Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Before Moon was quite certain how it had been managed, she was standing in a handsome dark room with a velvet-hung bed and a fire bigger than the one in the parlor, and a woman with a red face and fly-away hair was pouring cans of water into a bathtub shaped and painted like a swan.

  “That's the silliest thing I've ever seen,” said Moon in wonder.

  The red-faced woman grinned suddenly. “You know, it is. And it may be the lords and ladies think so, too, and are afraid to say.”

  “One of them must have paid for it once.”

  “That's so. Well, no one's born with taste. Have your bath, and I'll bring you a change of clothes in a little.”

  “You needn't do that. I have clean ones in my pack.”

  “Yes, but have they got lace on them, and a 'broidery flower for every seam? If not, you'd best let me bring these, for word is you eat with the King and Queen.”

  “I do?” Moon blurted, horrified. “Why?”

  “Lord Leyan went to them, and they said send you in. Don't pop your eyes at me, there's no help for it.”

  Moon scrubbed until she was pink all over, and smelling of violet soap. She washed her hair three times, and trimmed her short nails, and looked in despair at her reflection in the mirror. She didn't think she'd put anyone off dinner, but there was no question that the only thing that stood there was Moon Very Thin, tall and brown and forthright.

  “Here, now,” said the red-faced woman at the door. “I thought this would look nice, and you wouldn't even quite feel a fool in it. What do you say?”

  Draped over her arms she had a plain, high-necked dress of amber linen, and an overgown of russet velvet. The hem and deep collar were embroidered in gold with the platter-heads of yarrow flowers. Moon stared at that, and looked quickly up at the red-faced woman. There was nothing out of the way in her expression.

  “It's—it's fine. It's rather much, but...”

  “But it's the least much that's still enough for dining in the hall. Let's get you dressed.”

  The woman helped her into it, pulling swaths of lavender-scented fabric over her head. Then she combed out Moon's hair, braided it, and fastened it with a gold pin.

  “Good,” the red-faced woman said. “You look like you, but dressed up, which is as it should be. I'll show you to the hall.”

  Moon took a last look at her reflection. She didn't think she looked at all like herself. Dazed, she followed her guide out of the room.

  She knew when they'd almost reached their destination. A fragrance rolled out of the hall that reminded Moon she'd missed three meals. At the door, the red-faced woman stopped her.

  “You'll do, I think. Still—tell no lies, though you may be told them. Look anyone in the eye, though they might want it otherwise. And take everything offered you with your right hand. It can't hurt.” With that the red-faced woman turned and disappeared down the maze of the corridor.

  Moon straightened her shoulders and, her stomach pinched with hunger and nerves, stepped into the hall.

  She gaped. She couldn't help it, though she'd promised herself she wouldn't. The hall was as high as two rooms, and long and broad as a field of wheat. It had two yawning fireplaces big enough to tether an ox in. Banners hung from every beam, sewn over with beasts and birds and things she couldn't name. There weren't enough candles in all Hark End to light it top to bottom, nor enough wood in the Seawood to heat it, so like the great courtyard it was beautiful and grim.

  The tables were set in a U, the high table between the two arms. To her dazzled eye, it seemed every place was taken. It was bad enough to dine with the king and queen. Why hadn't she realized that it would be the court, as well?

  At the high table, the king rose smiling. “Our guest!” he called. “Come, there's a place for you beside my lady and me.”

  Moon felt her face burning as she walked to the high table. The court watched her go; but there were no whispers, no hands raised to shield moving lips. She was grateful, but it was odd.

  Her chair was indeed set beside those of the king and queen. The king was white haired and broad-shouldered, with an open, smiling face and big hands. The queen's hair was white and gold, and her eyes were wide and gray as storms. She smiled, too, but as if the gesture were a sorrow she was loath to share.

  “Lord Leyan told us your story,” said the queen. “I remember your teacher. Had you been with her long?”

  “All my life,” Moon replied. Dishes came to roost before her, so she could serve herself: roast meat, salads, breads, compotes, vegetables, sauces, wedges of cheese. She could limit herself to a bite of everything, and still leave the hall achingly full. She kept her left hand clamped between her knees for fear of forgetting and taking something with it. Every dish was good, but not quite as good as she'd thought it looked.

  “Then you are a witch as well?” the king asked.

  “I don't know. I've been taught by a witch, and learned witches' knowledge. But she taught me gardening and carpentry, too.”

  “You hope to find her?”

  Moon looked at him, and weighed the question seriously for the first time since the Seawood. “I hope I may learn she's been transformed, and that I can change her back. But I think I met her, last night in the wood, and I find it's hard to hope.”

  “But you want to go on?” the queen pressed her. “What will you do?”

  “The only thing I can think of to do is what she set out for: I mean to find your son.”

  Moon couldn't think why the queen would pale at that.

  “Oh, my dear, don't,” the king said. “Our son is lost, your teacher is lost—what profit can there be in throwing yourself after them? Rest here, then go home and live. Our son is gone.”

  It was a fine, rich hall, and he was a fair, kingly man. But it was all dimmed, as if a layer of soot lay over the palace and its occupants.

  “What did he look like, the prince?”

  The king frowned. It was the queen who drew a locket out of the bodice of her gown, lifted its chain over her head and passed it to Moon. It held, not the costly miniature she'd expected, but a sketch in soft pencil, swiftly done. It was the first informal thing she could recall seeing in the palace.

  “He wouldn't sit still to be painted,” the queen said wistfully. “One of his friends likes to draw. He gave me that after...after my son was gone.”

  He had been reading, perhaps, when his friend snatched that quiet moment to catch his likeness. The high forehead was propped on a long-fingered hand; the eyes were directed downward, and the eyelids hid them. The nose was straight, and the mouth was long and grave. The hair was barely suggested; light or dark, it fell unruly around the supporting hand. Even setting aside the kindly eye of friendship that had informed the pencil, Moon gave the village girls leave to be silly over this one. She closed the locket and gave it back.

  “You can't know what's happened to him. How can you let him go, without knowing?”

  “There are many things in the world I will never know,” the king said sharply.

  “I met a man at the gate who still mourns the prince. He called him the heart of the land. Nothing can live without its heart.”

  The queen drew a breath and turned her face to her plate, but said nothing.

  “Enough,” said the king. “If you must search, then you must. But I'll have peace at my table. Here, child, will you pledge it with me?”

  Over Moon's right hand, lying on the white cloth, he laid his own, and held his wine cup out to her.

  She sat frozen, staring at the chased silver and her own reflection in it. Then she raised her eyes to his and said, “No.”

  There was a shattering quiet in the hall.

  “You will not drink?”

  “I will not...pledge you peace. There isn't any here, however much anyone may try to hide it. I'm sorry.” That, she knew when she'd said it, was true. “Excuse me,” she added, and drew her hand out from under the king's, which was large, but soft. “I'm going to bed. I mean to leave early
tomorrow.”

  She rose and walked back down the length of the room, lapped in a different kind of silence.

  A servant found her in the corridor and led her to her chamber. There she found her old clothes clean and dry and folded, the fire tended, the bed turned down. The red-faced woman wasn't there. She took off her finery, laid it out smooth on a chair, and put her old nightgown on. Then she went to the glass to unpin and brush her hair.

  The pin was in her hand, and she was reaching to set it down, when she saw what it was. A little leaping frog. But now it was gold.

  It was hers. The kicking legs and goggle eyes, every irregularity—it was her pin. She dashed to the door and flung it open. “Hello?” she called. “Oh, bother!” She stepped back into the room and searched, and finally found the bell pull disguised as a bit of tapestry.

  After a few minutes, a girl with black hair and bright eyes came to the door. “Yes, ma'am?”

  “The woman who helped me, who drew my bath and brought me clothes. Is she still here?”

  The girl looked distressed. “I'm sorry, ma'am. I don't know who waited on you. What did she look like?”

  “About my height. With a red face and wild, wispy hair.”

  The girl stared, and said, “Ma'am—are you sure? That doesn't sound like anyone here.”

  Moon dropped heavily into the nearest chair. “Why am I not surprised? Thank you very much. I didn't mean to disturb you.”

  The girl nodded and closed the door behind her. Moon put out the candles, climbed into bed, and lay awake for an uncommonly long time.

  In a gray, wet dawn, she dressed and shouldered her pack and by the simple expedient of going down every time she came to a staircase, found a door that led outside. It was a little postern, opening on a kitchen garden and a wash yard fenced in stone. At the side of the path, a man squatted by a wooden hand cart, mending a wheel.

  “Here, missy!” he called out, his voice like a spade thrust into gravel. “Hold this axle up, won't you?”

  Moon sighed. She wanted to go. She wanted to be moving, because moving would be almost like getting something done. And she wanted to be out of this beautiful place that had lost its heart. She stepped over a spreading clump of rhubarb, knelt, and hoisted the axle.

  Whatever had damaged the wheel had made the axle split; the long splinter of wood bit into Moon's right hand. She cried out and snatched that hand away. Blood ran out of the cut on her palm and fell among the rhubarb stems, a few drops. Then it ceased to flow.

  Moon looked up, frightened, to the man with the wheel.

  It was the man from the hay wagon, white-haired, his eyes as green and gray as sage. He had a ruddy, somber face. Red-faced, like the woman who'd—

  The woman who'd helped her last night had been the one from the hay cart. Why hadn't she seen it? But she remembered it now, and the woman's green eyes, and even a fragment of hay caught in the wild hair. Moon sprang up.

  The old man caught her hand. “Rhubarb purges, and rhubarb means advice. Turn you back around. Your business is in there.” He pointed a red, rough finger at the palace, at the top of the near corner tower. Then he stood, dusted off his trousers, strolled down the path and was gone.

  Moon opened her mouth, which she hadn't been able to do until then. She could still feel his hand, warm and calloused. She looked down. In the palm he'd held was a sprig of hyssop and a wisp of broom, and a spiralling stem of convolvulus.

  Moon bolted back through the postern door and up the first twisting flight of stairs she found, until she ran out of steps. Then she cast furiously about. Which way was that wretched tower? She got her bearings by looking out the corridor windows. It would be that door, she thought. She tried it; it resisted.

  He could have kept his posy and given me a key, she thought furiously. Then: But he did.

  She plucked up the convolvulus, poked it into the keyhole, and said, “Turn away, turn astray, backwards from the turn of day. What iron turned to lock away, herb will turn the other way.” Metal grated against metal, and the latch yielded under her hand.

  A young man's room, frozen in time. A jerkin of quilted, painted leather dropped on a chair; a case of books, their bindings standing in bright ranks; a wooden flute and a pair of leather gloves lying on an inlaid cedar chest; an unmade bed, the coverlet slid sideways and half pooled on the floor.

  More, a room frozen in a tableau of atrocity and accusation. For Moon could feel it, the thing that had been done here, that was still being done because the room had sat undisturbed. Nightshade and thornapple, skullcap, henbane, and fern grown bleached and stunted under stone. Moon recognized their scents and their twisted strength around her, the power of the work they'd made and the shame that kept them secret.

  There was a dust of crushed leaf and flower over the door lintel, on the sill of every window, lined like seams in the folds of the bed hangings. Her fingers clenched on the herbs in her hand as rage sprouted up in her and spread.

  With broom and hyssop she dashed the dust from the lintel, the windows, the hangings. “Merry or doleful, the last or the first,” she chanted as she swung her weapons, spitting each word in fury, “fly and be hunted, or stay and be cursed!”

  “What are you doing?” said a voice from the door, and Moon spun and raised her posy like a dagger.

  The king stood there, his coat awry, his hair uncombed. His face was white as a corpse's, and his eyes were wide as a man's who sees the gallows, and knows the noose is his.

  “You did this,” Moon breathed; and louder, “You gave him to the King of Stones with your own hand.”

  “I had to,” he whispered. “He made a beggar of me. My son was the forfeit.”

  “You locked him under the earth. And let my teacher go to her...to her death to pay your forfeit.”

  “It was his life or mine!”

  “Does your lady wife know what you did?”

  “His lady wife helped him to do it,” said the queen, stepping forward from the shadows of the hall. She stood tall and her face was quiet, as if she welcomed the noose. “Because he was her love and the other, only her son. Because she feared to lose a queen's power. Because she was a fool, and weak. Then she kept the secret, because her heart was black and broken, and she thought no worse could be done than had been done already.”

  Moon turned to the king. “Tell me,” she commanded.

  “I was hunting alone,” said the king in a trembling voice. “I roused a boar. I...had a young man's pride and an old man's arm, and the boar was too much for me. I lay bleeding and in pain, and the sight nearly gone from my eyes, when I heard footsteps. I called out for help.

  “‘You are dying,’ he told me, and I denied it, weeping. ‘I don't want to die,’ I said, over and over. I promised him anything, if he would save my life.” The king's voice failed, and stopped.

  “Where?” said Moon. “Where did this happen?”

  “In the wood under Elder Scarp. Near the waterfall that feeds the stream called the Laughing Girl.”

  “Point me the way,” she ordered.

  The sky was hazed white, and the air was hot and still. Moon dashed sweat from her forehead as she walked. She could have demanded a horse, but she had walked the rest of the journey, and this seemed such a little way compared to that. She hoped it would be cooler under the trees.

  It wasn't; and the gnats were worse around her face, and the biting flies. Moon swung at them steadily as she clambered over the stones. It seemed a long time before she heard the waterfall, then saw it. She cast about for the clearing, and wondered, were there many? Or only one, and it so small that she could walk past it and never know? The falling water thrummed steadily, like a drum, like a heartbeat.

  In a shaft of sun, she saw a bit of creamy white—a flower head, round and flat as a platter, dwarfed with early blooming. She looked up and found that she stood on the edge of a clearing, and was not alone.

  He wore armor, dull gray plates worked with fantastic embossing, trimmed in glossy
black. He had a gray cloak fastened over that, thrown back off his shoulders, but with the hood up and pulled well forward. Moon could see nothing of his face.

  “In the common way of things,” he said, in a quiet, carrying voice, “I seek out those I wish to see. I am not used to uninvited guests.”

  The armor was made of slate and obsidian, because he was the King of Stones.

  She couldn't speak. She could command the king of Hark End, but this was a king whose rule did not light on him by an accident of blood or by the acclaim of any mortal thing. This was an embodied power, a still force of awe and terror.

  “I've come for a man and his soul,” she whispered. “They were wrongly taken.”

  “I take nothing wrongly. Are you sure?”

  She felt heat in her face, then cold at the thought of what she'd said: that she'd accused him. “No,” she admitted, the word cracking with her fear. “But that they were wrongly given, I know. He was not theirs to give.”

  “You speak of the prince of Hark End. They were his parents. Would you let anyone say you could not give away what you had made?”

  Moon's lips parted on a word; then she stared in horror. Her mind churned over the logic, followed his question back to its root.

  He spoke her thoughts aloud. “You have attended at the death of a child, stilled in the womb to save the mother's life. How is this different?”

  “It is different!” she cried. “He was a grown man, and what he was was shaped by what he did, what he chose.”

  “He had his mother's laugh, his grandfather's nose. His father taught him to ride. What part of him was not made by someone else? Tell me, and we will see if I should give that part back.”

  Moon clutched her fingers over her lips, as if by that she could force herself to think it all through before she spoke. “His father taught him to ride,” she repeated. “If the horse refuses to cross a ford, what makes the father use his spurs, and the son dismount and lead it? He has his mother's laugh—but what makes her laugh at one thing, and him at another?”

  “What, indeed?” asked the King of Stones. “Well, for argument's sake I'll say his mind is in doubt, and his heart. What of his body?”