She folded her arms across her breast. “It’s rather flattering to be told you’re unusual, don’t you think?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Kirila, you know he didn’t mean it like that!”
“How do you know what he meant? You hardly know him.”
“Neither do you! You’re only seeing what you want to see, whatever that is, for some unfathomable reason I can’t even—”
“Oh!” Kirila cried, leaping from the log and streaking across the practice yard. Larek had fallen, landing with a metallic clank on the packed ea
rth. She was half-way to him when he sat up, grinning at her, and she stopped, flustered.
“He does that a lot,” Chessie muttered.
“I won’t break you know,” Larek called. He smiled and winked, and for a moment the whole clearing turned stained-glass green.
“Up, up,” Otwick said. “Get up already!”
Kirila sat again on her log, her hands folded tightly in her lap. After a moment she remembered Chessie.
“I see your point, of course,” she began politely.
“What was my point?”
She blinked at him. “That I should...that we...that winter is coming and we should travel as far as we can before it sets in? Wasn’t that what you were saying?”
“It’ll do.”
“But then on the other hand,” she continued, her voice carefully diplomatic, “I am on a Quest, and the point is to see new things, new meanings, that might have a bearing on finding the route to the Heart of the World.”
“And how much meaning do you think Larek sees in anything that isn’t made of metal or scored in tenths of a point?”
She flushed angrily and jerked apart her hands, but before she could retort, Larek strolled over to them, Otwick glowering behind him from the middle of the practice field.
“I would ask a boon of you, my Lady,” the knight said formally. “Next week we ride at Launceston. May I wear your sleeve?”
She ducked her head. “I would be full honored, my Lord. Only,” she added, frowning, “I don’t have detachable sleeves on these tunics.”
He fiddled with his gauntlet, pleating and unpleating the wide cuff. “If you like,” he said shyly, “I could ask my mother to stitch a gown for you. She sews real good. And I like to see a woman in a gown instead of a tunic and skirt.” He looked at her, the shyness suddenly gone. “You’d look beautiful in satin, Kirila.” It was the first time he had used her name.
“Pink, I suppose,” Chessie muttered sourly. Neither of them heard him.
“I’d like that,” she said softly. “And then you could wear the sleeve when you ride. Where would you wear it?”
“On my helmet. Instead of those heron feathers.” His eyes widened a little. “Where else?”
“Well, I didn’t know,” she murmured, looking at him with arch boldness from under her lashes. He reddened, and Chessie stared at her, aghast.
“Come, we’ll ask her now,” Larek said, a little uncertainly. He held out his gauntleted hand to help her rise, and as she took it the sureness seemed to flow from her to him, and it was Kirila who avoided any direct look.
“Race you to the castle,” she stammered.
“No,” he said, tucking her hand in his arm. “I’d rather walk.” She glanced at him, and then looked down at her feet as though they belonged to someone else. Larek led her toward the castle, his green-armoured figure overtopping hers. Fierce mutterings came from the tilt field as Otwick began to pick up the lances and rings.
Suddenly Chessie called after them, in a kind of strangled fury, “And don’t think it’s a ‘new thing,’ Kirila, whatever the hell it is, because it’s not! It’s old—you hear me!—old!” She ignored him, walking close to Larek over the wildflower path, under the clear summer sky.
Fifteen
Chessie had found a book. He wouldn’t say where he got it, and it was unlikely it had come from the library at Talatour, which consisted of three or four volumes on heraldry, The Gallic Wars, a few smudged ballad sheets, and Triumph of Talatour: Origins and Tournaments of the Jade Jousting Team, privately copied and bound. But wherever it had come from, he had it.
Reading was a problem. He finally figured out that if he splayed both paws over opposite pages he could keep the book open and still read between his claws. This left each page with a faint paw print, deeper at the claw end and smelling vaguely of rabbit. After he had spent an entire morning splaying and clawing and reading, he went to find Kirila.
She was sitting alone in the solar, embroidering a yellow satin sleeve with green thread, and had just pricked her finger. When Chessie trotted in she was sucking the finger and searching the satin for blood. He saw it wasn’t a good time, but some urgency, pressing upward from a panicky spot in his stomach, pushed him ahead anyway. Kirila, dressed in her new satin gown with her hair in ringlets, looked a stranger. The neckline made him nervous, and the nerves made him shy.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
“What are you doing?”
She eyed him irritably. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re embroidering.”
“Well, that’s what I’m doing.”
“Oh.” He coughed diffidently. “May I see? Oh, yes, very...very nice.”
“Well, it’s not too bad,” Kirila said. She spread the sleeve out on her lap. “I was afraid I might have gotten blood on it, but I didn’t.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s a sleeve. For Larek to carry in the tournament.” She looked at Chessie defiantly, but he merely nodded and smiled, bobbing his head four or five times as though he wouldn’t be sure where to place it if he stopped.
“See, it’s a fairly difficult pattern. The green cinquefoils have to have each petal rounded at the tip, and that’s hard with straight stitches.”
“Oh,” Chessie said. “Yes, of course. Rounded.” He was bobbing again.
“It would have been easier to do trefoils, of course—two less petals—but the Talatour arms have cinquefoils.”
“I see. Cinquefoils.”
“Of course, I could have been really unlucky; they might have been octofoils, and that would have been really difficult.”
“Yes. It would. Be difficult.”
“I’ll tell you a secret, Chessie, if you won’t tell Larek,” Kirila said. She glanced around the solar worriedly, and Chessie, ears pricked and muscles taut with sudden wild hope, strained forward and held his breath. Kirila bent over and whispered into his ear, her voice hushed and tense. “I never embroidered before.”
“Never—”
“Embroidered. Not once. I did work a tapestry once, when I was a child, of the Creation of the Natural World. But no embroidery, till this sleeve, and it’s so important that it turn out well.”
“Never—”
“Chessie, what’s the matter with you? Why do you look so stupefied? It’s not that serious; just don’t tell Larek and he’ll probably never even guess.” She gazed complacently at the green cinquefoils.
Chessie shook his head as if he were shaking off flies. “Kirila—I have a book.”
She waited, but no more seemed to be coming. Finally she said encouragingly, “A book, Chessie? Where is it?”
“Outside, in the hall.”
“Well, why don’t you just go and bring it in?”
“I’ll just go and bring it in.”
He trotted back in carefully, mouthing the book as though it might explode, and laid it tenderly at her feet. Kirila picked it up. The title was Quests: A Longitudinal Field Survey, by Brother Sanctimus Moyle, O.F.M., of Eastwell Abbey.
“It’s a sort of a study of actual quests,” Chessie said. His words skittered over themselves like a rockslide, picking up a disorganized, plunging speed. “What the Brother did was gather a lot of information from questers and their questees, if it happened to be a quest for a person, and chart some common patterns. Impassable fords, for instance, turn up in 69.8% of all quests, did you know that? And holy hermits in 82.60. Makes us rather atypical, doesn’t it make you feel atypical? It makes me feel atypical. But he hasn’t just named all these recurring motifs—that’s what he calls them, ‘recurring motifs’—he hasn’t just named them, the really fascinating thing is, he’s organized them into—Kirila, are you listening?”
“Umm,” Kirila said. She was holding the book as though it smelled bad.
“—organized the recurring motifs into a sort of composite pattern, a kind of predictor of what the average quester can expect, although of course
there are always individual differences to be provided for. But the underlying pattern is clear. There are always trials to be passed, usually either three or seven, in three main types. The first two types are physical and moral. Examples of the former would include dragon-slayings, joustings with Black Knights, and rescuing maidens, while among the latter are typically found such phenomena as—”
“Chessie,” Kirila said, “come to to point.” She held the embroidery needle poised in front of her, a little to one side, like a sword.
“The point, yes. Well, the point is, of course, that you fit the pattern, too, in a general sort of way. You’ve had various trials on your quest, what with the Quirks and the Liel...um...and in Rhuor, and—”
“I didn’t need this...thing to tell me that,” Kirila said. She lifted the book with two gingerly fingers and dropped it on the floor. “Really, Chessie, I’m surprised at you. Belaboring the obvious didn’t used to be among your flaws. Even I know a trial when I see one.”
“No,” Chessie said simply. His skittering nervousness abruptly left him and he held himself still, velvety depths in his brown eyes. “No. Not the third type.”
“Third type of what?” Kirila said, without much interest. She glanced out the window; Larek was due back soon from team practice. He was going to show her how to feather arrows.
“The third type of trial. Physical, moral...those you can walk away from when they’re done. If you’re not dead. But the third—the third is gyve.”
Kirila’s head snapped back from the window. Chessie went on, his great eyes steady. “Gyve. Enchainment. Cloistering. Caesura. Captivity. Arrestment. Often accompanied by bewitchment. You can’t walk away from that. It holds you immobile. You turn into something you’re not.”
