III
THE MIND OF A CHILD
It was not yet halfway into the next moon-cycle after the celebration of Hauberin’s Second Triad, and gifts and polite congratulations were still pouring in from neighboring lands, but the royal court was in session once again; festivals or no, life must go on.
Hauberin, by this point totally weary of ceremony, had refused any elaborate court robes. His silky gray tunic and cloak, simple of design but soft and comfortable, were close enough to royal silver to pass, and the beautifully curved silver circle of the everyday coronet was a relatively lightweight burden on his brow. But he couldn’t avoid the chair of state on its slightly raised dais; his people insisted on some splendor.
Splendid the chair undoubtedly was, silver wrought in elegant little ripples like the waves of the sea. Unfortunately, though, it had been all too evidently designed more for style than comfort.
His discomfort wasn’t eased by the half-finished Word of Power, lacking only the final syllable that he was holding in his mind. It was a traditional means of royal self-protection, the theory being that a ruler could complete and shout out the Word faster than any would-be assassin could move. But it was also a prickly thing to hold, prodding at his thoughts for completion, uneasy as a mental itch.
So Hauberin sat within the spacious council hall with its shining walls of amber and nacre, struggling not to fidget, surrounded by sages and courtiers and the merely curious, and tried his best to keep his patience.
Before him stood the co-complainants (combatants, is more like it, thought the prince): Lietlal, Lord of Cyrran, and Ethenial, Lord of Akalait, grand titles for two whose bordering lands could be walked from end to end in a day. Old rivals, Lietlal and Ethenial, though they could just as soon have been brothers to look at them, nearly alike in youthful-seeming hawk-fine features and silvery hair. Only their slanted Faerie eyes betrayed their age, dry with too much life, too much boredom.
And so, out of boredom, they fought. In fact, they had been fighting over land, over horses, over whatever excuse came to mind, for longer than Hauberin had been alive. But this time the quarrel had turned bitter. Hauberin leaned forward in his elegant, uncomfortable chair and asked Ethenial bluntly, cutting into the man’s flowery, empty speech: “Did you kill the man?”
Ethenial blinked, offended. “My prince, the land is mine. Any who enter onto it without my permission trespass and—”
“Yours!” Lietlal interrupted. “That land has been mine since before the days of—”
“Yes, yes!” shouted Hauberin before they could start their argument all over again. “But did you kill the man?”
“I am not a murderer, my prince.”
The prince took a calming breath. “Lord Lietlal has brought complaint before me that you slew his servant.”
“A slave. Only a foolish old hu—” Ethenial broke off sharply, fair skin blanching, and Hauberin guessed that the unfinished word would have been “human.” “Only a slave,” Ethenial finished lamely.
“A life.” Hauberin’s voice was cold. “Which neither you nor Lord Lietlal can restore. Now, one last time, my lord: Did you or did you not kill the man?”
Ethenial hesitated, as though hunting for an excuse. Then his proud head drooped ever so slightly. “It was an accident,” he murmured. “I meant only to frighten him away. No one dreamed he would prove so fragile.”
“Ah.” Hauberin sat back again, thanking the Powers for innate Faerie truthfulness; without it, this case might have dragged on for days. “Then I order you to pay a bloodfine of—”
Neither lord was listening to him. “What are you laughing at?” Ethenial hissed at his rival.
“You, you land-thief.”
“Land-thief! That land is mine!”
“Impossible! My father drew the lines himself!”
“Your father couldn’t have drawn a true line if his magic hung on it!”
“At least he wasn’t a treacherous land-thief!”
As they argued back and forth, voices growing shriller and fiercer by the moment, Hauberin slumped in his chair, fingers steepled, glaring darkly down at both of them. There were so many other matters demanding his attention—not the least of them Serein—but he couldn’t do anything about anything while he was trapped here. Yet if he dared complain, the prince knew he would get nothing but mild contempt from those around him, not, this time, because of his human blood but because of his “youthful agitation.”
Youth. Though of course they showed few overt signs of age, none of the men or women about him had been young for . . . Powers, who knew how long? Most of them had served his father, some his grandfather, some of them might even have served—
Hauberin tensed in sudden alarm. Magic—The two idiots were arming spells against each other! The prince sprang to his feet on the narrow dais, completing and shouting out the Word of Power he had been holding in his mind, just barely tempering it in time to keep it from killing force. Even so, the Power was enough to slash through the half-formed magics, dispelling them, and send Lietlal and Ethenial staggering back as though he’d slapped them with all his might, stunned into silence.
Hauberin blazed out at them: “How dare you bring battle-magic into my court! You’ve already killed one man over that barren strip of land. How many more were you planning to add?” Their guilty glances only fed his fury: They hadn’t even stopped to consider the risks of war-spells in that crowded hall! “By the Powers, I should seize that land as Crown property!”
The prince looked sharply about, hunting a scribe to take down his decree.
No . . . wait. He had a better idea.
Hauberin whirled to face the two lords again, smiling fiercely. “You are so eager to fight for that land? So be it! You shall fight, one moon-cycle hence, at a site of my choosing: one to one, alone, with no one to aid or interfere.”
They stared. “Do you mean . . . death-spells, my prince?” Ethenial asked nervously.
“Whatever it takes. One way or another, my lords, the matter shall be settled!” With a deliberately dramatic swirl of cloak, Hauberin settled back in his chair. “You have my permission to leave.”
As the chastened lords slunk away, a wary voice asked, “But is this wise, my prince?”
Hauberin turned his head to see Sharailan at his side: Sharailan, oldest of the royal sages, so old no one could remember him as other than he was now: his fair skin still smoothed and unmarked, his back straight, but seeming somehow so brittle he would shatter at a touch. Even the once-bright hair and eyes had changed, their color faded under the weight of untold ages. A truly wise man, Sharailan. Also, unfortunately, literally a royal nuisance, devoid of wit and spontaneity.
“Why, yes, Sage,” Hauberin replied. “I think it is. Do you really believe those two want to give up their cherished bickering? No. They’ll ponder awhile, come up with some excuse not to duel, and go right back to their quarrels. Only this time they will be more careful of what they do.”
“But, my prince,” Sharailan insisted, “are you sure?”
“I am.”
“Yes, but—”
“I said, I am!” All at once at the edge of his patience with Sharailan and the whole tedious day, the prince sprang to his feet once more. But he couldn’t just go storming out of there, not without leaving condescending whispers in his wake. In a pretense of proper princely duty, Hauberin snatched at random the scrolls the startled sage had been holding for his signature. But then the prince glanced down at what he held, and stifled a groan. He wasn’t going to escape with anything so simple as a signature with this thing. Still, he could hardly stuff it back into Sharailan’s hands!
“I did promise to work on this spell,” Hauberin admitted. “And so I shall. Now. Outside. Alone!”
###
Hauberin, his crown sent back to the royal treasury, his cloak abandoned in this soft weather, sat out on a palace terrace in the warm afternoon light, inhaling air sweet with hay and flowers, and tried to concentrate only on the spell-scroll spread out on the small stone table before him.
It wasn’t easy.
Powers . . . what if he had been wrong about Lietlal and Ethenial? What if they did fight, and killed each other? Maybe Sharailan was right. Maybe he shouldn’t have acted so rashly. Maybe—
Hauberin exhaled sharply, angry at himself. Alarming though the fact sometimes seemed, even after these six years of rule, he was the prince. While he might listen to his advisors as much as he pleased, he must not let anyone else make his decisions for him.
Besides, I was right, Hauberin told himself. They will not duel.
He hoped.
Ah well, to the scroll. Hauberin studied it for a long while, frowning. And gradually he became engrossed in the problem despite himself, plotting out the steps he would need to take . . . Decided, the prince set to work.
Some sage in ages past had inscribed a basic wheat-fertility charm on the parchment, the Powerful symbols twisting elegantly about each other. Hauberin, delicately untangling and widening the twists, was attempting to widen the charm’s narrow application by including his own magical additions.
A few days back, he had argued that surely an older, more seasoned scholar would be a better choice for this. But the sages had all insisted the spell would have increased potency if the prince himself worked on it, citing the magical correlation between ruler and land. Hauberin wasn’t so sure about that. He was the rightful prince, no argument there, and as far as he knew, his half-human status had no effect one way or the other on his fertility. But it wasn’t as though he and actually sired a child, after all.
Still, Hauberin had to admit that testing his abilities like this (assuming the spell worked and all this wasn’t for nothing) was fun. Besides, there was a limit to the strength or the little field-magics most farmers used, and anything that coaxed the land into greater abundance . . .
The prince gave a dry little laugh. Whenever he turned his talents to some such less . . . fashionable subject, he bewildered his nobles. Why, they wondered, worry about something as plebeian as crops and harvests?
Let those harvests fail, and we’ll see how quickly they learn the answer to that! There’s a limit to what magic alone can do. Without the farmers they hold in such contempt, none of us would eat or—
“Oh, damn!”
The moment he’d released his will from them, the stubborn spell-syllables had curled themselves back up on the page into their original form. Yet again.
Hauberin leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. There was such a thing as being too conscientious. Maybe Alliar was right. Now that he had the fundamentals of the new spell set, he should just turn the whole thing back over to the sages.
The prince straightened, resting his gaze on his lands. The view from here was glorious: a sweep of fertile fields and meadows rich with flowers—solid patches of red, blue and yellow from here—merging into a dark green tapestry of forest folding itself up against the wild mountains beyond, and over all the clear, sunless, achingly blue sky of Faerie and the luminous Faerie light.
Hauberin got to his feet, soft gray tunic whispering silkily at the motion, and moved forward to lean on the terrace’s smooth white balustrade, enjoying the moment’s idleness.
But then his gaze sharpened. There amid the peaceful fields lay Serein’s estate.
Serein. So far there had been nothing but sweet innocence in all the man’s actions. By now, Hauberin could almost convince himself he had imagined the threat in Serein’s eyes the day of the celebration—no. It had been real enough.
And why hasn’t he acted on it?
The law, of course, was in Serein’s favor. Hauberin couldn’t exile his cousin, or slay him, or even hold him as a royal “guest” without some very real proof of treason; his magical folk, being by nature so near to chaos, clung to their laws as the only true stabilizing factor, and not even a prince dared go against them. Hauberin slammed his fist down on the balustrade in frustration.
“Damn you, cousin,” he muttered, “what game are you playing now?”
A mind brushed his, briefly, questioningly, and the prince sighed and answered silently, “Yes. Come.”
He didn’t actually hear Alliar approach. But then, no one ever did. A flash of motion, and the wind spirit was at his side, at the moment no taller than Hauberin and vaguely elfin in shape, fairly glowing in the clear light, deeply golden of hair and skin and luminous eyes.
Worried eyes. “My prince.” The being swept down in a bonelessly graceful bow, and Hauberin frowned.
“So formal, Li? What is it?”
“Am I your friend? Do you trust me?”
“Yes, and yes. Look you, I’m in no mood for word games.”
“Serein again?”
Sometimes his friend could read him too clearly. “Serein,” Hauberin agreed.
The being shivered “You’re going to have to kill him someday.”
“Alliar!”
“It’s true. For the sake of the realm as well as your own.”
“Ach, Alliar.” Very gently, Hauberin said, “He . . . isn’t Ysilar. You don’t have to fear him, I promise you.”
Anger flickered in the golden eyes. “I don’t fear him. But maybe you should! Wait, let me finish. Serein may be next in the line of succession, curse him—but can you picture him in your place?” Slim hands flew in a quick, fierce protective gesture. “Winds prevent! A fine prince he’d make, for all his fine looks, he, who dares hunger for your lands when he can barely manage his own?”
True enough. “But he is next in line. And aside from the fact that I don’t intend to make things easier for Charailis or Ereledan by removing him, I’m not about to murder my own kinsman. Particularly when I haven’t been able to coax out the slightest hint of whatever plots are hiding behind that pretty face of his.”
“You . . . could use force.”
Hauberin snorted. “How long do you think my people would support a half-blood prince who bent the law for his own use?”
“Ah. There is that. Ay-yi, at least the boy is free of him!” It was said with an ex-slave’s fervor.
“The boy.”
“Had you forgotten? The human! Serein’s little captive.” The being paused. “He . . . is free now?”
“Oh, Alliar, of course.” Hauberin had forgotten; he’d had more things on his mind than one small human. A touch abashed, he asked, “How is the boy?”
Alliar shivered. “Not overly well.”
“He’s ill?” It was sharply said; a half-human might not be immune to human disease.
“Not ill,” the being hedged, “not exactly . . . My prince, Serein is your kinsman . . .”
“I thought we had already established that. Come, speak.”
“At your will be it,” Alliar said formally. “The boy has been hurt. Deliberately, repeatedly, willfully hurt.”
Hauberin stared at his friend in horror. Who could ever have been dark-souled enough to torture a child? “It . . . must have been some human, back in the boy’s Realm.”
“I’m sorry. No.”
“One of us? No, that’s impossible. None of us would ever—”
“One man would. And did. Your cousin.”
“But—Alliar, that’s obscene! Not even Serein would—look you, I know you don’t like him—”
“Ha!”
“—but he would never do anything so foul—”
“The proof,” Alliar said sadly, “is there.”
“It can’t be! You’ve been among us long enough, you know that none of us, not even the—the lowest, would ever hurt a child: a rare, precious child!” But Alliar was watching him steadily, never flinching, and Hauberin hurried on, “Granted, the boy was terrified of him. But what else would you expect from a magickless little creature snatched from his Realm and dropped into ours? That doesn’t mean Serein . . . He . . .”
Hauberin stumbled to a halt beneath the weight of that quiet, unblinking gaze. “Ahh, Li . . .” Sickened, the prince asked softly, “What proof?”
“I’m . . . not sure exactly what torment was worked on him.” A new shudder shook the sleek golden form. “Not very much physical torment; at least I don’t think so. There aren’t any lasting scars. But mental harm, magical harm . . .” Alliar waved a helpless hand. “Who can say? The torture was real enough. The boy will not speak, or laugh, or even smile. And whenever anyone approaches, he shrinks away in terror, even from the Lady Aydris.”
“Aydris! Who could possibly be afraid of Aydris?”
“It’s the slant of eye, I think,” Alliar said delicately, “and the color of hair and set of features. They must remind him of your cousin. And so the poor little wretch cringes like some beaten animal expecting further blows. Of course,” the being added, “some of us have cringed from him as well.”
“What does that mean?”
“The boy has a human’s knife: Iron.”
Hauberin felt his heart miss a beat. That deadly metal . . . Iron was found only in certain human Realms. Tied totally to the human Earth, with no tempering ties to other forces—not moon-magic like silver, Fire-magic like copper—its power was so alien to Faerie and magic that the merest touch charred Faerie flesh. A cut, even a scratch, from an iron blade meant certain, agonizing death. “And you let him keep it? By all the Powers, Li, where’s your sense? You’re the only one here who can touch it. Get the thing away from him before he kills someone!”
“The Lady Aydris wouldn’t let me. She says that the boy sees it as the last link with his homeland.”
“The Lady Aydris is overruled. Sooner or later, the boy must learn to live here. Oh, and don’t give me that wounded wood-sprite look! I’m not being heartless! Alliar, think. Even if we knew which of all the many Realms in space and time was his, human years fly too swiftly. The boy would stand a good chance of—of crumbling to ancient dust the moment he touched mortal soil. Now go, get that dagger away from him.”
As far as Hauberin was concerned, the subject was now closed; pity wasn’t a Faerie emotion, and the half-human didn’t care to be caught in the middle of it, even by a friend. But Alliar continued to watch him so hopefully the prince added shortly, “All right, what else? Will the boy at least speak to—No, that’s right, he doesn’t speak our language.”
“I don’t suppose that you . . . ?”
“No. You know the only human tongue I speak is of my mother’s folk. I doubt the boy is even from her Realm, let alone her land. And stop staring at me!”
“I only meant—”
“I know what you meant. And I know what you want of me.” Hauberin threw up his hands in defeat. “Since the boy is, after all, under my protection, I suppose I can find the time to pay him a visit.”
###
Hauberin eyed the small human dubiously. What a scrawny little thing it was! All unlikely lengths of arms and legs—too thin, surely?—with those enormous dark eyes peering out from beneath that wild mass of black hair.
Did I ever look like that? I hope not!
But the boy seemed to see a resemblance, in coloring if in nothing else. He left the bed on which he’d been huddling and approached the prince with a wild animal’s wariness that struck an unexpected note of purely human sympathy in Hauberin and left him standing stock still and ill at ease.
And what was he supposed to say to the child. “It doesn’t matter, does it, boy? You can’t possibly understand a word I say.”
The human stopped, blinking, uncertain. After a moment he spoke, a rusty, hesitant string of sounds. Hauberin listened dutifully, then sighed. “No, boy. I don’t understand you.” He tried an experimental shift of languages. “And I don’t suppose you know my mother’s tongue, either? No. I thought not.”
So. Surely this satisfied Alliar and the maternally beaming Aydris? The prince turned to them—but in a little flurry of those gawky limbs, the boy caught him, clinging to him desperately. The startled Hauberin froze, confused and embarrassed, thinking with a moment’s wild gratitude, At least they managed to bathe him, not quite certain how to free himself.
“Hey now, boy, let go. I’m not your kinsman after all.”
No reaction.
“Let go, child.”
Ridiculous. If some presumptuous adult had dared seize him, Hauberin would have loosed his magic. But of course he couldn’t use magic now, not against a child!
“Come now, enough.”
If Aydris was so maternal-minded about the boy, let him go cling to her! Or Alliar, who was fairly choking with laughter. Hauberin glanced down at his small, determined captor, wondering if he could peel the boy off bit by bit. Like a limpet.
But all at once Hauberin glimpsed the boy’s eyes, and suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore, because where they should have been dark, they glittered a cold, familiar sea-green—
Serein!
No wonder he’d surrendered his slave so meekly. No wonder he had made no outward attack during all this past moon-cycle. He’d needed none. This child was his weapon!
The child who was armed with iron. Hauberin twisted desperately as he saw metal flash, but he couldn’t pull free from the tangle of limbs in the instant of time before—
With a wild, unfocused blaze of will, Hauberin hurled the boy from him, not quite in time. Something white-hot seared his side and he cried out in anguish, hearing Aydris’ terrified scream like an acho. Then a frantic Alliar was at his side.
“Let me see! Oh Winds, did the blade cut you?”
If it had, he was already dead. “Let me be.” The boy still had the knife and was about to strike again—“Alliar, let me be!”
This time the surge of will was controlled, a lance of light flashing from Hauberin’s outflung hand. The boy screamed, falling back against a wall, knife dropping from numbed fingers, and the prince lunged at him, catching the thin shoulders in a fierce grip.
“Link with me, Li.”
“My prince—”
“Link with me!”
He felt Alliar’s consciousness, cool and clear as wind, obediently touch his, then reached out to catch the boy’s mind with his own, brushing aside the unskilled, frightened attempts at defense, searching—There! As elusive as shadow, there was Serein’s presence, the merest trace, barely enough to say, I am, slipping, sliding away from him . . .
In the next instant, it was gone. Only the boy was left, trembling so violently only Hauberin’s grip on his shoulders held him upright. Sick with guilt, the prince gently touched his mind again in an attempt to soothe him, only to recoil in disbelief. There was nothing of the child-essence to be read, nothing save shadow.
That’s impossible, Hauberin told himself hurriedly, it’s only that he’s exhausted. He’ll recover, and prayed he was correct.
But he had to do something. If he couldn’t touch the boy’s mind, maybe he could at least reach him with words. “Poor child. Between us, my cousin and I have used you cruelly. But you’re safe now, little one. And the Lady Aydris will see that you remember nothing of this.”
His voice faltered. The woman quickly took the boy from him, and the small human fell helplessly against her, still shaking convulsively. Hauberin, feeling the onset of shock, fought his own shivers, straightening slowly, biting his lip at the movement.
“Now you will let me see the wound,” Alliar ordered grimly, parting the slash in the gray tunic with gentle hands. Hauberin glanced down in time to see the iron-scorched fabric crumbling away into little black flakes, and hastily looked away, stomach protesting. “Winds be praised,” he heard the being murmur after a time. “Not the slightest break in the skin.”
“I knew it.” When I didn’t start to die, Hauberin added silently in dark humor. “An iron-burn, no more.”
It was enough. It was beginning to hurt sickeningly, as though someone had pressed a fiery brand against his skin, and the pain was making him dizzy. But he waved off his solicitous friend, mind racing.
“He’s finally done it. Finally declared himself.”
“Serein?”
“Of course.” Hauberin closed his eyes for a moment, struggling to will his shaken body under control. “Oh, monstrous, to use a child as assassin!”
“And I am witness,” Alliar said sharply. “That’s why you had us link minds.”
“Exactly! Serein, Serein, I have you at—”
But Aydris’ scream of sheer horror slashed across his words. As Hauberin and Alliar turned to stare, the woman, white-faced, backed away, arms falling to her sides. The boy’s body sagged briefly against her, then slid slowly, bonelessly, to the floor.
“Winds protect,” Alliar gasped. “What . . . ?”
Hauberin reached out with his will, searching frantically for any sign of life. There has to be something, anything, he can’t be . . .
But then he knew the truth. The prince staggered back, this time glad of Alliar’s supporting arms.
“Nothing,” he murmured to the being, shuddering helplessly. “Alliar, there was nothing, not even a fading essence, nothing but that . . . shell.” The prince wanted to do something, cover the body, comfort poor, weeping Aydris, but his legs refused to obey him. Limp within Alliar’s support, Hauberin heard himself chattering feverishly, “I should have guessed. There was shadow in the boy’s mind before, I mean, when I touched him, shadow where there should have been—should have been life, but I never suspected, I—”
He broke off abruptly, struggling for self-control. “Oh, Li,” the prince said softly. “Serein’s magics ruined the child’s mind, tore it apart. When my cousin fled me, he destroyed what little essence-spark remained. There was nothing left, nothing that could cling to life for more than the few short moments we saw. “My cousin is a murderer. Serein has murdered a child!”