She was shaking as badly as I was. “Oh, Leo, it was such a terrible mistake. Sometimes I just go over it in my head and I think I’m falling, and I imagine that I ran away, but I didn’t. As soon as he locked the door, I realized it was a terrible mistake. I was too scared to say anything, and then it was too late and he wouldn’t listen even when I did. And now I’ve ended up here.
“I used to worry that my father would die out at the border and it would all be my fault. When Anselm’s father found out I was pregnant, he asked me to marry him, but I couldn’t. I hated him. I hated him as soon as he locked that door. And I was frightened of him. I said I’d marry him, but I got so ill with worry that my father just wouldn’t let me. My mother said I should, but my father swore he’d die before I married that man. And so Anselm’s father got angry, and he told Lucien, and Lucien made my father lose his job at the bank and have to become a soldier. And I was terrified to tell anyone, in case he might have my father killed. So no one knows who Anselm’s father is except my mother and father and me. And I just can’t bear my own baby being half a man I hate.”
She was still sobbing. “I thought I’d got over all this, but then my father came back from the border and I heard that Anselm’s father was dead, and now I’m so confused I don’t know what to think. It’s just brought everything up again. And I’ve been going almost mad, unable to talk to anyone about it. I feel almost as if I loved him, and I feel guilty for not marrying him, but I don’t know why. I hated him.”
Then I remembered something. I started shaking harder than ever. I picked up the paper and scrawled desperately, Who was Anselm’s father?
“Oh, Leo, I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anyone. I just can’t.” She looked at me with pleading eyes, and I knew then that she was going to. And I wrote suddenly, Don’t.
I was shaking badly, and she was shaking too, and she put her arms around me, and we both cried. Like two lost children, and no one to comfort us. “I know you must despise me, Leo,” she sobbed. “I can’t bear Anselm being that man’s son. I thought I’d be glad to see him dead, but I just feel so guilty. He was killed …” She pressed her face to my shoulder. “He was killed early on, the first night when the rebels were fighting the soldiers in the streets. A lot of government men were killed that first night.”
I tightened my grip on her arm. She pulled away from me, tears still falling down her cheeks, and picked up Anselm. The tears fell like jewels onto the baby’s face. “Leo, listen,” she said. “I have just read that newspaper. Everything is changing again.” She was still sobbing while she spoke. “I don’t know what I think anymore. But it’s true—the king is coming back. Lucien is dead. They are calling it a revolution.”
Much later, when she had stopped crying enough to speak properly and my fit of shaking had subsided, she told me everything that was in that newspaper, as well as she could. I would not believe it. Then she led me to the window and opened it wide and pointed up to the castle. “Didn’t you recognize the flags?” she said. “Orange, like they always used to be, until we were five years old. Don’t you remember?”
I had blotted out most of my childhood after my mother and father had gone away. But standing there by the window—leaning out to glimpse a sliver of a distant tower with a flag flying from it in the moonlight—standing there and looking up, I remembered.
I thought I was going to tell her then. I thought I would tell her about Ahira. But I could not. I picked up the paper she had handed me, and hesitated. And then I wrote instead, Let me tell you something. A story, about something that happened before Stirling was gone.
It was strange how the words I wrote could sound so measured and sane while the tears were running down my cheeks and my heart felt as though it was broken. I was trying to take us both away from that dismal room, to another place. I prayed that it would work and started telling her, in writing that shook as badly as Grandmother’s, about the book that I had found. About how the story had appeared, and the words that Stirling and I had read. And all of it—even that I had torn the book in half and thrown it away. And that it was me who had written those words all the time.
“You have powers?” said Maria, the tears still breaking up her voice. “I knew. I think I always knew.” She cried harder. “If I was like you, I would stay there all the time. I would dream I was in England for the rest of my life, rather than have to live here.” She gripped my hands. “Can you see England now?” she said. “Tell me about it—please, Leo.”
But I could not. So I put my arms around her instead, and she hugged the baby to her, and we waited for it to get light.
The moonlight glinted in the tears on Ryan’s face. Anna sat up and looked at him. The light was what had woken her, running out across the lake, over the lawn, and in at the window, so that the room grew pale as ice. She could not tell how many hours had passed. He had been watching the stars from her window as she had fallen to sleep that night, and now here he was crying. “What is it?” she said.
He started and turned. “I thought you were asleep.” He brushed the tears off his face hastily. “I don’t know, Anna. I seem always to be reduced to tears these days. My uncle would never stand for this behavior.” He tried to laugh but could not quite bring himself to do it.
She sat on the edge of the bed and watched him. “What was it that made you cry?”
“It was what Aldebaran wrote about being back at home.” He had a book in his hands, but he closed it now. “It made me want to go back to my country. It made me remember. I have been here so long, I started to think this was my place.”
He put down the book and blinked the tears out of his eyes. “And you dancing this evening. Perhaps I drank too much at dinner. Maybe that was it. Does Monica always celebrate expensive bookings like that?”
“She does now. Things have been bad here for a while, and then a group booking for September—it might be what carries us through.”
He nodded, still brushing the tears from his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I was crying.”
“I understand,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me. I know that you must miss your home.”
He caught hold of her hand. They sat in silence. “I suppose you have finished making up that dance,” he said then.
“Yes. Tonight I finished it.”
He wound his fingers through hers, frowning as though he was concentrating only on that. Then he let go of her hand and closed his eyes and said, “Anna.”
Out across the lake the clock chimed two. The stars had grown brighter and closer outside the window, but neither of them noticed. “Ryan, listen,” she said, and touched his shoulder lightly. But she did not go on.
He put his hand to the side of her face and looked at her for a moment. Then he drew back again and shut his eyes. “You know how I feel,” he said. “Maybe I should go. It is late.”
“Don’t go.”
He turned his back to her and sat on the edge of the bed. She put her arms around his shoulders suddenly. Her cheek was against his, and she could feel his jaw move as he swallowed. She thought about stepping away from him. Instead, she kissed the side of his face.
And then he turned and he was kissing her, saying, “Anna. Anna.”
The moonlight caught them in its beam. “Tell me to leave,” he said. “Just tell me and I will.” She shook her head.
The light was as solid as water, turning his face to silver, and her own arms around his neck looked like someone else’s in that light. Then she was lying beside him, and he watched her face for a moment without moving. “Anna, do you love me?” he said.
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because I have to know, otherwise—”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”
He laughed quietly, as though he could not believe her, and then looked up and met her eyes. “I am going home,” he said. “Tomorrow maybe, or the next day. I didn’t know how I could tell you—Anna, I love you. I honestly do, and I
would far rather stay, I swear—” He stopped and shut his eyes. “I don’t know if I should be here. Should I leave?”
“Stay here,” she said. “Don’t say anything else, just stay.”
In the silence of the early morning, when the hotel lay dark and still for a few hours, Ryan said, “If I go back home …”
“Yes,” she said, her head against his chest, listening to his heart beating. He ran his hand along her shoulder thoughtfully.
“If I go back, what about you? I will stop believing in this place. I will think England was just a fairy tale. And how can I, when you are here? You will probably be a famous dancer, and I will never see it.”
“I don’t know about dancing anymore,” she said. “It’s you now, all the time.”
They lay in silence. She began to drift into sleep. “I wish we were married,” said Ryan suddenly.
“What?” she said. “Are you still awake, Ryan?”
“Yes.” He turned to look at her. “I wish we were married. I seriously do. Then nothing would separate us. I’m asking you now, Anna—”
“What are you asking?”
“If you will marry me.”
She reached up and ran her hand through his hair, then let it fall again and closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will.”
“Anna, are you serious?” he said. She did not answer. He nudged her, then laughed quietly and stopped. Anna was already asleep, but Ryan lay still, wide awake, his arms about her, and watched the dawn rise over the lake.
Anna woke early and suddenly. Ryan’s face was resting against hers. His left arm was under her head, and his right arm was about her. She moved it carefully. She picked up her clothes and went to the window. In the darkness, everything had been enchanted. Now, in the morning light, it seemed faintly stupid. Birds were darting through the trees beyond the window, their singing sharp as ice in the still air. Anna leaned her head on the window frame and looked out.
Ryan stirred and opened his eyes. He raised his head and looked at her, then fell down again onto the pillow and covered his face with his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said then. “I honestly am. I don’t know—I should have left when I said.”
“You shouldn’t have left,” she said.
“Come here,” said Ryan, sitting up and looking at her. She crossed the room and sat beside him. He regarded her cautiously. “Are things still the same between us?” he said.
“Of course they are.”
And then she caught sight of the photographs on the table behind him, her own copies of the pictures Monica had downstairs. Her father’s open smile seemed suddenly the highest judgment on her. She didn’t look at her Nan. She caught hold of her necklace and went back to the window. “What?” said Ryan.
“Things get out of control,” she said. “You don’t mean to do anything wrong, but they go too far….”
“Who are you apologizing to?”
“I don’t know. Ryan, I don’t think we should have—”
“All right,” he said. “So we both drank a bit, and you were tired from finishing your dance and working all day, and I was homesick. If that was how this happened, all right. But it does not alter how I feel. What about you, Anna? Does it change anything?”
She watched the sunlight on the floorboards. “I have to talk to you,” he said quietly.
They dressed in silence. It was just past five o’clock, and the building was still. Anna stood at the window and watched the mist drifting across the lake. “Anna, listen,” Ryan said. “You know what you said last night?”
“What did I say last night? I said a lot of things.”
“When we were talking, just a couple of hours ago. When I asked if you would marry me.”
She turned to him, but she could not read his expression. “You never asked me that.”
He turned away from her and began making the bed. “Ryan, are you joking?” she demanded.
“Don’t say that!”
“Ryan—” She snatched the sheet from him so that he had to look at her. “We’re fifteen years old.”
“The law is different in my country. Fifteen, you can get married.”
“Did you really mean to ask me that, Ryan? Or were you half asleep and talking about nothing?”
“Of course I meant to ask you.”
“I thought you said that you were going back home. How can you do that if you marry me?” She stopped then. “You mean come with you.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
She sat down on the bed and looked at him. “I tried not to sleep last night,” he said, walking to the window. “I was lying there wishing that the sun would never rise because suddenly I didn’t want to be anywhere else except there with you. And then I thought, why not? Why not go together? You have seen the city. You are partly Malonian. Why not?”
“The city,” she said. It only made her think of Talitha’s strange young face, and the soldier called Darius, and the blood running over the stone of the castle. They were like pictures from a dream. “What would I do there?” she said.
“ We would be together. Anna, I have been wishing I was back there my whole life, but it means nothing now if I won’t see you again.”
“It’s easy for you to think about going back, Ryan,” she said. “You are just taking up a place that is already there for you.”
“What—because I am the prince—the king? Because it is supposed to be my destiny?” He shook his head. “It is nothing like that. Someone made that phrase up—‘the eyes of a king’—and everyone hung on to it, and it just stuck. Maybe it was Harold North who first wrote it—I don’t know—one of those influential writers. And next thing, the nation was trying to fit me into Aldebaran’s prophecy, and he was here in England working out his grand plans for my life. Everyone wanted it to be my destiny—that’s all. It has become my duty to go back, certain. But that is not the same thing. It is something I have to do out of responsibility, not because I am anyone great.”
“Only the other day you were telling me I had to be a dancer. Did you mean that?”
“You can dance anywhere, Anna.”
“That’s not true. And everything I have ever had is here. How could I leave to go to a place that I don’t even think of as real? I don’t know if I could even stay there. I think I would wake up back in England.”
“But I can’t stay here with you,” he said. “Come with me. My heart will break.”
“Will you please talk seriously?” she said. “Sit down and talk seriously to me.”
There was a silence. “Maybe you said you loved me and never meant it,” he said then. “But where I come from, if you love someone and tell her so, she doesn’t become just some girl you left behind. If what happened last night happens between you, you are going to marry her. You stay together and are never parted, not for anything. But maybe you never meant what you said.”
“I never said anything I didn’t mean,” she told him, raising her voice.
“And what, then? Tell me what to do.”
“Ryan, if you were an English boy, I would wait three or four years and then marry you. But this is not simple.”
He opened his mouth to tell her that love was simple. And then he changed his mind. “We have not known each other long,” said Anna. “You have to leave; I have to stay. I don’t see how we can change it.”
They watched the sun rising higher. He ran his fingers down the cut in her cheek, which was already healing. “Anna?” he said. “Tell me how your life will be after I leave. I want to know that.”
So they stood by the window and she told him. In the years afterward, he would try to imagine those things: the flat she lived in on the edge of the city; the playing fields below, where she practiced dancing in the early mornings; her oldest friends and where their own flats were—next door, or a floor above, or in the building opposite. “Keep telling me,” he said. “I am trying to remember everything you say.”
But she stopped then. Someone was approach
ing on the road. Ryan turned to look. A tall figure, striding toward them at a steady pace. Across the lawn, Aldebaran stopped and looked up at the window.
Then someone was knocking on the bedroom door. “Anna, are you awake?” Monica said. “Come and help me start the breakfast.”
Ryan glanced at Anna. “I will get my things and leave,” he whispered. “You go down and help Monica. We will wait for you at Lakebank.”
The house was locked and silent when Anna crossed the grounds. Then someone called her name, and she turned. Ryan was coming down through the trees toward her. She stopped in front of him. He studied her face. “Are you leaving?” she said eventually.
“I cannot go anywhere without that necklace of yours.”
She put her hand up to it and almost laughed; then her face grew serious again. “I forgot about that. With everything else.”
“Everything else,” he said. “Yes. Last night—”
She shook her head. “But why are you wearing these clothes? Are these Malonian?”
He nodded. “They are almost like my English ones. I will get used to them.”
Then Aldebaran was beside them. “We will leave in a few moments,” he said, turning to Ryan. “I have made strict arrangements to avoid trouble. The army is not yet so experienced as I might wish.”
Ryan’s eyes were still on Anna’s. Aldebaran turned to her. “Our people have been here already and taken everything we need. Since I will not see you again—”
“Won’t you?” she said.
“I will not come back. There is nothing for me here. For either of us. Ryan will have to put England out of his mind now.” He glanced at her. “Not entirely out of his mind. But we will not return.”
The Eyes of a King Page 35
