The Oddling Prince

by Nancy Springer

  And no recognition at all. My father did not know me either as Albaric or as Aric.

  Indeed, for weeks he had not known me truly. But this no longer hurt me. Somehow all the pain had turned on him instead, so that he suffered dreadful agony of spirit. Something had broken in him, or he had given up, and in him I saw a shadow too deep for any mortal help, sadder than ashes, murkier than sludge. As if he were a warrior dying after battle of no visible wound, doomed without hope. As if his fetch stood there.

  I would not add to his misery; I would not order him to yield. Instead, “Put the sword away,” I told him.

  Perversely, he turned and hurled it toward the sea, but so spent was he that it merely tumbled, clattering, down the rocks to the gravel shore.

  I slid my own sword back into its scabbard. Blood dripped from my wounds; I ignored it. Standing to confront him as was my right—the victor, by law I could have killed him—I demanded, “Look at me, King Bardaric. Speak truth. Why are you so unhappy?”

  “Once more I must murder my brother!” he cried as if the true words were torn from him by some force in me.

  “Why so?”

  “He has come back to take my throne!”

  “He has told you he wants it not.”

  “But I cannot trust or believe! I do not deserve—”

  “You have been the most deserving of kings.”

  He stamped his booted foot in a sort of thwarted frenzy. “Words and words and words, the ashes of a dead fire!”

  “Your fire is not dead, Sire.”

  “Bah! You are young! Young and glorious! I am old and grotesque and weary unto death!”

  “Then rest. Your throne is safe. What else so deeply troubles you?”

  “I cannot live—if I was ever—unfaithful to my Evalin!”

  “You were not. Never.” Despite my conqueror’s advantage, I felt my voice softening. “What else, Father? Out with it. What else has made you wretched?”

  “Jealousy. My son, his heart stolen—by a wyrd—”

  “Not so. My candle’s flame now burns twice as bright.”

  “I should love—visitant so fair—yet I am all horror and hatred and fear—”

  From some distance behind me, Marissa’s soft voice called, “The hands of the One are the hands of a healer.”

  I would not have thought to attempt it otherwise. Although I knew what had become of Albaric and rejoiced for him, I did not yet understand what the ring had been trying to show him and me for weeks, swirling two as one and one as two, white and white. Nor did I yet comprehend all that had happened to boyish, peaceable Prince Aric. But despite the crazed glare of my father’s eyes, I walked up to him, lifted my hands, and placed them gently on each side of his head, nestling my fingers into his harsh hair wet with sweat.

  His haunted shadow-blue eyes glared at mine as if he would strike me, but I faced him and willed myself past the anger, looking into him, seeking the inner man, finding at first only glimpses of scars worse than Escobar’s, of courtly cruelty suffered with a smile, of silken shackles and velvet chains—glamour’s dungeon. Elfland! For the first time, I sensed how it must have unmanned the king to be captured without a blow and imprisoned by fragrant, invisible bars. His mind could not remember, but his soul could not forget that timeless time, and I saw—I heard his soul cry out—dreadful, horrible, I wanted to flee, but I, Albaric son of Bardaric, must be strong. The foreverness of Otherwhere had been—still was, to the king—an instrument of torture, a golden rack upon which his selfhood had been torn, dismembered, thinned to tatters. His spirit was broken world without end, and I, a stripling prince, almost a lost child in that world, I had to help somehow. Terribly weak in that place, with all my small strength, I reached out to touch his tortured soul, if only to comfort. . . .

  I felt an indescribable pain such as nothing I had ever experienced before, agony I could not bear for long, could not withstand at all but had to for—for just a breath more, one more gasping grasp—

  I could stand it no longer. I blinked and thought I had failed, and my heart could have broken.

  But when I opened my eyes, it seemed I had held out just long enough. I saw my father again, in Calidon and in truth.

  There we two stood, on a headland above the sea. Blinking, I looked into the king’s eyes and they had cleared, theirs the cerulean blue of springs of living water; my father wept. The king wept. Lunging forward, King Bardaric pulled me into his arms. “Albaric!” he cried. “Albaric, my son, my son!”

  Warm in his embrace, Albaric felt such joy—I felt such joy—that I thought my heart would burst, and I laid my head on his shoulder not only with love but with need, feeling as weak as a baby. Indeed, it would seem that, swaying in his strong arms, I fainted.

  Some few moments later, I found myself lying on sweet-smelling heather with my head pillowed on Marissa’s lap—somehow I knew it was Marissa—and I felt so comforted, lazy, content that I did not move or open my eyes but listened to my family talking.

  “Are you sure he will be all right?” My father, with more heart in his voice than I had heard for many a day.

  “Of course he will be all right.” Mother sounded happy enough to sing. “He’s strong as the cliffs of Caltor. Look at him.”

  “He has Aric’s features yet finer somehow. More royal.” Father sounded glad yet bewildered.

  “The scar only makes him more handsome,” said Marissa, as I felt her soft touch on my face.

  “He is a swordsman beyond compare.”

  “You taught him,” said Mother with warmest pride.

  “He has all of Aric’s honest strength yet a grace, a light—”

  “His white fire nimbus, you saw it?” Marissa’s eager voice.

  “No.”

  “That’s a pity. It’s gone now.”

  “I mean a different kind of light. Within, not on his skin. I can’t explain—”

  “There is poetry in him now,” Mother said serenely. I could feel her deftly binding the worst cut on my arm. “And, I hope, music.”

  “How could I not have loved Albaric from the moment he saved my life?”

  “Bard,” said my mother with greatest affection, “everything always looks different afterwards. Do not blame yourself; let the past go. My heart fills, overflows, with joy to have you back.”

  “Everything that happened was fated,” Marissa said. “Necessary. Not your fault.”

  “You think so, young seeress?”

  “I know so.”

  There was a long, resonant silence, during which I decided it was time for me to stop being a sluggard. I opened my eyes.

  “Aric!” Marissa exclaimed. “He’s awake.”

  “Albaric!” cried my father, his voice choked with emotion. Seeing him, hazily I wondered why he was bare-chested; later, I realized he had given his black tunic to be ripped into bandaging, to bind my shield arm and put it in a sling.

  “Father.” I put out my hand to him where he knelt on the moorland by my side. He took it, and I felt his fingers trembling.

  He swallowed hard. “My son redoubled,” he said with difficulty, “I have been—wrongheaded—”

  “Sire,” I interrupted, “never mind all that, please. Just tell me no one will die in the morning.”

  “Great blue blazes, no!” Letting go of me, he leapt to his feet. “I must go back at once to free Escobar!”

  “No need, Bard,” Mother said placidly, pointing back along the sea cliffs toward Dun Caltor. “Look. He is coming to you.”

  CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIFTH

  FATHER TURNED TO SEE. Wishing to do likewise, I forsook Marissa’s lap and tried to stand up but succeeded only in floundering to my knees, then sinking to a seat with my back against a pile of saddles. Still, from there, I could see horsemen approaching at a gallop, and the foremost rider, tall, broad-shouldered, and nobly upright on his steed, even at the distance looked like Father’s twin.

  “Escobar!” the king shouted in a very different way than the week
before. “Escobar! My brother! Well come!”

  Within a moment, the horsemen moiled to a halt before us, dismounting, and the first one was indeed Escobar, and Father opened his arms to him, and they embraced.

  How it warmed my heart that my father had a brother!

  Trying not to smile too widely, I looked elsewhere, lest I embarrass them, and there, among other guardsmen, I saw Garth! I stared at him with greatest wonder, for he stood straight as a lance, no longer maimed but doughty and hale, waiting to report to his king.

  Escobar and the king gazed at each other, my father smiling, his brother quizzical. “Look around you, Bard,” said Escobar. “Why is it springtime again? What fey thing has come to pass?”

  Startled, I noticed how merrily the breeze blew the scent of rain and blue violets my way. The drought was gone as if it had never been; I sat in honey-sweet heather shining with dew.

  Garth could wait no longer to tell the king, “My liege, the lock shattered and the dungeon door swung open, the shackles fell to bits—”

  But the guards were all talking at once, to Mother or Father or each other.

  “Dun Caltor shook, the keep shook to its roots!”

  “Garth reared up and stood strong as a bullock—”

  “The stones rattled atop the sea cliffs.”

  “—but too dumbstruck to bellow.”

  “Green and thriving, all the land within that moment turned green again.”

  “King Bardaric, what has happened?” Escobar insisted, removing his cloak and placing it around father’s brawny, bare shoulders.

  “I’m King Bardaric no more,” Father told him with the warmest of regard. “The throne is yours by birthright.”

  Escobar shook his head as if bothered by a wasp. “I’ve told you, I don’t want your confounded throne.”

  “Nevertheless, you are the king.”

  “Balderdash. I’m glad enough to be out of that blasted dungeon. I take it from your welcome that I am pardoned?”

  “You are free with no need for any pardon. It is high time we Caltors forsook the family tradition of killing one another.”

  “Bah. For the matter of that, what sort of king would I make when I hadn’t even the guts to slay you?”

  “A goodly king.”

  “I’m cranky and weary and old, Bard. Have mercy.”

  Yes, mercy had returned to King Bardaric. Greatly moved to see my father himself again, I sat watching, with Marissa by my side as if she had never left it; I found we were holding hands. She asked, “Aric, my love, how do you feel?”

  I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it. “Happy as a wee puppy, and nearly as feeble.”

  “Oh, no! Is it a wee white puppy you are?”

  “Bah!” I smiled at her, knowing with uncanny certainty that she knew my strength would return. “Tweaking my beard, already, Mischief Marissa?”

  “What beard?” But even as she said it, her merry eyes widened and sobered. “No need.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Even without your white fire crown, they recognize you, my love.”

  I heard her soft voice clearly, for the hubbub had quieted, and with an odd, fated feeling I saw that people were staring at me. One after another, they had caught sight of me and ceased talking, until all was silence except for sea birds calling, the soughing of the breeze, and the thrum of the sea. My mother gazed at me with fondest pride, and even Father and Escobar had turned to study me.

  “We have been a pair of fools, Bard,” said Escobar to my father with gruff good humor yet a kind of awe. “We’re neither of us King of Calidon. Right under our noses, seated on a throne of heather, behold the White King.”

  “The White King has returned!” someone exclaimed, and then other voices joined in as if strummed like a harp. “The White King!”

  “The One True King!”

  “The One has come back to Calidon!”

  “The White King from the sea!”

  Escobar came and kneeled in front of me so that his head would not rise above mine; I hoped that was the only reason. Father did the same.

  “My liege,” ventured Escobar, “how did this wonder come to pass?”

  I shook my head. “Later. Right now I feel weak as buttermilk, mine Uncle.” He ducked his head to hide his smile when I called him that.

  “Albaric, my son. . . .” Father sought my eyes with his. “Is it well if I call you that?”

  My heart swelled; I felt tears mist my eyes. “It is well. It is wondrous!”

  “Then Albaric, White King, what is your command? Will you now take the throne?”

  “No, not yet.” Still holding Marissa’s hand for strength, still half in a daze from all that had happened, yet I knew some things quite surely. “I wish you to reign for the rest of your days, please, King Bardaric; the people of Caltor love you.” Because I was now the White King, I knew my words settled the matter. My mind could encompass my new self, made of legend, only a little, but that little I shared. “What I think I should do is ride throughout Calidon with my bride”—turning to Marissa, I consulted her with my eyes and found troth in hers—“spreading peace to the reaches of the kingdom and doing what good I can.” There would be quarrels to end, outlaws to befriend, many kinds of healing. . . . “Prince Escobar, I would be honored if you would advise me.”

  He bowed his head. “The honor is mine.”

  Close at hand, Mother cried out, “Look! Look at the sky!”

  I took one glance, then said to Father and Escobar, “Help me up,” and with their support, I stood between them, surprised to find myself a bit taller than either. We all gazed up at the blue—more deeply and truly blue than I had ever seen it, the sky of my kingdom, with white, white clouds blowing in the high wind—but they formed the mane and forelock around the head of a great blue horse that looked down on us, regarding us with wise violet eyes.

  Bluefire! I alerted my steed, the earthbound one, with my mind.

  And I heard him bugle a neigh of greeting to his sire in the sky.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nancy Springer is the bestselling and award-winning author of more than fifty novels, beginning with the Books of Isle fantasy series (The White Hart, The Silver Sun, The Sable Moon). She writes in a plethora of genres, including mysteries (the Enola Holmes series), magic realism, contemporary young adult, and children’s fiction. Springer has also published hundreds of short stories and poems. Her work has been included in school curricula and reprinted in textbooks.

  Springer was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and has been a full-time professional fiction writer for more than four decades. She began writing immediately after her graduation in 1970 from Gettysburg College, although teaching classes, attending conferences, and raising her son, Jonathan, and her daughter, Nora, slowed her down a bit at times.

  In 1986, Springer’s fantasy short story “The Boy Who Plaited Manes” was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. By that time she had also started writing in other genres. In 1994, Springer received the James Tiptree Jr. Award for the gender-bending novel, Larque on the Wing; in 1995, she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for her young adult mystery, Toughing It; and in 1996, she received an Edgar Award for children’s literature for Looking for Jamie Bridger.

  But Springer never completely left fantasy behind her. Her Arthurian novel I Am Mordred won a Carolyn W. Field Award in 1997, and its sister volume, I Am Morgan le Fay, was nominated for a Printz Award in 2002.

  After living most of her life in Pennsylvania, in 2007 Springer moved to an isolated area of the Florida Panhandle, where, despite being “retired,” she wrote The Oddling Prince as a deliberate return to her beginnings as a writer. She has come to consider writing not so much a career as a calling. In a recent interview, Springer said, “Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption.”

  he Oddling Prince