by G. Wulfing
G. Wulfing, August 2007.
The Leaving Of Princess Laellinon
It was dark. Amorphous clouds scudded in front of a half moon. Lathel watched them from the ramparts of the castle, leaning on his spear. For some reason, an old tune kept running through his head – a tune that he had often sung to a certain child, when she was little, to quiet her. It reminded him of her.
The goatherd gave a weak grunt as his foot slipped yet again on the greasy ground. He pulled his foot back under him and kept going, half-running towards the vast grey looming ahead of him that was the castle. The moon was in front of him, giving erratic and dim light.
Something was approaching. Lathel sensed it. He swung on his heel, toward the great gates, his grey eyes sweeping the shadowy landscape beyond the castle wall. Was it some late messenger for the king?
The young goatherd was panting. He staggered to a stop before the towering gates of Tarafel, and tried to gather his breath before calling to the guards.
Lathel called first. “Hail!”
The cry drifted down, on the wind, to the goatherd.
“Who goes there?” shouted Lathel calmly.
Coedas the goatherd gulped for breath. His mouth was dry. “I bring a message to the king,” he barked, his heart hammering.
“Who goes there?” Lathel repeated, unmoved. Anyone could say that they had a message for the king. Lathel could play this game all night; he wasn’t going anywhere, and he wasn’t letting anyone in until he was sure of them.
“A goatherd, of the Jaraffa Hills. Please … the message is important.”
The goatherd’s voice was weakening.
“Wait me there,” Lathel replied. He descended the stairs unhurriedly, and retrieved a torch from the guardhouse at the foot of them. He fired it from the single candle on the table, and with a jerk of his head he summoned the two resting guards who sat eating there. One of them also lit a torch.
By the light of the torches, they opened the small iron door within the right of the two iron gates. The goatherd, his breath rasping, stepped through and found himself close between two armoured guards, each wearing a sword and carrying a spear, and radiating strength and authority.
Lathel glanced the goatherd over in the light of the torches. Only a boy, his face very weary, and Lathel could smell the muddy miles on him. “This way,” ordered Lathel quietly, and led on.
They took the goatherd through the darkened courtyard, toward a side door of the castle. Lathel unlocked it, led down a short hallway, and opened a door that led into a small room containing a bed, a chair, and a washstand with a jug and basin. “Get some water,” he told one of the guards – adding, with a glance at the boy, “and some food,” – and motioned for the other to stand at the door. Lathel picked up the candle that was on the washstand and lit it from his torch, then held the torch so that he could see the boy’s face, which seemed to be streaked with tears as much as with sweat.
“Your name?”
“Coedas, son of Shalaan and Maycha, from the Jaraffa hills.” The boy swayed with exhaustion.
With the stem of the torch, Lathel indicated the chair. “You may sit if you wish.” But the boy remained standing. “How come you to bring messages to the king?”
“I … I need to speak with him.”
“King Pontas will be made aware of your presence in the morning.”
“Please …” The goatherd hesitated. “It is urgent.”
“His Grace is asleep; surely it can wait ’til morning.”
“No, it … it concerns his daughter.”
A heartbeat later Lathel barked, “Wake the king!”
Towing the boy by his upper arm, and vice-gripping the torch in his other hand, Lathel marched Coedas through a dozen corridors and up two flights of stairs. In a hallway, they came upon the guard who had been sent to wake the king, and two people in rich velvet robes, with untidy hair. Lathel dipped his head. “Your Graces.” He pushed Coedas down into a kneeling position.
The king and queen! Coedas’ mind reeled.
“What message about my daughter?” the king asked urgently. His voice was deep and sounded cultured, even at this hour of the night.
“She – Your Grace, she –” Coedas sputtered. He choked on the words. “She has left us.”
A sob caught in his throat. For a moment he could see Arum’s face, smiling, the hill-wind caught in her rich brown hair.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” thundered the king.
“We found – a door. A door out of Tabasen. The writing told us what it was. She went through it. I begged her not to, Your Grace, I begged her not to go …” The goatherd’s tongue failed him and he sobbed, too exhausted even to produce tears.
‘A door out of Tabasen’ … Lathel’s mind went strangely numb. He, too, saw the princess’s face, laughing in sunlight as she rode outside the castle walls.
King Pontas knelt to stare at the goatherd, his face furrowed with anxiety and bewilderment. “Why? Why did she go?”
Coedas could do nothing but shake his head. He did not know why she had gone. Lathel’s hand was still gripping his arm, and the fingers of it had gone bruisingly hard.
“I don’t understand,” cried the king. “Where has she gone?”
“She has left us,” sobbed Coedas. “She has gone from our world.”
“But where?” wailed the king.
“Into another,” Coedas told him. “We cannot reach her. The writing said –” his breath caught in his dry throat – “the writing said that those who go through cannot return except by their own choosing.”
There was stunned, grieving silence in the hall for a moment.
“I thought … she was happy here,” the king said softly, brokenly.
I thought so too, Lathel answered in his mind.
“Oh, Laellinon,” whispered the queen.
Laellinon, Lathel repeated in his mind, thinking of the little girl whom he used to hold in his arms and lull; the skipping little girl whom he used to accompany along the walls of Tarafel; the brown-haired girl with the soft singing voice; the adventurous girl riding her horse in the greenwood under his guardianship. The old lullaby ran in his head.
Oh, Laellinon …
The king looked again at the dishevelled goatherd. “Did she – did she say that she would come back?” he demanded earnestly.
The goatherd cast his mind back to those moments beside the mysterious door standing in an unsupported doorframe in the middle of a cavern, black and unmarked as a shadow, heavy on its hinges.
She had made no such promise.
“She –” he began, and found no more words. He saw Arum moving toward the door, as though compelled, but willing. His rising sense of dread had climaxed. ‘Arum, don’t touch it. It’s dangerous – I can feel it.’
“TELL ME!” shouted the king, his hands moving unbidden toward the goatherd’s throat.
Coedas saw Arum, the princess Laellinon of Morranius, lay her hand on the shadowy handle and draw the door open. He could not see what lay beyond. ‘Arum, no! Don’t!’
She had looked back at him, one last time. She had smiled. ‘I’ll always remember,’ she had said.
Then she had stepped through the door. Coedas had screamed. The door closed behind her, and Coedas charged to it and flung it open, but there was only the cavern beyond. Nothing but a doorframe and a door, in the middle of a cavern.
Coedas’ throat hurt again, remembering how he had cried her name over and over until his voice was raw, pleading with her to come back, but somehow knowing that she could not hear a word.
“She said ––” He looked up, for the first time, into the king’s eyes, and found them full of tears. They were brown, dark brown, like Arum’s.
“She said only that she would always remember.”
The king and queen waited for three days before making the announcement … just in case.
During that time, Coedas remained at the castle, sitting in the lavish guest chamber that
was allotted to him, just thinking; or lingering on the castle wall, staring out at the view that Arum must have known so well. He had recounted to Their Graces in detail all that had happened since their daughter had been smuggled over the border of Morranius into the Jaraffa Hills of Ethain, to escape the attack on Tarafel of her throne-hungry cousin Ratarkus. This conversation had taken place the day after Coedas arrived at the castle, once he had eaten and slept to recover his strength, and had sent a message to his family to tell them where he was. Included in that message was the king’s summons for Coedas’ family to meet the king and queen at Tarafel as soon as they could.
The king and queen had invited Sir Lathel, Sir Hove, and silver-haired Sir Trit-Cohn, whom Coedas recognised as the man who had brought the princess to Coedas’ family and commanded them to keep her safe, to listen to Coedas’ story.
Coedas told them all how this broad-shouldered archer with silver hair and grey eyes had come, cloak-swathed and travel-stained, to his family’s cottage in the hills and presented the goatherds with a twelve-year-old girl who had the bearing of a queen. How the man had left no name but had shown them the royal crest of Morranius: a white lily, the symbol of purity, mercy, and compassion; and had charged them, on pain of death, to keep safe this individual whom he claimed was important to the Morranian throne. Coedas remembered those dark eyes, staring proudly into his own, in the dim candlelight of the cottage. ‘Her name is Arum,’ the archer had said. ‘That is all you need to know.’ He had told them that when the time was right, he would return for
