The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  I had broken into a cold sweat. I pulled my cloak around me and leaned against the wall. Was it a hallucination? I was not that tired. A vision? How sent, and by what agency? Tempting me to the most unnatural crime, to kill my mother’s father Prospero—to what end? I had power already; I could not think of any enhancement I might gain from his death. The idea made me ill. For either it had happened, and the Maze was far worse a place than Freia had ever said, or I had imagined it, and my own mind was alien to me.

  For the rest of my watch beside Prospero I stared up and down the corridor anxiously, wondering what other visions might come. Nothing happened, which was excruciating in its own way.

  When Prospero yawned and rolled over and woke up, he grunted a greeting to me and took out his water flask. A drink and a bite to eat later, he rubbed his eyes and neck and said, “A quiet night, as it were?”

  I nodded.

  “ ’Tis well.” He looked up and down. “Alas, you’ve done your duty with too much diligence, Gwydion, for had you broken faith and nodded, perhaps we’d have awakened outside these damnable walls. Naught’s altered.”

  We got up, stretched and rubbed our stiff muscles, and walked slowly on, along the corridor the way Prospero had come to me. We walked hand-in-hand to keep from being separated. When I came to an opening and turned right, he chuckled.

  “In this unruly place, you impose rules?”

  “It was the only thing I could think of,” I said defensively.

  “I do not think our powers of reason will release us, no more than powers of sorcery can. We are lost to reason and the Spring until this thing sees fit to spit us forth at one end or t’other.”

  “I hope that’s soon. I’m already tired of it.”

  We walked awhile, a and I found the silence unbearable.

  “I saw something while you were asleep, Prospero.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. “A mirage or a … seeming?”

  “Yes.”

  “I too have seen such. Spare your thought for better things. They are vile nothings; they are less than wraiths; they are no more than … influences.” He spoke with vehement certainty and contempt.

  Influences. Influencing me to kill Prospero? Mocking me for not doing so? For wanting to? It was good advice, not to worry about it. The very thought made my stomach wrench. How had my sword come to my hand? I must have drawn it, fearing the face … I pushed the thoughts away, as he advised.

  A few minutes later we came across something that made us stop and consider.

  The corridor was flooded. Prospero lifted up his lantern and then brightened it to see the extent of the flooding, and it seemed to me that I could see across it.

  “I think there’s something white over there.”

  “A small thing, pale, perhaps a rock,” he said. “It lies at, oh, eleven o’clock …”

  “Yes.”

  Prospero looked at the dark water which lay without moving against the dark stones. “How deep, I wonder, can this water be? Dark in darkness: I cannot plumb it with my eye.”

  Still holding his hand, I stepped in. Shallow at the edges. I took another step. It covered my boot tops.

  “Belike it falls off of a sudden, as the shore, or belike it masks a stair or cavity,” Prospero pointed out, and I came back.

  I emptied the water from my boots. “I can swim.”

  His mouth twitched, not succeeding to smile. “So can I. By the way, I trust the stuff is no more unwholesome than the water ’twould appear to be.”

  I looked hastily at my feet. I bent down and sniffed the stuff. It smelled like stale, dirty water.

  “I think it’s just water.”

  “Let us hope this does not mean we have a leaky foundation beneath our Citadel,” Prospero muttered. “ ’Twould weaken the building beyond buttressing.”

  We looked at the white thing, the only thing that wasn’t black in the whole world.

  “Well then, needs must undertake the swim if we’re to go onward, and truthfully ’tis a change from this walking. Keep your lantern and pack dry,” Prospero said after a minute of reckoning the distance. “It seems not far.”

  We put my haversack and lantern on my head, and Prospero held the lit and the unlit lanterns he had in his left hand, and we set forth. It was water. It came up to our knees, and up to our thighs, and then the bottom did drop out. I pulled Prospero’s free arm around my neck, and he held the light high while I swam.

  “It’s farther,” I said, “than it looked.”

  He said nothing.

  I swam.

  The white thing was my target. I swam straight toward it. My arms began to ache. It was hard work, swimming for two, and my boots were full of water.

  I decided I’d better keep them on and kept swimming.

  Prospero held the lantern up high, though his arm must be stiff and uncomfortable.

  Finally my hand hit something; I barked my knuckles on stone and scrabbled to grab onto it. And we were in a very curious place. We were at the bottom of a wall, from what my hands told me, though my eyes told me I was looking straight ahead, level across the stone, at the white thing …

  I conveyed this to Prospero.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I did.

  “Now, without looking—nor shall I look—move you along, yet keep a hand upon the wall …”

  I did this, and bobbed along through the water, Prospero around my neck still, kicking to help me. I don’t know when it happened, but the wall became easier to grab suddenly, and without even thinking about it, I pulled us up and out, opening my eyes.

  We sat on the floor next to a puddle of water perhaps six feet broad. I wondered what would happen if I tried to jump across it.

  “I don’t like this place,” I said, a small shake in my voice because I was tired with all that swimming.

  Prospero, his hand still on my shoulder, bent and picked something up.

  “An apple core,” I observed. It was brownish, but not bad.

  “One of the others has passed this way—unless you dropped it, for I’ve not done so.”

  “No,” I said, and then, feeling inspired, said, “Mother was here.”

  “This is an eloquent apple, to tell you so much,” he said, lifting his eyebrows.

  “Dewar eats apples core and all, and so do I for that matter. Mother does not.”

  Prospero smiled and patted my head. “Brilliant, Holmes,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Pay me no mind; I maunder. You’re observant and nimble-witted.” He ate the apple core himself.

  I thought of Mother sitting by the puddle and eating an apple in the dark. She hadn’t a light, after all. “She was alone,” I said, “when she dropped it, because Dewar would have eaten it if he were with her.”

  Prospero swallowed and nodded, looking bleak. When I’d caught my breath, we went on.

  Our clothes were dry by the time we met the next illusion. It ran toward us.

  “Dazhur!” I called.

  “How now, witch, how camest thou—” Prospero began, and he grabbed my arm and yanked me back. I had let go of him.

  “My Lord!” she gasped, dishevelled, tear-streaked and smudged, blonde hair coming undone.

  “How did you get down here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered, “I was Summoned hither by you, my Lord Gwydion …”

  I shook my head. Something bothered me about her.

  “Dazhur,” I said, as it came clear to me, “what did you do to your hair—”

  She vanished with a terrified scream, blowing away as a cloud before wind.

  “Women! So squalled your mother when once I asked her that,” Prospero said wryly after the scream had faded from our ears. “Speak or be silent, a man’s damned either way. What of the wench’s hair?”

  “Hicha said she’d cut it.”

  Prospero laughed, really laughed. “In the new fashion! I did not know that. Recently?”

  “Just a few weeks
ago.”

  He laughed harder and then made a rude noise. “Hah! ’Tis points for our side.”

  The stone around us remained unmoved by his mirth.

  “Let’s go on,” I said, wearily. On we went.

  The next encounter came after another rest stop. Prospero watched while I slept, and I watched while he slept. I was undisturbed by further illusions, but I wondered about their source. Prospero didn’t say whether he saw any or not. Given the nature of mine, I supposed he might not be inclined to discuss them. We ate bread and cheese and apples, drank water, and shook the kinks out of our bodies without talking.

  The corridors went on and on and on. A glimmer of color ahead was a welcome change in the monotony, illusion though it be. Prospero saw it too. “Hmph,” he grunted, ready to be unimpressed.

  It neither moved nor made a sound as we approached nearer and nearer. I could not remember if the first illusion I had seen had really made sounds or not, as Dazhur had. It had been less substantial than she had seemed, certainly, and more demanding.

  Prospero stopped just as I resolved the colors and shapes and tried to speed up; he jerked on my arm and halted me. We faced a T-intersection. Dewar sat against the wall, his low-flamed lantern beside him, and he held Freia, and they were both asleep. From his uncomfortable attitude—head tipped back and lolling to lean on hers, which was on his shoulder—he must have dozed off on watch. He had a bruised scrape on his forehead and a ravelled tear in his dark-grey doublet. Freia had lost her mantle and had Dewar’s blue-green cloak around her, over her dress, and her left hand, with the scabbed line from the knife gash black on her palm, lay loosely open on his knee, a gold spark where her wedding-ring nestled in the crease of her finger’s base. His left arm encircled her, lest they be parted as they rested no doubt.

  “Prospero,” I whispered.

  “Shh.”

  I looked at him. I was sure they were real. Prospero put his finger on his lips and shook his head at me.

  He didn’t want to wake them up. I smiled and thought that was nice, and he nodded and we walked up to them as quietly as possible, then sat down when neither of them twitched a muscle.

  A quarter of an hour later, Dewar’s lantern guttered and went out, and the only light came from Prospero’s lantern—we had used up all the fuel in one and had abandoned it, and now we kept mine in reserve. Freia stirred, snuggled closer to Dewar, sighed, squirmed the way one does when trying to find the least discomfort, and then sighed again and relaxed. Dewar mumbled, “Hmmm …” and slumped down, then started awake.

  “Holy Sun in the Spring!”

  “Hush,” said Prospero.

  Dewar regarded us both suspiciously. Freia, with a “Humm? Wha’ now …” sound, woke up and blinked fuzzily. Though she had slept, she looked tired and her face was pale in the lamplight. Dewar’s eyes were shadowed and taut lines of tension fringed them and his mouth.

  “Are you real?” Freia asked plaintively, still hugging Dewar.

  “Yes,” Prospero said.

  “Of course you’d say that,” Dewar retorted.

  “Hell’s bells,” Prospero said, “why, then believe we are not, if it likes you better so, and ignore us. But a moment past your oil burned out, and we’ve light to spare.”

  Dewar grabbed his lantern and shook it; empty, no question about it.

  “Did you see anything?” Freia asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, looking away.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “You are real,” she decided, which was annoying. “A false Gwydion would tell me something.” And she smiled as I looked back to protest.

  “How do you know?” Dewar demanded.

  “I expected him to answer when I asked, and when he did not I was surprised but recognized that it was in character nonetheless.”

  Dewar nodded, satisfied by this motherly logic. Freia yawned and shook her mussed head, smiled at Prospero too, and said, “I shall forgive you for leaving me in the dark.”

  “Though ’twas none of my will’s doing, I thank you for your forgiveness,” he said, and let her hug him. She still kept a hand on Dewar, though. “You two may sleep again, if you would,” Prospero said over her shoulder. “We’ll stand guard ’gainst ghosts and dreams.”

  She shook her head and said something too soft for me to hear. Her father hugged her harder, closing his eyes for a moment.

  “This is an inconstant and perilous place. I’ve feared what harm might come to you, and it eases my heart to see the two of you hale and well,” Prospero said to them when he let her go. My mother reached over and tidied my hair.

  “Well we are, if you call being lost in the Maze with nothing to eat well,” Dewar said. “I hate to be a bludger, but have you any food?”

  “Yes,” I said, and during the ensuing conversation I learned that Freia estimated her total subjective time lost as being around six days, and that for three of them she’d been alone in the dark without food or water. I told her about the apple core.

  “Ah, that was the time I lost Dewar,” she said. “It was in my pocket.”

  He still had one hand on her shoulder. This became understandable when they explained that they’d met once shortly after her separation from Prospero, walked for a ways, and been separated at that puddle. Dewar had taken a running jump across it and, naturally, found himself alone on the other side. Freia could not see how wide it was when he was gone, and she had sat down on the edge to eat the apple and then wandered away, giving up on a speedy reunion with her brother. They had met again three days afterward, not parting for an instant since, and had eaten the last of their food the previous “day.”

  “The stuff nightmares are made of,” I muttered.

  Freia nodded.

  Dewar found our encounter with an illusion of Dazhur intriguing.

  “She’s involved with this somehow. I met her myself directly after getting lost.”

  “What did your illusion look like?”

  “I think it was indeed Dazhur,” he said. “Her hair was short, bluntly cut the way the Northern girls are wearing it, her dress was one I’ve not seen before, and she bragged that I was going to be begging for her favor real soon. I didn’t know she’d cut her hair.”

  “Oh?” said Prospero. “Dazhur.” He frowned; my uncle shrugged.

  “Phoebe said something about … rituals,” I said. “About Dazhur’s rituals in Threshwood.” There was something else about Dazhur, too … I strove to recall it.

  “She said she was raising a power Phoebe couldn’t understand,” Mother said. “That was why Phoebe chased her down to Errethon where I presume she carried on—and carried on—as usual.”

  “What power could she raise?” Dewar said. “There is only the Well in Landuc and the Spring here, and she has partaken of neither. I know she hasn’t been to Morven.”

  “I don’t know,” Freia said. “I trust Phoebe’s instincts, though.”

  “So do I,” I said. “Dazhur was getting into very arcane stuff, from what I could tell.”

  “She seduced Josquin when he was here while you were Gaston’s squire, Gwydion,” Freia said.

  “No!” said Dewar, his eyebrows shooting up. “Jos? Surely you’re mistaken. It’d be utterly unnatural for him …”

  Prospero snorted.

  She shook her head. “So it seemed to me. Artificial. Contrived. I wondered at it, but I couldn’t stop it; it was none of my affair. I supposed Josquin must know his own mind, and he never mentioned her to me. Everyone in town knew about it, though, and of course Hicha did too, and I think that he was the reason Dazhur left Hicha. I wonder what seducing him might have done for Dazhur. Ever since never, she was always hotfoot after … you know, all of us.”

  “Arcane stuff indeed! I wonder what it might have done for him,” my uncle muttered. “Clearly I left town too soon that winter.”

  “That was it!” I said. “She was still living with Hicha then. She was wit
h Hicha, do you recall it, Dewar? You told me so when you visited Gaston and me.”

  “I did, she did—The maps!”

  We looked at one another: Dazhur had certainly had ample opportunity to rifle the Archives when she was Hicha’s lover, in Hicha’s confidence.

  “Raising a power,” Prospero muttered. He looked at us all, frowning. “Well-a-day, this gossip is not getting us out of the Maze. Let us move along and see what the place has to offer us.”

  “And let’s stay together this time,” I said, standing.

  Freia stayed close to Dewar. He kept an arm around her waist or over her shoulders, or she would hold his hand or arm closely to her side. Her free hand held mine; I held Prospero’s, and he held the lantern. Now we walked along the corridor away from the T-intersection where we had found my mother and uncle.

  “This feels different,” Dewar said after a moment.

  “Hm,” his father replied.

  “Do you …” Dewar didn’t finish the question.

  “Yes, I feel it,” Prospero said slowly, after half a minute’s slow walk in silence. “I do feel it. ’Tis not quite like the Spring, though.”

  “It’s altered, but I cannot put a word to it,” Dewar said.

  “It’s wrong,” Freia said.

  I hadn’t picked up on whatever it was they were discussing so cryptically.

  “Gwydion,” Dewar said, glancing at me over Freia’s head, “do not clutch at it, for it is not quite there—you must look for … currents.”

  I tried that. The lack of Spring-force had previously made this a frustratingly blank exercise, but now I saw what they meant: there was something there, similar to the Spring but not quite like. It was going … “Inward,” I said aloud, as this became apparent to me.

  “Drawing toward …” Prospero said, “toward … No good can come of this. Freia, you ought not to have come,” he said to her, almost angrily.

  “Papa,” she replied in a warning voice.

  He growled and let go my hand for an instant to loosen the Black Sword in its scabbard, a slithery metal noise. I dropped Mother’s hand automatically, cued by the sound, and checked Talon; as I let go of her, she touched my shoulder and left her hand there, pulling me to a stop and with me Prospero and Dewar.