The Tangle Box

  The Earth Mother paused, and one hand lifted, a strange and compelling gesture. “The soils must be gathered by you, Willow, and by no one else. You must collect them, you must mix them, and you must take root in them when it is time to give birth. The soils must come from special places in each world, for they must reflect the character of that world, combining what is best and worst about the creatures who inhabit each. There is within your child some part of all three worlds, you see—something of Landover, of Earth, and of the fairy mists. If the child is to grow strong and healthy, if it is to secure wisdom and understanding, if it is to sort through and choose from the seeds of good and evil that exist in all living creatures, there must be a balance of possibilities inherent within it. The soils offer that balance. They offer magic that will sustain and secure.”

  “Fairy magic, Earth Mother?” Willow asked doubtfully.

  “As surely as any other. This child’s heritage is long and complex, Willow. Its bloodlines run back to when the people of the River Country were part of the fairy world. You carry both bloods within you; so must your child.”

  Willow’s face was drawn and frightened. “Must I go into these worlds to gain possession of the soils, Earth Mother? I cannot do that. I cannot pass into the fairy mists or even out of Landover to Ben’s world if he does not take me there. The medallion he wears as King will be needed. I must take him with me after all.”

  “No, Willow, he cannot go with you on this journey. Your own words—do you remember?” The elemental’s face was kind and sad and hard and certain all at once, such a strange mix of emotions that Willow took a step back. “Listen to me now. Hear everything that I would tell you. This will be difficult, but you will have help. There are things at work here that even I do not yet understand. But one thing is certain. Your child must have the soils I have described. You must gather them, mix them, and take root in them. You alone. You must not be deterred by your fear. You must be brave. You must believe. Your child’s life depends on it.”

  Willow was ashen now, gone cold with the enormity of what she was being asked to do. Ben could not help her. Who then would?

  “You will begin at the old pines where you go to see your mother dance,” the Earth Mother whispered in the stillness of the glade, her voice a ripple across the muddied waters on which she stood. “I will see you safely there. The first of the soils shall come from the lake country, where the best and the worst that is Landover can be found in a single grain. Take from the clearing where your mother dances a small bag of the soil you will find there. When you have finished, you will be met by someone who will guide you into Ben’s world.”

  “Who will meet me, Earth Mother?” Willow asked softly. “Who will it be?”

  “I am not given to see that yet,” came the reply. “I am given to see only this. Your guide will come from the fairy people, who are equally committed to the safe birth of your child. I have visited them in dreams and found that it is so. This child, this firstborn of human and fairy, of Landover’s King and Queen, is special to them as well, and they will do everything they can to keep it protected. Thus they will provide one of their own as guide, one whose magic will allow you safe passage, first into Ben Holiday’s world and then into their own. Your guide will know where to take you to find the soils you need.

  “But, child, take warning,” she added quickly, her voice gone dark with premonition once more. “The fairy people harbor secrets in all that they do, and nothing with them is ever what it appears. They will have reasons beyond what they reveal for giving you aid. Do not accept everything you are told without question. Do not think that you know the whole truth. Be wary always. They will give you the help they have promised; that much is certain. They will see the child safely born; that is certain as well. But all else remains in doubt, so stay cautious in all that you do.”

  “Can you tell me nothing more?”

  “I have told you all.”

  “There is too much uncertainty in this journey, Earth Mother,” the sylph whispered. “I am frightened.”

  The Earth Mother sighed, the sound of the wind passing through the trees at eventide. “As I am frightened for you, child.”

  “Must I go, then?”

  “If you wish your child safely born, you must.”

  Willow nodded, resigned. “I do.” She looked away into the trees, as if thinking to see something of what was hidden from her. “How much time do I have to make this journey?”

  “I do not know.”

  “The baby, then. How much time until the baby is born?”

  “I do not know that either. Only the child knows. The child will decide when it is time. You must be ready when that time comes.”

  A sudden desperation tightened Willow’s throat. “Can you see where the child is to be born? Can you tell me at least that much?”

  “Not even that,” the Earth Mother replied sadly. “The child will decide the place of its birth as well.”

  Willow fought back against her despair. “Little is left for me to choose, it seems. All decisions are given to others.” She could not keep the bitterness from her voice. “I am the mother of this child. I am the one who carries it within her body. I am the giver of its life. Yet I have almost nothing to say about its coming into the world.”

  The Earth Mother did not speak. They stood facing each other in the silent clearing, the sunlight filtering down from the south where it eased toward day’s end, the waters of the pond between them reflecting their images as if through poorly blown glass. Willow wondered suddenly if her own birth had been so complicated, if the very complexity of it had contributed to her mother’s decision to leave her to her father, to abandon any further involvement, to forgo the pain of raising her when the pain of giving her life had been so intense. There was no way to know, of course. Her mother would never tell her the truth. Willow thought then of how she had left Ben, slipping away without saying good-bye, and she wished now that she had woken him.

  She straightened. Well, there were few second chances given in life, and it was best not to dwell on their scarcity.

  “Good-bye, Earth Mother,” she said, for there was nothing else to say, no other words to speak. “I will remember what you have said.”

  “Good-bye, Willow. Keep strong, child. All will be well.”

  It was almost exactly the same thing she had said to Ben. All will be well. The words reached out to mock her. Willow’s smile was bleak and ironic. She turned and walked to the edge of the clearing.

  When she looked back again, the Earth Mother had disappeared.

  Ensorcelled

  When Ben Holiday woke that first morning to find Willow gone, he was not a happy man. She had told him she was leaving, of course, so he was not surprised to discover she wasn’t there. He even understood why she had left without waking him to say good-bye; he probably would have reacted every bit as badly as she had imagined. But none of that made him feel any better about the situation. He simply didn’t like being separated from her, even for the best of reasons—and he wasn’t sure this visit was one. He had listened to her explanation and tried to be fair about what she was doing, but in the end he still didn’t understand any of it. Why did she have to go alone? Why did she have to go now?

  Why did the feeling persist, despite his efforts to suppress it, that she was keeping something from him?

  He might have sat about stewing for the entire day or even the rest of the week if it hadn’t been for the fact that once again he had scheduled a full day of meetings in his continuing effort to find a way to be a good King. It wasn’t as easy as people might suppose. In the first place, there was a decided clash of cultures at work in his stewardship of Landover. This was a place in which the feudal system had been at work for hundreds of years (according to Abernathy’s carefully maintained histories), while Ben Holiday was a product of what passed in his world for a democracy. Instinctively almost, he found himself from day one looking for ways to implement the kind of government he k
new and believed in. The lawyer in him wanted law and order to be the cornerstone of his government and to guarantee justice of, for, and by the people. But you didn’t come into a strange country and simply throw out the system already in place. That was a swift and certain path to anarchy. As they were fond of saying where he came from, you had to work within the system.

  So Ben settled early on for working toward the establishment of a benevolent dictatorship (still didn’t sound too good when he said it, but it remained the best description he could come up with). The emphasis, of course, was supposed to be on the word benevolent and not on the other. The trick in all this was to introduce the changes he wanted without making it too obvious. People always accepted change more readily when they didn’t realize it was happening. Thus the need for Ben Holiday as King to constantly walk a tightrope. Of course, after two years he was getting pretty good at it.

  The process was convoluted, and only Questor and Abernathy really knew what was going on. As the King’s closest advisors (not counting Willow), they were pretty much privy to everything that happened. In most instances, they supported Ben’s ideas, arguing mostly on the side of caution and restraint in the introduction of his somewhat-revolutionary ideas. Once Ben had established himself as an acceptable and resilient King, one not likely to be dislodged, the next step was to bring the Kingdom’s warring factions into some kind of accord. That meant getting at least a semblance of cooperation from such diverse peoples as the once-fairy, the humans, the kobolds, and the rock trolls—not to mention various smaller groups—none of whom wanted much to do with the other. Ben had succeeded in that endeavor through a combination of threats, promises, and bribes. A King had to be something of a magician—apologies to Questor Thews—and there was a great deal of on-the-job training. Thus a hard stand here led to a compromise there. You had to know when to bend and when to hold fast.

  Starting out as a lawyer was good training, as Ben was fond of saying, for becoming a King.

  So here was how matters stood at present in the reign of Ben Holiday, latest King of Landover, a place every reasonable person who hadn’t been there knew couldn’t possibly exist. The King still had the final say in all matters, particularly in disputes between lesser rulers and leaders of the various peoples of the Kingdom. Because Ben had finally garnered a solid base of support throughout the whole of the land and because he was backed by the armored might of the Paladin, almost no one ever considered using force against him. Ben, on the other hand, had to be careful not to give any of those lesser rulers and leaders reason to feel that their own stature was in any way being diminished. Thus they had to be left to govern where it was reasonable and sensible to allow them to do so. Where the King’s own special brand of magic came into play was in getting them to govern the way he wanted.

  Ben established early on a series of advisory committees (his designation) to oversee such matters as resource management (land, water, air, and magic—well, of course, in a magic kingdom!), commerce and travel (trading of goods between peoples and the transportation of same), currency exchange (frequently bartering), public works (road building and repair and management of the King’s lands), and judicial review (resolution of civil disputes and criminal violations). He set up administrative officials in each part of the Kingdom to oversee the workings of all this, and periodically he brought them to Sterling Silver for a review of how the process was working and what could be done to make it stronger. It wasn’t a perfect system by any means, but it had the added benefit of teaching Landover’s many and diverse citizens—whether they realized it or not—how to participate in a government system. It was a learning process that took time, but Ben thought that he could see it building on itself. Where once the peoples of the lake country and the Greensward wouldn’t have given each other the time of day, now they were working together to solve such common problems as how to conserve and protect water resources and how most effectively to use crop lands for growing. He had them sharing their knowledge and reconsidering their prejudices. He had them behaving better than they had behaved in centuries.

  In some ways it was all very primitive compared to where he had come from. But in other ways it was like being able to start over before so much was poisoned. Ben was careful about choosing what knowledge he introduced from his old world. He kept it pretty basic. Good health habits and improved farming techniques, for example. He stayed away from things that would result in drastic change and possible harm—Industrial Revolution inventions and gunpowder. Some things he didn’t know enough about to introduce, and that limited what he could choose from. He was at heart a lawyer in any event—not an engineer or a chemist or a doctor or a manufacturer. Maybe, he reflected now and again, it was just as well.

  Besides, Landover had something going for it that his old world didn’t, and it was important to remember to add it into the equation. Landover had magic. Real magic, the kind that changed things just as surely as electricity. Landover was infused with it, and many of her citizens practiced it in one form or another, and what they did with it obviated the need for many of the things that science had introduced once upon a time in Ben’s old world. So it wasn’t as simple as it first seemed, this business of categorizing and defining the pluses and minuses, pros and cons, and good and bad of the Kingdom of Landover.

  In any case, Ben Holiday’s schedule that first day of Willow’s absence kept him from dwelling on his dissatisfaction with the matter of her going in the first place, and it wasn’t until he retired after a rather late dinner, alone in their bedchamber, that he found himself confronted by his personal demons once again. He stood on the balcony that opened off the room, staring out across the starlit land for a long time, trying to decide how he should handle the situation. He could go after her, of course. Bunion could probably track her down in nothing flat. But he knew even as he considered the idea that he would never do anything so contrary to what she expected of him. He considered using the Landsview, the strange instrument that allowed him to go out into the land and find anyone or anything to be found there, all without ever leaving the castle. He had used it more than once to see what was happening in a faraway place. That was a tempting alternative, but in the end he discarded it as well. It was too much like spying. What if he were to see something that he wasn’t supposed to see, something that she preferred to keep hidden from him? When you loved someone as much as he loved her, you didn’t resort to spying on them.

  He settled finally for going to bed and lying awake most of the night thinking about her.

  The second day passed very much like the first except that he was required to spend an extraordinarily long time with a delegation of Rock Trolls, convincing them of the wisdom of carting a portion of their raw ores down out of the Melchor for sale to others rather than insisting that the forging be done entirely in their furnaces and according to ner coming even later, which of course delayed bedtime until well after midnight, so that when he finally crawled beneath the covers he was so tired that he was almost asleep before he happened to turn over one final time on the pillow and so bring his hand in contact with the piece of paper tucked under it.

  He sat up at once. He didn’t know why, but he was instantly certain of the importance of this paper. He brought light to one of the bedside lamps with a touch of his hand, the castle awake even when he slept and responsive to his wishes. He angled the paper into the circle of the lamp’s faint glow. The paper was folded in quarters, and he opened it carefully and read:

  Holiday,

  If you would know of an invasive magic that threatens Landover in a way even I cannot tolerate then meet me two nights hence on the eve of the new moon at the Heart. Come alone. I will do so as well. I pledge you no harm and safe passage.

  Strabo.

  Ben stared. His mind raced. Strabo the dragon can write? How did this get here? The dragon couldn’t manage to fit through the bedchamber window, could he?

  He stopped himself and reconsidered. The dragon wouldn’t
have written this. Or delivered it. He would have had someone else do both. Somehow. If the letter really was from him. If this wasn’t some sort of trick. Which it likely was. Strabo had never written him before—or even contacted him. Strabo, Landover’s last dragon, a reclusive, melancholy curmudgeon of a creature who resided far east in the wasteland of the Fire Springs, didn’t even like Ben Holiday and had made it abundantly clear on more than one occasion that he would be ecstatic if he never saw the King again in his entire life.

  So what was this letter all about?

  Ben read it twice more, trying to picture the dragon speaking the words. It wasn’t hard. The letter sounded like him. But the sending of it was odd. If the dragon was indeed seeking a meeting, this threat of which he warned must be a serious one. Ben discounted the danger of a personal attack. Strabo wasn’t interested in harming him, and even if he was he wouldn’t bother sending a note to lure him out—he would just take wing and come after him. Asking Ben to come alone was in keeping with the dragon’s personality. Strabo didn’t care for humans in general and would want any meeting kept private and personal. He also was quite honorable in his own peculiar way, and if he promised safe passage he would keep his word.

  Still, the whole business made Ben uneasy.

  Come alone?

  Come at midnight?

  He read the letter again and learned nothing new. He sat propped up against the massive iron headboard, pillows at his back, thinking the matter through. He knew what Questor and Abernathy would say. He knew what reason dictated. But there was something compelling about this letter, something that refused to let him simply discard it and go on about his life. It kept him reconsidering the matter, insisting that it was imprudent to ignore the warning. A sixth sense whispered that there was indeed something to heed here, something of which to be wary. Strabo did not act without reason, and if he felt there was a danger facing Landover then he was probably right. If he felt Ben should know about it, then Ben probably should.