The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  Ideally, of course, her enthusiasm would extend to drinking of the Spring and going forth on her own. Her steadfast refusal was not only difficult to understand but difficult to accept. She was one of us, one of Argylle’s family, and it was right that she join the accord, the union, of the Spring.

  I set up a number of mental arguments to justify the trip while I stared out the window watching the rain fall on the snow.

  When it seemed like a good idea, not a flight from tedium, I went to bed to sleep on it.

  In the morning, it was sleeting.

  “Oh, lovely,” I muttered, looking at the ice outside, and shook my head.

  Ulrike was writing a letter, reading another and replying to it, at the breakfast-table. She had become fast friends with Lishon Voulouy at New Year’s, and they wrote back and forth every other day—or so it seemed. I couldn’t imagine what they had to write so much about unless they were reporting on the business of everyone in town.

  “Good morning, Gwydion,” she said, looking up wide-eyed and covering her letters up with a start as I came in.

  “Good morning, Ulrike.” I poured myself coffee, propped my feet on one of the empty chairs, and began leafing through the newspaper. Ulrike had scavenged out the social and gossip pages. I snagged them back from her unapologetically and read the latest rumors and scandals and false allegations, then went on to the prosaic and dull news of ship arrivals and cargoes in Ollol, wine futures, and caravan reports. It tasted like cardboard in my mouth, the dry everydayness of it …

  Irritated by the banality of the editorial comments, I folded the whole thing into a paper hat with a paper cockade and dropped it on my oblivious sister’s head. Ulrike jumped.

  “Gwydion!”

  I laughed at her. “We leave tomorrow, or maybe the day after.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll take you to Montgard.”

  “You will?” she squeaked.

  “I will.”

  “Oh, Gwydion!” Delighted, she jumped up, losing the paper hat, and ran around the table and gave me a hug around the neck and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Hey!” I said, embarrassed by the unusual display. “Sit down, kid. Or better, make a list of things you need that you can fit in your saddlebags and go pack.”

  Ulrike released me. “I’m so glad! How can you leave?”

  “Nothing important is happening,” I said. Which was exactly true. It was all utterly ordinary.

  I felt a little guilty about leaving town and sticking Walter with the job of substituting for me. I’d decided to work several tasks at once into the journey. Delivering Ulrike to Montgard meant that we had to cross the Border Ranges, so I would ride through the Border more slowly on my return and check the area out. Argylle had agents in several Eddies along the way, off the Road and near it, and I thought it might be good to shake them up a bit with a surprise visit. Mother had done that sort of thing, after all. Lastly, the origins of the monster plague were still unclear, although the best explanation still seemed to be that an Eddy had ruptured. Therefore I meant to do some sorcerous work and see if I could pinpoint any disruptions in the Spring’s flow and then correlate the disruptions with beastly intrusions.

  Thus I found ample justification for taking a trip out of town. And I’d be gone no more than two months; finished or not, I felt I should return to Argylle after that.

  Walter was entirely agreeable about taking over for that time. “You ought to visit Montgard for a while, Gwydion,” he said when I talked to him about it later that day. “Enjoy yourself a bit.”

  “I might do that,” I said in a probably-not tone of voice.

  “I know you and Alex get along like paraffin and fire,” he added with a little smile, “but in the event that he and Ulrike don’t harmonize, you might bide there so you can bring her home.”

  “Perhaps. I hope this won’t hamper your own work too much.” Walter was fully as busy as I, with more interesting things. I felt guilty about pulling him away from them for a frivolous reason like this.

  He laughed. “Let me worry about that, Gwydion. No, it will not. I can delegate some of the rehearsal time, and mainly what I’ll be doing in the Citadel will be caretaking. The Council has been very meek since you shooed that dragon away. I doubt anything important will come up, just busy-work.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t leave me a huge stack of unfinished business to attend to, and then I shrugged. That was the price of a holiday. And by the time I got back, the weather would be better and I’d have a fresh eye for things like the wine-cellar problem. Really, this was the best thing for me to do just now. Hadn’t my tutor always counselled me that sometimes the only thing to do with a problem is to let be and review it later?

  “Well enough, then,” I said. “Don’t drink me dry, and have fun, and all that.”

  “Always, Gwydion. When shall you leave?”

  “I was thinking of leaving in two days. The full moon is then and there are lots of directions open.”

  Walter nodded. “Fine. I’ll be ready.”

  “Come over tomorrow and we can go over current business. There isn’t much. Come in the afternoon and stay for supper, if you can …”

  “Sounds great. See you then.”

  In due course Walter came over. I briefed him on the unfinished business I was leaving him and briefed him on the stuff I didn’t expect him to worry about so that he’d know about it. Afterward we had a casual supper and sat around drinking afterward telling each other embarrassing and funny anecdotes about our friends and older relatives, and finally we went off to bed after Walter gave me a lot of messages for people he thought he knew in Montgard.

  14

  THE NEXT DAY WE LEFT AT midmorning. Shaoll and Walter ate breakfast with us and bade us farewell at the Iron Bridge, arm in arm, the picture of a happy couple. Looking at them, I wished very much that I too had someone to wave good-bye with like that. Anselm and Hicha the Archivist, with whom I had done last-minute business at breakfast, waved from the tall lily-and-rose decorated front doors of the Citadel, and Ulrike waved back; I lifted my hand and then focused my attention on the journey, closing my eyes and letting Cosmo take us out at a slow walk.

  Ulrike was sensibly dressed in breeches and a heavy cloak; she had her hair up under a hat and looked like a boy at first glance, which was smart of her if it was intentional. We travelled light, carrying only a few spare clothes and some food and water. I rode Cosmo and she had a sedate, good-natured honey-colored palfrey named Daffodil. Virgil rode my left shoulder contentedly, making brief forays away from us from time to time to hunt for himself as we travelled on the Road.

  I had refreshed my memory of the route from an Ephemeris and a Map of Pheyarcet’s Roads and Leys. Getting near Montgard was a straightforward (so to speak) enough journey; getting into it would be trickier. The place has few approaches. Gaston chose it for defensibility for reasons of his own and later he had found it a convenient and pleasant hideaway for rendezvousing with Freia, and later still a perfect secluded place to conceal their first-born children Alexander and Marfisa from the world. But he had long since stepped down from ruling as their Prince and handed it over to Alexander; Marfisa wasn’t interested in it for herself and spent her time in other places, on her own affairs of which she said little. Alexander had dwelt there—when he wasn’t in Landuc—ever since.

  The route I intended to use from the Border to Montgard was not the most direct, but it had no seasonal or time-dependent Nexuses along it, and it passed through a couple of important Nodes. It was a relatively simple one with which Ulrike ought to be familiar. Our path to the Border from the Citadel I chose for its directness, on the principle that it is always good to know a fast way home to safety.

  I began to feel the flow of the Spring which surrounded us. I sank into it, let it suffuse me and fit itself to me as I fit myself to it. The Spring was the center of everything, the center of my being, and from it radiated the Roads and the weaker Leys, the shifting pu
lses of a cycling tide. I turned Cosmo’s head to the south, to ride along the Boulevard, and felt the constriction in the Road ahead at the South or Errethon Gate, felt the pulse of a Node not far outside the town and a relatively minor Nexus at a fountain as we passed it.

  We rode through the town quickly to the Errethon Gate. As we passed through it I felt the disconcerting flicker that was the perimeter of the city pass by. Ulrike moved closer to me, riding beside me. I smiled at her.

  “Feel that Node? That’s the Crow’s Tree,” I told her, and then realized she couldn’t feel it; she hadn’t drunk of the Spring.

  Ulrike shook her head.

  “That one,” I pointed at it, a solitary giant at a Y in the road ahead, which had been used as a gibbet from time to time and whose trunk was studded with nails, one for each hanged man or woman. It was laden with wet snow now, and snow whitened the usually black ground beneath its branches on which last year’s leaves rattled like bones. The Y at which it stood had one arm that was paved and worn as this road that we were on now, and another arm that was little more than a track, the vaguest sunken outline of a way on the ground. “We’ll bear right there,” I added, and we did, and with that turn we left the Errethon Road of Argylle and moved onto the real Road, the Road that went by its own non-geometrical and mysterious ways to places that were not on this globe and places that were and to places that weren’t really anyplace at all, the Road that rippled around us like the water of an insubstantial and powerful river, and that had its source, as all things in Argylle’s domain did, in the Spring beneath the Citadel. We left no hoofprints in the snow beneath the oak.

  Ulrike rode closer still to me. We passed phantom towns, unseen by our ghostly fellow-travellers; I felt the pulse and pound and pull of the Nodes and Nexuses and the leakage of the Leys we passed, and ignored them. This was the fastest and easiest way out of Argylle to the Border. There were a few knots (so to speak) in it, complicated Nexuses where we would have to say or do the right things or be there at the right time in order to go on, but by and large it was open Road. Pheyarcet’s Roads are less straightforward than Argylle’s, all in all; Panurgus built obstacles in certain places and modified the Road itself to improve Landuc’s situation in the heart of Pheyarcet. Mother hadn’t had the ability to do that, nor had Prospero evidently; at any rate Argylle’s Dominion was much as it was in the beginning—which simplified travel considerably.

  We rode at a good speed through wastelands and weird landscapes and one place that terrified Ulrike so that she seized my hand as Daffodil shied with fear—a dark, humid, and warm spot of Nothingness where there was no sound nor direction nor sensation to be had, where there was nothing but the Road to carry us on.

  I talked to Ulrike as we rode along, starting by asking if she had been in the Border Range between Landuc and Argylle before. She had not. So I told her something of that place.

  “It is a strange environment,” I said. “Things come and go there. There are fluxes that pass through, changing things. In the area called the Mountains of Madness … perhaps you had better just avoid it for now until you have a bit more experience.”

  “Are we going through there?”

  “No. We’re going to take the most direct route I could find across the Border. It will still take us a few days. We will pass the nights in the huts and waystations that are there. If we’re lucky,” I added hopefully, “there’ll be a caravan going through.” There would be stories and news and perhaps a trader or two I knew, fellowship in the dark starless nights.

  “Father said there is a lot of trade up and down the Border, but he didn’t know much of it … He said people from Landuc don’t go there.”

  “They cannot pass the peaks on their side, that is true.”

  “Why is that?”

  “That was one of the results of the Independence War,” I said. “I can give you a book about it. It was one of the concessions Landuc made, that the Border is not under its influence. And it wasn’t anyway—it is complicated.”

  Ulrike nodded. “Father said it was a dangerous place.”

  “Oh, not all that dangerous if you know where you’re going. Which I do. And if you stick to the trail it’s safe as houses.”

  “Is the trail charmed? Like the Road?”

  “No, no, no. Of course not. There are no Roads in the Border. Sorcery doesn’t work there. Most sorcery,” I corrected myself.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because it’s between. It’s … it’s neutral, you see,” I said. “Picture … hm, picture two equal circles, interpenetrating. There’s a vesica where they overlap. Rather than both of them dominating there, consider that the circles, one Argylle’s Spring, one Landuc’s Well, cancel each other out.”

  Ulrike digested this. “Can we use our Keys there?”

  “Sometimes. It’s unpredictable.”

  “That is dangerous, then,” she decided.

  I shrugged. “So is getting out of bed.”

  My sister blinked, taken off guard by this, and said nothing more.

  We broke to rest the horses and have a snack in a dark, cool forest by a stream whose boulders were covered deeply with velvety blue moss. Virgil caught up with us (he’d been missing for an hour or so) and perched on Cosmo’s saddle, preening meticulously. I took out the Map of Pheyarcet which I had brought with me and showed her our path from the Border to Montgard once we had crossed it.

  “This is not so direct …” Ulrike said, tracing it with her finger. “Wouldn’t this be better?”

  “No. You see this Ley here which connects these two Nexuses? I don’t know what kind of condition it’s in. It is not in a much-travelled part of the world and it could be very difficult to follow. I am sticking to the Road on this trip, so that you will know a fast way into a safe place if you should need it.”

  “Oh …” Ulrike nodded with understanding.

  “Yes. See, from this Nexus here, you could, if you wished, change course at the standing stone and head toward Landuc. If you wished. And here, at the well—see the mark?—here is an inn that is a popular place for people from Landuc to stay, a good place to run to if you’re ever in trouble in that area. Look, you can take this Ley, or this leg of the Road, or this or this to get there …” and I showed her several spots of interest as we lunched.

  She had never seen a Map of this kind before, though certainly Gaston had had at least one for each of the two realms, Argylle’s and Landuc’s, he moved in. I supposed he had been keeping Ulrike ignorant so that she would not make a beeline for Huhanwa when he had sent her forth from him. Heartless, some might say—but she did need to get out on her own. A cleverer person might recall details of the rides along Leys and the Road she said he had taken her on, might have noted the route they followed into Landuc, but Ulrike, a born follower, had not done those things, so Huhanwa’s location was as great a mystery as ever. Perforce we must leave it thus. Gaston would come around in his own time, no matter what Alexander thought or said.

  “And these are all the Roads, all the world there is,” Ulrike said, sitting back on her heels.

  “No, this is not all there is,” I corrected her. “But this is all that we can use. The Road leads into places where we cannot survive without special protections, sorcerous or physical, against poison gases, extreme conditions of heat or cold, hostile places not for us. We think there is life there, but we are not inclined to investigate.”

  “If it is poisonous—”

  “There are other kinds of life and living things than ours. We only see what is harmonious with us.”

  We mounted and rode on then, pushing on toward the Node where I meant to stop for a longer rest—a busy village with a few good inns, where two Leys crossed the Road. There we could sleep.

  In due course and without incident of any kind we attained the village, chose an inn which featured a plump and cheery red pony on its sign, and took rooms there for the night. I sent Virgil off to keep watch from the roof.

&
nbsp; The beer was very good and the food was fine country fare, substantial and filling. Since my sister had not drunk of Argylle’s Spring, the language was strange to her, and so Ulrike retired after we ate. I went for a stroll through the village and then listened, smoking a long clay pipe of the native tobacco, as the locals and other travellers traded stories and songs in the common room.

  I slept well, a pleasant holiday-feeling stealing over me as I lay in my bed listening to the little night sounds without. Travelling is a seductive occupation. If I’d been alone, I’d have altered my journey somewhat, taken longer to get to Montgard than we would, but I supposed I could just drop Ulrike off there and then fare forth on my own business.

  In the morning I purchased more food for us and we set out in a light rain, which was soon left behind. Our course moved back to the Road outside the village at an ancient cairn onto which we each tossed a rock before continuing on, attaining the Road thereby. I intended to push us now and make the Border our next stopover. Thus we rode harder, Virgil hanging onto the saddlebags behind me this time.

  The Border is a stark and uninviting-looking place. The valley that runs between the two steep mountain ranges is not so unpleasant, but the mountains themselves are inhospitable and the trails are not for the faint-hearted. We entered the foothills as the light was fading from the sky and I hurried us along to a hut marked on my map, which we reached by lantern-light in the perfect blackness that is the Border night.

  There was no one else there. It was the standard unattended wayfarer’s hut for the mountains, built to provide refuge for any traveller who needed it, maintained by the donations of caravan merchants and traders’ and craftsmen’s guild associations. These huts are sprinkled about and are an essential part of the tracks that wind through the mountains; without them, few would travel those mountains because few would care to be out in the open at night.

  Ulrike and I fed and watered the horses and left them in their side of the building (half for people, half for animals). There was peat, and it was chill in the stone hut, so I made a fire in the cylindrical stove. We ate cold meat and bread and rolled up in our cloaks on the uncushioned bunks without much talk. I tried to lighten Ulrike with suggestions of things she might do in Montgard, but she found the place oppressive and answered me distractedly, so I left it, played catch with Virgil for a few minutes to calm him down a bit (he dislikes the Border intensely), and then turned in.