“First, what we are doing, which will certainly set some tongues wagging.” Lily smiled. “Simply being closeted together without anyone seeing what we are up to.”
Rosa had kept to her rooms for two days after returning, mostly because she discovered she was a great deal more worn-out than she had thought. She had bathed until she finally had the last of the filth out of her hair, from under her fingernails, scrubbed off her skin. She’d slept an amazing amount. And she had eaten far more than she would have thought, too; mostly fresh fruits and lovely, lovely salads, but when Lily had suggested a nice bit of roast beef she had eaten such a great slab of it that the ladies of the Court would have been scandalized had they seen it.
“I put about the truth—that you were recovering from your ordeal,” Lily added. “Of course, since I was the one who said this, most people didn’t believe it, and thought I had locked you up. I suspect that only the fact that your servants could come and go freely stopped the rumors that I’d had you murdered in your bed.”
Rosa nodded. This morning for the first time ever she had turned up for Morning Court, and had defiantly taken her place beside Queen Sable, something she had not done since the Queen had arrived. The Queen had given her a cold stare, but then, the Queen gave everyone cold stares, and there wasn’t a particle of difference between this one and the one she bestowed on someone she really did not want to hear petitioning her. They sat side by side on matching smaller thrones—the larger one for the King had been removed to the back of the dais—listening to petitions. Breaking fast, of course, was done in the private apartments, so this was, officially, the first time the two of them had been together since Rosa’s return. The Lesser Audience Chamber had been so full of frozen politeness that it was amazing icicles weren’t hanging from the noses of the courtiers before it was all over.
“It was all I could do to keep from laughing during Court,” she said with a grin. “You do know I was deliberately imitating you, don’t you?”
Lily chuckled. “We believe,” she said, a deep chill in her voice, “that the petitioner should reconsider his position. But we would like to hear the opinion of the Princess Royal.”
“The Princess Royal has no opinion,” Rosa replied, with the same distant manner and chill. “Except that the Royal Consort is a stranger here, and thus, may have the analytical distance required to asses this situation.” They both laughed.
After Morning Court was the large meal of the day, dinner. This was the meal at which everyone who was anyone had to turn up, unless he or she was ill. When Rosa entered at the same time as the Queen, and the two sat side by side at the high table, it caused an immediate stir, because again, Rosa had not sat at dinner since the Queen had been installed. Dinner was a piece of balletic extravagance that only a country as wealthy as Eltaria could afford. There were seven courses, and each course had several dishes. One was not expected to eat everything, or even to taste most of the dishes—though Siegfried had made good inroads on many of them. Rosa wished she could have been there to see the reaction of the two men the first time they had been presented with such bounty.
“What happened at the first dinner—with our tagalongs, I mean?” she asked.
“Siegfried’s eyes nearly jumped out of his head. I had put them on either side of me and he muttered something about not expecting the feast day in Vallahalia. Leopold was…impressed. But he spent most of the feast trying to impress me by pretending to be casual about it all.”
“At least Leopold didn’t try to pocket the knives and forks,” Rosa said drily.
After dinner—which took place in absolutely uncanny and unnatural silence, since virtually everyone was waiting and watching to see what Rosa and the Queen would do—the two had stood up simultaneously. The Queen announced, in a stern voice, “Princess Rosamund will be pleased to attend us in our chambers. Alone.”
Rosa had bowed stiffly and replied, “It pleases us to do so.” Her manner had made it very clear that she was doing so only because she felt like it. The moment that they had exited, the Dining Room had erupted with the buzz of speculation.
Once the two of them were safely behind the locked doors of the Queen’s Chambers, however, they had nearly collapsed with laughter. They held each other up, giggling helplessly, and every time one of them would manage to get herself under control, she would glance at the other and go off again. Once they had wiped their eyes and settled down, though, it had been time to get down to business, and the first order of business, it seemed, was drinking that Dragon’s Blood and obtaining the gift of tongues that would come with it.
“Now, about the gift of tongues—it will also help you get through strange accents and even muddle through languages you don’t already know,” Lily said, as she uncovered Jimson’s mirror. “Not as clearly as with animals, but human language is much more complicated than animal language. Siegfried had a nice dose of Dragon’s Blood after killing a particularly nasty one when he was just ten. That’s why Siegfried can actually bumble through Eltarian without having learned it before he crossed the border.”
Rosa was a little distracted at the moment, because she was hearing two things from the birds outside in the garden, one set of information layered over the top of the other. She heard the perfectly expected birdsong from them. But she also heard a tangled jumble of other things. From the robins, “I’m here! Here! Here!” From the larks, soaring above them all, “Look at meeeeeee! Look! Look!” From the meadowlarks, farther out where the stables were, “My place! Mine! Mine!” And from the starlings, squabbling over the kitchen midden, “Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
“It’s working already,” she said, and made a face.
Lily watched her, and nodded sympathetically. “You will get used to it, and you’ll soon be able to tune the nonsense and useless things out. Meanwhile allow me to introduce you to a most intelligent little source of information, the one who actually told me about Siegfried and the dragon.” She went to the window and whistled, holding out her hand. In no time at all, a little brown bird whisked off the roof and alighted on her outstretched finger. The bird tilted its head to the side and chirped. What Rosa heard, under the melodious chirping, was, “I don’t suppose you have any of that lovely cream cake, do you, Godmother?”
She nearly jumped with surprise.
“Of course I do, little friend,” Lily said fondly, and brought the bird into the sitting room, where she let it hop onto the table where a slice of crumbled cake was waiting in a white porcelain saucer. The bird happily stuffed herself—the voice that Rosa had heard had definitely been female—and Lily waited patiently.
“I tend to believe in serving my guests dinner before I interrogate them,” she said to Rosa, drily. The bird looked up and gave a wink, before going back to the cake crumbs.
When the bird was at last full, it hopped onto the back of a chair and regarded them out of intelligent black eyes that sparkled like two beads of jet.
Rosa stared at her, fascinated. Her fingers itched to touch those tiny feathers. “I don’t suppose…you’d let me stroke you, would you?” she asked tentatively. “I’ve never stroked a live bird before.”
“Have you any nasty lotions on your hands?” the bird sang. “Or perfumes, perfumes are nasty. too. Oil is bad for my feathers.”
Rosa shook her head.
“All right then.” The bird waited for Rosa to hold out her hand, and hopped onto the finger that Rosa offered. Her claws felt very light, very delicate, like two bits of thistledown that had contracted a little to hold on, and to Rosa’s surprise, they were quite warm. Carefully, she stroked the bird’s head with her other index finger, just barely touching the amazingly soft, smooth feathers for a while, then growing bolder, carefully, gently scratching with index finger and thumb, as she would scratch a young kitten. The bird closed her eyes in pleasure and very nearly purred. “Ooh, you do that very well,” she trilled. “I like you. You’re as nice as Siegfried.”
“That’s a fine recommendat
ion,” Lily chuckled. “Now, would you be so kind as to tell us all about Siegfried’s past? Where does he come from? Who are his parents? And how on earth did he get The Tradition so interested in him?”
“He comes from the Kingdom of Drachenthal, which actually has no King, just a great many Clans that are constantly fighting with one another, and a lot of foolish, quarrelsome gods. His father and mother are brother and sister, and the children of a god and a mortal,” the bird sang. “I don’t really need to weary you with all of the details. The gods of his land are rather dim, and they don’t think very far ahead. They actually take pride in acting on impulse, as if that was particularly heroic. They make bargains with each other and with magical races without thinking of consequences, and The Tradition only compounds all of the difficulties that rushing about doing things impulsively causes. Well! Just as an example, the gods are always messing about and siring children on mortal women, and then become surprised when their goddesses aren’t happy about this. Then the goddesses want to punish the women for violating the vows of marriage, and the gods want to protect their leman and—it just gets very, very messy.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “Which only makes me a great deal happier that we at least are not burdened with that. Gods are best at a distance, and not meddling with mortals. Do go on.”
“Well, Traditionally, this would make him a Hero. Which he is. It would also make him just as dim as his grandfather-the-god and his father, who couldn’t even recognize his own twin sister and fell in love with her and made things even messier, if you can imagine it. Actually Siegfried is not dim, not at all. He is really quite clever, so when he tasted Dragon’s Blood and heard me talking, he actually stopped to listen and ask some intelligent questions. I was able to warn him about The Tradition and what his fate would be if he didn’t do his best to avoid it. When he heard that, he didn’t just bluster something useless about Death and Glory, he actually listened to my advice, and then took it. I’m quite fond of him, really. And he’s kind. Even when all he has is a crust, he makes sure I have enough to eat.”
“Well,” Rosa said, cautiously, “Traditionally speaking, that is one of the marks of a true Hero. It might not all be him…”
The bird tilted her head. “I like you. You are smarter than you look. But no, most of it is him. Traditionally the Heroes of Drachenthal are mighty of thew, small of brain, and not kind at all. Usually when one of us magical birds tries to warn them, they turn around and try to kill us with rocks.” The bird paused. “Of course, the fact that we can only get their attention when they have hangovers might contribute to that.”
“So just what is this fate he keeps trying to escape?” asked Lily.
The bird’s words turned lyrical, as her eyes half closed and she sang the tale. “Asleep on a stone in a ring of fire is the Goddess-Shieldmaiden who sheltered his mother from the wrath of the god-her-father and allowed him to be born. She is awaiting the kiss of a Hero, for only the kiss of a true Hero can awaken her from her slumbers. When he kisses her, she will belong to him, and thus will begin his fate! Love! Death! Doom! And Glory!” The bird ended on an upward spiraling trill, standing on the tips of her toes, her eyes completely closed.
Then she settled back down again, flipping her wings to settle them. “Sounds nice in a song, not so nice in reality. The Shieldmaiden happens to be another aunt, which is rather awful, right there. Poor Siggy, until he got out of Drachenthal it seemed the only women he ever saw were related to him! It’s the usual messiness of cursed treasures—we managed to avoid that part—and then more messiness that would follow on rescuing the aunt from the sleep spell. Curses of forgetfulness, betrayal, jealousy, murder and suicide. The Drachenthalers all think this sort of thing is grand stuff, and they don’t seem to have quite the same problem with incest that other kingdoms do, but from my point of view…” She fluttered her feathers with contempt. “If they didn’t wrap it all up in magic and saga and a lot of self-inflated ego, it would be pretty tawdry. Fortunately, Siegfried, although he does enjoy being a Hero, is not terribly fond of Doom and Death and he has a healthy dose of common sense. So since there is nothing particularly Heroic about leaping across a ring of fire and kissing a sleeping girl, he’s been avoiding girls-sleeping-in-fire-rings-wearing-armor as if they were carrying plague.”
Rosa blinked. “I’ll admit that I am not very widely traveled, but are armored wenches in fire rings very common in the countryside?”
“You haven’t been with us.” The bird sighed heavily. “I’m beginning to suspect that the Drachenthaler gods are constantly moving the wretched wench and planting her in our path. Or The Tradition is. We are hardly a fortnight in some places before she turns up.”
“That’s very possible,” Lily confirmed.
“I had this notion that if we could find a girl that was almost a match for Burning Helmet, or whatever her name is, we could trick The Tradition into leaving him alone and he could settle down with a nice wife and some ordinary Heroics. We’ve been trying to find a girl-sleeping-in-a-fire-ring who is not a Goddess-Shieldmaiden, nor wearing armor, for quite some time now, but we haven’t been having a great deal of luck. And in fact, the Doom-fraught one has been cropping up more and more frequently.” The bird sighed, and regarded Lily with sad eyes. “You see, that was why, when he saw your Goddaughter the Princess, we got so excited. There was just enough about the situation to satisfy The Tradition so that it would leave him alone, and enough that was unlike that he wasn’t going to end up playing the rest of the tale out.”
Well, although Rosa had a great deal of sympathy for the poor nearly Doomed Hero-lad there was one thing she objected to. “I don’t particularly want to ‘belong’ to anyone,” she protested. “Especially not forced into it by The Tradition.”
Lily looked quietly pleased at that. The bird fluffed her feathers. “Well,” she sang, with just a touch of irritation, “you can’t blame the lad for trying to escape the simplest way possible. It isn’t as if he has a Fairy Godmother to help him. Only a lot of gods who only make things worse.”
“You have a point,” Rosa admitted. “Well then…I suppose he can stay, and if we find a Burning Maiden adorning one of the sheep fields, I’ll send someone to cover her up or something.”
“He’s large, strong, and a Hero,” Lily pointed out, pouring a saucer full of water for the bird, who drank some daintily. “If anyone tries to hurt you again, he is pretty much honor-bound to chop them into small bits, since he has accepted your hospitality.”
“Well let’s hope that he chops them up pre-rather than post-my-mortem,” Rosa said. “Now, what about the other one?”
“I can’t help you there,” the bird murmured. “We never set eyes on him before he and Siegfried collided in the clearing.” She eyed the saucer. “That’s just big enough to bathe in….”
Taking the hint, Lily moved it to the window ledge where the bird could splash and sing to her heart’s content, then fluff and drowse in the sun afterward, safe from cats.
“In that case,” the Godmother said, returning. “We can move to our other source of information. Mirror, mirror, on the wall—”
“Who is the cleverest of them all? Myself, of course,” Jimson replied, his green face fading into view. “I am so clever, I impress even myself.”
“Impress us, then,” Rosa chuckled, as he winked at her. She had gone from being terrified of the “demon in the mirror” to becoming as fond of him as Lily was. Or—she cast a glance at Lily—perhaps not quite that fond, given the tender look the Godmother was giving to the creature. But certainly fond.
“Prince Leopold von Falkenreid,” Jimson intoned. “Absolute dead middle of the five sons of the King of Falkenreid and the one his father was quickest to toss out of the Schloss with a horse, a sword and a hearty slap on the back.”
“And is there a reason why?” Lily asked. “Drinking? Wenching? Gambling? Seduction of cloistered votaries?”
“Popularity,” Jimson replied.
Lily blinked. “Surely I didn’t hear you correctly? His father wanted to be rid of him because he was popular?”
“Let me show you.” The mirror cleared, and then showed a young man a few years older than Leopold, perhaps twenty-five, doggedly inspecting troops. He…was not handsome. He was not particularly fat, but compared to Leopold, he was rather, well, lumpy. Leopold wore even the shabby outfit he had arrived in with a panache that made it look as if it was better than it was, and the fine garments that had been loaned him looked as if they had been made for him, and were flattered that he considered wearing them at all. This poor fellow in the mirror could never be described as anything but stodgy.
“This is the heir to the throne, Leopold’s eldest brother, Theodore. No one dislikes Theodore, but he arouses no particular enthusiasm, either. He’s not a bad fellow, and he’s not dim, in fact he has a very good mind, but a good mind isn’t the sort of thing you can trot out to show to the populace. He has never, in his entire life, done anything wrong. He has a plain little dumpling of a wife, who has produced three little dough-lumps of children. He is faithful to her, to his father, to his church.”
“Whereas Leopold?” Lily asked.
“Has riotous parties in taverns, is frequently found abed with women who are no better than they should be, organizes street battles between factions of students from the University and once rode his horse into church because he said the beast needed the blessing more than he did.” Jimson’s face appeared again. “And while the leaders scold him, rail at him and hold him up as a bad example, the general populace adores him. He’s more popular with the Army than anyone but the King. He is absolutely loyal to his older brother, mind you, and does not want the throne—“
“It would be too much work,” Lily said wryly.
“Possibly. He is willing to work hard when he sees a reason to. When part of the city burned down he was out there in the street with the fire brigades, and when it was out, he was known to climb up on ladders with a hammer himself. He is loyal to a fault, he always keeps his word when you can get him to give it, and as far as I can tell, he has never purposefully hurt anyone. But the King absolutely despaired of poor Theodore getting any recognition for his hard work and many talents as long as Leopold was around. So, he booted him out.”
The Sleeping Beauty Page 10
