Veiled Rose (42 page)

“Oi!” bellowed the Fool. “If you don’t let me through, I’ll be certain it gets back to your superior officer, and you’ll wish you’d never—”

“Right. As though you’ll be on chatting terms with my superior officer,” the bigger one growled. “Listen, mister, we don’t let just anyone come trampin’ through here, and anyone who tells you otherwise—”

At that moment, movement among the bushes caught the Fool’s gaze. A girl stood there, peering out from behind a bush. She wore a simple gown, and her hair was pulled back in a braid with strands escaping messily about her face. Her eyes were round with surprise, and when she saw the Fool looking at her she ducked back behind the shrubs. He could not tell if she was a lady of the palace or merely a servant, but it seemed worth a try.

“Lady!” he cried. He pulled and twisted, nearly breaking free again. “Fair lady! You seem of a gentle nature. Tell these blackguards to unhand me—
OW
!”

The smaller guard caught hold of his ear and gave it a vicious twist, knocking his bell-dripped hat off in the process. Then the big one picked him off his feet and tossed him out through the gate. The Fool rolled ungracefully in the dirt partway back downhill. With a cry of “And take your hat with you!” the guards slammed the gate with a final, ringing clang.

Lionheart—for it was he, somewhat thinner, paler, and more threadbare than last seen—picked himself up stiffly. He could feel bruises developing all over his body. How was it that he could face a dragon and live, yet couldn’t get past two such bumblers? They watched him between the bars of the gate, so with great dignity he walked back up the hill. They stiffened and one put a hand to his sword, but Lionheart did not look at them. He picked up his jester’s hat, which looked like a crushed flower. Shaking it out so that all the bells jingled, he placed it back on his head, tilting it at a rakish angle. Then he swept the guards a bow. “Farewell, great oafs of idiotic disposition,” he said. “Until next we meet.”

“Away with you!”

Lionheart hastened back down the hill.

He did not retrace his path down the western side of the hill into Sondhold. No, that would be to admit defeat. This was merely a regrouping to consider his next course of action. He’d already tried his luck at Westgate and been rebuffed. “Bring your petitions on the third and fifth days of the week,” everyone said.

“I don’t come with a petition! I come with a letter of recommendation from—”

But no one believed him.

One dead end after another. Lionheart cursed as he picked his way down the hill. Was he destined to spend another four years in Sondhold, just as he had in Lunthea Maly, desperately trying to gain access to the palace and being turned back at every portal? Performing at Beauclair had not proven this difficult. Amaury Palace was famed for its spectacles and entertainments, however, and a jester of any worth could easily find a place there. Not so in sober Parumvir.

Goldstone Wood grew up this side of the hill, and Lionheart found himself approaching its thick and untamed borders. The shade cast by the trees looked inviting. Any relief from this blistering heat would be welcome. Lionheart doubted any of the fabled monsters that purportedly lived within that shade would suddenly creep to this portion of the wood to devour one rejected jester. So he flopped down with his back against a tall, spreading maple at the edge of the forest, and took stock of his position.

Somehow he had to get into the palace and present his letter to the steward. King Grosveneur’s seal would undoubtedly carry some weight, but not with idiots like those guards at the gate, who probably couldn’t spoon porridge to their mouths without special instruction. Yet how could Lionheart get past them?

The weight of his problem, the heat of the day, and the long climb up the side of the mountain joined together in a force too great to withstand. Exhaustion worked its own persuasion, and he slept.

You know the Princess Varvare.

The voice sang into his mind while Lionheart lay between waking and sleeping.

She has gone from this world. Beyond reach of my voice.

He groaned and stirred, but his eyelids were too heavy with sleep to open. His body felt oddly paralyzed where he lay amid the roots of the maple tree. His mind felt paralyzed too, unable to drive out that voice that was not a voice, speaking without language.

My master grows impatient.

Lionheart muttered, “Dragons eat your master.”

Then his eyes flew open and for the briefest moment he saw the Other.

When you see her, you will send her to me. I will wait in the Wilderlands.

Lionheart woke in a cold sweat, still sitting up. His hands had torn up great handfuls of dirt, which he now released. Slowly his breathing calmed, and he crawled out from under the shade of the trees.

“Serves you right,” he whispered, taking comfort in self derision. “Everyone knows you shouldn’t nap in a Faerie Forest. Especially not so late in the day.”

The sun was setting, and the day was cooler. Lionheart was just as much on the wrong side of the wall as he had ever been. He stood awhile, trying to shake off the nightmare. He remembered none of it—almost the moment he woke, the vision had fled his memory—but the sensation of fear lingered. To drive it off, he started walking along the wall of the palace gardens, trailing a hand against the stone blocks as he went.

Suddenly Lionheart turned and looked up the wall.

All he needed was a moment with a housekeeper or the steward, someone with brain enough to recognize King Grosveneur’s seal. If he could just present himself at the palace and bypass those dragon-blasted guards, he did not doubt he would gain entrance.

He must gain entrance. He had a ring to find.

Resolve quickened him. He darted downhill until once more he reached the edge of the Wood, where the trees grew right up against the garden wall. As easily as he had once climbed the mountainside near Hill House, he scaled the trunk of a big oak and scooted along thick branches overhanging the wall. Gaining the wall itself, he looked down.

The sun was setting in earnest now, illuminating some of the world in a brilliant glow but casting the rest into deep shadows. In that awkward lighting, he found it difficult to guess how great the drop below him was, whether it was the same as on the far side, shorter, or longer. But there was nothing for it now. He took a deep breath and jumped.

And landed on top of someone who let out the most ear-splitting scream that ever shattered a man’s eardrums.

They tumbled in the path, Lionheart ending up on top, squashing the slender person, who kept screaming for all she was worth. “Oh, hush!” he cried. “I’m so sorry! I beg you, please, quiet!”

Her screams increased, and he had no choice but to clamp a hand over her mouth. He still had not seen her face, but he could tell she was a young woman, hardly more than a girl. Poor thing, he must have terrified her; but then again, she wasn’t increasing his peace of mind either.

She wriggled in his grasp, still screaming into his hand, though the sound was muffled. “I say!” he hissed between his teeth. “Really, I’m sorry. I had no idea you were down here. Terribly rude of me, I know, but I can’t help making an entrance, it seems, no matter how I try.”

He felt her relax a little in his grip as he spoke, and the screaming stopped. Hoping against hope that it had ended for good, he allowed her to sit up. “Are you quite calm?”

She nodded.

“All right, I’m going to let you go. Please—”

The moment he loosened his hold, she pulled free of him and leapt to her feet, whirling around to face him. In the last glow of the sunset he got his first good look at her. It was the maiden from the garden, her braid messier than ever, her eyes wide with terror.

She was, he noticed, quite pretty.

But she was drawing breath for another great bellow.

Without stopping to think, Lionheart flung himself on his hands and knees before her. He spread out his hands and cried in a voice of despair, “Please! Can you forgive this lowly worm, O gentlest of maidens, for his unforgivable rudeness, dropping in on you, so to speak? Will you forgive him or strike him dead with a dart from your eyes? Oh, strike, maiden, strike, for I deserve to die— No! Stay!”

She stared as he rose to his knees and covered his face with his hands, wailing, “I do not deserve such a death! Nay! It would be far too noble an end for so ignoble a creature as you see before you, to die from the glance of one so fair! No, name instead some other manner for my demise, and I shall run to do your bidding. Shall I cast myself from yon cliff?”

Leaping to his feet, he sprang over to a statue on a pedestal a few feet away. It was the figure of a king looking over his shoulder in stern scrutiny of the world. Lionheart clambered up onto the pedestal and put his arm around the stone king’s waist. “She says I must die,” he told it, indicating the girl with a sweep of his hand. She stood with her mouth open, hardly seeming to breathe. “Will you mourn for me?”

The stone king scowled. Lionheart turned and gazed with great melancholy across the garden, pressing a hand to his heart. “Farewell, sweet world! I pay the just price for my clumsiness, my vain shenanigans. My grandmother told me it would come to this. Oh, Granny, had I but listened to your sage counsel while I was yet in my cradle!”

He made as though to jump but paused and turned to the girl. “Farewell, sweet lady. Thus for thee I end a most illustrious career. The Siege of Rudiobus was hardly a greater tragedy, but then, Lady Gleamdren was not such a one as thee!”

He gathered for another spring, catching hold of the stone king’s fist at the last moment. “I don’t suppose my end could be put off until tomorrow, could it?”

The girl started to speak, but afraid it would turn into a scream, Lionheart interrupted with a hasty, “No! For you and your wounded dignity, I must perish at once. Go to, foul varlet! Meet thy doom!” With a cry, which he dared not make too loud, he flung himself from the pedestal, turned a series of neat somersaults, and stopped in the path just at the girl’s feet, flattened like a swatted fly. He twitched once, then was still.

Silence followed.

He opened one eye and peered up at the girl, who was staring down at him. “Satisfied, m’lady?”

To his huge relief, a smile broke across the girl’s face and she laughed out loud. At the sound of that laugh, Lionheart, for the first time in his life, fell in love.

It wasn’t all that difficult, the whole falling in love business, Lionheart thought later on as he sat in a tiny room in the servants’ wing of Oriana, darning his jester’s motley. Inconvenient, to be sure, but not difficult.

The girl, it turned out, was a princess. Of course she was. He should have known the moment he set eyes on her that she could hardly be anything less. Princess Una of Parumvir, only daughter of King Fidel, out for a stroll on a fine summer evening, alone with her thoughts and a book of poetry.

And a fine opal ring gleaming on her finger.

Just like the oracle had said. Lionheart’s face hardened into a scowl as he focused on his stitching.
“You will know this ring by two things: its stones, fire opals, as hot inside as a dragon’s flame; and its giver, a princess who will fear you at first, but later will laugh.”