The Witchwood Crown

  As if to remind him that she was no servant to hurry at his command, the queen slid the brush through her hair a few more times. At last, she put down the mirror and the brush and came to the bed and slipped quickly under the coverlet that Simon held.

  “Are you hiding your charms from me?” he said, half-amused. “Are you afraid I will be overcome with base lust? S’Tree, now that I think of it, I might be.” He reached for her, felt the cool, silky flesh of her hip beneath his fingers. “Come here and find out.”

  “No! Stop! You gave me a promise!” She pushed his hand away, but wiggled closer so that he could press himself against her. “You are in a good mood because you have won the argument and will have your way about our grandson. But I am not going to share your mood. Go to sleep.”

  He let his head fall back against the pillow and stared up at the canopy, blue cloth studded with stars, like a map of the firmament. “Why do you think that I wanted so badly to go to the Sithi?” he said at last.

  Miriamele stirred. “Because we need their wisdom. And you are right about that, Simon . . .”

  “No. I wanted to go to the Sithi because I miss my friends.”

  “You have many friends. Binabik is right here with you!”

  “Not for much longer, Miri. How long has it been since we saw him last, before now? Years. And how long since we have seen any Sithi-folk except their poisoned messenger? Ten years? More, I think.” He pushed himself up a little so that he could cradle her head in the crook of his arm. It was hard for Simon to understand, when they were close like this, how such a small person as his wife should be so powerful, should be able to reach into his heart at will and squeeze it, leaving no wound on his flesh but making his soul ache. “I miss them, Miri. I miss the days we traveled together. Not because I miss being young—although that’s there, of course—but because I miss having true friends.”

  She turned a little to look at him. “You have many true friends.”

  “Friends at court are not true friends. There are a few, like Jeremias and Eolair, who knew me before we were put on the throne . . .”

  “I was not put on the throne, remember. I was the king’s daughter.”

  “Unbend a little, my sweetheart. There was never a more unpopular monarch than your father since Crexis the Goat killed the Redeemer. The truth is, neither of us should have ruled. It should have been your father’s brother Josua, who led the fight against him, but Josua passed the throne to us instead.” He reached over and carefully began to stroke her hair. “But all this is neither here or there. I want to see the Sithi again. I cannot say why, but I will never feel complete again if I do not. The world we knew in our youth is gone, but the Sithi are not. You never saw Jao é-Tinukai’i, but there is nothing like it in the world. Even the greatest cities the Sithi once built can’t compare. It was like a song, a story . . .” He could not find the words and fell silent.

  “What does that have to do with Morgan? He doesn’t know the Sithi, and will probably not feel anything like the same thing as you if he meets them. He will complain that they don’t know any funny songs and the women are too old.” She laughed suddenly in spite of herself. “I imagine he will be less successful seducing women who have lived a thousand years.”

  “I imagine so.” Simon closed his eyes. The stars on the canopy were beginning to dizzy him. He had not realized until this moment that he was tired. “God gives us one short life, Miriamele. I was lucky to have wise teachers—Binabik, Geloë, Aditu, Jiriki, and most of all Morgenes. They taught me to see beyond the obvious. I try to remember that. Morgan has had no such teacher.”

  “Then be that teacher, Simon. Do not send him away. The Sithi are not as they were. They are not going to take him in and tutor him.”

  “But that is just the point, Miri. You’re right. The Sithi are different than they were to me, or at least they seem to have changed. The world is different than it was when we were young. We have tried to teach him, but Morgan has never wanted to learn anything from us, so he has to learn for himself. So far, he has only had a little patch of the world to explore, and he has known it only as a prince. No wonder he sees little beyond the bottom of a tankard!”

  “You can’t make him be like you, Simon.”

  “I don’t want to. I want him to learn things on his own. Not completely alone, of course. Eolair is one of the kindest, wisest men I know. And don’t forget, Morgan will also have the trolls as companions for much of the trip. I know Binabik and Sisqi won’t let him come to harm if it can be avoided or escaped.”

  “Don’t, Simon. Don’t be so trusting. God didn’t save John Josua, for all our prayers.”

  “I trust nothing as true except what I have seen, Miri. That’s why Morgan needs something different. He will grow. He will see something of the world, a part of it that does not know to bow down to him, to indulge him, to pardon him when he behaves badly. What if you had never left Meremund? What if you had spent the whole of the Storm King’s war living in a castle, hearing news only from servants who didn’t want to upset you? What if you had never tested your own courage?”

  “Many would have been happier if I hadn’t,” she said with some bitterness. “They called me mannish. They called me a witch for cutting my hair and wearing men’s garb.”

  “Not me,” said Simon, but could not keep the yawn inside him any longer. “I called you perfect. I called you my love.”

  She slid her head up a little higher, so that her mouth was close to his ear. Even after so many years, the feeling of her warm breath there still made him shudder a little. “Go to sleep,” she said. “You are tired and tomorrow will be a difficult day.” She kissed him. “But do not think you have cured all my unhappiness or curbed all my anger.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Sleep was tugging at him, and for once he was glad he had stopped dreaming. He didn’t want to see that deadly blue eye again. He didn’t want to feel that ancient, unforgotten cold.

  He was knocking, knocking so loud the entire castle must hear it, but still the heavy door remained shut, a solid rectangle of dark wood. He pounded until his knuckles were sore, but still no one answered him.

  “Father!” His voice was high and quavering because he was close to tears, but knew that if he let them flow he would be mocked—princes do not weep. “Father, are you there? Why won’t you answer?”

  Just when he was about to turn away, as he had so many other times, the door silently swung open, then stopped, exposing a black gap of barely a hand’s breadth. He stared. His heart seemed to be thumping as loud as his knuckles had against the ancient wood, as though someone was still knocking. Somehow he knew that his father stood on just the other side, waiting and listening. His father had finally opened the door. He was waiting for his son.

  But he’s dead, Morgan realized, and his stomach clenched in sudden terror. The door began to swing inward again, the dark gap growing larger but revealing nothing but blackness beyond. No, my father’s dead. He’s been dead for years—I don’t want to see him that way—!

  He sat up, damp with sweat, tangled in a blanket atop a vaguely familiar bed with a warm, slender body stretched next to him. The pounding continued.

  “Your Highness!” someone called from the other side of the door, and he recognized the voice of Melkin, his squire. “Please, your Highness, open up! I have a message for you!”

  “God’s bloody Tree!” Morgan cursed, trying to still his speeding heart. What good was strong drink if it didn’t keep away bad dreams? Especially that one, the old one that had plagued him so long. The worst one. “In the name of the Aedon, go away!” he shouted, then groaned and rolled on his side. He tried to pull the covers over his head, but the young Rimmerswoman beside him complained at being stifled and tugged them off her face. This ordinary sound and movement pushed back the darkness tangling the prince’s thoughts.

  What was the girl’s name ag
ain? Svana. The swan. Not a bad name for her, actually. Her hair had been so fair it was almost white, her limbs long and graceful. At least, that was what he had thought when he had been drunk. He wasn’t so certain he wanted to look too closely in the harsh daylight.

  The rapping at the door resumed. “Highness, please, don’t go back to sleep! The king and queen have summoned you!”

  Morgan groaned. His jaw still throbbed from the blow he had suffered on the tower roof, and his brains felt so foul from too much wine the night before that he would have welcomed his own beheading in Market Square. Instead, he was to be hauled out of his warm sickbed—although in all honesty he had to admit that he was the one who had deliberately made himself sick with drink—to be scolded, doubtless in front of the whole court, for the disaster of Hjeldin’s Tower.

  “I said go away, Melkin. Come back when the sun is higher. Tell them I climbed a mountain and flew away.” Oh, sweet Usires, but it would be wonderful to be able to float away on the warm wind. “What time is it?”

  “Nearly twelve of the clock, Highness.”

  “Then come back when the sun is lower instead.” He unsquinted his eyes for a moment. Even with the windows shuttered, the light leaking past the edges tortured him. “Below the horizon would be best.”

  “But Highness! The king and queen . . . !”

  “The king and queen can wait. It’ll give them more time to think of things to scold me for. They’ll thank me, you’ll see.”

  “But Prince Morgan . . .”

  “Go piss in your ear, Melkin.”

  Just as he was settling back into the sticky clutches of sleep, the door to the room banged open. Startled, Morgan rolled onto his side, but when he peered through slitted eyes at the doorway, instead of his squire’s lanky form he was surprised to see what looked like one of the mountain trolls standing there waving something at him.

  “Get up, Highness!” the stumpy figure announced. “I have good news for you.”

  Squinting against the hateful light, he saw at last that it was no troll but only Mistress Buttercup, the extremely short, largely round proprietress of the house. He groaned again. “Good news?”

  “Your debt is paid, Prince Morgan.” She shook the sack in her hand, which clinked substantively. “The Lord Chamberlain has sent gold on your behalf, at the orders of the king and queen.”

  “What?” He pulled himself up to a sitting position, which required him to remove Svana’s elbow from his chest. “Then why are you waking me?”

  “Because this substantial sum was given to me on the understanding that there would be no more coming. Which means that as of this moment, you are detaining my little frost-princess there without pecuniary return to me, and occupying one of my expensive beds as well.” She put her hands on her hips, grinning broadly. “Neither did your benefactors pay for breakfast, so get on with you, Your Highness. Up you go and out.”

  “But you’ve been paid!” Which made no sense. Why would his grandparents do such a thing when they were angry with him? “Why are you brawling and shouting at my door when the sun is barely in the sky?”

  “Barely touching noon, you mean. Up, up, young princeling, or I will have to get the Ox brothers to help you out of bed.” She waddled to the side of the bed and poked at him with the spoon she often carried. “Your family has paid your debt, for which I give all thanks to a merciful God—and so should you, because you had all but bought this place if it had waited any longer—but it was with the understanding I reject your custom from here forward. Consider your custom rejected, Highness, but of course with my many thanks for your patronage.” Buttercup smiled. Through the throbbing of his head, Morgan thought she looked a bit spiteful. “Up with you. Or have you suddenly become shy?”

  He pulled on his breeks slowly and then went looking for the rest of his clothes, trying to make sense of what had just happened, while Mistress Buttercup helped him out by pointing with her spoon. “Over there, I think I detect a sleeve. Under Svana, yes. And your shoes, I see them peeking from under the bed like a pair of frightened puppies. Ah, and there is your jerkin, noble Highness, hanging from the window shutter. How did it get there?”

  Dressed at last, and with a trailing ceremonial procession made up of Buttercup, the two thick-headed Ox brothers, and pale Svana still wrapped in the coverlet they had shared, he let his squire Melkin lead him out the door and into the hideous, scalding light of the sun.

  “On behalf of my girls and my purse, Prince Morgan, I thank you!” called Buttercup. “I cannot say come again, because I have law from the High Throne itself saying I may not, so I will not. But I can say, ‘Good journey!’”

  “Good journey? It is scarcely a moment’s walk back to the Hayholt,” Morgan grumbled to Melkin. “What in the name of all the saints is going on today?”

  “I couldn’t guess, Your Highness,” Melkin said, but Morgan thought his squire looked a bit shifty around the eyes. He couldn’t consider it too deeply, though, because it took all his concentration simply to wade through the blazing sunshine.

  Miriamele thought that summoning Morgan to the throne room was a bit much, but she had promised to let Simon do what he thought best.

  The queen was among the few that had good memories of the lofty chamber. As a small child she had watched her grandfather enthroned here beneath the centuried banners, dispensing justice from the Dragonbone Chair. Later she had watched her father playing the same role in this same hall, although the good days had not lasted long that time. The hall had always reminded her of a great cave, the banners of the king’s subject countries and peoples hanging down like dripstones, and at the center of the mock-cavern, the dragon itself. Of course, this dragon was only bones, a skeleton throne the color of yellow ocher which neither she nor Simon wanted to use.

  “Morgan, prince of the land and heir to the High Throne, you have been chosen for a great task,” Simon said, using his Important Things To Say voice that Miriamele found slightly annoying.

  The prince looked as though he had come from a rough night. Miriamele would have felt more sorry for him as he blinked and shrugged and shook his head if he had managed to wash and dress himself first. Instead, he looked as though he had been dragged straight in from some Erchester gutter. Many of the courtiers present, and there were more than a few, whispered behind their hands at his condition, but they knew better than to openly mock the prince in front of his grandparents. She wished her husband had chosen to speak to the prince in private, but Simon had lost his patience over the hours it had taken to find him, and no longer seemed interested in sparing Morgan’s feelings.

  As Simon explained the nature of the great task, a vital mission to the court of the Sithi coupled with the need to get the poisoned Sithi envoy back to her own healers, Morgan only listened with mouth open. When Simon announced that Count Eolair and Morgan himself would be the ambassadors, the prince stared at him with a look of such incomprehension that Miriamele momentarily lost all her sympathy and in fact wanted to slap him.

  “Me? Why should I go?” Morgan demanded.

  Simon was cold. Too cold, Miriamele thought, but still she kept her promise and held her tongue. “The first and best reason, young man, is because your king and your queen have told you to do so. There are other reasons which I will gladly share with you in private.”

  “But I don’t know anything about the Sithi!”

  “And they know nothing about you. Let us hope they don’t regret the loss of that innocence after they meet you.” Simon looked like a thunderstorm, but he was struggling to find gentler words, Miriamele could see. “You will be traveling with Count Eolair. The lord steward knows them as well as almost any man alive. But what is more important, you are traveling to see them as a prince of the High Ward, and as the heir to the throne. That is something important, boy, very important. Do you see that? Tell me you do, I pray you.”

  Morgan
only stared sullenly, so Simon took a breath, then laid out the rest of the charge he and Miriamele were putting upon them. Mounted knights and a foot troop of Erkynguard would accompany the envoys, and the trolls would ride with them until the groups went their separate way and Binabik’s family continued back to Yiqanuc.

  The prince listened for a while, then stirred. “And who can I take with me to fill the long days? Melkin is a rather poor conversationalist.” He stared at his squire, who tried to make himself look even smaller.

  “If you do not think that Eolair and Binabik, two of the cleverest, wisest men in all of Osten Ard are company enough,” Simon said with a sour face, “I suppose we can permit you to take one of your companions—I’m not certain I would call them friends—with you on the journey.”

  “Praise the saints and angels,” said Morgan, for the first time showing something other than resentment. “I shall hate to leave the others behind, but Astrian is a good man with a jest as well as a sword—”

  “Ho, lad, ho!” said Simon. “I didn’t say you could pick one of your friends, I said you could take one of your friends. You may bring Sir Porto. He has carried a sword on behalf of the throne, at least, and proved himself a good man, even if that was long ago. We plan to surround you with wisdom and experience, Morgan—not accomplices.”

  “Porto! But he is a hundred years old! A thousand!” Morgan stood up now, his face white and his hands shaking from the prior night’s indulgence as much as from anger. “This is all meant to punish me, isn’t it? All because I won’t do what you want from me. You hope they will lose me in the forest or in the eastern mountains somewhere and I will never embarrass you again.”

  “By merciful Rhiap!” Simon hunched forward, his beard spreading against his breastbone, and for a moment Miriamele saw something in her so-familiar husband that looked more like one of the ancient prophets than the kind man she knew. “Do you think that I would risk a mission this important, risk my best counselors and soldiers, just to punish you? Boy, you make me angry indeed. Very angry.”