The Oddling Prince

by Nancy Springer

  “What has happened to Father?” I begged.

  Perhaps Albaric knew as well as I did that they had probably already killed him. I could not yet envision my father, the king, slaughtered, his head on a pike. I could not yet think anything clearly. But Albaric said, “You are in great danger. We must hide you.”

  Turning from stone to water, I steadied my head against the back of his and hung onto him for strength.

  Thinking aloud, he murmured, “Which also means hiding a rather large windflower-blue stallion.”

  “Pig-herder’s hut,” I whispered.

  “Verily? Where?”

  It was not far, just a crude shelter with three log walls and a canvas roof thatched with straw, a refuge from rain and a place to warm oneself by a fire. Not large enough for stabling, but large enough to block the sight of a horse browsing behind it. I stumbled down off Bluefire by myself, but then I stood unable to move from the spot, scarcely seeing anything around me. Fearsome images had taken over my mind. It was Albaric who stood forehead to forehead with Bluefire, giving the steed silent instructions, then caressed his crest and let him go. Likewise, it was Albaric who piled dry leaves into the shelter, cleared away twigs, and told me, “My brother, lie down before you fall down.”

  Shaking my head, nevertheless I sat on the ground.

  So he sat down facing me and said, “Tell me.”

  With an effort, I focused on him. “Tell you what?”

  “Domberk has taken Dun Caltor. Tell me all that it means.”

  Facing him, I no longer winced at the sight of the sword cut on his face. It spoke to my wounds within. “So long as it heals clean, ’twill leave quite a dashing scar,” I remarked. “No one will think you less than man any longer. Maidens will swoon over you.”

  “Tell me,” he repeated just as gently as the first time.

  So I told him. “Our father is dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Almost certainly he has been slain, and his head paraded like a prize.”

  I sensed that Albaric did not understand how vile this was, that he knew nothing of the respectful care of bodies after death, and how should he? Where he came from, there was no death. Yesterday in the wilderness, we had left our dead guardsmen lying on the ground. He thought about our father for a while, then asked, “What else?”

  “My mother is likely taken prisoner. Perhaps dishonored.”

  “Dishonored?”

  “Perhaps Brock of Domberk has—forced her.”

  Again, while the sun rose above the horizon and coaxed birdsong from the trees all around us, he thought about this.

  “He has taken her, you mean,” he asked, “somewhat as my mother took your father?”

  “Yes, but by force of hand, not—” Suddenly I loathed the thought of Elfland’s glamour, beauty even in evil, but I did not speak of that. Instead, I went on. “Other women within the castle have perhaps been taken. Other men have died.”

  “The villagers?”

  “Terrified, likely, but not killed. Peasants are needed to till and harvest, care for cows and sheep and fowl and swine.”

  “And horses? Do you think Todd is alive?”

  “Perhaps. One can hope so.” Albeit painful, my brother’s bleak questions had done me good, as I think was his intention. They had given me back to myself.

  Albaric studied me. “What will you do?”

  “I must save Mother.”

  “How?”

  “I do not yet know. Tonight, when darkness comes, we will try to find out.”

  He nodded. “Until then, rest.” He betook himself into the shade of the shelter and lay down. “Bluefire will warn us if anyone comes near.”

  Lying on the bed of leaves beside him, I said, “Now we are both homeless, my brother.” I had felt it in him often, the rue of having no place, and now I felt it in myself as well, what it was to be an outcast. More: a fugitive. They would want to kill me.

  Albaric had no harp anymore, but he opened his mouth and his singing rose to the sky as if on softly feathered golden wings:

  What is a friend?

  Troth without end.

  A light in the eyes,

  A touch of the hand—

  I will follow you unto

  The ends of the land.

  I was glad he had changed the words. I wished to live.

  Such was the strength, the comfort of his presence that I felt able to sleep. Drowsily, not for the first time, I marveled that I, the most ordinary of mortals, could sense his thoughts, when he was the magical one, power in his eyes, his touch, his voice. . . . The echo of his song in my mind turned to a dream. I slept.

  He slept beside me, I think, until past midday, when Bluefire’s soft nose upon our faces awoke both of us.

  Alert at once, neither of us moved except to turn our eyes, then our heads, to where the horse stared. From the meadow beyond the fringe of the forest came muffled earthy snorting snuffling sounds.

  Pigs.

  Contented pigs rooting, up to their eyes in dirt.

  And with the pigs, to keep them out of trouble and herd them home again at nightfall, would be—someone. A boy, most likely.

  If he wandered into the forest, he might stumble upon us and make an outcry. I would not let that happen. First, I needed to find out who he was.

  “Wait here,” I whispered to Albaric, feeling for my favorite weapon—a stone—as I eased up from the ground and crept as softly as I could to where I could see—yes, there was the lad, looking up at the sky, hoping to spy a hawk or an eagle, perhaps—or maybe even cerulean winged horses.

  I breathed out, for he was a happy sight to me.

  I hurled a stone, but not to strike him, only to bounce in the grass at his feet, alerting him. Another made him look my way. Holding my forefinger to my lips—shhhh!—I let him see me. He almost cried out anyway but managed to be silent except for sobbing as he ran to me and flung himself upon me. Never had I experienced such a greeting, and it touched my heart, especially coming from a shy peasant boy. I lifted him off his feet as he hugged me, carrying him back to Albaric. He was Todd’s grandson, Toddy.

  “Prince Aric, oh my Prince,” he gasped, weeping, “they all say you are dead!”

  “They do, do they?” I murmured, ruffling his hair, patting his back. “Keep your voice down or they might come and kill me yet.”

  “Prince Aric, they—Domberk—came and—”

  “Yes, I saw the flags.” Easing myself out of his embrace, I set him down and myself sat beside him. “Hush, Toddy, now be calm, my good lad, for there is much I need to know.”

  “Toddy?” Albaric asked me, seating himself on the leafy forest floor a little farther away. “Todd’s son?”

  “Grandson.”

  “He—Grandpa—he died in the fighting.” Staunch and true, like Todd, the boy had got control of himself. “Out with the horses, he was the first to see them coming at dawn, cowardly sneaks, and he raised the alarm, and he and the grooms died to the last man, fending them off while the soldiers assembled. But it was all confusion, and they—the enemies—got ladders up before the guards could properly man the walls. . . .”

  “They took you by surprise and overran you.” I summed it up for Toddy, for his small face had gone very pale beneath his freckles. I could imagine; it had been just another dawn to a sleepyheaded boy, then suddenly screams, swords clashing, bloodshed, his grandfather dead. “Did Father—did King Bardaric die in battle?” I assumed so. I knew my father would fight to the death before surrendering Dun Caltor.

  “No, Prince Aric, he is yet alive!”

  CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH

  IMPOSSIBLE!

  Unless—

  The thought hurt me like burning iron. Feeling it bleed the color from my face, I forced out a single word. “Torture?”

  “No, my Prince! He is not being harmed.” Toddy’s wide eyes could not have been more earnest. “All the castle marvels. He is in the dungeon, alive and well with not a mark on him,
for the scullery boys see him when they take food to him.”

  “Bread and water?”

  “No, good food! The best the kitchen can offer!”

  “And my mother?” I asked, dubious and dazed, for so far the narrative made no sense.

  “Locked in the king’s room, my Prince, and we know this because the kitchen folk take food to her there also.”

  “You mean the room at the top of the tallest tower.”

  “Yes.”

  The room in which my father had lain dying when Albaric came. The room with nothing but stone wall and stony cliffs and cold sea below.

  As it was the king’s room, likely Brock Domberk had taken it for himself. What he might have in mind for Mother. . . . But I held my voice carefully in check. “Lord Brock? Does he enter that room?”

  “He rages outside the door, Prince Aric, but only to go away again because the queen will not have him. Indeed, he rages everywhere, at everyone. He is a pig, that one.”

  “An insult to honest swine. You should know better.”

  Listening, Albaric smiled, but I don’t think Toddy understood my joke. Vehemently he repeated, “Lord Brock is a stinking pig. Always shouting. Yet. . . .” His young voice faltered, puzzled. “Yet he punishes no one.”

  “And he does not force himself upon the queen.”

  Toddy looked blank, as if he did not entirely understand the question, but answered, “The queen says he may not come into her chamber, so he stays outside and swears.”

  “For a stinking pig, that’s very odd.”

  I talked with the boy awhile longer, learned that his father had wounds but would live, obtained his most solemn promise that he would tell no one, not even his family, that he had seen me, and all the while Albaric sat by, silent, forming a plan. I could feel it in him and wondered greatly what it might be, for how could we two hope to rescue Father from the dungeon or Mother from the tower?

  “The hogs have scattered everywhere by now. I must find them,” said Toddy regretfully, getting up to leave.

  “And what will you tell your mother, Toddy, when she sees your shining face?” I still worried that he might betray me without meaning to.

  “Why, she shan’t see me for a few days, nor will anyone else, for I sleep in the meadow with the swine. But my Prince, will I see you again?”

  “It is most fervidly to be hoped.”

  “Let us go,” said Albaric as soon as the boy was out of sight.

  “Go where? Albaric, what are you scheming?”

  “I’ll show you in a few minutes. First, we need Bluefire.”

  We walked toward where we had last seen the horse, not daring to call him aloud, yet in a moment he trotted up to us.

  “Good. You first, my brother.” As always, the words “my brother” warmed my heart.

  “We need to go quietly through the woods down to the sea,” Albaric said when he was seated behind me on Bluefire, and it did not surprise me that the horse at once started forward, walking in the correct direction. Albaric spoke on. “No one from the castle will observe us if we approach Queen Evalin’s tower that way, after dark and hidden by the cliffs.”

  True enough. “And then?”

  “And then we can take a coracle and make our way to the base of the tower where the queen is kept.”

  True, again, yet insane. “Albaric,” I inquired dryly, “can you fly?”

  “Not in this body.”

  “Then how are we to scale the tower?”

  “I will show you,” said Albaric simply, but then added with a sudden change of tone, “if it works in this world. Cockleburs, I am a dolt, I hadn’t thought it might act differently here. Halt Bluefire a moment.”

  Even before I pulled on his mane, the horse stopped, and my oddling brother leapt down, drawing from under his tunic a relic, a vestige of his Elfin past, that I had almost forgotten: a red-gold coil of Queen Theena of Elfland’s hair, still with all the glamour on it that was ever there, so bright in the late-day light that I blinked, looking upon it.

  Albaric took a deep breath. His eyes closed for a moment, then opened, intent. With the coil of Theena’s hair cupped in both hands he caressed it, whispering to it. Then he took a loop and tossed it skyward as lightly as a child tossing a pebble into the air. He laid the rest on a patch of moss, patted it, then started to climb.

  “Praise be,” he breathed, “it works.”

  “What!” I exclaimed, for I had not known the strand of hair awaited him in the air, so fine it was all but invisible, and attached to nothing. Yet hand over hand, he climbed it without apparent effort, surging well above me within a moment. My head tilted backward to its utmost, I called, “Albaric, stop!”

  Holding on by one hand, he did so, looking down to ask, “Why?”

  Seemingly unsupported there between earth and sky, his flaxen hair floating, against all sense, so as to halo his head—I had almost forgotten how fey he was, but surely I remembered now. “You terrify me!”

  “Fear not.” Lightly he slipped down again to stand on the ground, smiling. “Try it, and you will find it is not hard.”

  “As soon as I am done shaking.” The strong reminder of his otherness had set me trembling.

  His smile faded. “Brother, do you love me—or not?”

  It was not a dare, but a plea, and of course, there could be but one answer. Swinging my leg over Bluefire’s neck, I jumped down, walking on unsteady legs to stand beside Albaric. I took hold of what looked like a spider-web filament glinting in the air and tugged it lightly, just to see whether it would give way—then found myself a foot off the ground! Hastily, I grabbed with the other hand and bobbed even higher. Somehow, the strand of Elfin hair made me weigh no more than a feather, so that I could climb more easily than I walked.

  “It would not be strong enough to hold you otherwise, you see,” said Albaric as if explaining something very simple.

  As preparation for the night ahead, I kept climbing, feeling dizzy not with height but with the strangeness of being Aric. Aric the butterfly, whimsical spirit, warrior on the wind. . . . Something of Elfin insouciance seemed to enter me from the shimmering fiber I climbed. “How high does it go?” I called to Albaric.

  “As high as it must. I aimed only for the treetops. You’d better come down.”

  I did so, feeling far better than when I had gone up. “How did you know?

  “Oh, I used to play in Mother’s hair when I was little. . . .” With an odd look he turned away.

  “Is that a mortal pang I see?” I gibed gently. “Meseems I am growing more like you, and you more like me.”

  “Hush, you scamp. We must ride.”

  This time he sat in front. I made sure of it, knowing Bluefire would comfort him. Keeping to the groves and woodlots, silent, we rode at a walk towards the sea, and at last, far out in the country, with no one to see us and nothing in sight but moors where a few sheep fed, we reached it. At the edge of the sea, we turned and cantered along the gravel shore toward Dun Caltor.

  Albaric broke silence. “So this, this narrow passage between the sea and the true land, this is the strand?”

  “Yes.” On one side of us, the moors rose gradually into cliffs, and on the other side washed the glinting gray-green endless water, its chill waves lunging as if to grasp but then falling back, frothing and falling back, foaming and falling back.

  “And the sea, it frightens you.”

  My pride stung, I did not answer directly. Instead, I asked, “Why are there no seas in Elfland?”

  “How do you know that?” He was all innocent surprise, and I regretted my challenge.

  “I know because I know you.”

  “Well, it is true. There are none. Yet—yet this is beautiful.”

  Sinking as if to swim in that western sea, the sun glossed it—and the towers of Dun Caltor, now visible in the distance—with glamour worthy of an Elfin cavalcade.

  “It is beautiful whether in sunlight or moonlight, and I fear it,” I admitted, “al
though I have a few times ventured onto it with the fishing boats and have suffered no harm except salt spray and slippery odors. I think you have no sea in Elfland because no death is there.”

  A hushed moment passed. Then very softly he sang:

  By that dim shore swam a ghost-gray ship

  Low in the water but nothing within

  Except shivering scent of fear insubstantial

  And mournful voices of folk unseen.

  “Hush,” I said. “Please.”

  He hushed only his singing. “Is this where the dead go, then?”

  “To far western isles, folk say.”

  “So death is beautiful, like the sea?”

  “Perhaps someday death may seem beautiful to me. Not yet.”

  As the sun sank lower, the cliffs rose higher, at first to shield us from the view of anyone, especially the invaders from Domberk, but then to threaten us, for the strand grew ever narrower.

  “Where are the coracles?” I blurted, for we had reached the place where a steep path—long ago carved into the rock—made its winding way down the cliff from the village. I saw ropes for tying, and posts. This was where there should have been boats drawn up upon the shore—yet there was not one to be seen.

  Albaric drew Bluefire to a halt, and I dare say that, although I could not see his face, he stared as blankly as I.

  “We are a pair of lackwits,” I said finally. “Of course the fisherfolk saved their wives and children from the invasion. It was dawn. They were still ashore, or not far from it. Likely they’ve fled wherever they could.”

  We sat a bit longer in silence. Then Albaric asked, “My brother, can you swim at all?”

  “Nary a bit. Can you?”

  “Only to paddle in pretty Elfin pools. I look on this smother and fear it as you do. But all horses swim. Bluefire fears it not.”

  “You asked him?”

  “Yes. He is willing to dare it. What say you, Aric?”

  Just ahead, the wild waves slammed into the cliffs, and there was no gravel strand anymore, no footing; perforce we must take to the sea. I could think of no other way to reach Mother, nor did I think long. This was no time for thinking, only for action.