And Other Stories (29 page)

The tables were set in a U, the
high table between the two arms. To her dazzled eye, it seemed
every place was taken. It was bad enough to dine with the king and
queen. Why hadn’t she realized that it would be the court, as
well?

At the high table, the king rose
smiling. “Our guest!” he called. “Come, there’s a place for you
beside my lady and me.”

Moon felt her face burning as she
walked to the high table. The court watched her go; but there were
no whispers, no hands raised to shield moving lips. She was
grateful, but it was odd.

Her chair was indeed set beside
those of the king and queen. The king was white haired and
broad-shouldered, with an open, smiling face and big hands. The
queen’s hair was white and gold, and her eyes were wide and gray as
storms. She smiled, too, but as if the gesture were a sorrow she
was loath to share.

“Lord Leyan told us
your story,” said the queen. “I remember your teacher. Had you been
with her long?”

“All my life,” Moon
replied. Dishes came to roost before her, so she could serve
herself: roast meat, salads, breads, compotes, vegetables, sauces,
wedges of cheese. She could limit herself to a bite of everything,
and still leave the hall achingly full. She kept her left hand
clamped between her knees for fear of forgetting and taking
something with it. Every dish was good, but not quite as good as
she’d thought it looked.

“Then you are a witch
as well?” the king asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve
been taught by a witch, and learned witches’ knowledge. But she
taught me gardening and carpentry, too.”

“You hope to find
her?”

Moon looked at him, and weighed the
question seriously for the first time since the Seawood. “I hope I
may learn she’s been transformed, and that I can change her back.
But I think I met her, last night in the wood, and I find it’s hard
to hope.”

“But you want to go
on?” the queen pressed her. “What will you do?”

“The only thing I can
think of to do is what she set out for: I mean to find your
son.”

Moon couldn’t think why the queen
would pale at that.

“Oh, my dear, don’t,”
the king said. “Our son is lost, your teacher is lost—what profit
can there be in throwing yourself after them? Rest here, then go
home and live. Our son is gone.”

It was a fine, rich hall, and he
was a fair, kingly man. But it was all dimmed, as if a layer of
soot lay over the palace and its occupants.

“What did he look
like, the prince?”

The king frowned. It was the queen
who drew a locket out of the bodice of her gown, lifted its chain
over her head and passed it to Moon. It held, not the costly
miniature she’d expected, but a sketch in soft pencil, swiftly
done. It was the first informal thing she could recall seeing in
the palace.

“He wouldn’t sit
still to be painted,” the queen said wistfully. “One of his friends
likes to draw. He gave me that after...after my son was
gone.”

He had been reading, perhaps, when
his friend snatched that quiet moment to catch his likeness. The
high forehead was propped on a long-fingered hand; the eyes were
directed downward, and the eyelids hid them. The nose was straight,
and the mouth was long and grave. The hair was barely suggested;
light or dark, it fell unruly around the supporting hand. Even
setting aside the kindly eye of friendship that had informed the
pencil, Moon gave the village girls leave to be silly over this
one. She closed the locket and gave it back.

“You can’t know
what’s happened to him. How can you let him go, without
knowing?”

“There are many
things in the world I will never know,” the king said
sharply.

“I met a man at the
gate who still mourns the prince. He called him the heart of the
land. Nothing can live without its heart.”

The queen drew a breath and turned
her face to her plate, but said nothing.

“Enough,” said the
king. “If you must search, then you must. But I’ll have peace at my
table. Here, child, will you pledge it with me?”

Over Moon’s right hand, lying on
the white cloth, he laid his own, and held his wine cup out to
her.

She sat frozen, staring at the
chased silver and her own reflection in it. Then she raised her
eyes to his and said, “No.”

There was a shattering quiet in the
hall.

“You will not
drink?”

“I will not...pledge
you peace. There isn’t any here, however much anyone may try to
hide it. I’m sorry.” That, she knew when she’d said it, was true.
“Excuse me,” she added, and drew her hand out from under the
king’s, which was large, but soft. “I’m going to bed. I mean to
leave early tomorrow.”

She rose and walked back down the
length of the room, lapped in a different kind of
silence.

A servant found her in the corridor
and led her to her chamber. There she found her old clothes clean
and dry and folded, the fire tended, the bed turned down. The
red-faced woman wasn’t there. She took off her finery, laid it out
smooth on a chair, and put her old nightgown on. Then she went to
the glass to unpin and brush her hair.

The pin was in her hand, and she
was reaching to set it down, when she saw what it was. A little
leaping frog. But now it was gold.

It was hers. The kicking legs and
goggle eyes, every irregularity—it was her pin. She dashed to the
door and flung it open. “Hello?” she called. “Oh, bother!” She
stepped back into the room and searched, and finally found the bell
pull disguised as a bit of tapestry.

After a few minutes, a girl with
black hair and bright eyes came to the door. “Yes,
ma’am?”

“The woman who helped
me, who drew my bath and brought me clothes. Is she still
here?”

The girl looked distressed. “I’m
sorry, ma’am. I don’t know who waited on you. What did she look
like?”

“About my height.
With a red face and wild, wispy hair.”

The girl stared, and said,
“Ma’am—are you sure? That doesn’t sound like anyone
here.”

Moon dropped heavily into the
nearest chair. “Why am I not surprised? Thank you very much. I
didn’t mean to disturb you.”

The girl nodded and closed the door
behind her. Moon put out the candles, climbed into bed, and lay
awake for an uncommonly long time.

In a gray, wet dawn, she dressed
and shouldered her pack and by the simple expedient of going down
every time she came to a staircase, found a door that led outside.
It was a little postern, opening on a kitchen garden and a wash
yard fenced in stone. At the side of the path, a man squatted by a
wooden hand cart, mending a wheel.

“Here, missy!” he
called out, his voice like a spade thrust into gravel. “Hold this
axle up, won’t you?”

Moon sighed. She wanted to go. She
wanted to be moving, because moving would be almost like getting
something done. And she wanted to be out of this beautiful place
that had lost its heart. She stepped over a spreading clump of
rhubarb, knelt, and hoisted the axle.

Whatever had damaged the wheel had
made the axle split; the long splinter of wood bit into Moon’s
right hand. She cried out and snatched that hand away. Blood ran
out of the cut on her palm and fell among the rhubarb stems, a few
drops. Then it ceased to flow.

Moon looked up, frightened, to the
man with the wheel.

It was the man from the hay wagon,
white-haired, his eyes as green and gray as sage. He had a ruddy,
somber face. Red-faced, like the woman who’d—

The woman who’d helped her last
night had been the one from the hay cart. Why hadn’t she seen it?
But she remembered it now, and the woman’s green eyes, and even a
fragment of hay caught in the wild hair. Moon sprang up.

The old man caught her hand.
“Rhubarb purges, and rhubarb means advice. Turn you back around.
Your business is in there.” He pointed a red, rough finger at the
palace, at the top of the near corner tower. Then he stood, dusted
off his trousers, strolled down the path and was gone.

Moon opened her mouth, which she
hadn’t been able to do until then. She could still feel his hand,
warm and calloused. She looked down. In the palm he’d held was a
sprig of hyssop and a wisp of broom, and a spiralling stem of
convolvulus.

Moon bolted back through the
postern door and up the first twisting flight of stairs she found,
until she ran out of steps. Then she cast furiously about. Which
way was that wretched tower? She got her bearings by looking out
the corridor windows. It would be that door, she thought. She tried
it; it resisted.

He could have kept his posy and
given me a key, she thought furiously. Then: But he did.

She plucked up the convolvulus,
poked it into the keyhole, and said, “Turn away, turn astray,
backwards from the turn of day. What iron turned to lock away, herb
will turn the other way.” Metal grated against metal, and the latch
yielded under her hand.

A young man’s room, frozen in time.
A jerkin of quilted, painted leather dropped on a chair; a case of
books, their bindings standing in bright ranks; a wooden flute and
a pair of leather gloves lying on an inlaid cedar chest; an unmade
bed, the coverlet slid sideways and half pooled on the
floor.

More, a room frozen in a tableau of
atrocity and accusation. For Moon could feel it, the thing that had
been done here, that was still being done because the room had sat
undisturbed. Nightshade and thornapple, skullcap, henbane, and fern
grown bleached and stunted under stone. Moon recognized their
scents and their twisted strength around her, the power of the work
they’d made and the shame that kept them secret.

There was a dust of crushed leaf
and flower over the door lintel, on the sill of every window, lined
like seams in the folds of the bed hangings. Her fingers clenched
on the herbs in her hand as rage sprouted up in her and
spread.

With broom and hyssop she dashed
the dust from the lintel, the windows, the hangings. “Merry or
doleful, the last or the first,” she chanted as she swung her
weapons, spitting each word in fury, “fly and be hunted, or stay
and be cursed!”

“What are you doing?”
said a voice from the door, and Moon spun and raised her posy like
a dagger.

The king stood there, his coat
awry, his hair uncombed. His face was white as a corpse’s, and his
eyes were wide as a man’s who sees the gallows, and knows the noose
is his.

“You did this,” Moon
breathed; and louder, “You gave him to the King of Stones with your
own hand.”

“I had to,” he
whispered. “He made a beggar of me. My son was the
forfeit.”

“You locked him under
the earth. And let my teacher go to her...to her death to pay your
forfeit.”

“It was his life or
mine!”

“Does your lady wife
know what you did?”

“His lady wife helped
him to do it,” said the queen, stepping forward from the shadows of
the hall. She stood tall and her face was quiet, as if she welcomed
the noose. “Because he was her love and the other, only her son.
Because she feared to lose a queen’s power. Because she was a fool,
and weak. Then she kept the secret, because her heart was black and
broken, and she thought no worse could be done than had been done
already.”

Moon turned to the king. “Tell me,”
she commanded.

“I was hunting
alone,” said the king in a trembling voice. “I roused a boar.
I...had a young man’s pride and an old man’s arm, and the boar was
too much for me. I lay bleeding and in pain, and the sight nearly
gone from my eyes, when I heard footsteps. I called out for
help.

“‘
You are dying,’ he told me, and I denied it, weeping. ‘I
don’t want to die,’ I said, over and over. I promised him anything,
if he would save my life.” The king’s voice failed, and
stopped.

“Where?” said Moon.
“Where did this happen?”

“In the wood under
Elder Scarp. Near the waterfall that feeds the stream called the
Laughing Girl.”

“Point me the way,”
she ordered.

The sky was hazed white, and the
air was hot and still. Moon dashed sweat from her forehead as she
walked. She could have demanded a horse, but she had walked the
rest of the journey, and this seemed such a little way compared to
that. She hoped it would be cooler under the trees.

It wasn’t; and the gnats were worse
around her face, and the biting flies. Moon swung at them steadily
as she clambered over the stones. It seemed a long time before she
heard the waterfall, then saw it. She cast about for the clearing,
and wondered, were there many? Or only one, and it so small that
she could walk past it and never know? The falling water thrummed
steadily, like a drum, like a heartbeat.

In a shaft of sun, she saw a bit of
creamy white—a flower head, round and flat as a platter, dwarfed
with early blooming. She looked up and found that she stood on the
edge of a clearing, and was not alone.

He wore armor, dull gray plates
worked with fantastic embossing, trimmed in glossy black. He had a
gray cloak fastened over that, thrown back off his shoulders, but
with the hood up and pulled well forward. Moon could see nothing of
his face.