by Carol Berg
Ob straightened his shoulders and bowed deeply. “Majesty.”
As he came up, I motioned for him to look at me, forcing his watery red-and-yellow eyes to meet my own. “Next time, watch closer.”
As the wide brown man set to his duties, I stumbled my way to the royal apartments on the fourth level, fell into a bed the size of a banqueting table, and slept for an entire cycle of the light.
CHAPTER 17
By the time I crawled out of the royal bed on my first morning as the Bounded King, Vroon had taken most efficient charge of my household. A young male servant with only one ear and a wooden stick for a leg was waiting for me with a tub of steaming water and fresh clothes suitable for royalty. I accepted the fine-woven red shirt and black breeches, black hose, and calf-high boots - all of them, amazingly enough, made exactly to my measure - but diplomatically postponed wearing the gold-encrusted doublet and elaborately jeweled belt. Feeling properly human after the bath, I sent the servant to inform Princess Roxanne that I would wait upon her in an hour, then grabbed two hunks of hot bread, dripping with butter and honey, from a tray beside my bed, and set off to see Paulo. With my breakfast had come word from Nithea that he was awake.
When I arrived, Nithea had him propped up on pillows and was feeding him tiny spoonfuls of a thick whitish substance that smelled like rotten fish.
“Demons, have you come to rescue me?” he said weakly.
“Only to see that you’re not making Nithea too miserable with your complaining.”
“She’s got me so flat, I couldn’t lift a horse’s tail, then shoves more of this mess down me so I’ll puke out what insides I’ve got left. I thought it was a new torture from the Guardian.”
“You look better,” I said. And so he did. Some of the swelling had gone down in his face, his color was healthier wherever he wasn’t purple, green, or black, and his eyes had a spark of life in them.
Paulo screwed up his forehead and looked me up and down. “You look cleaner than last time I saw you, and your outfit’s pretty fine, but I think this lady should work on your busted face for a while and leave me be. You look like a mountain fell on you. What do you think, Nithea?”
“The king said you were to be made well before anything else. I do his will.”
Paulo squinted up at me. “The king… I was right, then.”
I shrugged.
Nithea took the pillows out from behind him and rolled him onto his side. I sat on a stool beside his bed and told him what I’d done.
“So why haven’t you gone to the Source yet?” he said, wincing as the woman spread a salve over the lash marks on his back.
“I just woke up. I had to come here first.”
He kept looking at me.
“All right, I don’t know. It’s what I wanted… what I came here for… the whole reason we got caught… ”
“You’re scared. That’s what.”
“I’m not scared. I’m just waiting for you to get on your feet again. You heard something ‘not right’ in that cave, and I didn’t. So, maybe you need to be with me when I go back.”
He pressed his face into his pillow, muffling a miserable groan. Around all the cuts and bruises he had gone a sickly yellow. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “This lady and her tree milk have done for me again.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
Nithea shook her head, holding up four fingers, then five, but her eyes smiled reassuringly above her veil. So it would take more than a day, but he would be all right.
“I’ll come back later when you’re feeling better.”
Nodding to Nithea, I left the room and headed down the stair in search of Roxanne.
Was Paulo right? Was fear what made me feel like a battle was going on in my chest every moment we stayed here? My connection to the Bounded was very deep. The land, the people, the problems… Every day, the place revealed itself a little more. I could look at the Singlars and know what names they would choose. I understood what had to be done to release them from their peculiar confinement to their towers, and I was already trying to figure out how they might share the wonders of the gardens. But I didn’t want to know these things or feel them. I didn’t belong here. I had to go back and clean up the mess I’d left behind in Leire, and then find some place to hide where no one could ever find me.
I wasn’t looking forward to my interview with Princess Roxanne, but unlike the Bounded, she was full of surprises. She wasn’t waiting for me in her apartments, but was bustling about the audience hall, peering into every nook and cranny, pulling back curtains, examining columns and doorways and every hand’s-breadth of the walls. Two Singlar women, dwarfish like Vroon, trotted after her on their stubby legs, while a male servant observed her from the wide doors to the rotunda.
The princess had gotten cleaned up as she wanted. Her hair hung heavy and damp halfway down her back. Evidently no one had found any gowns to fit her, so she wore a simple wool robe, much too large, that she had tied at her waist with a gold cord. Not very elegant, but the color, a rich blue, made her light hair look like gold thread.
When she saw me enter the room, she immediately altered course and hurried across the floor, planting herself in my way as if I had intended to walk past her. Her face, now that it was clean, looked like a fine sculpture, perfectly smooth, and rounded just enough to look soft. But you could have struck sparks from her eyes. They were gray, like steel. “So I’m a prisoner again. A fine rescuer you are.”
Why had I decided to visit her? Yes, I’d been harsh with her. And this was a strange, ugly place, bound to be frightening for someone with no experience of sorcery. But her father had burned sorcerers alive, slaughtered them and anyone who knew them: my father, Tennice’s brother, their friends, the infant they had thought was me. I had no reason to think the princess would do any different in his position. I ought to put her off the Edge.
“You are free to come and go as you like.”
“What a polite thing to say. But most houses provide doors and windows that make it a bit easier. Do you see any such things hereabouts?” She pulled back a green curtain, only to drop it again once she had shown me the blank wall behind it. With her lips pressed together, she strode from one drapery to another, nearly tearing them from the wall to illustrate her point. “And my chambers have none either. But then perhaps you still have plans to cut off my skin if I complain.”
She was certainly afraid - the Lords had taught me to smell and taste fear - but she did a good job of hiding it. I followed along behind her, hands clasped behind my back. It was true I had told Vroon to give her rooms without window slots. I had thought peeking through them might frighten her worse than she was already.
“Didn’t these women tell you how to leave the tower?” I nodded to the dwarfish women just out of politeness. They turned scarlet, placed their hands on their ruffled white collars, knelt, and bowed their heads to the floor. Roxanne glared at me. I nudged the women to get up, wishing myself ten leagues away. I’d give her a quarter of an hour and that was all.
“They only told me this ‘think of yourself out’ idiocy. Does it give you pleasure for your servants to be insolent or were you testing my obedience? I didn’t kill them for it, nor give them even a gentle slap for their rudeness.”
“But it’s the truth. They just don’t understand that you’re not used to such things. This is… ”
“… not Leire. Yes, I remember.” She spun on her heel, almost causing me to collide with her. “So tell me, O great king, where in the blighted universe are we?”
“Its inhabitants call this world the Bounded.”
“This world - ” She sat down abruptly on a plain wooden bench next to the wall. To her credit she lost none of her color. “You really mean that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I heard a story once of another world… ”
“… and a bridge of enchantment that joined it with our own.”
“I remember some of it. Such a wild tale
… sorcery… other worlds… villainous creatures with no souls. I thought the woman must surely be mad.”
“That woman was my mother.” My mother had been astonished that King Evard had kept his daughter in the room as she told him about Gondai and the Bridge and the battle that had killed her brother.
“Your mother… truly? I couldn’t believe my father would even listen to her. I thought it was only because she was related to his sword champion, the Duke of… ” Her voice trailed away, and her gray eyes grew wide, staring at me again. “That’s who you are! Duke Tomas’s son!”
I bowed. “The stupidest boy in the world - at your service.”
Her brow wrinkled. “But the woman who told the story was not Duke Tomas’s wife.”
“There was a mix-up early on. He wasn’t really my father, but my uncle. His sister, Seriana, was - is - my mother.”
She shook her head. Her hair was curling as it dried and a few of the curls fell down on her face. She didn’t seem to notice. “Gerick. That was your name. And you were so unfriendly! You wouldn’t say anything and wouldn’t play anything I wanted. I told you about the cherry tarts to impress you. And later you were stolen by bandits. Everyone believed you were dead.”
“It’s complicated. I didn’t die.”
“So this is the world your mother told of?” She looked around the audience hall with new interest.
“No… or rather, I’m not exactly sure. It’s a long story. Would you like me to show you how to leave the Blue Tower? That’s probably enough strangeness for one day.” Then I could leave her to her own devices.
“Yes. Certainly. It might prove to me that I’m not your prisoner.” She popped up from the bench. “This is so odd. We played together. It seems a thousand years ago right now. This place… these people… You know… I don’t care if it’s complicated to explain where we are. I want to hear it. I’m not stupid. And I’m not some ninny who faints at the least fright. But, yes, show me how to get out of here first.”
Roxanne didn’t stop talking the whole way down the length of the audience hall. Without giving me much time to tell her anything, she peppered me with questions, not always the ones I expected.
“Who is your friend that you care so much for him?”
“His name is Paulo. He was born in the village of Dunfarrie. My mother befriended him there, and four years ago he helped her rescue me from the people who abducted - ”
“A common boy, then.”
“Those words have no meaning with respect to Paulo.”
“All right, all right. I can see not. Are you really as fierce as you say?”
I kept my eyes on the doorway at the end of the hall, wishing we were in the rotunda already so I could push her through the wall and be done with her. “My childhood was very unusual. I’ve done everything I say.”
She thought about that for a moment, her sidelong gaze feeling like fire on my skin. “There are a number of people who would say you are young to be a king, but I think it would be more accurate to say you are very old to be a year, ten months, and five days younger than me.”
The main entrance to the Blue Tower, where Paulo and I had first come through to visit the Guardian, was centered on a sheer curved wall, identifiable as a tower entrance only by the narrow silver band at its edges. I traced my finger over the outline to show her. “A dwelling in this world is called a fastness. They look like towers to us. But dimensions - height and width and depth - are measured differently here, so the interior spaces don’t reflect the exterior shape. And though the interior doorways between rooms look familiar to us, those which pass through the walls do not. The women were exactly right. You have to think of yourself out…”
I explained the passage to her as Vroon had explained it to me, and I described the thoughts I had used successfully. That was not easy, as I didn’t even have to consider them any more. Then I gave her a demonstration. When I popped back in, she was already yelling at me.
“Sorcery! I should have known it! How is it you are capable of such wickedness?” The princess was flushed, whether with anger or fright I couldn’t tell. “And how could you think that I - ”
“It’s not sorcery, though I’m sure to you it appears the same. But you and every person in this land can do it. And no one burns you for it.”
This time, she did turn pale. I thought she was going to run. But she just stared at me until my skin grew hot. “Well then,” she said at last. “Explain it to me.”
It took me a few moments to decide how much to say. I’d done a lot of thinking about the Bounded. Anyone in the Four Realms would call Nithea’s healing practices sorcery, and the same for Zanore’s route-finding, Ob’s weighty words, and the whole business of towers that grew. Yet I’d felt no telltale prickles of enchantment when the healing woman had massaged my shoulder - twisted when the dead maintainer had fallen on me - and I could suddenly raise my hand above my head without passing out from the pain. And I summoned no power to think myself out of the Blue Tower. The “prickles” were a sign of the resistance of the natural world to the use of a sorcerer’s power. So I had concluded that the Guardian had pronounced no magical winding to open the stone circle passage to the garden because no magic was needed. The fundamental nature of the Bounded was magic.
The princess’s fingers tapped impatiently on her folded arms.
“Well, first you have to understand the distinction between natural law and sorcery. Natural law is the set of rules a world works by - which can be different depending on the world. Sorcery is the use of a particular kind of power to stretch or extend or nullify those rules. Going in and out of these towers has no more to do with magical power than does riding in a wheeled cart or sailing on a lake in Leire…”
I tried to explain how things that would be inexplicable in our world and require a sorcerer’s power to accomplish could be a natural part of another one. I felt as if I was making a muddle of it. Roxanne stared at the floor, listening, her frown deepening by the moment.
When I finally gave up and stopped talking, she glanced up. “All right, then. I suppose that makes some kind of perverse sense. Go on.”
I was astonished. I wondered briefly what she might say if I told her I’d melted rocks with lightning from the tip of my finger or had swum in the deeps of the ocean in the form of a fish. I stayed with nature. “So, the way to pass between these spaces we call in and the spaces we call out is to convince yourself which way you’re going. Your mind’s just not used to being in a world with a different set of rules, and it doesn’t believe it when you tell it what to do. If you don’t want to try it, I could - ”
“No. I’m feeling a bit overstuffed with all this strangeness, and I’m tired of this dismal place and these lamps that are forever being turned up and down by creeping servants I never see. I need to walk in the sunlight. Maybe go riding.”
“Uh… perhaps there are a few more things you should know before we go out…”
Roxanne was very determined, and mastered entrances and exits in short order. She seemed to accept my word that it wasn’t evil. I supposed she had no one else to trust. However odd, I was at least someone she knew.
Once we were outside, she marveled at the green stars and massive lightnings of the Bounded, and called the towers “extraordinary” and “exotic.” This is not to say she was pleasant company. Mostly she complained about her awful robe, and the wind, and the too-large sandals they had given her for shoes, and the black dirt, and all the inadequacies of service in the Blue Tower. But even though I sensed how she was repulsed by many of the deformities in evidence, she never once showed it to those who crowded around us as we walked.
After a short walk, we headed back toward the Blue Tower. As we crossed the commard, a bent old woman with a jaw that bulged out like a bullfrog’s throat dropped to her knees in front of me and kissed the toe of my boots. She wasn’t the first Singlar to have done so that day.
Roxanne glared as I sent the old woman on her way. “They
worship you! You must tell me how you’ve come here. I don’t care how long or complicated the story. How is it you’re their king? And why were you a prisoner?”
“I need to go - ”
“It’s your vile henchmen who brought me here, ‘King’ Gerick, putting a bag over my head and taking me before a horrible man who wore a crown and acted as though he were a king, though he had no kingly manner about him - ”
“And I would guess you told him who you were and what he could expect from your father if he so much as looked at you.”
Her eyes could have ripped the skin off a rabbit, but her tongue never slowed. “ - and in his most disgustingly impudent manner, this vile man threw me into that dungeon, where those other beastly creatures would come and taunt me and look at me, and I refused to believe in them. I spent a great deal of time screaming, until I decided that I must be in the hands of Kerotean priests, and that everything was an illusion induced by their wicked potions and elixirs. I believed they were taking vengeance against my father by driving me mad, and I decided I wouldn’t let them do it. So it’s only right that you tell me what’s going on in this place. Why are you a king?”
“It’s all bound up with a prophecy or an oracle or something like that… ”
I didn’t explain about the Breach or the Lords or why I had come here. I just told her about the Guardian and his corruption, and how I’d come to the Bounded for my own reasons, but gotten caught up in their expectations. As I talked, we started walking again, across the commard and back into the city. It rained a little as we walked, but the air stayed warm and still. Roxanne didn’t seem to mind. She kept her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the roadway as she listened. But she didn’t miss a word, and she kept interrupting me with more questions.
