Beyond the town walls there's grass, and the horse is happy with that. We have to wander farther to find a stream, and we both drink from there.
Distantly we hear a bell ringing, and too late I realize it's the town curfew. By the time we get back to the wall, the gates have been shut and locked for the night.
I tie the horse's reins to a tree, then put the saddle on the ground to use as a pillow. This does not feel natural and familiar, and I have the feeling this is not something I've done before. Another unpleasant first for me.
The night does not bring back any of my lost memories. I try to convince myself that I imagined the old woman with the blue-green eyes, that I really did get struck on the head, and that eventually my memory is bound to return.
But in my heart I know this is not true. In my heart I know that the woman was there, that she was a witch, and that for some reason she has bespelled me.
In the darkest hours I wonder just how far her spell has worked: Has she destroyed my memories, or do I have no memories because previously I did not exist to have memories? I think with alarm of all those stories with witches and frogs. But she didn't call me a frog, I console myself; she called me a pig. Still, while I cannot remember my name, or my family, or my country, there are certain things I know: I know, for one, there is a certain connection between witches and frogs; I know the difference between north, south, east, and west; I know to be embarrassed and humiliated by the way the servants have treated me; I know how to walk on two legs, and that feels natural to me, as does riding a horse and sleeping—if I could—indoors. But anything personal, anything that could lead me to who I am, is gone. And my only hope is that the unknown lord of this unknown castle in this unknown land will somehow miraculously know me.
In the morning, when the town gates open, I pick what grass and leaves I can feel out of my hair and once again approach the castle. There's nothing I can do about the grass stains on my clothes. I use the saddlecloth to rub the horse down, and the horse gives me a look that says he's used to much better.
I find the steward again, looking more disapproving than before. Perhaps it's the grass stains. Perhaps it's the horse trailing behind me, as far as the reins will let him get so that it appears even he doesn't want to be associated with me. Perhaps the steward is worried that I plan to bring the horse with me into the audience hall.
When I ask the steward what the chances are of seeing the lord today, he snorts and says it's Sunday. No audiences on Sunday.
By now I'm so hungry I think: If the horse gives me any trouble, I'll eat him. But I know I won't. He may well be my only way to get home.
I find one of the young boys who helps in the stables. First I throw myself on his mercy, but he's pitiless. Then I offer him my ring with the emeralds. One of the things I have no memory of, no sense for, is money. Either I've never had money, or—more likely—I've never not had enough money. I can tell, though, by the glint in the young page's eyes, what a good bargain he's struck. A gold ring with two emeralds for a stall big enough for my horse and—since I have no better choice—myself to stay in until after I've been seen by the lord of the castle. The ring pays for oats and water for the horse, what food the boy can smuggle from the kitchen for me, the use of a currycomb so I can groom the horse, and the boy's secrecy, because I suspect if the steward or the stable master knew, they'd throw us right out.
True to his word, the boy keeps me fed with hard cheese and harder bread. This diet does nothing to improve my memory.
After three days the lord finally comes to the audience hall to speak to the petitioners, but there isn't time for him to deal with each of us, and he leaves without seeing me.
The fourth day the lord returns. I realize I'm getting more and more disreputable-looking as I sleep in my clothes, and straw gets ground into my hair, and I pick up the scent of the stables. The servants must be getting alarmed by my continuing presence, for as the lord starts to leave, once again without glancing at me, I see the steward whisper to him. The lord looks up, over the heads of the bowing crowd, and directly at me.
I take a step forward.
The lord leans down to whisper to the steward, shaking his head.
He doesn't know me.
After all this, he doesn't know me.
The lord leaves, the crowd disperses, and the steward comes up to me and smirks, "Ready for your apology?"
He has two younger, burlier servants with him, and they take hold of my arms and fling me out the door.
When I pick myself up, I find my young stable boy watching me. He's holding on to the reins of my horse, and my saddle is flung over the horse's back, though it's not fastened. The boy says, "The stable master found your horse and says you have to leave."
As I take the reins, the boy whispers to me, "For your other ring, I could find another place for you."
I shake my head, knowing I cannot afford his prices.
Heading for the castle gate, I pass the stable master. "It's a good horse, though," he calls out to me. "Are you willing to sell him?"
I shake my head, for the horse is my ride home.
I go out through the castle gate and into the town itself. But I stop short of leaving the town. What should I do? I know I'm lost; but when someone is lost, it's best to stay in one place, lest you accidentally elude anyone searching for you.
Is there anyone searching for me?
I could go from town to town, one step ahead of my would-be rescuers. And quickly run through all my possessions and be no better off. I decide to stay in this town and hope that there is someone missing me, trying to find me.
Looking from the horse and his saddle to my dragon ring, to the gold sunburst pin that holds my cloak, I notice how shabby my once-fine clothes are beginning to appear. They won't last long, so they're what I'll start with. I begin to search for someone who'll buy the clothes off my back—trade sturdiness for finery and hopefully give me a few extra coins in the bargain so I can eat.
With the money I get for trading my clothes and selling my pin, I can afford a week's meals and lodgings for myself and a stall for my horse in the stable of a small inn. Every day I take the horse out to graze on the grass outside the town walls, so I don't have to use up my small amount of money to buy food for him.
I go around the town, talking to people, hungry for names. Nothing sounds familiar. Nobody looks familiar to me. And I look familiar to no one.
The dragon emblem on my ring seems to be just a decoration—it means nothing to anyone. So, after the week, I offer the ring to the owner of the inn. He says it will buy me two more weeks' lodging. I bargain with him. I say: "Three weeks' worth of food, and I'll stay in the stable with the horse."
The innkeeper is not pleased with the arrangement, but finally he agrees. I'm not happy with the arrangement, for the stalls are much smaller than at the castle's stables, and I'll be lucky if I don't get stepped on. Still, I'm assuming that in three weeks I'm bound to remember or find out something about my past.
But after three weeks I have to approach the innkeeper with yet another bargain. "Ill work for my keep," I offer, "mine and the horse's."
The innkeeper lifts up my hand, which is soft and white compared to his. "Never done a day's work in your life," he snorts.
I don't remember, one way or the other, but my hands say he is right.
"I can learn," I tell him.
The innkeeper raises his eyes to the heavens and shakes his head, but he agrees.
My job is to muck out the stable twice every day. In addition, I have to keep the inn clean, too, the common room and the guest rooms. My hands are blistered and my muscles are sore, but I get to eat all the leftovers I can scrape from customers' plates.
Unfortunately, all this work leaves little time for taking my horse out to graze, and meanwhile the weather is beginning to turn colder. Soon there will be no foraging. First I sell the saddle, telling myself that once I find out where home is I can ride there without a saddle. With the money
I get from selling it, I buy enough oats to make the horse happy again. For a time.
But then that runs out, and I see he's getting skinnier and skinnier. Eventually I realize I have to sell him soon, or the castle's stable master won't want him.
"I'm sorry, horse," I whisper. I still don't remember his name, and I have no way of knowing how fond of him I was before. Now he is the only thing I have left to connect me to the furthest back I can remember: the day on the road with the blue-green-eyed witch.
The stable master buys the horse, with much grumbling and shaking of his head over the horse's sad state. After all we've been through together—maybe because of all we've been through—the horse doesn't look sorry to leave me.
As I walk through the town, I give one of my coins to the man with the withered hand who stands on the same street corner every day, begging. It isn't that I have money to spare, but I recognize that this may well be where I end up next.
At the inn the innkeeper tells me that he's sorry—I've been a better worker than he ever imagined—but his nephew has arrived from the country, looking for a job, and the innkeeper has given him mine.
It's been so long since I've been clean, or comfortable, or well fed, I'm desperate enough to be willing to spend some of my money from the sale of my horse to take a room. But when I reach into my pocket, I find nothing there but a hole.
I leave, so that the innkeeper doesn't have to throw me out, the way the castle steward threw me out.
I walk down the street, wondering if I should beg my coin back from the beggar. From behind me, I hear the clatter of horses' hooves on the street. I press against the wall to get out of the way—the lord and lady of the castle and their friends are always tearing through the streets on their fast mounts, careless of the poor folk who have to scurry out of their way.
The riders, two men, have to slow down to take the corner. I look to see if either of the horses is mine, but neither is. I keep walking, the only way to stay warm, but one of the men pulls his horse to a stop; and the second man stops, also, to avoid colliding with him.
"Your Highness?" a voice says.
I look up and around, and it's the first man, and he's looking at me.
"Is it you?" he asks in sick amazement.
"I don't know," I have to admit. "Is it?"
He leaps from his horse for a closer look, then practically kneels, he bows so low.
"Our long-lost prince, found at last," he proclaims to any of the town's inhabitants who might be wondering. He whips off his cloak and puts it around me. "Oh, well met, sir," he exclaims with such joy it nearly breaks my heart.
He orders the younger man with him to get off his horse. "Help His Highness up," he says, "and you walk along behind."
Belatedly the younger man scrambles off his horse, and he actually does kneel on the cobblestones.
"How far to home?" I ask.
"Two weeks' journey," the older man tells me.
I know how sore my feet have been since I sold my fine boots with the rest of my clothing, and I can't subject this poor young squire to walking for two weeks. "We can ride together," I say, which makes his eyes go wide in amazement.
And so we do.
I learn my name, which does not sound familiar, and I learn that I have a father and mother who have been frantic concerning my whereabouts, and there is a princess to whom I am betrothed—foreign born but lovely, I'm assured—and none of their names sound familiar, either. And when we finally reach my ancestral lands, nothing looks familiar.
The man who found me—one of many such searchers, he informs me—sends word ahead that I have been found, but that my memory has been lost. We enter the courtyard to my own castle—which looks less familiar to me than the castle in the town where I stayed. I return to the sound of trumpets blaring and men cheering and maidens throwing flower petals out the windows to greet me.
A gray-bearded man and a plump woman are standing by the fountain, and before the horses even stop, the woman is rushing forward, crying out, "Oh, my poor, sweet baby."
"Mother," I say, which seems a fairly safe guess, and she throws her arms around me, then turns to the crowd and says, triumphantly, defiantly, "See? He does remember."
But I don't.
I have to take other people's word for who I know, and who I like, and what I did as a boy, and what my interests are, and that I love my parents, and that I'm happy with my betrothal to the princess.
They tell me I'm calmer than I ever was before, and more patient, and kinder. Which sound like compliments, until I think about it. When I point this out, everybody laughs and says, No, no, but we mean it—we loved you before, but you're gentler and more considerate since your adventure.
Whatever my adventure was.
Which is the one thing none of them knows, either.
And nothing seems familiar.
Except, sometimes, when I look at the princess I'm to marry, I find her looking at me with an expression that's almost familiar, watching carefully, appraisingly, and her eyes are cool blue green, and that's something I don't want to think about at all.
Witch-Hunt
LYSSA SAW HER FIRST WITCH TRIAL and public burning when she was six years old. But it wasn't until she was ten that she learned the witch-hunters were after her and her parents. And it wasn't until she was thirteen that the witch-hunters finally tracked her family down.
It was a quiet summer evening. Her father, who owned and worked the same land his father had cleared and plowed before him, was outside for one final after-dinner check on the animals before coming in for the night. Lyssa and her mother were at the kitchen table, kneading and forming dough, which they would leave to rise overnight.
Lyssa heard a sound near the door that she thought was her father cleaning off his boots before coming in.
But her father didn't come through the door.
Lyssa had just long enough to wonder what was delaying him. Then the door burst open with a crunching of wood and a crash. And a voice was shouting at them not to move, don't try anything, don't make a bad situation worse. White-garbed witch-hunters rushed into the kitchen—five of them ... no, six ... no, eight—men and women alike, their heavy, muddy boots stomping across the kitchen floor that Lyssa's father wasn't allowed to walk on except with stockinged feet.
Before Lyssa could move—before what she was seeing had fully registered—her mother grabbed hold of her, dough-covered fingers digging into her shoulders, trying to put herself between Lyssa and the witch-hunters.
"Don't—" her mother started, but by then the witch-hunters were on them, and they yanked them apart.
There was movement from behind, more witch-hunters, who had come in through the back of the house. "Satanic bibles," one of those said. He was wearing thick leather gloves that reached almost to his elbows, as though the very touch of the books would contaminate him. He let the books drop to the floor. Three of them. Hers. Which meant the man had been in her room, looking through her things, had lifted the mattress off her bed. It must be the most common of hiding places, that he had found it so quickly. She could hear someone still rummaging through her parents' room. Already the witch-hunters had her mother's hands bound behind her back. "The child?" someone asked.
It was the first time Lyssa was glad to look younger than she was, for the witch-hunter in charge hesitated, then shook his head no.
And then there was another flurry of activity by the front door, and another witch-hunter entered.
Any hope of her parents being able to talk their way out of this situation, of finding a means to escape—any hope sank with the realization that the newcomer was Norah Raybournne, the woman known as the Witch-Hunter General. She had no such title, of course, only a relentless enthusiasm to seek out God's enemies, and a gift for leadership. It was said Norah Raybournne was well aware of the name the people had given her and did not object to it.
"So..." the Witch-Hunter General said softly, walking around the room, as though to study Lyssa
and her mother from different angles. She made a wide circle, lest the hem of her white gown pass over the books her people had found in Lyssa's bed. "So..." Her hair was gray, and she wore it in a simple braid that hung halfway down her back. There was nothing soft, nothing frivolous about her. She was a tall woman, and when she stopped in front of Lyssa, Lyssa found herself at eye level to the heavy gold cross the Witch-Hunter General wore low on her chest—a cross engraved with an eye, the witch-hunters' symbol, to indicate ever-vigilance.
Not ungently, the Witch-Hunter General took hold of Lyssa's chin, forcing her head back and her gaze—unless she closed her eyes—up. Her touch was dry and cool. Like a snake, Lyssa thought.
As though she could read Lyssa's thought through her eyes, the Witch-Hunter General shook her head. "Pitiful," she said. Not letting go of Lyssa, she shifted her attention to Lyssa's mother. "Pitiful child of Satan. How could you corrupt her like this?"
Instead of answering, Lyssa's mother demanded, "Where's my husband?"
Neither did the Witch-Hunter General answer. She said, "You and your husband both have much to answer for." Her eyes came to rest on Lyssa once again. "Perhaps it's not too late for the little one," she said, "with fit parents. Though I much doubt it."
Lyssa jerked her face away. She could imagine what fit parents meant to witch-hunters.
"Burn the house," the Witch-Hunter General ordered.
Lyssa's mother kicked the shin of the witch-hunter standing nearest her. Startled, the woman cried out, drawing everyone's attention. Even the Witch-Hunter General.
Fit parents, Lyssa thought. Once the witch-hunters handed her over to her new fit parents, she'd be trapped for life—or until, if ever, she could convince them she'd forgotten her witchly ways. If she had the power the witch-hunters were so afraid of, she'd use it. But her only chance—her parents' only chance—was for her to run.
Curses, Inc. And Other Stories Page 9
