The Oddling Prince

by Nancy Springer

  “Lightning smite me, you are the best swordsman I have ever—”

  Then I became aware of a tall figure standing nearby as if he had been watching for a while. Silenced, I turned to the king. But Father spoke first to my brother, and only a little gruffly.

  “Aric speaks truth, Albaric. You are a superlative swordsman.”

  Albaric bowed his head courteously at the compliment but then raised his eyes to gaze straight at Father as he said, “Small wonder, my King, for you taught me.”

  The words struck like a sword, staggering the king. “What?” he roared.

  But Albaric replied in the same quiet tone, “You are the one who taught me my swordsmanship, all the while I was growing up, my—” I knew he struggled to keep the word “father” unspoken upon his lips.

  I think Father knew it too. “Silence,” he ordered, then turned to me. “Aric, come with me. I would speak with you.”

  Leaving my gear with my brother, I obeyed. Father led the way almost to the middle of the tourney field, to an isolation where no one could hear us.

  When he stopped, I expected to withstand his long stare before he loosed his royal wrath. But he surprised me. He said at once, quietly, “My mind is reeling. I see his heart in his eyes, yet I remember him not, and the more I admit there is truth in him, the less I feel for him except to shudder at his freakishness.” But his tone changed. “Aric, could you not spare me his presence for a few hours? I told you not to bring him.”

  Lightly I retorted, “You told me not to bring a pet goblin, my Sire. But I have none.”

  “You knew what I meant.”

  I took a deep breath. “Father,” I said, “Albaric told me that you said I was ever wont to tweak your beard.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes. And I think never has it needed tweaking more than now.”

  “To the contrary. I know not what to think, and you jest? Never have I had less stomach for your impudence.”

  “Then I am sorry.” I had wanted to teach him not to call my brother, his son, by hateful names, but now I felt at fault. “Come, Father, have a few bouts with me,” I coaxed. “Whack me upon the head, and you will feel better.”

  He shook his head, averting his eyes. “I’m likely to ‘whack’ too hard. Some other day,” he muttered, and he strode away.

  The day proceeded, like many a Calidon day, from wind to rain to rainbow and sunshine. Under that painted sky, we rode forth, Albaric and I, he upon Bluefire and I upon Valor. Taking my advice, Albaric persuaded Bluefire to accept the lightest of saddles, so that he might brace his feet in stirrups and spare his sore legs. But not so much as a string restrained the blue stallion’s head as we galloped up pastures cropped short by sheep, and onward to the meadowlands wet after their shower, smelling greenly sweet, then to the wooded hills. Wary of the blue steed, Valor made no attempt to press ahead of him, nor do I think he could have. When I felt Valor tiring, I called to Albaric, and we slowed to a walk—although truth to tell, Bluefire pranced more than walked.

  “Is this country very strange to you?” I asked my brother. “Very ugly compared to whence you came?”

  “Ugly, no. Odd, yes. The piles of stone—”

  “Cairns. Burial mounds.”

  “And the great rocks set on end?”

  “Ancient peoples put them that way.”

  “Ancient?” He did not understand the word.

  “Long ago.” I struggled to explain. “Dead and gone so far in the past that we know nothing of them.”

  “Long—is large time.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am unaccustomed to a land with time and life and death in it. These mighty trees, is it the weight of time I feel in them?”

  Giant oaks loomed around us now, rainwater gently dripping from their crowns far above, and even Bluefire quieted in their shadows, passing their mossy trunks of great girth. I, too, felt a sense of awe. “Perhaps. They stand like the rocks, yet they live, they grow, they have been here longer than any man, and sometimes I have fancied that I could hear them whispering among themselves as they listened to the news of the wind.”

  “They seem to me beautiful and wise,” Albaric said. “I feel at home in this place. Is this where—where my mother came a-riding?”

  I blinked, wondering at myself, for I had thought only to gallop the blue stallion uphill to sap his wild energy, yet I had led us straight to the wood where Father and I had gone hawking that day—little more than a month ago, yet I felt as if a lifetime had passed.

  “Yes, this is the place,” I answered as our horses paused to drink at the spring, and then as if the wisdom of the giant trees could help us, I blurted, “My brother, what are we to do about this disgruntled father of ours?”

  “I wish I knew.” Albaric stroked the blue roan’s neck, and for once the steed stood still, so that we could face each other. “When I came here, I quested only to save his life,” Albaric admitted. “I never gave a thought to the way it is with mortals, that there would be the next day and the next.”

  “Afterwards.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you hoped he would still be a father to you.”

  “Yes, like a fool. How should he remember? Yet here I am.”

  “Knowing what you do now, would you have accepted the quest just the same?”

  “Of course! I could not let him die.”

  “But now you will die.”

  “Right now?”

  “No.” I most certainly hoped not.

  “Then what matter?” He shrugged, yet gave me a piercing stare. “Aric, if you pity me, stop it, for there is no need. Even if I could return, which I cannot, there is nothing in Elfland for me. My mother would rather I were never born, and the others shun me; I am an oddling there just as I am here. To all except you.”

  I murmured, “Perhaps not.”

  “What? You’re not saying—”

  I felt his keen alarm. “No, no, I will never forsake you, my brother! What I mean is, perhaps you are not an oddling to all people. Perhaps we should go somewhere else. To a place where no one saw you ride through a barred gate, where no one saw your white horse return to the air, where no one has heard of a fey ring. To a place where perhaps no one will see you as anyone or anything except—you.”

  When I saw hope dawning in his eyes, however faint the glimmer, the dayspring, then I knew we had to do it.

  CHAPTER THE TENTH

  I BADLY WANTED TO SPEAK with my father alone, heart to heart, and not hide like a child behind my mother’s skirts, but for Albaric’s sake, I put aside my pride. I hardly knew Father anymore; I needed Mother for the sake of her good sense, and moreover she had as much right to hear what I proposed as Father did. So, as I wished them to understand it was a serious matter, I petitioned both King and Queen of Calidon, in writing, for an audience.

  “Do you know how to read and write?” I asked Albaric as I penned this missive in the privacy of my chamber.

  “Yes.”

  “They have books in Elfland, then?”

  “No. Fa—I mean, King Bardaric taught me. He would write on sand with a stick and I would read. In Erse,” Albaric added.

  I paused, my quill dripping upon the blotter, to gawk at him.

  He smiled, amused. “There is no writing in Elvish.”

  “But. . . .” I struggled for understanding of what it might have been like for him, growing up. “But your mother spoke Erse?”

  “When she was in love with the King of Calidon, yes. But the moment he was gone, she forgot it.”

  I shook my head and returned my attention to my writing. But once my missive was completed, blotted, folded, sealed with wax, and delivered, I sought out the castle scribes, who unlocked for me the chest where the books were kept, for they were few and precious. Untold years had gone by since the Romans had left behind what little learning they had brought here, and throughout the Craglands and the southern lands near the wall—Hadrian’s wall—all had returned to ignoran
ce and greed. There, barbaric tribes painted themselves and hacked at one another with huge swords so heavy it took two hands to wield them. Wild, fierce peoples, they fought against anyone they pleased, including the Norsemen with dragon-headed longboats who raided the shores.

  Here to the far north, in rugged Calidon, we lived as if in a different land, a mortal Othergates; here was mostly peace, aside from occasional defiance from the Domberks. But they were a petty enemy, while the fearsome Norse seafarers with horned helmets passed us by, for their runes, which we could not decipher, had at some time been chiseled into our sea cliffs, and there were legends of the founding of Calidon by a flaxen-haired White King who had come from the sea and would come again to welcome back a time of peace and plenty. The legends claimed that this was why the Norsemen let us alone: because we were the descendants of one of their ancestors, if not one of their gods.

  This much was true, that we of Calidon, like the Vikings, were tall and fair, while the people of the Craglands and the other southerners were short and dark.

  Nor did raiders from the Craglands often venture this far north. No one greatly desired our chill, stony kingdom where arable land was sparse and the growing season short. We possessed little for anyone to covet; we fished the sea, hunted, herded sheep, and while we kept ourselves reasonably equipped for war, we tried to preserve peace and civilization of a sort.

  Civilization. Books.

  The ones in Latin and Greek I left with the scribes, but I took an odd old volume bound in piebald-spotted leather with the fur yet on, and this I offered to Albaric.

  He did not at first understand what it was. When I opened it and showed him the leaves of parchment and the words inked thereon, he gasped, turned to the beginning and began at once, albeit with difficulty, to read.

  Thus he spent the two days before my audience was granted. He could hardly raise his eyes for the wonder of the words. “These are songs!”

  “Ancient ones. They may once have been chanted around the holy bonfires on the quarter-days when the year turned.”

  “Year? Turned?”

  “A year is like a wheel, a great turning circle of time. Winter, spring, summer, autumn, and then another year, winter and so on all over again.”

  “This has been going on for a large—um, long—time?”

  “Since time began.”

  “Time began? What came before?”

  Perhaps my mind was a wheel; it seemed to spin, or wobble. “I do not know.”

  “I do not know some of these ancient words either. What is ‘troth’?”

  I sighed with relief; this was easier. “Troth, like both,” I corrected his pronunciation.

  “Troth, like both of us?” A sober joke that was perhaps no joke at all, and he said the word correctly.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Is it the same as truth?”

  “In a way, yes, but more. Troth is. . . .” I searched my mind. “It is honor and valor and—and uncommon loyalty. Utmost faithfulness.”

  “A great weight of meaning for one small word.”

  “Yes. Where did you find it?”

  He sought a page and read aloud, haltingly,

  What is a friend?

  Troth without end

  A light in the eyes,

  A touch of the hand—

  I would follow you

  Even to Death’s dark strand.

  The catch in his voice, I realized, was partly from emotion. I touched his hand.

  “I mean that,” I said, but then I had to turn away and leave the room, for I had taken myself by surprise, and I felt embarrassed to face him.

  Often, those days, I tried to see my father alone, no avail. I think he avoided me.

  So as the appointed time for my audience approached, I took great pains to dress as if I had not a care in my heart. I wore youthful clothing—fur leggings, a jerkin instead of a tunic, and over the jerkin a gaily checked short cape, and over that a woolen neck kerchief of a different plaid—here in Calidon we did not weave only plaids of exact design, as the Craglands folk did their clan tartans, but we enjoyed any bright-colored work of the loom. I put aside my sword belt, and in what I hoped was winsome regalia, I went to meet my father and my mother in the council chamber.

  To Father’s credit, when he saw me, he took off his torc and baldric, and he and Mother descended from their thrones. More humbly seated, they waited for me, standing before them, to tell them what I wanted so very formally. What permission, what favor, what boon.

  I had determined that this should not be the sort of audience they expected.

  I had seen to it that nearby, on a sideboard, stood a sconce of many candles, unlit. I lifted this, took out one of the candles, and lighted it at the hearth fire. When it burned strongly, I carried it toward my father and dropped to one knee before him.

  “Sire,” I said to him, “see this flame, how it shines? It is my fealty for you.”

  He raised his brows. “Why should it be necessary for you to bespeak your loyalty?”

  By way of answer, I arose to set the sconce back where I had found it, for I needed the use of both hands to loosen another candle from the sconce and light it from the first. When it burned strongly, I handed it to the queen. “Mother, here is the flame of my love for you.”

  She smiled.

  “Has the one flame taken away from the other? Has my love for you taken away from my love for my father?” I held up the first candle. “Sire, does this flame burn any less brightly than it did before?”

  “Bah! Of course not! Aric, why such talk?”

  “Because it is needful.” I took another candle from the sconce, lit it from mine and handed it to him. “That is yours, Sire, for all the warmth in your heart. Do we now have less light?”

  “Son, you weary me, speaking in riddles.”

  “Why is it, Father, that I have felt so little of your warmth of late, when my own has not changed?”

  In a low voice, he said, “I feel a change.”

  “But you can see—” I lifted my small beacon. “There is no lessening of my love. I swear it, Father. I could light candles for my bookmasters and weaponmasters and for Todd and his grooms and my horse and my hawk—”

  “Pray do not so!” And praise be, he laughed.

  “Only one more, then.” I chose a fourth candle and lit it. “This is for Albaric.”

  Father’s laughter stopped like a stone, dropped. “Place it far from me.”

  I put it back into the sconce, and my own alongside it.

  “No,” Father said.

  “Yes, if I am worthy to be called your son,” I said quietly, turning to face him.

  “Bah!”

  My mother then astonished me. Without fuss, as if she performed the most ordinary of daily tasks, she rose from her chair, her wide-sleeved silk gown rustling like wind in oak leaves as she walked to place her candle in the sconce beside mine. And as she returned to her seat, she took the one out of my father’s hand. “I think I must safeguard this for you,” she remarked. “You were just about to blow it out, were you not? In anger? When I smile on Albaric, are you angry at me too?”

  “I do not pass judgment on anyone!” The words sounded like a plea, and I could not at first understand the look on my father’s face, for I had never seen it before. “But a king must think like a king. An oddling comes and claims to be my son. What can I think but that he schemes to take the throne?”

  Mother drew from beneath her gown the golden chain on which hung something that looked like a black ember glowing red. The ring! Like a coal of fire pendant upon its own prison, it danced. “See how the mischievous thing rejoices in your suspicion,” Mother chided. “I can almost hear it chuckling.”

  “Put that monstrosity away from me!” said Father in a voice as harsh as a rasp. Yet his face reddened, and now I recognized what I saw there: shame, with which he struggled clumsily, unaccustomed to guilt, to error. Never in my memory had such self-doubt afflicted him before.


  I felt for him, terribly. “Father, let me see whether I can help.” Like a child, I sat on the floor at his feet. “Please hear me, my Sire. Do you remember how, as you lay dying, you rallied for a moment to say good-bye to Mother and me?”

  “I have told you, I remember naught—”

  Mother did an odd thing. Onto his still-burning candle, she slipped the ring, which settled upon the taper like a belt around the waist of a tunic. As if something had bespoken him, Father turned to gaze into the candle’s flame.

  “Yes,” he whispered, his face harrowed by memory. “Yes, terrible, my self watery weak, my body the merest fragile shell. Aric, I wanted to tell you—” He hesitated, remembering some deathbed message, some words from the heart he no longer wished to speak. “I wanted to tell you something, but you ran out of the room.”

  “I needed to tend to uproar in the courtyard,” I said. “Darkness hung overhead that night, Father, the spirits were singing around the tower, and then one rode in on a fey white steed.” He had heard the story, of course, but now he was listening, and perhaps seeing, as never before. So I told him all, from the moment I first bespoke Albaric until the moment Albaric cozened the eerie ring off his finger. “And then you opened your eyes and said, ‘What in bloody blazes is going on?’”

  I imitated his voice. He laughed as if he felt the joy of that moment, and as he turned to me, Mother snuffed the candle with her fingers, slipped the ring off, and laid it in her lap.

  “Father,” I asked, “do you remember the first moment you saw Albaric?”

  “Yes. The comeliest youth ever to walk the earth. And he still is,” Father added in wonder. “Why, now, do I no longer regard him so?”

  “Never mind that. He asked you, ‘Sire, do you not know me?’”