Heir Apparent

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "Oh, for goodness' sakes!" Deming snapped. "We haven't the time!"

  "Sure we do," I told him.

  He continued to grumble and complain, but from what I'd seen in playing this game so far, there was absolutely nothing I could do or say to make the man act pleasantly.

  My father didn't take long to arrive. He came running over the hill that my computer subconscious identified as the direction of the bog. "Janine!" he cried, sweeping me up into a great bear hug that took me totally by surprise. He was such a big guy, I found my face pressed into his chest. Considering that he had come straight from cutting peat in the bog, this was not the best position in the world in which to be. I held my breath, trusting that he would let go before I suffocated.

  I could hear my little foster siblings chanting for his attention, "Father! Father!"

  "Hush now," my mother said. "Run along. Your father, your sister, and I must speak with this man."

  Then—still pressed against my father's chest, I could both hear and feel the rumble of his voice—my father asked, "She's been told, then?"

  "Yes." Deming sighed impatiently.

  My father held me out at arm's length to look me over, and I was amazed to see that his eyes glistened with tears. "I was hoping we'd have more time," he said.

  He was going to miss me? My father was saying he was going to miss me?

  Though he was just a stupid computer simulation, I felt my throat tighten. "I'll come back," I promised. "Or, better yet, I'll send for you."

  He forced a smile. "We'll come," he assured me. Then he glanced in Sir Deming's direction before he said to me, "Janine..."

  He hesitated, and Deming said, "Get on with it, man. Shake her hand, wish her luck, repeat after me: 'It's been nice knowing you; good-bye.'"

  I sincerely hoped that at some time during the progress of the game, I would be called upon to kill Deming. Surely one of the infinite variations Mr. Rasmussem had talked about could accommodate that. "Could we have some privacy here?" I asked.

  Yet again Deming sighed, but he strode several long steps away.

  "Janine," my father said, "when you first came to us, you were less than a week old—-just a tiny little bundle, wrapped in a blanket."

  My mother nodded mutely, dabbing her eyes.

  I glanced at my father's rough and dirty hands and saw no ring, but why would a peat cutter have a ring?

  He continued, "The midwife who brought you said that you were the daughter of the king and of a servant woman who had died in childbirth."

  From off to the side, Deming complained, "She's been told all this."

  "Go farther away," I ordered him.

  He took a few more steps, and I wiggled my fingers at him to keep going, until he was practically at our neighbors' pigpen.

  In a lowered voice, Father continued. "When your birth mother died, and she didn't have any relatives to send you to, your uncle Mayer, who was the king's gardener, suggested to the king that we might take you in. The king knew that at court your life would be in danger because the queen was obviously not pleased by the idea of your competing with her own children."

  "And the king favored you," my mother said, "because he'd loved your mother so, and because the queen brought up her sons to love only her, not him."

  That explained some things.

  Father glanced at Deming, who was feeing the other direction and was a good thirty yards away. Still, Father lowered his voice to a whisper. "So the midwife brought you here, but she also brought something else."

  "Yes?" I prompted.

  He nodded. "A ring."

  "Really?" I said. "Imagine that."

  "It's a magic ring," Mother told me.

  Now, that was interesting. I'd been assuming it was just a keepsake to prove I was the king's choice. "What kind of magic does it do?" I asked.

  Father said, "The midwife didn't say. She just said it was something your mother had asked with her dying breath to be given to you if you were ever summoned to court."

  When that seemed to be the end of his story, I said, "Which I just have been."

  "Which you just have been," he agreed.

  "So ... where's the ring?"

  "The midwife has it. I decided it would be safer with her, just in case the queen knew of its existence and tried to get it from us. I didn't even tell Solita here."

  OK. That made sense. Sort of. "Where's the midwife?"

  "She has become a hermit," Father said, "in service at the Shrine of Saint Bruce the Warrior Poet."

  I'd heard of it, but no memory stronger than name recognition surfaced.

  "So I need to go to the shrine," I said.

  "If you want the ring," Father agreed.

  After what felt like a dozen false starts because I didn't have it?

  "Be safe," he told me.

  "Be good," my mother told me.

  I kissed them both. I kissed my brothers and sisters. This time I really felt as though I were leaving my true family behind. I was tempted to go back up the hill and kiss Dusty, but I was sure Deming would ride off without me if I tried.

  "Are you finally quite through?" Deming asked

  Father stepped to within a nose length of him and said "She's your new king, little man. Treat her respectfully."

  For some reason—maybe because Father was about a foot taller and about two feet wider—Deming bobbed his head and stammered, "Yes, of course. I meant: Does it please you to go now, Highness?"

  My father winked at me as Deming lifted me onto the horse before he mounted in front of me, the first time he hadn't left me to scramble on by myself.

  "Good-bye, good-bye," my family and I called out. I kept looking back and blowing kisses until I could no longer see them.

  Maybe the people at Rasmussem need to develop a new game called something like Happy Family, where there's no gathering treasure or fighting hostile warriors or solving puzzles, just nice people who speak kindly to you and don't make you feel like one of those Christmas trees you see by the curb on December 26. I bet other people, besides me, would be interested.

  Maybe.

  OK, probably not.

  When we got to the crossroads beyond the boundary of St. Jehan, I told Deming, "We need to go to the Shrine of Saint Bruce the Warrior Poet."

  "Why?" he demanded, his newfound respect strained.

  "Because I'm your new king and I command it," I told him.

  Deming sighed but turned down a different road from the one we had taken in all the previous games. "I don't even like poetry," he complained.

  It was the first thing he'd said that I could relate to.

  THE ROAD led into the woods, where Deming chose a path that more or less followed a stream. He insisted that, though not a lover of poetry, he knew the way. I wondered if we were going to meet the bow-happy relatives of the poacher boy, which got me to wondering what would happen to him, since I wasn't going straight to the castle. But if I was supposed to play a part in that, his capture by the guards must be triggered by my arrival at the castle.

  It wasn't a long ride before we reached what looked like an about-to-fall-down lean-to of twigs and hide that sagged against a hill.

  "There she is," Deming said, stopping the horse half a city-block length away. "Feordina the Knitter. I'm not going any closer."

  Feordina the Knitter? I squinted my eyes in the direction he was looking, at what I had supposed was a heap of forest debris piled by the wind into a corner formed by the lean-to and the hill. I became aware that the pile of debris had looked up and was watching vis.

  "Wait for me," I told Deming, dismounting.

  "Yeah, yeah," he said. He, too, got off the horse and led it to the stream to drink.

  I approached the lean-to. "Good day to you," I said.

  The reason the person—Feordina—looked like a compost heap was that her clothes seemed to be made entirely of vegetation. She had a basket by her feet that was filled with dandelions, and that was what she was knitting with. I mean, she
had knitting needles made of smooth sticks, but she was using dandelion stems as yarn. Dandelion stems not being very long, every few stitches she'd reach down into the basket for a new dandelion, lop off the top with her thumb, then add this new stem to the garment she was knitting. And I knew it was a garment she was making because she seemed to be wearing last season's model, over a fashionable chemise of what I was guessing to be moss and lichen, with accent points of leaves and a hint of heather. She had a two-foot-wide mushroom cap on her head.

  "Hold on," she told me, "I'm counting knits and purls."

  I waited while she got to the end of the row.

  "So"—she didn't set her project down, but she looked up at me through her bushy eyebrows, which themselves almost looked knitted—"who are you and why are you here?"

  "I'm Janine," I told her.

  She looked at me blankly.

  "Janine de St. Jehan." Still no reaction. "You were midwife at my birth. In the king's castle. "Where my mother died. You brought me to my foster parents, Solita and Dexter the peat cutter." She was the right woman, wasn't she?

  "You don't look like the Janine I remember," she said.

  "Well"—I was beginning to get worried—"it has been fourteen years."

  "Hmmm," she said noncommittally.

  "My parents—my foster parents—said that they left a ring with you that my mother wanted me to have."

  "We'll see," Feordina said. She carefully set her knitting down in the basket and stood, creaking and snapping. I couldn't tell if that was her bones, or something she was wearing. She was even shorter than me, probably only four feet tall. "Well, come in, then."

  She motioned me to follow her into the lean-to, which hardly looked big enough for two. But it turned out to be only an entryway, protecting a huge crack in the side of the hill. There were burning torches set into nooks and crannies in the cave surface, so I had no trouble seeing.

  The cave must have been formed by an offshoot of the stream we'd been following, for it was quite damp, which made me sneeze. The cave was roundish and about as big as, say, your average one-stall-and-a-sink public bathroom, which it also kind of smelled like. At the far wall was a life-size statue of a man who most likely was Saint Bruce the Warrior Poet. What was kind of neat was that, even though his face was carved wood, his armor was real: a plate-metal helmet (the visor was up, which was how I saw his face), gauntlets, shin protectors, and a surcoat of mail—thousands and thousands of interlocking circles of metal.

  "Wow," I said. "Impressive."

  When Feordina didn't say anything, I asked, "Uhm, what does this have to do with me and the ring?"

  She waggled her finger at the statue, and my heart sank. "I hid the ring in the coat of mail." She smiled apologetically, showing little brown teeth, and I winced, not for the teeth but because I saw what was coming. "I wish I could remember where."

  I ran my fingers over the metal, but nothing came loose. "Any hints?" I asked. "Arms? Shoulders? Back?"

  She just shook her head. "But the rightful owner—and according to you, that's you—can call it forth."

  "How?"

  "Why, by reciting poetry, of course."

  Of course.

  I asked, "You mean like"—I paused to remember—"'Listen, my children and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere'?"

  "Cute," she said, "though a bit short."

  "No, that wasn't the whole thing." I started panicking because I didn't know the whole thing. I'd just said all I remembered. Did I know any poem in its entirety?

  No matter, for she said, "But it has to be a poem of your own making."

  "Oh," I said. How hard could that be?

  "Of course," Feordina said, "if Saint Bruce doesn't like your poem, he chops your head off."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Poem Can Be a Home to Those Who Roam (Or, Like, Whatever)

  If Saint Bruce didn't like my poetry, he got to chop my head off? That was even stiffer than my teacher Mrs. Kascima, who isn't satisfied with the quality of her quizzes unless half the class fails.

  "I don't know," I said, though a moment before, I'd been convinced this ring was my only chance to succeed in the game—or at least to succeed in starting the game.

  Feordina folded her arms across her chest and sighed. "That's all right; don't worry about me," she said in a tone that was just the slightest bit insincere. "Take your time; think it over." As though I couldn't hear, she muttered, presumably to Saint Bruce, "Like she's got a choice in the matter." She smiled brightly at me, then a moment later heaved another sigh.

  "What, exactly, does this ring do?" I asked.

  "I'm not going to answer that question at this point," she said, "not until I know it's really you."

  Well, it wasn't like getting killed would be a new experience for me. "All right," I said. "Any rules I should know about?"

  "Nope," Feordina said. "Just so long as it's your own poem." She considered before adding, "And Saint Bruce was very well-read, and was known for his incredible memory."

  Which sounded like she was saying I looked like a cheater. I was offended but suspected it wasn't worthwhile defending myself to her.

  "And he chops people's heads off," I asked for clarification, "if he suspects the poem is somebody else's...?" I drifted off, hoping that was the extent of it.

  "Or if the poem stinks," Feordina finished for me. "You wouldn't believe the number of people who come in here with stinky poems. What a mess. Speaking of which, I should probably get the mop and bucket out now. Well, never mind, we'll see." She gave me that bright smile again. "Did I forget to mention there's a time limit?"

  "You most certainly did." Could things get any worse? Silly question: Things can always get worse. "You mean there's a limit to how long the poem can be?"

  "I mean there's a limit to how long you can wait between entering the shrine and starting—and ending—the poem. Bruce doesn't like a lot of dithering, you know."

  Before I had time to throttle her, she added: "I'd say your time's probably ... oh, about half gone."

  Which didn't give me enough time to throttle her and think up a poem. "Any particular subject or type of poem he prefers?"

  I figured she'd say he wanted a rondel or a sonnet or some other kind of poem I could name but not remember how to structure; I also feared that he might be especially fond of deep, meaningful, symbolic poetry. But she just shook her head. And glanced warily at that sword the statue held aloft, as though revising her estimate of how much time I had left.

  Did I detect a smear of red along its length, or was that just the light from the torches?

  All right. What, exactly did I have to lose? I announced: "An Ode to Saint Bruce." He had to like a poem praising him—didn't he?

  No reaction.

  OK.

  Except, of course, that my mind was blank.

  OK...

  It made no sense to just stand there without trying while my time ran out. I started:

  "A warrior poet named Bruce..."

  My mind ran through a series of words rhyming with "Bruce," none of which seemed particularly apt.

  "...wrote odes to his horse and his goose."

  I fully expected the sword to come down then, but it didn't. I cleared my throat. OK, that took care of the "poet" part, what about the "warrior"?

  "He won honor and prizes..."

  Prizes? What was I thinking of, prizes?

  "...'gainst foes of various sizes..."

  'Gainst was poetical, even if the line itself was forced. And now what about the "saint" part?

  Knowing it sounded like the pathetic begging it was, I finished:

  "...and protected young poets from abuse."

  Feordina winced and ducked.

  I closed my eyes and braced myself for the blow from the sword.

  No pain. No fizziness. No maternal call of, "Janine! Janine, come back to the house."

  Maybe I was still alive. I peeked to check.

  The statue just st
ood there, like a good statue should.

  Stood/good/should: Now the rhyming was coming to me.

  Feordina lowered her arms from protecting her head and gave a snort of disbelief. "He must be in a good mood," she proclaimed. "Lucky you: He's accepted your poem."

  I couldn't fault Feordina for being surprised. I was amazed myself. "Now what?" I asked.

  "Now you ask for what you want," Feordina said, "and if it's within Saint Brace's power, he'll grant it."

  I closed the mouth I had opened to ask for the ring. "If it's within his power," I repeated.

  She nodded. "'If it's within his power.'"

  "What does that mean?" I asked.

  "It means: If he can do it." Feordina rolled her eyes despite her polite smile.

  Oh, well, thank you very much for clarifying that particularly challenging question. Though I had come to get the ring, suddenly I wondered if the ring was my best option. "What sorts of wishes does he grant?" I asked. "And what sort doesn't he grant?"

  "Well," she said, "I've never known him to turn down a request for facility at rhyming or meter, which I do have to point out are areas in which you seem to be particularly weak."

  "Ahh," I said, suspecting that she wouldn't recognize sarcasm, "very useful to peasant girls who need to take on the royal court."

  "Hmmm," she said as though maybe she did know sarcasm when she heard it. "Of course, Saint Bruce does tend to get cranky with greedy people who are granted one wish then ask for more."

  "Cranky," I said. "As in..." I glanced at the upraised sword.

  "Hmmm," Feordina agreed.

  "So what do you suggest?" I asked.

  She sighed audibly. "You came here looking for something in particular. Is your attention span so short that you've forgotten?"

  "I came looking for my mother's ring," I said.

  Feordina leaned close as though she was about to whisper something to me, but instead she shouted: "Well, then, ask for it!"

  "I wish for my mother's ring," I said.

  There was a slight ping as something metallic fell—I couldn't see from where on the statue—and hit the floor of the cave. I caught the glint of metal as the ring rolled to bounce off my right big toe.

  "Oy!" Feordina smacked her palm against her forehead. "Was that so difficult?"