by Dave Duncan
She laughed and took my face in both hands. The result was even more inspiring than I had expected. Her kissing was superb, with a fanatical attention to detail. I must have been grinning like a maniac as I limped back into the taproom.
It had been a kind thought, but it wouldn't have worked. If Fritz found me missing when he returned, he would be out to the stable in a flash, long before I could open it and lead out a horse. I didn't have any intention of leaving, anyway.
The maid was creeping downstairs, clutching a small casket. The next tale was about to begin.
The light from the lantern caught her. I saw the thickening under her chin and suddenly some things became obvious.
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19: The Maid's Tale
M-m-my name is Rosalind, may it please you, although I am also known as Heidi. I am … I mean, I was until a few days ago … a maidservant for the margrave of Kraff. Not in his castle, but in his town house in Gilderburg.
My mom was called Rosalind and named me after her. She always called me Rosie. The cook who came after her had a daughter named Rosalind, too, and I think that was why I came to be called Heidi instead of Rosie, so we wouldn't get mixed up.
My father was a prince and I am rightful queen of Verlia.
I don't remember my father at all. I remember my mom telling me that he was a soldier, a mercenary, and he died of an arrow wound at the siege of Hagenvarch. That was before my mother came to Gilderburg, so nobody else remembers him, either, nobody I know of. I don't know what name he went by when he was a soldier. My mom never said much about him, or I don't remember if she did. I was very little, of course. Not what he looked like or anything. She did tell me he was of noble birth, but not how they met, or anything like that. She used to cry when she spoke of him.
Even here, my memories are patchy. She seemed very pretty to me, but they tell me all little children think their mothers are pretty. She had dark hair and dark eyes. I think she was tall … I'm not sure. She died of the coughing sickness. I must have still been little, because all I remember is that one day she wasn't there anymore.
The other servants kept me, although I suppose they must have told the margravine about me, and she must have given leave for me to stay. It was kind of her. Not many people would have kept a useless orphan around. I've never seen the castle, not that I recall, but the town house is very big, and the castle is much bigger, so I'm told. I have … had … a bed up in the attics, but in the winter they let us sleep in the kitchens, for warmth.
As soon as I was old enough, I began to work for my keep. Cleaning pots and scrubbing floors, mostly. I am a good girl. I work hard and try to please. Cook often thanks me for doing a good job, not like some. She trusts me with money to go out and buy things in the market. And I don't let the gardeners and footmen take liberties.
One day in summer, a very strange thing happened. I know you will find it hard to believe, but Captain Tiger and her ladyship have asked me about it, over and over, and they believe me. I'm a good girl. I don't tell lies.
The margrave and margravine had left town and gone to the castle, and we were doing the spring cleaning, which we always do, every year. We do it later than most of the big houses do, but that's because we wait until the margrave isn't in residence anymore. Other houses' staff laugh at us for being always late, but we do as good a job as they do.
So this morning I'm helping Karl and Mistress Muller clean the young master's rooms and she sends me up to the attics with a box of winter quilts to store. This isn't the attics where the servants sleep. That's in the west wing, and this is the south wing, which is just used for storage, and it's all dark and stuffy and I'm frightened of getting cobwebs on my cap. Mistress Muller would scold me. It's full of all sorts of boxes and trunks and things that must have been there for years and years. I finds a place for the box I'd brought, leaving it with the labeled side showing outward as Mistress Muller likes, and I don't waste time and dawdle. I go back to the stairs, and when I'm about halfway down, then a voice speaks to me.
"Heidi!" it says. Plain as sunbeams in a cellar.
I stops with my heart all flittery-fluttery and says, "Who's there?"
"A friend of yours, Heidi," it says, ever so quiet and yet ever so clear. "I have important things to tell you."
I says, "Is that you playing devilment, Rab?" Thinking it was the turnspit, you see. That lad's got more tricks'n a sack of kittens, Cook always says.
The voice says, "No." It says, "Come back tonight when you have time to listen, because I have a lot of important things to tell you."
Well, then I thinks it must be Dirk, the footman, who's got nastier sorts of tricks in mind than Rab, so I says, "You think I'm simple? You come out right now or I'll lock you in!"
But no one came out, so I run down and lock the door, thinking it must be Dirk and that'll serve him right. Then I hears Dirk and Anna sniggering in the laundry corner, so I knows it isn't him, and I sort of forgot all about it all until I goes to bed that night. Then I remembers locking the door and begins to wonder if I've locked young Rab in there. There's no one sleeping in that wing with the family away. I gets to worrying that Rab may be shut in there and shouting his head off and no one'll hear him until next winter. I can't recall if I've seen him around since, or even at supper, and it's not like him to miss his victuals. I learns the next day that Cook caught him into the preserves in the larder and shut him up in the wood cellar with no supper as punishment, but I don't know that then, lying in bed worrying. So eventually I gets so worried that I gets up, ever so softly, without waking Anna who I shares my room with, and I wrap my cloak about me and I go creeping over to the other wing.
It's ever so spooky doing this and I got to be ever so quiet, because if Mistress Muller catches me, she'll think I'm a loose woman carrying on with Dirk or one of the other young men, and I'll be put out in the street like some I could name. But I gets to the attic door and I unlocks it, and then I opens it very quietly, and says, "Rab? You can come out now."
And that strange little voice says, "Heidi, I'm not Rab, and I'm not Dirk, and not any of the footmen or gardeners or stableboys. I have important things to say to you."
I says, "Say them, then, because I'm not coming up those stairs."
"Your real name is Rosalind," the voice says, "and your mother was a princess and your father a prince, and you should be a queen on a throne in a far land."
"Rab," I says, "if you don't come right out here and stop this nonsense right now, I'll lock the door again, so help me."
"You have a birthmark," the voice says, and it says just what the mark is like and where it is, and then I know this isn't Dirk or Rab or any of the others, because I'm a good girl.
I finds it hard to breathe, I'm so taken aback. "How you know all that?" I says.
It says, "Because I am the god of your fathers. I knew your father and his father and all their fathers back for hundreds of years, and they were all kings, and you should be a queen."
Eventually I gets cold standing there, so I do go up to the attic, and wraps myself in one of the quilts I put up there only that same day, and I sit and talk with the voice until I start to go to sleep despite myself and how excited I am. Then the voice sends me back to bed. The next night I goes back again, and the next night, and the voice tells me all sorts of things about me, and about the land I should be queen of.
It says its name is Verl, and on the third night it leads me to it, and it's just a china dove on a high shelf, ever so small and covered with dust. And it tells me to take it back to my own room, and then I can put it under my pillow and it can talk to me while I'm in bed while Anna's asleep, and then I won't have to spend so much time in the box room. And Verl said it wasn't stealing for me to take it—I mean him, or maybe her, because Verl says it doesn't matter which I call him. Anyway, he had belonged to my mother. Or my mother had belonged to him, since he's a god, but even if people thought she, he, was just an ornament, the ornament had b
elonged to my mother and my father before her, and was rightfully mine, not the margrave's.
But Verl can't talk with anyone but me to explain this, so she told me how to keep her well hidden by day, in a place I hadn't known about and would never have thought of.
But at night I slips Verl under my pillow and lies still in the moonlight as she tells me about my family.
My father was the son of the king, whose name was Just-blade. My father's name was Star-seeker, and he fell very much in love with my mother, who was a lady and pretty as I'd always thought she was, and whose name was Sweet-rose.
Prince Star-seeker told Sweet-rose he loved her and would marry her. Sweet-rose took awhile to convince, but he wooed her and told her he would love her always and be true until she fell in love, too, and they agreed to be married as soon as possible. The prince went to the king and asked his blessing.
But King Just-blade would not approve. He said that Star-seeker must marry a princess from another land to seal a treaty. He said that the princess was already on her way to Uthom to be betrothed, although she was too young to be married for several years yet, but that did not matter because Star-seeker also was too young to marry. Star-seeker's heart was a stone.
"How can I break this news to Sweet-rose?" he asked himself, and did not know the answer. So he went to the shrine where his family god was kept, a silver shrine all sparkling with rubies. The god was Verl, of course. The prince knelt down and prayed, telling Verl all his troubles.
"You are right and your father is wrong," Verl said. "Sweet-rose is a fine match for you, and this foreign child-princess is of tainted blood. Bring me the king."
Star-seeker went and told his father that the god wanted him. King Just-blade went and listened to the god, after making her wait a few days. But he refused to change his mind. The betrothal had been agreed to in a treaty, he said, and to break it now would mean war. He also said that family gods should not meddle in politics, which was very disrespectful of him. He ordered Lady Sweet-rose banished from the court, to a lonely castle on the coast, called Zardon.
Prince Star-seeker went back to pray to Verl again. This time Verl was very angry with the king! The god told Star-seeker to take her away from the palace. He mounted his horse and rode out alone, except he took the god with him, 'cos she told him to. She led him to where Lady Sweet-rose was imprisoned. They escaped together. They were married by the god herself. The king ordered a great hunt for them, searching all the ships and posting guards on the mountain passes, but because they had the god with them to help, the lovers fled away without being caught.
They traveled north for a long time, until they arrived in the Volkslander. Star-seeker became a mercenary soldier, and Sweet-rose became a mother, when I was born. After that, when Star-seeker went to fight, he left his god Verl behind to guard his wife and baby, and because he did not have his god with him to protect him at the siege of Hagenvarch, he was struck in the shoulder by an arrow. Wound fever took him.
Then my mother changed her name to Rosalind, because Sweet-rose is not a usual sort of name in our country. She took service with the margravine, as cook. Foolishly, one summer when I was very small, she left the god Verl back at the town house when we went to the castle. Being away from the god's protection, she caught the coughing sickness and died.
All my life the god had waited on a shelf in the store room, waiting until I was grown up and she could speak to me when I was there alone. And now she told me all this and much more.
She told me, also, that the bad King Just-blade had died and there was no king in Verlia, but I'm rightful queen. She said, too, that an oracle had said that Star-seeker's daughter would be found beyond the Grimm Ranges. She told me that there was a man in Gilderburg looking for me and I must go and tell him that I was the one he wanted.
Well, I was very scared then, and I says I can't do a thing like that, speak to a strange gentleman. Verl say then I must tell Cook or Mistress Muller, so they can speak for me, and I says they won't believe me, and I won't. And every night the god is telling me, and I keeps refusing.
But then the god says that the man will be leaving the next day, and this is my last chance, and it is my duty to go. So I puts on my clothes, all quiet, and my coat, and I puts Verl in my pocket. I creeps down the stairs, feeling like a very bad woman. I never done anything like that before. I unbars the kitchen door, though my hands shake so much I can't hardly manage it. I goes out and creeps through the streets to where Verl tells me, and then she says to wait. There were lights on in the windows still, although it was ever so late.
So I waits in the shadows until a carriage pulls up at the door, and then a gentleman comes out. I never seen him before.
"Now, Rosalind!" Verl says, and I runs forward as he comes down the steps. He looks at me in surprise.
"Captain Tiger!" I says. "I am the queen you are seeking."
And then I faints dead away.
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20: Interlude
It was all very horrible. I have left out the awful stuttering, the long pauses, the quiet prompts from the dowager when the speaker mumbled into confused silence. Even had I not glimpsed her goiter earlier, I would have known that the girl was a cretin, or at least a simpleton, just from the way she spoke. We all squirmed with pity as the tale unfolded. The lantern guttered and failed altogether; the fire burned low. A heavy darkness crept in on us.
Rosie seemed to believe her own story. Indeed, she had to believe it, for she lacked the wits to have made it up. I am not without skill or experience in detecting falsehood. I could believe in her. I could not believe the truth of what she said, though. Why did her companions? It was impossible!
The dowager leaned across Captain Tiger and patted Rosie's hand. That was the largest movement she had made all night. It brought tears to my eyes.
For a few moments nobody spoke. Perhaps everyone was trying, as I was, to imagine this pathetic dredge ascending the throne of Verlia. That was impossible, too, unless she was just to be used as a figurehead married off quickly to some competent young noble who would wield the power and who had no scruples about taking a moron to bed.
Was this the game that Captain Tiger and her ladyship were planning? Had they coached the wretch in that improbable rigmarole in the hope of passing her off as rightful successor so that they could role through her? I had thought better of both of them. Moreover, this was no ordinary missing-heir problem. How could they ever expect Hool to accredit an imposter?
The notary still sat between me and the girl. He turned to look at me, and I saw my own thoughts mirrored in his eyes. He went up marginally in my esteem. I glanced at the merchant, the actress, the minstrel, and saw the same pity—and the same disgust.
Rosie herself had slumped back into her previous lassitude, the slouch in which she had sat all night. Only the casket at her feet was new, and the tiny porcelain bird on her lap, and its silken wrapping.
The burgomaster spoke first, of course. But he did not spring to attack the girl, who would have been helpless before his bluster. He went straight for the dowager, who must be the prime mover in the conspiracy.
"Perhaps you would explain your part in this, my lady?"
The old woman shrugged and went back to staring at the fire. She would not see eighty again. She must be taxed to her limits by this long night.
"I am from Verlia, as you have guessed," she croaked. "I am pained to see it slithering into civil war … the assembly breaking down in riot, cities rebuilding old walls … When the news of Hool's oracle arrived, I wondered what I might do to help. I heard of Captain Tiger and hired him to assist me."
"Why you? A woman of your years embarking on such a journey? You carry patriotism to extremes, ma'am."
"My sons were occupied in drilling troops."
He waited, but she added nothing more. His bushy black brows drooped even lower. "If you claim this scullion as your rightful queen, ma'am, then why not dress her as befits her ran
k?" He oozed disbelief.
The answer came in the same weary whisper. "For her own safety, it seems wiser to pretend that she is my servant, until we reach Verlia and I can assign her greater protection. She agreed to this."
Of course Rosie would agree. She would do anything a "lady" told her to. Even now, she seemed unaware that she was the topic of conversation. But the real reason must be that Rosie was incapable of being anything more than a servant, and to start granting her royal honors would shatter the few wits she had. She would go catatonic.
Burgomaster Johein turned his glower on the soldier. "You accept her tale, Captain?"
"I do."
"A serving girl rushes up to you in the street claiming to be a queen and you believe her? Just like that?" Considering that he was addressing the only armed man in the room, the merchant was drawing close to rashness.
"Not quite like that," Tiger said in a thin voice. "We had her carded back into the armiger's house and revived. She was half frozen and terrified out of … alarmed at what she had done. We got her story out of her—not as much as you have heard tonight, but enough to prick our curiosity. We asked her a few questions. The answers surprised us. Next day we asked more. We inquired into her background."
Johein snorted. "But the main witness is that figurine?"
We all looked again at the china bird the girl had produced from the casket. It was a dove, yes—made of porcelain and freely glazed. It did not resemble in the slightest the image of the god Verl that I had … that I had described when telling the tale of White-thorn. My word on the matter would carry no weight with this company, of course. And even I could not deny that the god might have changed her icon since those far-off days. The image is not the god, merely a representation, a dwelling, a symbol. An ornament is an ornament.
Tiger spoke again, still softly, but with a hint of danger in his stillness, like a drawn bow. "There have long been rumors that Prince Star-seeker took the royal god with him when he disappeared. That is the commonly accepted explanation of why the king's second marriage proved barren and his sister died childless. Verlians expect their household gods to protect them from harm, but only within reasonable limits. They know that they are mortal. The god's primary responsibility is continuance of the family. Lack of heirs is the fault of the god,"
