Sword and Sorceress XXVII

by Unknown

  She could save him the trouble. But first she must compose herself. She concentrated on what she was: Princess of Ciern. Sole heiress to the kingdom. Valued adviser to her father the king.

  “It will cause great difficulty with Aimar,” she said evenly, “if I am no longer available to marry their prince. That is the crux of the negotiations.”

  No reply. She turned around and saw her father staring at her with wide, startled eyes.

  “It will mean war,” she said. “That is the most important thing, isn’t it?” And as she said it, she truly believed it. Her responsibility to her people settled around her like a comfortable, heavy cloak.

  “Yes,” her father said finally. “But—”

  Alina smiled. She enjoyed showing off how smart she was; people rarely expected it, when they saw her porcelain features and golden hair. It was especially fun when she managed to surprise her father, who should have known better.

  “It’s rather obvious,” she said. The folded paper in her palm had grown damp. “What would a goblin take in exchange for a life, except another life? My mother gave him hers.”

  “We know little about the fae,” her father said warningly.

  “I’m not faulting your sorcerers, Your Majesty. They must have suspected it. But now they know.” Her voice didn’t even threaten to quaver. She was proud of that. “My mother was fifteen when she bore me. Eighteen when she... disappeared.” She lifted her eyebrows. “I am eighteen now.”

  Her father leaned back, looking thoroughly impressed. Somehow it wasn’t as satisfying as it usually was.

  “Eighteen years for eighteen years. That must have been the bargain.” She glanced once at her mother’s portrait before meeting her father’s eyes again. “And you know it now, because Rumpelstiltskin is back. The bargain is over, and he’s come back for me.”

  #

  It was not as simple as that, of course. It never was, with the fae.

  What had happened was that gold was turning back into straw.

  There were fifty bales of gold thread in the king’s storeroom, left over from Alina’s mother’s bargain. Or rather, there had been. Until that morning, when the seneschal did his daily check and found instead a roomful of old, moldering straw.

  The sorcerers were universally agreed: it was a sign of Rumpelstiltskin’s return.

  The advisers were universally agreed: it was an unmitigated disaster.

  “The sorcerers might be correct,” Alina told her maid, Rose, while her hair was being brushed for bed. “The advisers certainly are.”

  Rose made a sound of assent, the brush never ceasing its steady strokes. Alina caught a glimpse of the maid’s expression in the mirror. Rose had a broad, pleasant face that usually bore a slightly puzzled expression. Though far less intelligent than Alina, she was the closest thing the princess had to a friend.

  She also reported everything Alina said to the king. Alina didn’t mind that. She had no secrets from her father.

  “The real question,” Alina went on, “is what has happened to the gold we’ve already traded. But of course we don’t dare ask. If our neighbors think we tricked them on purpose, then Aimar, Mosun, and Palis could all invade at once.”

  “The king’s cape is still gold,” Rose offered, as she worked out a tangle.

  Alina refrained from wincing as her hair twisted sharply against her scalp. Rose did not have a gentle hand with a brush. It was a small pain Alina chose to bear, for the sake of her only friendship. And, she often thought, as an exercise in self-discipline. A princess could not afford to let her feelings show on her face, even—especially—when those feelings were pain.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Thread that has already been woven seems to have remained gold.”

  For now. She could only hope the goblin would tell them what he wanted before the king’s cape disintegrated and covered him in straw.

  Rose put the brush down at last, and Alina got to her feet and went to her window. Below her sprawled the city, lights and gray silhouettes in the night. All those thousands of people—and thousands more, beyond the city—getting their hair brushed, or brushing it on their own, getting ready for bed. Intact families, with no men gone for war, no women weeping over the deaths of soldiers.

  For now.

  Alina had never questioned why her father married her mother for the sake of bales of gold. Ciern was not a rich country. The gold—and her father’s wisdom in using it—had helped protect these people for almost two decades. The king would not have been what a king should be, if he had spurned his responsibility to those thousands and thousands of people because he did not love a woman.

  Alina knew very few of the thousands of people in the city below her. She did not love any of them. But she did not want them to suffer because she had failed them.

  She sighed, turned away from the window, and allowed Rose to change her for bed.

  #

  That night, the empty room that had once been used for spinning was suddenly no longer empty. The sentry Alina had posted there came to let her know, and Rose shook the princess awake from a dream in which gnarled green hands pulled her down into the earth.

  Alina dressed simply and swiftly, in a long white gown, and hurried through the hallway with Rose’s disapproving stare burning into her back.

  The west wing of the castle was dark, bare, and deserted. There had been a fire here—years after Alina’s mother had died—and though it hadn’t damaged the thick stone walls, a faint, ashy smell still drifted through the corridors, between the singed and crumbling tapestries and the blackened remains of carved wooden furniture. Alina had a torch, but its light was only enough to let her see her way, not to show her what was hiding in the shadows.

  She knew there were things hiding in the shadows. She could hear them, brushes of wind where there should be no wind, half-heard sounds that could have been the scraping of branches or the hiss of the wind. They were the sorts of sounds that a person would think—would tell herself—she was imagining. But Alina had never been one for imagining.

  When she reached the room where her mother had once spun straw into gold, she pushed it open without allowing herself to hesitate. She didn’t even acknowledge to herself that she wanted to hesitate.

  The torch went out as soon as she stepped into the room. All at once it was dark, so dark that when she briefly closed her eyes, it made no difference.

  Alina knelt and put the torch down on the floor. She settled it carefully on its side, then straightened and said, “I am not afraid of the dark.”

  A moment of silence—she fancied it was startled. Then a voice said, “Perhaps it is I who am afraid of the light.”

  It was a female voice.

  Alina stumbled forward, one step, then stopped. She whispered, “Mother?”

  “Come no closer,” the voice said. “If you see me, it will break what little protection I have.”

  Alina’s fingers dug into the thin silk of her gown. “Protection from whom?”

  “From him. Do you have to ask? Do you not know my story?”

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Alina could make out a hint of movement at the far end of the room. She was seized by a sudden, shocking hunger: a desire to see the woman hidden in the shadows, to look her in the eye. To see if she resembled her. Alina looked nothing like her father, but maybe...

  She had never wanted anything so badly in her life. And at the same time, it was something she had wanted her entire life without ever really knowing it. She tried to get a grip on the sudden turmoil inside her, and she succeeded. Mostly.

  “I read your letter,” she said. Her voice came out clear and smooth.

  “Ah,” the woman said. A short sound, not much more than a breath, but Alina heard the surprise in it.

  There was silence for a moment. Then her mother said, “So you know that I love you. Come to me, my daughter. The king will let you go now, because of the gold.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Alina said.
>
  She heard her mother’s indrawn breath. “It is, my daughter. It is always that simple, to choose love.”

  Alina stood very still. She squared her shoulders. She said, “I know the goblin’s true name.”

  Silence—but a silence more profound, somehow, than the ones that had come before. Alina snatched up her useless torch and rushed forward, into the shadows.

  It was as she had suspected. Her mother was gone.

  #

  That afternoon, for the first time in her life, Alina lied to her father.

  She didn’t know why she was doing it—another rare sensation for her. She was allowing herself to be guided by her emotions, like the silly noblewomen she had always despised. But something about hearing her mother’s voice had let her emotions loose, and something else—her anger at her father, perhaps—made her not want to rein them in. Besides, she trusted her own intelligence enough to consider that there was a good reason for her distrust of the king, even if she hadn’t fully figured out what it was.

  So she lied.

  She was very good at lying—it was another essential skill for a princess—and her father had no reason to doubt her. She explained her actions of the night before by telling of her intent to go, alone, and give herself to the goblin when he appeared. That part was true, yet it was the thing her father had the most difficulty with.

  He didn’t tell her the truth, either, about why he couldn’t accept the obvious solution. He raged that she had no right; that she—or rather, her impending marriage and the alliance that hinged upon it—were too important to the realm.

  “Not as important as the gold,” Alina corrected him.

  She was right, and he knew it, and yet he raged. He, too, was being controlled by his emotions now. She marveled at it. Was this part of the goblin’s plan?

  They said the fae were ruled entirely by emotions, that their courts were seething masses of love and hate and jealousy and desire. It had always sounded abhorrent to her, but now she thought she could see why some people were drawn to it.

  It was a while before her father calmed down enough to ask the obvious question, and that was when she lied.

  “He was there,” she said, “but the torch went out, and I didn’t see him. I told him I was there to fulfill my mother’s bargain, and he just... he laughed.” She shuddered. “It was not a human sound. I don’t know how I even knew it was laughter, but it was. And then he was gone.”

  “The gold in the storeroom,” one of the king’s sorcerers reported, “is still straw.” The sorcerers had been nervously silent while the king raged, and still looked nervous—as well they might, Alina thought, considering how useless they were turning out to be.

  “Don’t you mean the straw is still straw?” she asked pointedly. “It was never truly gold.”

  The sorcerers exchanged glances. One of them, a scrawny young man, said reluctantly, “Human magic cannot change the true substance of things. But the fae... we do not know what the fae can do.”

  “It seems to me,” Alina said, “that there is a lot you don’t know.”

  “Daughter,” the king said warningly. The Sorcerers’ League was a powerful force, not one to anger lightly. Alina knew this. The note of surprise in her father’s voice made her flush. But she kept her scornful gaze on the young sorcerer’s bony face.

  “We know better than to go meet him on grounds of his choosing,” the sorcerer snapped at her. “If you had waited, things might have turned out differently.”

  Alina was not surprised by the open disapproval in his eyes. She was used to it, from those who spent enough time with her to see past her beauty. People found her strange and unwomanly. The duke of Darmil, who had courted her last fall, had told her that she needed to acknowledge the passionate side of her nature—with an eye, apparently, to benefiting from that acknowledgment himself. But Alina saw the breathless romances and desperate tears of her maids, and had never seen any benefit in them. She liked being cool and calm, unaffected by emotional storms.

  It didn’t bother her that so many found her unnatural. Her father, too, was calm and dispassionate—and her mother, it had always been impressed on her, was not. It was a good way to rule a kingdom. Her father liked her even demeanor. He always had. And he was the only one whose approval she had ever wanted.

  Until last night. Until she heard the voice of the mother who loved her, and had suffered terribly for that love. It made her wonder what it would be like to love fiercely, wildly, without regard for consequences. It made her wonder if the duke was right, and there was something she was missing.

  She kept her eyes on the sorcerer, and her voice angry, as she spoke. She didn’t want to look at the king, and she didn’t trust herself to disguise her voice.

  “They will turn out differently, next time,” she said. “He has shown that he can be drawn into the open, by me. I can make him appear before the court. And before you.”

  “How?” It was the king who asked.

  She had to look at him then, but years of training stood her in good stead. She met his faded blue eyes with utter calm. She even smiled.

  I’m sorry, Father. But the thought didn’t make it into her voice.

  “By the threat of taking me out of his reach. The king of Aimar has been pressing us to announce a betrothal. Let us do it in three nights’ time.”

  The king looked at her for a moment. She had never noticed, somehow, the depth of the wrinkles around his eyes.

  Then he turned and said sharply, to the sorcerers, “Will that be enough time for you to set up a spell?”

  The sorcerers assured him that it would, and the king nodded, even though they all knew that no human spell had ever captured any of the fae.

  Only one human being, outside of legend, had ever held the fae to any sort of bargain. And that was Alina’s mother.

  #

  The ball was a bit sparse, due to its being so hastily put together. All the members of the court came, of course, and the few foreign dignitaries who happened to be in attendance; but the ballroom still seemed empty, the music echoing a bit hollowly among the dancing couples. Alina took her turn among the dancers, wearing a violet gown of layered silk, her scalp aching from Rose’s ministrations. The king sat on the dais, his face blank. The sorcerers stood together at his side, blue-robed and murmuring secretively.

  The goblin appeared in the middle of the dance floor. He appeared quietly, with no smoke or flames, so that it was a moment before the shrieks of the dancers alerted Alina to his presence. She stood utterly still as the lords and ladies stumbled and fled, some brushing hard against her in their haste, almost knocking her over. She planted her feet wide on the marble floor.

  The sorcerers drew together and cried out a spell in unison. Alina felt that brush by her, too. The jostling of the dancers had not made her stumble; the spell did. She took one step sideways, to keep her balance. But the goblin just stood there and grinned as the magic shattered against him.

  He was ugly and beautiful at once. Ugly because he looked almost human and yet horribly not, beautiful in the wildness and magnetism that radiated from him. His skin was tinged green, his deformed features hovering between animal and human. He was short, and wide, and might have been naked. It was hard to tell if those shimmering blue-green feathers were his clothing or a part of him.

  He ignored the dancers, the sorcerers, and the king. He looked at Alina, and her breath caught under the force of his gaze. It was so powerful that nothing else about his appearance seemed to matter.

  “So,” the goblin said. His voice was like discordant music. “You claim to know my true name?”

  “I do,” Alina said, her voice as cool as years of practice could make it. Only she felt the sharpness with which her fingernails dug into her palms.

  “And you will call me by it? Before the court?”

  He knows, she thought, and forced her fingers loose. Her palms still hurt, and she felt the sharp sting of blood. “I will.”

&nbs
p; There was an utter silence, such as had never before been heard in the court of Ciern. Even the sorcerers’ robes did not rustle. They stared, seven pairs of piercing eyes. They did not know.

  “I will,” she said again.

  “Then do it,” the goblin commanded. “If you would have your freedom, do it.”

  “Wait,” the king said. Alina did not dare look at him, to see if he knew. “What happens to her if she is wrong?”

  The goblin’s protruding upper lip curled, touching the tip of his long nose. “A bit late to be worrying about consequences, Your Majesty.”

  “Someone else will say your name,” the king said. “I will do it.”

  “It has to be me.” Alina pulled herself as high as she could. “The name is only true coming from me.” She faced the goblin. “I call you Father.”

  If the court had been silent before, now it was a tomb. Even the king uttered not a sound—which told Alina that, if he had not known, he had at least suspected.

  And had tried to protect her anyhow.

  The goblin broke the silence with a laugh—a long, inhuman cackle. Alina did not flinch.

  “How did you know?” her real father asked, when finally he was done.

  “I never felt truly human.” Though she had never realized it, either. “And my mother hinted at it, in a letter she wrote me. That was why she never expected my father to let me see the letter.”

  The my father came out of her mouth without thought, and she felt the king’s flinch from halfway across the room.

  “Then you will come with me,” the goblin said, and she returned her attention to him, where it should have been all along.

  He did not phrase it as a question, but Alina hesitated. Tell me before the court... if you would have your freedom. And she had it. They all knew, now, that she was not the king of Ciern’s daughter, and that meant she was no longer useful. The treaty with Aimar would have to be sealed some other way.