by Helen Lowe
Does this mean she’s dead? Sigismund wondered, and felt cold, despite the warmth caught between the stone walls. He could hear Flor’s voice, promising to hunt down all those who opposed his grandmother’s will, and he felt afraid for Rue, who had put herself at risk to help him escape. Even, he thought savagely, if she is not of my rank, or station, or kind.
He chose to dream that night, deliberately defying his father and seeking a clue to Rue’s whereabouts or fate. He hoped the dream would return him to the forest of Thorn and the house with the Faerie mound below it, but instead he found himself on a windswept hilltop. The green earth showed the outline of old ramparts and there were tumble-down foundations beneath the long grass. He could see a dark line of forest in the distance and the sky overhead was filled with gray hurrying clouds. The wind chilled him and his hand reached automatically for the hilt of the red and white sword, but closed on nothing.
“You must always carry it with you from now on,” said Balisan’s voice behind him, “even into your dreams.”
The master-at-arms was standing on the crest of one of the ramparts, his hair and cloak blown sideways by the wind. He seemed sculpted out of shadow and bleached bone, and Sigismund shivered, remembering the warriors who had stood beside Flor in the Faerie hill. “Did you follow me here, or bring me?” he demanded. “And where is this place anyway? What happened here?”
“You did,” said Balisan, jumping down from the rampart and walking toward him. “Once this would have been the zu Malvolin castle in the west, the one called Highthorn. It was built to overlap both Faerie and the house in Thorn forest where the Margravine trapped you. But you used the sword you found there to sever the planes and this was the outcome.” He smiled, and Sigismund shivered again. “Your father will want to send a punitive expedition to put down the zu Malvolin here, but a ruin is all that they will find.”
Sigismund stared around at the ruined hill, more shaken than he cared to admit. “You said I was gone for almost two years,” he said, “but these ruins seem far older than that.”
Balisan shrugged. “Time moves differently in dreams than in the waking world. But this is still your handiwork, Prince Sigismund—yours and the sword’s. I thought that you should see it.”
“The sword,” Sigismund repeated, and shook his head. “It’s one of those artifacts you told me about, isn’t it? And its power is connected to mine, no matter what Master Griff says.”
“Master Griff is a scholar,” said Balisan, “and so finds it hard to trust in anything that is not set down in books. But you are right about the sword. It has power of its own, but it also focuses and extends the power of the one who wields it, as the Margravine has discovered to her cost.”
Sigismund remembered how Balisan’s eyes had gleamed when they first rested on the red and white blade. “You already know about this sword, don’t you?” he said slowly. “Not just its power, but who it belonged to before?”
Balisan nodded, the gleam back in his eyes. “It is the sword of Parsifal, the one he bore on the Grail quest. Its name is Quickthorn and you will need it when you go into the Wood.”
Sigismund turned and looked at that dark, distant line of forest, remembering again how he had dreamed of the sword after his illness, before Balisan came to the West Castle. There were so many stories told about the sword of Parsifal: that it was twin to Excalibur, the sword wrought by the faie and given to Arthur; that it was a holy sword brought to the northern lands by Joseph of Arimathea; or that it was first found and drawn from a stone by Parsifal, outside the Castle Perilous. It was hard to believe that any human being could hold a blade of such power and live, let alone bring it out of Faerie and into the mortal world.
“But I have power too,” he said, half to himself, and felt the dream wind touch cool fingers against his cheek. “And I’m stronger now, since I’ve been in the Faerie hill.”
“That is what happens once you begin to use your power in earnest.” Balisan rested his hand on Sigismund’s shoulder. “Your talent for power is at least as great as your aptitude with a sword, but although you did every exercise I set for you, I still felt you were holding back at some level. Perhaps,” he added, “because unlike swords, your power is not something you have been familiar with all your life.”
“Perhaps,” said Sigismund. He recalled that first moment when he knew he had been trapped and then all the events that followed. “I suppose need did drive me into it more fully,” he admitted, and slid a suspicious glance at Balisan. “That wouldn’t be one of the reasons you let me go off to Thorn without you, would it?”
He would not, he reflected privately, be at all surprised. Balisan kept his own counsel, but Sigismund was quite sure that he was capable of being devious.
The master-at-arms met his eyes, his expression inscrutable. “I have already told you my reasons,” he said. “But you did seem to be managing on your own, once I caught up with you.”
That was true, Sigismund supposed. He turned and studied the Wood again, thinking about the castle that lay at its heart and everything he knew about the hundred-year sleep. “If I am the chosen prince,” he said, “then the Margravine will have to try and bring me under her power again. She won’t have any choice.” He frowned as he remembered her conversation with Flor. “And once she has what she wants, she’ll go after everyone who’s opposed her. Syrica and Rue. The sleeping princess. My father. People I care about,” he added softly.
Balisan’s answering tone was cool as the dream. “Then you will have to find a way to stop her.”
Sigismund laughed, short and hard. “I will,” he said grimly, then stopped, thinking he sounded like his father. He shook his head. “Of course, she’ll try and kill me as well once I’ve served her purpose.”
“Trying is one thing,” Balisan replied calmly, “succeeding is quite another. You have already hurt her in this last encounter and now you have the sword, so the Margravine is not going to have it all her own way. And I am still here.”
Yes, thought Sigismund, studying him carefully. But who or what are you? Where do you fit in? Are you of the faie as well, or some other power that moves in this world?
He supposed that his father must know, but was less sure that the King would give him the information he wanted. But a prince should know the truth, he thought, frowning again, about his friends as well as his enemies. He remembered, immediately afterward, that it was Balisan who had taught him that, but knew that he would get no answers from the master-at-arms. Balisan would expect him to work out any answers for himself.
The dream, Sigismund realized, was beginning to fade and Balisan had already gone. He expected the fading to continue into full sleep, but instead the dream shifted abruptly and for the first time in years he found himself inside the enchanted castle. He was standing in a hall that he had never seen before, with a dry fountain at its center and a drift of yellow leaves across the floor. Rose leaves, he thought, stooping to look at them, and when he straightened he saw the vines, twisting and scrambling their way through windows and along the wall. There was a stair at the end of the hall, curving upward with a cable of rose vine along the balustrade.
Sigismund walked up, following the vine until he came to a landing where more roses had thrust their way through narrow pointed windows and were creeping down the walls. There was a door there as well, with a mosaic pattern in gold and lapis lazuli above the lintel and a thick carpet of rose leaves across the threshold. Sigismund tried to step through but was held back by an invisible barrier. The room was choked with briars, some of them as thick as his wrist and all armed with long cruel thorns, but he could just make out a bed through the tangle. There was a young woman sleeping on it, with golden hair so long that it spilled across the bed and down onto the leaf-strewn floor. It was held back from her face by a jeweled coronet and Sigismund stared, knowing that this was the most beautiful face he would ever see.
There was the slightest sound behind him, a flash of movement in the corner of h
is eye, and he whirled to catch a glimpse of ragged skirt and bare brown feet disappearing down the stairs. “Rue!” he cried, and sprang after her, but as is the way in dreams, he found himself stumbling out another door and into a wintry garden. There were weeds growing through the gravel paths and a small dilapidated summerhouse in the distance.
It stood, Sigismund realized, squinting at it, in the middle of a dry lake—but he was more interested in finding Rue. He called her name softly, but only the rustle of dry leaves answered him, and there was no herb to pluck and call her forth, only the ever-present rose briars.
“Rue,” he called again, but the dream was fading now in earnest. He could feel the familiar pull of his bed and the daylight world and this time they would not let him go.
“I’m glad you’re still alive,” he whispered, as the garden and the last of the dream slipped away. “And I won’t stop looking. I’ll find you, wherever you are.”
Sigismund and the King
At first, Sigismund was haunted by his vision of the sleeping princess and his brief glimpse of Rue, but the urgency of the dream faded as the days passed, dissipated by events in the Royal Palace. Life with the King in residence was like stepping into the middle of a buzzing hive, with both the old and new palaces filled by what felt like a small army of courtiers, soldiers, and scribes. The center of the hive was the King’s study, and Sigismund found that his opportunities to spend time with his father and get to know him better were limited. He struggled to put a name to all the new faces that came and went, and shook his head over the sheer volume of paperwork and the number of royal audiences that made up the business of being king.
He had been afraid, the morning after his dream of the ruined castle, that his sudden reappearance might give rise to fresh rumors of the royal curse, but no one seemed to doubt the story of his two-year tour of foreign courts.
“Although it is fortuitous,” Master Griff said, when they next met in the King’s study, “that my visit here has coincided with your return, since it will appear that we came back together.”
Sigismund thought about the way magic power seemed to work and doubted that fortune played any part in his arrival at just the right moment. “But in secret? What reason would we have for that?”
The King’s smile was mirthless. “We will say that your decision to return was highly confidential for reasons of state. Within a week any number of stories will be circulating without you, or I, or anyone close to us needing to say anything at all.”
“But,” Master Griff added, “I think we may safely rely on Wenceslas, who made the journey with me, to drop hints to anyone prepared to listen. He will suggest that we came back swiftly and without fanfare because you refused to like any of the ladies that your father had sent you to meet. So with unrest brewing in the south again, the King decided you had better make yourself useful here.”
Sigismund shook his head over this duplicity but could not help smiling at the same time, thinking that Master Griff seemed to be enjoying his new role. The scheme worked too. People still whispered behind their hands and gossiped over the new list of prospective brides that the chamberlain was said to be drawing up, but at least there were no rumors about the royal curse or dark deeds in the forest of Thorn.
Any gossip around Sigismund’s return, however, soon gave way to discussion of events in the southern provinces and reports that the unrest there might turn to outright rebellion again. Dispatch riders came and went and the King spent much of each day closeted with his generals. Sometimes he asked Sigismund to sit in, and these sessions were always about assessing and countering the zu Malvolin threat. Sigismund soon found that Balisan had been right in their dream discussion: his father was determined to put down any hint of insurrection, whether in the south or the west.
“I won’t have the west go the way of the southern provinces,” the King said grimly, on a day when early autumn rain was beating in grayly at the study windows. “I will take their holdings there into my own hands, or raze them to the ground if they resist.” His generals murmured their agreement, one going so far as to add that the zu Malvolin were like cankered wood—you had to wipe them out, root and branch, before the rot spread.
Sigismund found out afterward that this particular general was a Langrafon, the younger brother of the present Count and in theory Flor’s uncle. Except that he knew by then that the real Florian Langrafon, and all his retinue, had been ambushed and murdered on the way to the capital several years before, their bodies tipped into a mass grave on the edge of the forest of Thorn.
It was Balisan who uncovered this, pursuing the doubt raised in the King’s study on the night of Sigismund’s return. But as far as the court was concerned, the young man they knew as Flor Langrafon had remained at Thorn lodge after the boar hunt then returned south to answer an urgent summons from his family. All the Langrafons in the southeast knew was that Flor had sent word that he was coming home but never arrived. They made inquiries but no body was ever found, and in the end Flor’s disappearance was put down to one of the many mishaps that could befall a young man traveling alone: brigands, a fall from a horse, or being swept away crossing a flooded river.
“Let them continue to believe that,” the King said, when Balisan told them what he had discovered. “There is no need for the world to know how bold our enemy has become.”
Bold indeed, Sigismund thought, remembering his own kidnapping. Not even Balisan could find out who the young man they knew as Flor really was, but the fact that he called the Margravine “grandmother” suggested that he must be one of the extensive zu Malvolin family. It was tempting, when faced with the real Florian Langrafon’s murder, to agree that the whole zu Malvolin line needed to be wiped out.
The only problem with that, Sigismund reflected, is that my mother was related to the Margravine as well—and so am I. So nothing is ever simple.
He felt certain, when the reports of unrest in the south grew more frequent, that the trouble there was only a cover for the Margravine’s true focus in the west of the realm. The real question was not what she would stir up in the south but when she would try and bring him beneath her power again. The uncertain situation reminded him of the times when he had trained blindfold with the sword: straining for the slightest whisper of movement, but not knowing where his opponent was or where the next attack would come from.
Restlessness drove him to seek out Balisan and train hard with Quickthorn, because then at least there was no time for thinking. There was only the thrust and counterthrust as they pressed up and down the hall, and the utter concentration required to hold his own against the master-at-arms. Sigismund had hoped this might prove easier with a mystical sword that answered to his power, but it didn’t seem to make any discernible difference. He could sense the strength coiled inside the sword, but for the moment it lay quiet.
Sigismund was frustrated too by how little he could find out about Quickthorn’s origins, despite spending considerable time reading through the books and scrolls that Master Griff had unearthed. There were numerous records of magical swords, as well as of heroes and ogres, faie and dragons, but few references to Quickthorn specifically or any definite connection to Parsifal.
“It’s not even clear who made the sword,” he complained to Master Griff, who had first been surprised, and then amused, to find him studying the records at all. “Although I like the story that it was twin to Excalibur.”
“You’ll notice that both swords were found in stones at different times,” Master Griff replied, “depending on the story variant. But there are too many gaps in the record. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know the truth of your sword’s origins.”
“There are a lot of variants,” Sigismund agreed, “particularly around the Parsifal story. And sometimes I think it’s become mixed up with the Gawain legend, with this part about the lady who is sometimes loathly and sometimes fair.” He flicked over a few pages. “But I do like some of these other stories, especially the one about
the princess chained in the cave as sacrifice to a dragon.”
Master Griff looked taken aback. “I don’t think I remember that one in particular.”
“Quite a few of them do seem to be about girls being sacrificed to supernatural forces,” Sigismund admitted. “Although that’s not why I like this one, so you needn’t look so worried,” he added with a grin. “It’s just that this girl doesn’t sit around waiting for someone to rescue her. She distracts the dragon by telling it stories, and it enjoys them so much that eventually it lets her go. Later, the same dragon helps her defeat an invading army. It must have been one of the dragons that could talk,” he said, putting the book aside and stretching. “Like in Wenceslas’s stories.”
“And fortunately for the princess, not particularly hungry when they first met,” observed Master Griff, his tone so dry that Sigismund grinned again. Still, he couldn’t resist mentioning the story to Wenceslas, the next time they were practicing archery together.
Wenceslas loosed his arrow, his expression interested. “I’ve never heard that tale before, but it sounds like a good one. I’d like to read it sometime.”
Sigismund raised his own bow and took careful aim. “I’ll ask Master Griff to lend you the book if you like.” He narrowed his eyes at the target and shook his head. “Your shot beat mine. It’s just a shade closer to the bull’s-eye.”
Wenceslas smiled, but his eyes held a faraway expression. “If I told that story,” he said, “I’d make it so that eventually the princess kisses the dragon, and then it transforms into one of those dragonlords in the really old stories—you know, like the ones that spoke to the northern heroes, and to Parsifal when he was on the Grail quest.”
