Sword and Sorceress XXVII (12 page)

She knew there were things hiding in the
shadows. She could hear them, brushes of wind where there should be no wind,
half-heard sounds that could have been the scraping of branches or the hiss of
the wind. They were the sorts of sounds that a person would think—would tell
herself—she was imagining. But Alina had never been one for imagining.

When she reached the room where her
mother had once spun straw into gold, she pushed it open without allowing
herself to hesitate. She didn’t even acknowledge to herself that she wanted to
hesitate.

The torch went out as soon as she
stepped into the room. All at once it was dark, so dark that when she briefly
closed her eyes, it made no difference.

Alina knelt and put the torch down on
the floor. She settled it carefully on its side, then straightened and said, “I
am not afraid of the dark.”

A moment of silence—she fancied it was
startled. Then a voice said, “Perhaps it is I who am afraid of the light.”

It was a female voice.

Alina stumbled forward, one step, then
stopped. She whispered, “
Mother
?”

“Come no closer,” the voice said. “If
you see me, it will break what little protection I have.”

Alina’s fingers dug into the thin silk
of her gown. “Protection from whom?”

“From
him
. Do you have to ask? Do
you not know my story?”

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness,
Alina could make out a hint of movement at the far end of the room. She was
seized by a sudden, shocking hunger: a desire to see the woman hidden in the
shadows, to look her in the eye. To see if she resembled her. Alina looked
nothing like her father, but maybe...

She had never wanted anything so badly
in her life. And at the same time, it was something she had wanted her entire
life without ever really knowing it. She tried to get a grip on the sudden
turmoil inside her, and she succeeded. Mostly.

“I read your letter,” she said. Her
voice came out clear and smooth.

“Ah,” the woman said. A short sound, not
much more than a breath, but Alina heard the surprise in it.

There was silence for a moment. Then her
mother said, “So you know that I love you. Come to me, my daughter. The king
will let you go now, because of the gold.”

“It’s not that simple,” Alina said.

She heard her mother’s indrawn breath. “It
is, my daughter. It is always that simple, to choose love.”

Alina stood very still. She squared her
shoulders. She said, “I know the goblin’s true name.”

Silence—but a silence more profound,
somehow, than the ones that had come before. Alina snatched up her useless
torch and rushed forward, into the shadows.

It was as she had suspected. Her mother
was gone.

#

That afternoon, for the first time in
her life, Alina lied to her father.

She didn’t know why she was doing it—another
rare sensation for her. She was allowing herself to be guided by her emotions,
like the silly noblewomen she had always despised. But something about hearing
her mother’s voice had let her emotions loose, and something else—her anger at
her father, perhaps—made her not want to rein them in. Besides, she trusted her
own intelligence enough to consider that there was a good reason for her
distrust of the king, even if she hadn’t fully figured out what it was.

So she lied.

She was very good at lying—it was
another essential skill for a princess—and her father had no reason to doubt
her. She explained her actions of the night before by telling of her intent to
go, alone, and give herself to the goblin when he appeared. That part was true,
yet it was the thing her father had the most difficulty with.

He didn’t tell her the truth, either,
about why he couldn’t accept the obvious solution. He raged that she had no
right; that she—or rather, her impending marriage and the alliance that hinged
upon it—were too important to the realm.

“Not as important as the gold,” Alina
corrected him.

She was right, and he knew it, and yet
he raged. He, too, was being controlled by his emotions now. She marveled at
it. Was this part of the goblin’s plan?

They said the fae were ruled entirely by
emotions, that their courts were seething masses of love and hate and jealousy
and desire. It had always sounded abhorrent to her, but now she thought she
could see why some people were drawn to it.

It was a while before her father calmed
down enough to ask the obvious question, and that was when she lied.

“He was there,” she said, “but the torch
went out, and I didn’t see him. I told him I was there to fulfill my mother’s
bargain, and he just... he
laughed
.” She shuddered. “It was not a human
sound. I don’t know how I even knew it was laughter, but it was. And then he
was gone.”

“The gold in the storeroom,” one of the
king’s sorcerers reported, “is still straw.” The sorcerers had been nervously
silent while the king raged, and still looked nervous—as well they might, Alina
thought, considering how useless they were turning out to be.

“Don’t you mean the
straw
is
still straw?” she asked pointedly. “It was never truly gold.”

The sorcerers exchanged glances. One of
them, a scrawny young man, said reluctantly, “Human magic cannot change the
true substance of things. But the fae... we do not know what the fae can do.”

“It seems to me,” Alina said, “that
there is a lot you don’t know.”

“Daughter,” the king said warningly. The
Sorcerers’ League was a powerful force, not one to anger lightly. Alina knew this.
The note of surprise in her father’s voice made her flush. But she kept her
scornful gaze on the young sorcerer’s bony face.

“We know better than to go meet him on
grounds of his choosing,” the sorcerer snapped at her. “If you had waited,
things might have turned out differently.”

Alina was not surprised by the open
disapproval in his eyes. She was used to it, from those who spent enough time
with her to see past her beauty. People found her strange and unwomanly. The
duke of Darmil, who had courted her last fall, had told her that she needed to
acknowledge the passionate side of her nature—with an eye, apparently, to
benefiting from that acknowledgment himself. But Alina saw the breathless
romances and desperate tears of her maids, and had never seen any benefit in
them. She liked being cool and calm, unaffected by emotional storms.

It didn’t bother her that so many found
her unnatural. Her father, too, was calm and dispassionate—and her mother, it
had always been impressed on her, was not. It was a good way to rule a kingdom.
Her father liked her even demeanor. He always had. And he was the only one
whose approval she had ever wanted.

Until last night. Until she heard the
voice of the mother who loved her, and had suffered terribly for that love. It
made her wonder what it would be like to love fiercely, wildly, without regard
for consequences. It made her wonder if the duke was right, and there was
something she was missing.

She kept her eyes on the sorcerer, and
her voice angry, as she spoke. She didn’t want to look at the king, and she
didn’t trust herself to disguise her voice.

“They
will
turn out differently,
next time,” she said. “He has shown that he can be drawn into the open, by me.
I can make him appear before the court. And before you.”

“How?” It was the king who asked.

She had to look at him then, but years
of training stood her in good stead. She met his faded blue eyes with utter
calm. She even smiled.

I’m sorry, Father.
But
the thought didn’t make it into her voice.

“By the threat of taking me out of his
reach. The king of Aimar has been pressing us to announce a betrothal. Let us
do it in three nights’ time.”

The king looked at her for a moment. She
had never noticed, somehow, the depth of the wrinkles around his eyes.

Then he turned and said sharply, to the
sorcerers, “Will that be enough time for you to set up a spell?”

The sorcerers assured him that it would,
and the king nodded, even though they all knew that no human spell had ever
captured any of the fae.

Only one human being, outside of legend,
had ever held the fae to any sort of bargain. And that was Alina’s mother.

#

The ball was a bit sparse, due to its
being so hastily put together. All the members of the court came, of course,
and the few foreign dignitaries who happened to be in attendance; but the
ballroom still seemed empty, the music echoing a bit hollowly among the dancing
couples. Alina took her turn among the dancers, wearing a violet gown of
layered silk, her scalp aching from Rose’s ministrations. The king sat on the
dais, his face blank. The sorcerers stood together at his side, blue-robed and
murmuring secretively.

The goblin appeared in the middle of the
dance floor. He appeared quietly, with no smoke or flames, so that it was a
moment before the shrieks of the dancers alerted Alina to his presence. She
stood utterly still as the lords and ladies stumbled and fled, some brushing
hard against her in their haste, almost knocking her over. She planted her feet
wide on the marble floor.

The sorcerers drew together and cried out
a spell in unison. Alina felt that brush by her, too. The jostling of the
dancers had not made her stumble; the spell did. She took one step sideways, to
keep her balance. But the goblin just stood there and grinned as the magic
shattered against him.

He was ugly and beautiful at once. Ugly
because he looked almost human and yet horribly
not
, beautiful in the
wildness and magnetism that radiated from him. His skin was tinged green, his
deformed features hovering between animal and human. He was short, and wide,
and might have been naked. It was hard to tell if those shimmering blue-green
feathers were his clothing or a part of him.

He ignored the dancers, the sorcerers,
and the king. He looked at Alina, and her breath caught under the force of his
gaze. It was so powerful that nothing else about his appearance seemed to
matter.

“So,” the goblin said. His voice was
like discordant music. “You claim to know my true name?”

“I do,” Alina said, her voice as cool as
years of practice could make it. Only she felt the sharpness with which her
fingernails dug into her palms.

“And you will call me by it? Before the
court?”

He knows
, she thought,
and forced her fingers loose. Her palms still hurt, and she felt the sharp
sting of blood. “I will.”

There was an utter silence, such as had
never before been heard in the court of Ciern. Even the sorcerers’ robes did
not rustle. They stared, seven pairs of piercing eyes.
They
did not
know.

“I will,” she said again.

“Then do it,” the goblin commanded. “If
you would have your freedom, do it.”

“Wait,” the king said. Alina did not
dare look at him, to see if
he
knew. “What happens to her if she is
wrong?”

The goblin’s protruding upper lip
curled, touching the tip of his long nose. “A bit late to be worrying about
consequences, Your Majesty.”

“Someone else will say your name,” the
king said. “I will do it.”

“It has to be me.” Alina pulled herself
as high as she could. “The name is only true coming from me.” She faced the
goblin. “I call you Father.”

If the court had been silent before, now
it was a tomb. Even the king uttered not a sound—which told Alina that, if he
had not known, he had at least suspected.

And had tried to protect her anyhow.

The goblin broke the silence with a
laugh—a long, inhuman cackle. Alina did not flinch.

“How did you know?” her real father
asked, when finally he was done.

“I never felt truly human.” Though she
had never realized it, either. “And my mother hinted at it, in a letter she
wrote me. That was why she never expected my father to let me see the letter.”

The
my father
came out of her
mouth without thought, and she felt the king’s flinch from halfway across the
room.

“Then you will come with me,” the goblin
said, and she returned her attention to him, where it should have been all
along.

He did not phrase it as a question, but
Alina hesitated.
Tell me before the court... if you would have your freedom.
And she had it. They all knew, now, that she was not the king of Ciern’s
daughter, and that meant she was no longer useful. The treaty with Aimar would
have to be sealed some other way.

She already had a few ideas for how that
could be managed. She wanted to tell her father... but he wasn’t, of course.
Wasn’t her father. Her father was a creature of Faerie with whom her mother had
dallied and then turned to for help. Whose child she had kept from him, for as
long as she could.

Alina wanted to help the king anyhow...
but that was just something
she
wanted. He had many advisers, after all.
At least half of them understood the political landscape well enough for their
advice to be useful. But none of them could save her country. None of them
could bargain with a goblin.