One for the Morning Glory (10 page)

It was needless to say that the Prince was as good as his word. In fact the only reason Cedric ever wrote such a thing in his
Chronicle
—or the King in his never-finished notes toward his autobiography, or Sir John in letters to his son many years later, for they all did write "The Prince was as good as his word"—was because it seemed de rigueur in a fairy tale. It spared a long description of the Prince going forth in his litter to work healings every morning, and studying in the Royal Library and Royal Alchemical Laboratory far into every night, eliminating one cause after another, following up little threads of history and every stray observation made by every shrewd commoner. Besides, it furnished a way to get into the next part of the tale.

So the Prince was as good as his word, and though his youth and strength bore him up, all the same he grew tireder every day. The plague seemed to settle to about two hundred fresh cases every morning, and by now every house near the castle had been visited—just once. The plague continued to spread away from the castle in a widening ring, like a ripple in a pond, never taking more than its two hundred or so, but never fewer, and slowly and deliberately moving outwards.

Now, Prince Amatus, because of his grief after Golias's death and his horrible misbehavior after, had many fences to mend and little time to mend them, so he necessarily neglected things and at the same time felt badly about the neglect. As a result, he seemed to be everywhere at once. He would be pawing through some dusty record in the library, then you would see him hand it off to some apprentice scribe with strict instructions to report anything that seemed even remotely relevant, and race down the twisted spiral of stone steps to the Royal Alchemical Laboratory, where he would be conducting some experiment on the blood or urine of a sufferer (only to find out that all that could be said was that the sufferers generally had less blood than, and about as much urine as, they ought to), and then he would be down in the Royal Witch's workshop to talk to Mortis, because he would realize it had been a full day since he had even said hello.

"This dungeon is too deep and dark for you," he told her. "Let us move you back up into the light and air, where you can breathe freely and see for a long way."

She shook her head decisively, and he noticed that she did not seem entirely well. "Have you suffered from the plague?" he asked her.

"Not directly." She sat heavily upon her chair. "Prince, I have no suggestions for you."

"What do you mean by 'not directly'?"

"We are all affected, Prince."

He sat down next to her. Her once purely white hair was showing little traces of yellow and gray; the sky blue of her skin was becoming more of a slate color; and her new scales were coming in larger and more irregular, so that her skin was losing its iridescence and becoming coarse and messy. There was a distinctly yellow tinge on her once-white fangs.

"We all age in some way or other, Highness," she said, and he realized that she had been reading his thoughts.

"I had not realized that," Amatus said. "Just the other day, it seems, Psyche was telling me the opposite. Or rather—I had asked her why she did not age—"

"Oh, but she does. Faster than the rest of us, in fact. But not in her appearance. The last day you ever see her, she will look much the same as ever. The Twisted Man, too, is not what he was when we first came here; that might, perhaps, show, if you were ever to see any more of him than his hands, eyelids, or jaw."

Amatus waited a long time, but at last he broke the silence. "There is much I don't understand."

"That will never change," Mortis said decisively. "Except that
what
you don't understand will change." She sighed. "The sun is almost down. You should not be down in this part of the castle after dark, Prince."

"Why not?"

"That's one of those things you will understand eventually."

As the Prince stood, he saw that in the half hour of their conversation, Mortis had grown visibly older.

"It draws quickly now, Highness. Things are moving. You want your plague ended, do you not?" Her expression had always been cold, but now the line of her mouth was perfectly flat. She seemed to have no feelings about what she was saying. "I will tell you what I can. Do not be here after dark; this is no longer a good place for you."

"Because of what may happen, or because of what I may do?"

"Because of what you may see and what you may become. Three questions, then, Highness—Are you sure that all your friends are your friends? Is it possible that you were helped to drink the Wine of the Gods when you were young, but that the help was not to your benefit? And—listen closely to this question—what does it all seem like, whatever you may be told it is?"

The Prince nodded, committing the questions to his memory quickly, for he knew that these were the sorts of things of which portents are made, particularly when one is speaking to a witch. The first one seemed clear enough but was the sort of thing he did not wish to think about; the second seemed to be deliberately ambiguous, so he assumed it was; and the third was the kind of question that normally showed up only in riddles. He therefore decided to postpone any consideration of any of them. Events would propel him back to them soon enough. But even many years later, when he wrote his
Memoirs
and recorded the questions, he still had little idea what she had meant.

The Royal Witch stood up quickly, and swayed. "The sun is almost down, Prince. Get up to your tower. Go now."

There might have been urgency, or fear, or desire in her voice, but the strain was unmistakable, and so Amatus raced up the stairs before he had thought about it. As he went he could feel ice around his heart and a desire to sit down and weep forever; his feet stumbled and slammed on the slippery stones, and he continued directly up into the tower, bursting out onto the High Terrace just as the last rays of sunlight touched it. He stretched his hand into the sun, and what he felt then was like the shock when he took the plague from a sufferer—but in reverse. It was as if something huge, cold, gray, slimy, and ill had burst out through his arm, leaving his body. Feeling better than he had in days, he stayed to see the first star come out.

The next day, when the Prince went forth in his litter to heal the sick, he gave Duke Wassant, who was to head his escort that day, strict orders that after each healing, if the sun was out, he was to be carried out into the broad daylight. The Duke swept a low bow, his heavy body surprisingly graceful (or it was a surprise to anyone who had not seen him use his pongee), and asked no questions.

This alarmed Prince Amatus, for he had always relied on the Duke and Sir John to question that which they did not understand and that which seemed senseless, and thus keep him from a great deal of nonsense.

"Have you no questions, no thoughts about this?" he asked.

"Highness, I know you have spent long hours in the Royal Library and I merely believe that you have some reason for this. It does seem that since the illness leaves one cold inside and pale, that the sun, which makes people warmer and darker, might be able to drive it from you more quickly. But the major reason why I asked no question is because you gave the command with such dread, as if you feared what it might lead you to."

Prince Amatus was about to deny this when he noticed that there was a sick, grim feeling in his belly, that his breath was coming in tight gasps, and that his face was constricted in a ghastly grin, which—if there had been another half available to
not
grin with—would have been a ghastly half-grin. He was terrified, and he had not noticed it, and he certainly did not know why.

When he spoke, it was soft and almost shy. "You are right, of course. There is something I dread to know or dread to do. I do not know what it is, either. Perhaps the time has come to delve into
Things It Is Not Good to Know at All.
It might be in there by mistake. Many things are. But first we must deal with the plague; it is halfway down to the river now, and we might perhaps hope that when it runs out of city it will run out entirely, but I don't think we can depend on that. I'll ride the first stage; just bring the litter along."

The first one that day was a very young girl, her hair still uncut and her teeth still new and white in her terribly pale gums; when Amatus touched her the shock was deep and terrible, and he had only a moment to think it was worse than usual before he fell back onto the litter. They carried him out into the sunlight, and in his half-consciousness he was barely aware of the Duke explaining that this must now be done between each cure but that everyone would receive the healing touch just as always.

The sunlight had the expected effect and more; something foul and icy, like slush that floats on an open cesspool, burst out of his gut when the sun touched him, and he sat up, fully recovered. In short order, they had discovered it was quickest to carry him out into the sun, where he recovered instantly, and then let him walk back in for the next cure.

"Always, before, there was something of the sickness left in me when I recovered," Amatus explained to the Duke as they rode back. "The sun on my skin drives it out entirely, and though it feels as if I were dying
at
that moment, it is all over
in
that moment."

"Pity it's winter, Highness; we can't count on sunlight nearly often enough. Do you really feel well?"

"Better than at any time since Golias died." The Prince sucked in a great gasp of cold, clear air, sweet as dandelion wine and clear as springwater, and looked around at the streets before them, winding between the snug houses. Children in dirty—but not ragged—clothing played in the streets amid the puddles of water running off the snowcapped houses, and everywhere there was the smell of cooking. "The Kingdom, for all of it, is a good place," he said.

"Have you ever doubted that?"

Amatus turned his single eye on the Duke, and long after the Duke remembered that expression and eventually told Cedric about it. When Cedric wrote it down in his
Chronicle,
however, he could not remember what the Duke had said, and since the Prince could hardly be expected to know how he had looked, there was no way of recalling it for certain. Amatus remembered only having thought long and hard about the question, so perhaps that was what the Duke saw.

"Wassant, you are loyal to the bottom of your blessed soul, and so decent that you cannot conceive that a place might be utterly spoiled and poisoned. But I am to reign here, and so it is a question I must consider. Be glad you don't have to answer such questions." Then he was silent again, looking deep into the Duke, for the seriousness of the answer had surprised even Amatus a great deal. After that long moment of gazing at each other, the Prince laughed and began a merry song, an old ballad of how a gallant woodman crossing a bridge in the fog had lost his way, thought he faced a great giant, boldly drawn his trebleclef, and fought with the terrible being on the narrow bridge, only to discover that the bridge was the highway, the giant a windmill, and he himself only the dream of a butterfly who had been unable to imagine a Chinese philosopher.

The tune was jolly, so Wassant joined in after a moment, and then all the men took it up, singing in a rough four-part harmony that was traditional among entourages of fighting men in the Kingdom, who needed only a dashing officer singing lead as an excuse to burst into song.

When the song was done, the Duke was grinning and all the dark thoughts of the morning were fled for the time being. "Calliope loves that song," he said, "it's a pity she wasn't here."

Prince Amatus had a sudden thought. "In fact we haven't seen her since before the plague began. I had written asking her forgiveness and had never heard back from her. It is not at all like Calliope to sulk or not to forgive; I will have to call on her, today, to make sure that nothing is wrong."

"You could do that now, if you wished," the Duke said. "I would be happy to accompany you, or if you wish to meet her by yourself—"

"Why, Wassant, you're blushing."

The Duke looked down at the wet gritty pavement over which his horse was clopping and said, "Highness, I meant only to spare you any shame. I should have known better; as well spare the winter being cold."

Amatus laughed at that, a warm, clear laugh that made women look up from their washing and workmen from their tools, and though he did not notice it, the tone of his laugh, so free and warm, put heart in them and started rumors racing through the city that the Prince would shortly have found the cure for the plague and that good times would come around again before Winter Festival.

"Duke Wassant, what I love best about you is that your loyal heart has no governance over your rough tongue. Yes, we will visit Calliope immediately; send the men back to the castle to report, and let us go to her home right away,"

In moments they were tying up their horses in the small, sunlit square where Calliope's house fronted.

Prince Amatus knocked on the door with some enthusiasm, for he had missed Calliope without realizing that she was who he missed or how much he had missed her, and so he was more eager than he might have thought he would be. She might still be furious with him, but he now at least had a good excuse for his neglect of the past few weeks, and he was sure that he could apologize more than adequately.

And making up with Calliope was always delightful; she had a knack for being petulant exactly long enough to make it a pleasure when the forgiveness shone through, without carrying it on so long as to allow one to think that she might be enjoying the situation.

He knocked again; it had been some moments, now, as they stood on the wet doorstep in the bright sun that seemed to pick out every crevice between every brick and shingle in the courtyard.

The door opened a crack, and the face behind it would not quite look out enough for Amiatus to see anything other than that it was not Calliope.

"My lady Calliope is not in, or rather she is inside, but she is not in to you, or rather she is not in to anyone," the voice said, repeating verbatim the sort of thing that Calliope must have said.

The door thudded shut.

"I think she's particularly annoyed with you," the Duke commented.

"We might well infer that," Amatus said. "I had imagined that she didn't want to speak to me until I'd apologized, but I'd never thought that she wouldn't want me to speak to her until I had apologized. Well, I suppose there's nothing for it but some foolish heroics."

The Duke clapped him on the shoulder. "Now I know that you are healthy again."

Less than an hour later, after due reconnoitering (and a certain small amount of embarrassment while they established that they both knew the location of Calliope's bedchamber within the house, but despite both their best efforts had never been inside it), Amatus was looking dubiously at a curious iron device in the Duke's hand. "It's called a grig, and it's used by the daring herders of mountain leghorns in the high, rocky parts of my duchy, when they climb the stony escharots to bring down the strays. One says Secundine over it, then one tosses it onto any firm surface where it will cling, and then we climb the line attached to it. I'm quite sure we can get it all the way onto the Lady Calliope's roof without trouble, and after that it's merely a matter of climbing the line."

"Have you ever used a grig?" the Prince asked.

"I've climbed several escharots, and there was a time in my life when I used the grig daily," Wassant said. "Nothing to it."

In fact he had climbed the escharots when he was young, by the expedient of hanging on to the back of the harness of one of his father's leghorn herders, and he had used the grig as a paperweight while he was at school, but he saw no particular reason to alarm Prince Amatus since after all there was nothing to it.

To Amatus's surprise and Wassant's relief, the grig landed and held silently, with the line running directly by Calliope's balcony. There were no sounds from inside, so Amatus's guess that the thump of the grig would be audible only in the unvisited attic was probably true. He wondered for a moment, if the attic were truly unvisited, whether the grig had made a noise at all.

There was a moment of confusion between the two friends, for the Duke thought that he should go up first because it was his duty to scout for danger ahead of the Prince (and secretly also wanted to make sure that the grig was working properly before he trusted the heir to the throne to it). The Prince, figuring himself for the hero of the story—and also knowing that the worst danger at the top of the line was likely to be Calliope—insisted on going first. Finally, to avoid the humiliation of having rank pulled, the Duke gave in.

Amatus went up the line quickly and gracefully as a monkey, if one could imagine a monkey with one arm and a detached foot that followed him. In very little time, he had stepped onto Calliope's bedchamber balcony and signaled for Wassant to come up.

But as the Duke reached for the line, the grig let go of the roof, and fell to the ground. The rope coiled neatly at the Duke's feet and the grig thumped to the center of the coil, for though the Duke did not know it, Secundine had to be repeated over the grig three times if the line was to be used for more than a single climbing. Once the Prince had let go of the line, the grig had been waiting only for a short tug to return to its master.

Amatus knew even less than the Duke, and was as furious as the Duke was embarrassed. But since the Prince dared not make noise, he was forced to communicate his anger to Wassant entirely by gesture, and since the poor Duke was so ashamed that he was hanging his head and could not see the Prince above him, this was completely unsatisfactory.

After a few more angry gestures at the back of the Duke's head, Amatus gave up in disgust and turned to the problem of getting into Calliope's bedchamber. The doors onto the balcony were locked, but there was no bolt as far as he could tell, for there was no point in one three stories up; the latch was only there to keep the door closed.

The blade of his escree was not quite thin enough to lift the latch, but with some digging to make a hole, the point of his pongee was. The whole time, as he worked at it, he expected Calliope to shout from within, or someone to notice him, but nothing happened as he continued to pry away in the warm winter sunlight. He looked down to see that the Duke was now looking up, made an angry gesture, saw Wassant blush and look down, and felt simultaneously relieve and guilty. He knew he would forgive his friend shortly.

At last he had damaged enough of Calliope's woodwork to get at the latch, and pried it up. The doors to her bedchamber swung open in front of him, and he stepped softly inside.

Calliope was lying in the bed. She looked as if she were dead. He crept forward. A stench like a just-opened grave made him rear back for a moment, and as a light breeze blew the curtain, light washed over her. Her features were terribly pale and from the cast of her face he knew at once that she had had the plague since the first day, and he realized that because she had not wanted to go out, she had remained here, ill, until she was unable to call for help, and then continued to get worse. He mentally cursed her servants for fools.

As he stepped closer, he saw that her skin was as pale and white as paper, except for two unnaturally bright red patches, one on each cheek. Her lips were a bruised shade of blue, and the skin around her eyes was drawn and dark, leaving her cheekbones terribly prominent. She had lost much weight, and she had always been a slender girl.

Closer still, and now his heart hammered, for it seemed that anyone who looked so ill could not possibly still be alive. He knew how much plague must be in her.

He did not hesitate; he placed his hand on her forehead.

Though every time before had made the Prince feel as sick as if he had drunk drakeseed, though each time had felt like an arm-breaking shock and a giant's hand tearing his bowels from his living body, all that was as nothing to this. Always before he had fainted from the pain and sickness penetrating him, but this time the illness seemed to lock into his arm and pour straight into his brain and heart with such horrifying force that it was impossible for him to fall into the comforting darkness.