Heir Apparent

by Vivian Vande Velde

  But Sister Mary Ursula came from a different world from me. I suspected Sister Mary Ursula came from a different world from the other people in this world, too, but I didn't say so. She told me, "You need to cleanse your soul—make it One with the world."

  "How do I do that?" I asked.

  "Solitude. Fasting. Meditation. Skinny-dipping in the moonlight."

  "I think I'll wait until my second week as king for that," I said, willing to risk that I was skipping something I was supposed to do.

  Sister Mary Ursula didn't argue. "All ways lead to the One," she said, "though some ways get you there faster."

  "Speaking of getting places," I said, "what I want are people to deliver messages for me. Who would I talk to about that?"

  "You could talk to me," Sister Mary Ursula said. "But in all honesty, I don't know much about it. Probably the one you need to speak to is Penrod, captain of the guard."

  "Fine," I said. "Thank you. I'll see you later."

  "Don't you want to discuss the meaning of life?" Sister Mary Ursula took a few steps after me.

  But she stopped following when I said, "In a little bit." She was obviously a dead end. I had chosen the wrong counselor, that was all there was to it. There was no way the game was supposed to be played with me spending my first afternoon here cleansing my soul and listening to Sister Mary Ursula philosophize about life. Or, at least, I didn't think so.

  I was sure the ceiling would come crashing down on me at any moment now. Or maybe there would be an earthquake or a tidal wave, something to kill me off and set me down at the beginning again. But in the meanwhile, there was no reason I couldn't try to find out information that would be useful for my next try.

  I went back out into the courtyard. No guards this time; if they weren't terrorizing the local citizenry, they were probably huddled somewhere conspiring to kill me. I stopped a servant woman who was carrying a basket of laundry. "Any idea where I would find Captain Penrod?" I asked her.

  "He might be in the guardhouse." She pointed to one of the doorways.

  Luckily, the door was wide open, because I didn't know if—as a princess-about-to-be-appointed-king—I was supposed to knock. I mean, obviously I outranked them, but I didn't want to walk in on a group of guys who might be in the process of getting dressed or undressed, or who might be sitting around scratching or belching and farting or doing whatever it is guys do when there aren't any civilized folk around. But with the door already open, I rapped my knuckles against the doorframe, called, "Hello!" and walked in.

  There were about a half-dozen guards, who were neither walking around naked nor conspiring against me—at least not obviously so. Apparently this wasn't where they slept but just where they hung around. A pair of them were seated at a table, playing a game my subconscious identified as knucklebones. Most of the others were clustered around them, and I gathered, from the snatch of conversation I caught before they saw me and stopped, that they were betting on the outcome of the game. One man was napping on a cot in the corner, and another was making some sort of adjustment to his sword belt. All of the men, except the napper, jumped to attention when they saw me. Not guiltily, I thought, just wary.

  "Captain Penrod?" I said.

  "Yeah?" The man who answered was the one who had been fiddling with his belt. He was also the guard I'd talked to several times this morning—the one who had arrested the poacher. The one who had killed me two or three games back.

  I decided not to hold that against him. "I need to invite the magic-users of the realm to a meeting," I said.

  "Done," the man said.

  Did he mean, "I will do your bidding so quickly, you might as well consider it done already"? Because he certainly wasn't moving, quickly or otherwise.

  "'Done'?" I repeated.

  "Prince Wulfgar already gave that order."

  "Oh," I said, because—excuse me, but—the way Prince Wulfgar and I had left things, Sister Mary Ursula was my adviser, and she had advised me to steer clear of magic, and he had no reason to believe I wouldn't take her recommendation. Sure, that was what I had decided. But after he left. I had certainly not told him to go ahead and give the order.

  Some of this—not the details but the surprise and annoyance—must have shown on my face. Captain Penrod gave an unpleasant smile and said, "You and Prince Wulfgar need to consult more to get your stories straight."

  I took that as indication the captain had found out I'd misled him regarding the poacher. I didn't like the way the other men had moved in closer—even the guy who earlier had been lying down. I braced myself, but so far their weapons were still sheathed.

  "You're right," I told Penrod, told all of them. "As I'm starting my rule, I'm sure to make many mistakes. But I want you to know: You and your men are very important to me. I realize you perform some of the hardest, most dangerous, most thankless jobs in the realm." I had no idea what their duties were, but doesn't everybody feel that describes their jobs? I figured it couldn't hurt for me to be sympathetic.

  They did seem to—well, not mellow or relax, but maybe loosen a bit at my words.

  "I want all of you to feel free to come to me with any of your concerns. And I want you to go ahead and give me advice if you think anything in the way this kingdom is being run is wrong."

  Well, that was a mistake.

  They started complaining to me about everything from my being too soft on the peasants to the fact that they weren't paid enough and weren't paid regularly, and the food was pretty generally lousy, and they really didn't like the way the queen had a tendency to hit on the younger men.

  "Wow," I said the instant there was a pause, "I'm going to look into all of those things. First..." I was going to apologize for undermining their authority with the poacher boy; but on second thought, they might take that as permission to enact harsher measures on the nearest peasants. Besides, I didn't think a king should start her reign by apologizing. "First," I said, "the money owed you."

  That certainly seemed the right choice for getting their attention. They all spoke at once, their words tumbling over one another, but I gathered that they'd been shorted their salaries several times over the past months.

  "Who's in charge of paying you?" I asked.

  "Counselor Rawdon," they all said, seven voices speaking as one.

  Rawdon, of course, had walked off in a huff. Had he simply left my presence or had he left the castle? "I will get to the bottom of this," I promised. "Who can take me to Counselor Rawdon's room, or..." I still didn't have a clear idea what I was supposed to be doing in this game. "Or, well, to all the places I need to go?"

  They all looked ready to volunteer, which was a distinct improvement to their earlier mood. But it was Penrod who said, "I will accompany you, Highness."

  "Good. Thank you." I nodded to the other men. "At ease," I said, which was about all the military-speak I knew.

  Penrod and I walked back out into the courtyard. "Any idea how soon before the magic-users will be here?" I asked.

  "Uldemar is the only one with a regular house in a town, and that's about a half-day's ride from here. The messenger Prince Wulfgar sent should be there by late afternoon. Uldemar has wizardly ways to contact the others. Depending on where they are and if they can come immediately, I should think they'd be here sometime between noon tomorrow and..." He trailed off, indicating no upper limit for how long it could take.

  Ouch. OK, so I guessed I wasn't supposed to wait on them.

  Then my new top priority was to get the guards happy with me so they wouldn't kill me again. "What—" I started. But I heard a sound, that stomach-churning whoosh of an arrow that I recognized from my death a couple times back, when the woodsmen had fired their arrows at me.

  What did I do now? I thought things had been going ... maybe not well but sort of OK. Hadn't they? Had the guardsmen been only pretending to accept my proposals?

  Except that I hadn't felt an arrow slam into me, and I didn't feel any fizziness.

  I lo
oked back to the doorway of the guardroom, but there was no bowman there. Could I have imagined that sound? I turned to Captain Penrod, and he wasn't where I had left him.

  He was, in fact, on the ground at my feet, an arrow through his heart.

  There was a supply wagon parked in front of a servants' entrance, and a man jumped out from behind it. He was a huge, hairy guy, and it was hard to tell where his hairiness ended and his tunic—which my subconscious identified as elk hide—began. On his head was one of those horned helmets worn by cartoon Vikings and fat ladies in German operas.

  Before I could get out much more than a squeak, he clapped a massive hand over my mouth. I kicked, squirmed, and tried to bite—but didn't get much reaction.

  Still, my pathetic scream must have gotten someone's attention, for one of the guards came to the guardroom door.

  A second man, who could have been my attacker's twin, edged out from behind the wagon and let loose an arrow that struck the guard in the throat.

  I was still trying to jab my attacker where it hurts—which apparently is a lot easier in the movies than in real life—as he dragged me backward toward the wagon. There were two bowmen behind the wagon, who covered our retreat, as well as others, I now saw, on top of the wall that separated the courtyard from the surrounding woods. At just about the same time I became aware that the placement of the wagon had hidden a rope ladder the attackers had used to get into the castle compound, I also became aware that it wasn't my attacker's hand that smelled so bad, but the cloth he held in his hand over my nose and mouth.

  Whatever he'd soaked the cloth in made my knees wobble and give out, and he flung me over his shoulder as he grabbed hold of the rope. The ground spun, and I lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Are We Having Fun Yet?

  I woke up when someone threw a bucket of cold water on me. Even in my groggy state, I was beginning to figure this was the only bath I was likely to get in this particular lifetime.

  Speaking of baths, two big hairy guys who looked as though they'd never heard the word—and who may or may not have been some of the ones I'd seen in the castle courtyard—were standing over me, one with an empty-though-still-dripping bucket in hand. This guy said something to me—a whole string of words I couldn't understand.

  "I don't speak your language," I said.

  The second man switched to whatever language English passed for in this world. "Where do it be?" he demanded. Despite his appearance, his accent was pleasant and musical—sort of Jamaican but not.

  I was smart enough not to check to see if the ring I'd tied to my bodice laces was still there.

  "Where do what be?" I asked.

  "Do na play the dumb one," commanded the other guy, his accent thicker. "The crown, to be certain."

  That was a surprise. I had no idea who these guys were or why they were looking for the crown, but I couldn't see any reason not to be honest. "I haven't been officially named king yet," I explained. "Not for a couple more days. I don't know where they're keeping the crown in the meantime."

  The two guys exchanged a look that struck me as a can-this-girl-be-real? look.

  "What?" I asked.

  They talked over me as though I weren't there. "Mayhap she be playin' the dumb one?" the one with the bucket said. "Or mayhap she really be as stupid as she seems?"

  I resented that, even though I was lying in a puddle of new-made mud, obviously these guys' prisoner. And there were a bunch of other guys, looking just like these two. A whole bunch. Like hundreds, I guessed, seeing their tents, their campfires. I was in some sort of enemy camp.

  Bucketless stroked his bushy beard speculatively. "It might be that no one has been telling her yet," he said, but he didn't sound as though he really believed it.

  "Nobody has told me much of anything," I agreed.

  "You be the new king," said the bucket guy. "How can they be na tellin' you what you be needin' to know to rule?"

  "Well," I admitted, "I do suspect some of them are trying to get around that me-being-the-new-king thing."

  The guy who spoke better English gave a short, sharp laugh, and this time I guessed he believed me. "I would bet," he said. Then he asked, "Do anybody be telling you about King Grimbold?"

  I shook my head. "Who's he?"

  He grinned, his white teeth flashing. "Me."

  A king. Another one. Oh boy. "You're not a contender for the throne of..."—implanted memory floated to my mind's surface, and my kingdom gained a name—"Shelby, are you?"

  Grimbold snorted. "I be having my own kingdom, thank you—when Shelban kings be not sabotaging us." He could see I wasn't following this. "In the north," he added, which wouldn't have meant anything to me except for what Queen Andreanna had said about us being threatened by a barbarian army in the north.

  I didn't ask if he was a barbarian, which sounded a bit rude to me. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't to a barbarian, but I decided not to chance it. I asked, "King Cynric took your crown, is that what you're saying? He took away the actual crown?"

  "He be stole it away," the other man interrupted. "From Grimbold's father, King Tobrecan."

  "I don't know anything about that," I said. "I was raised away from court."

  Grimbold gave that barklike laugh of his. "Like Wulfgar."

  This was not news to me, but for the first time I wondered if Wulfgar and I had more in common than I had suspected. That he had been educated away from home was the first thing Deming had said about him—but had it been to protect him from court intrigue? Had Cynric seen that Queen Andreanna had enough ambitions for herself that she posed a danger to their son when he was too young to defend himself? I saw there were a lot more questions I should have asked at court.

  The barbarian with the bucket said, "But now that King Tobrecan is bein' dead and Grimbold is bein' our new king, and now that Cynric is bein' dead, it is bein' time to reclaim the crown that been fashioned by Xenos for Brecc the Slayer, our firstest chieftain."

  "Xenos," I said, recognizing the name. "There's a magician today by that same name."

  Again the men exchanged a long-suffering look.

  They couldn't be talking about the same man, could they? How long ago had this Brecc ruled, and how old would that make Xenos? But, then again, we were talking about a magician.

  "She do be as stupid as she looks," the guy with the bucket said.

  "I be liking her," Grimbold argued. "She does na know nothing, but I na be going to hold that against her."

  "So what do that be meanin'?" the other man asked.

  "We shall be letting her live," Grimbold said.

  That was a relief.

  Grimbold said, "We shall be demanding the crown as ransom for her."

  The other gave a dismissive snort. "What makes you be thinkin' they be payin' a ransom for her, useless thing that she be?"

  I couldn't help but mentally agree. They were going to ask my family to trade something—presumably of value—for me? This opened up a whole new batch of possibilities for public humiliation.

  Grimbold stroked his beard pensively as though his companion had presented a new thought. "We can always be killing her later," he said.

  Which I guess showed he wasn't all that emotionally attached to me.

  "Set a guard on her," Grimbold ordered, "and send a envoy to the castle to be demanding the returning of my crown in exchange for the life of their new king."

  I couldn't even use my ring on Grimbold. If I said, "Here, take this ring," and he put it on, and then started doing everything I said, then surely this other guy would catch on that something was wrong.

  Nor could I use it on my guard: Grimbold had given his orders. There were too many men in this camp who would question why those orders were being ignored if I got this guy to release me.

  The barbarian guard got a length of chain and some shackles—not promising an easy escape at all—then he brought me to a tree in the midst of their campground, and he fastened me there, by my
left ankle. All in all, they were being more considerate than I had reason to expect from enemy barbarians. The shackle wasn't tight, and the chain was long enough that I could sit, stand, He down, or walk around the tree—choosing shade or sunlight as I pleased. But I still felt like a leashed dog.

  From the position of the sun, I guessed that it was midafternoon. The last meal my stomach remembered was a breakfast of hard bread and salted fish back in St. Jehan—a menu the real me had to keep from dwelling on or I would have gagged. I felt hungry, and these guys would have already had their midday meal and wouldn't be thinking about supper for another several hours.

  A guard was posted to watch me. He was given the key to the shackles, which I found reason enough to try to strike up a friendship. It was hard to tell if he didn't speak English, or if he simply didn't want to talk.

  There were some women in the camp, and one of them brought me a cup of water.

  "Thank you," I said. "Any chance of any leftovers from lunch?"

  She looked at me quizzically and said something that sounded like, "Doe naado?"

  "Food?" I said. I pantomimed eating, but she shook her head. I thought she meant she didn't understand rather than that I couldn't have any, but there was no way to know for sure. My guard certainly didn't offer any commentary.

  There were even a few kids. Some of them seemed curious, some seemed to be playing a game of dare—approaching, then running away. When I didn't chase after them, a few got bolder and took up a new game of throw-clumps-of-dirt-at-the-prisoner. My guard napped obliviously in the shade of his own tree.

  I didn't even know if my royal family was planning to rescue me. Should I be patiently waiting for them to come swooping in, or was I supposed to be working on some plan of my own?

  Of course, it would help if I had even the beginnings of a plan of my own to get me started in the right direction.

  Knowing how difficult it is to judge the passing of time when you're bored, I think I waited about an hour and a half, maybe two. The sun did lower a bit in the sky.