by Jane Yolen
“Think,” Jenna said. “Think like a queen, Scillia.”
Scillia was silent. If she was thinking, it was not apparent. She just looked angry.
Corrie put his hand on his sister’s shoulder. “She’s made copies, of course. And shown the originals to the council.”
“Hold your brother Corrine close, Scillia,” said Jenna. “Dark sister to your light. He has the mind of a plotter and the soul of a saint.” She stood. “I am tired. Alta alone knows how tired. But I have no time to sleep. Come with me to your father’s room and give him your farewells.”
“With all my heart, mother,” Corrie said, bowing his head.
“But I am going with you to the grove,” Scillia said. “Surely I can say my farewells there.”
“Only as far as the grove, daughter. Not into it. And I have no guarantee your father will be able to speak to you there. Besides, it is not yet your time to come into the grove. This is your turning.”
“What do you mean, mother?” Scillia asked, but she spoke to her mother’s back. She turned to Corrie. “What does she mean?”
This time he had no answer for her.
Their goodbyes were short for Carum, already groggy from the healer’s strong poppy decoction, could barely keep his eyes open.
Scillia knelt by the bed and held her father’s hand. She marveled at how light it felt, as if dying were merely the loss of bone. Corrie stood at the bedfoot, his shoulders hunched, his right hand on the canopy’s tester. He was so tall and silent a presence, he almost looked like the figure of Alta’s Last Watcher that was embroidered on the main arras in the throne room: that dark-robed, vulture-headed character from the tales.
Jenna looked at the two of them rather than at Carum and sighed. They will do! she thought. Then for a moment she worried about Jemson, off somewhere in the bowels of the castle or perhaps down at the Berick docks bribing some poor Garunian sailor to take one last message for him. That he should be such a sorry son … She stopped herself. He is what he is.
She knew that Scillia and Corrine between them would serve the country well, and they could handle their treasonous brother with the help of the council. Jemson was sly and he was a braggart, but he had no real strength. Of that she was sure.
“For this turning,” she whispered.
As if he heard her, Carum moved fitfully in the great bed. His eyes flickered open and his lips formed Jenna’s name. “I need to tell …” he began. Then his eyes closed.
“I am here, my love,” Jenna said, quickly shooing the others from the room. Before they quite got out the door, Jenna whispered, “Scillia, I count on you.” Then she closed the door behind them with a quiet snick.
Jemson was neither in the bowels of the castle nor at the docks. He was high on the battlements, a tame dove in his hands. In a small pouch tied to the dove’s right leg was a message.
This being a time of peace, there were no guards around to see what Jemson was about, but he moved stealthily anyway. When he was certain no one had seen him, he flung the bird into the air.
The bird flapped once, twice to get its balance. It flew east to the water’s edge, then south along the coast, till it found its heart’s compass. Then it headed straight east again across miles of open water toward its home.
The cart with Carum’s bed was pulled along the King’s Way by two broad Dales mares bred for placid dispositions and massive strength. The road was still broken and pocked by the long winter’s upheavals, and the cart lurched along like a drunkard just come from the ale house. Carum was drugged much of the time and did not notice how long or how wretched the road was.
“Or else he would be sitting up and making lists for the repairs,” Scillia said.
Jenna agreed, even smiling for a moment. Then she grew serious again. “Soon enough he will have to endure a harder route, and without the tincture at the end. For he must be awake to agree to the last. I will, myself, pull him through the woods to the grove. It will of course mean tying him to the sledge, but …”
“Two to pull will make things go more smoothly, mother,” Scillia argued. “Two. Or more. We have the soldiers. Surely they can …”
“We have been over and over this, Scillia,” Jenna said. “No one but your father and I are allowed to go all the way. Great Alta said I can bring one other into the grove.”
“But you are already two in a single breast, mother,” Scillia pointed out. “There is Skada.”
“If I go by night. But if I go by day there will be just Carum and me.”
Scillia shook her head. “How can you leave your dark sister behind?”
“As you say, she is here, within me. So in a way I do not leave her at all. The Book of Light says: two sisters, two sides. But there are no shadows in the grove. She could not come in bodily even if I wanted her to.” She put up her hand as a signal to stop and the soldiers leading the two mares eased them to a gentle halt. “Here. Here is where we stay.”
Scillia dismounted and checked her father who still slept heavily in the cart. Then she turned to Jenna. “You cannot mean here, mother.” She pointed around them where the great trees crowded in toward the broken road. “There is nothing here but forest. You cannot mean to stop here.”
“This is exactly where I mean to stop.” Jenna turned from her. “Take the sledge down,” she ordered.
“Then you cannot know what you are doing,” Scillia said. “I forbid it.”
Jenna turned to her and smoothed a lock of Scillia’s hair that had come unbound on the ride. “You cannot forbid me anything,” she said softly. “I am still queen. And your mother besides.” If she meant to be comforting, her humor missed its mark.
Scillia took a step back, away from her mother’s hand.
“Sil, you must trust me on this. You and Corrie. As for Jem …”
“Jem trusts no one and no one trusts Jem,” Scillia said bitterly.
“That you shall have to sort through yourselves,” Jenna said. “Do you know what the Berick fisherfolk say? The skate and the eel do not swim the same, but they both live in the sea. That is you and Corrie and Jem.”
“We are not fish nor have we fins.”
“You are not hearing me.”
“I am not listening.”
They glared at one another while around them the soldiers completed their tasks.
“When father is dead, then will you come home?”
Jenna took the step toward Scillia again, and put her arms around her daughter whose body remained rigid with anger. “Listen this time. He is not going to die. Nor am I. We will live on in the grove till you need us again.”
“The grove or the Green Hall? Wasn’t that what the M’dorans call it?” Scillia tore herself from her mother’s arms. “Whatever its name, it is nothing but a nursery story. I will not be cozened at such a time with such tales. I am no child.” This time she walked two steps away, her one hand balling into a fist.
Jenna smiled sadly. “Such stories hold their own truth, Scillia. And the truth is that your father and I were at the beginning of this circle, but it is your turning now.”
“You intend to die with him!” Scillia cried. “I will never see you again.”
Jenna went over to her and took the fist in both her hands, gently prising the fingers open. She kissed her daughter’s palm. “When you look in the mirror, Scillia, when you speak to your own daughters and sons, you will see me and hear me. I will be with you when you need me most.”
“I need you most now, mother. We all need you most now.” Scillia fought the tears that glittered in her eyes, willing them not to fall.
“The Dales need you now, not me,” Jenna said. “My work is done. It was done twenty-six years ago but I stayed for love. Your work is just beginning. Take the soldiers and go. Do not make me weak now when I need strength for two.” She embraced Scillia once again and this time Scillia returned it, her body shuddering with emotion.
They stood breast to breast for a long moment, before Jenna broke the
m apart. She turned and started lining the sledge with cushions from the cart. A single soldier helped her, a woman with hair like a newly threshed wheat field.
“I know you,” Jenna said slowly. “You are Sarana! Did you not go back to your own captain?”
“No, I stayed on at the castle and sent Voss home.”
“And have you been here, on the road, with us all the time? I did not recognize you till now.”
“We notice what we must,” Sarana said.
“And your back?”
“Better than his,” Sarana said, nodding at Carum still dozing fitfully in the cart.
Sarana and Scillia helped Jenna lift Carum into the sledge where they tied him down with a soft belt across the chest and feet so that he would not slip out. Scillia leaned over and kissed his face, but he did not stir.
Then one by one the soldiers filed past to gaze down at their king. Sarana was the last of them.
“Now go,” Jenna said to them and they started back down the road in a line more ragged than they were used to, but Scillia stubbornly stayed behind.
“You must go, too,” Jenna said to her. “For your father. For me. Be a queen. Your people need you. Now!”
Reluctantly, then angrily, Scillia mounted her gelding and rode after the soldiers. She did not look back to see Jenna, white braids atop her head like a crown, pick up the ends of the sledge in which Carum lay and start to pull it over the grass and into the nearest woods.
Sarana peeled off from the troop at their first rest and, putting the woods between her and her mates, raced back the way they had come. She found the mark of the cart and the sledge tracks going into the woods. Leading her horse, she followed carefully deep and deeper still.
After a while the trees opened out again onto a meadow where the grass was still winter brown. She puzzled over the muddled trail. Jenna’s track and that of the sledge were clear. But all around them, sometimes going across and smudging the prints, were the signs of many small naked feet, as if a gang of barefooted children had gathered around the woman and her burden.
Sarana had heard stories of the Grenna, the Green Folk, the Little People, but she did not credit them. She had put her childhood—stark and terror-ridden—behind her along with childhood’s stories. Still she could not imagine what a group of children would be doing in this high meadow, so far from any town, shoeless and tracking the queen. She did not like the look of that circle of small prints. In her experience, things that could not be explained were dangerous things.
Mounting her horse again, she galloped along the sledge trail to where the meadow ended once again in the woods. She had to dismount there to follow the trail along a crumbling ridge. In her heart she was all admiration for Jenna who must have been gifted with enormous strength to have come so far so fast dragging the sledge. But her head was full of warnings.
“Ain’t natural,” she whispered to herself. “Ain’t right.”
The ridge ended at a cliff’s edge. So did the trail. It took her all the rest of the day to climb down that cliff, sliding at times on the rocky scree.
There was no sign of the sledge, the sick king, the queen.
A week’s scouring on small rations and less sleep brought her no more answers. She gave up only when there were no more crumbs of journeycake and her stomach clenched at the thought of more boiled ferns. She rode her horse slowly back toward Berick Castle and the barracks she now called home.
Scillia and the soldiers had been four days going and three days coming back. Her mood was not helped by the weather: it was grey and foggy in the mornings, grey and rainy in the afternoons. Only at night, under a surprisingly clear sky where stars flickered like fireflies, did she find some measure of peace.
But she did not sleep.
And she did not weep.
The sergeant in charge of the guard tried to find her a place strewn with pine needles, soft and scented, since she would not rest in the cart.
But still she did not sleep.
And she would not eat.
“Please, princess,” the sergeant begged, his homely face scrunched in concern. “If you do not sleep or eat, your mother will have my head.”
He does not know, Scillia thought. He does not understand that she is never going to return. She did not try to enlighten him.
Only when they arrived back at the castle to find the gates closed to them and the watch inexplicably wearing the colors of Garun soldiery did she tell him what she knew.
“A queen three days and no longer,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh.
“You will be queen for all time, ma’am,” he replied. It was all he said while he marshalled his few men and Scillia, leading them away from the castle and into the cover of the deep mazed woods before the Garuns within the stone walls had time or inclination to follow.
THE LEGEND:
Three days ride from Berick is a deep old-growth forest known as Gemma’s Grove or Queen’s Own. The woods there are thick with oak and blackthorn, rowan and ash; three species of squirrel live there and nowhere else in the Dales. In the deepest part of the woods is a strange meadow called The Green. Trackers and huntsmen will not willingly cross that lea. Men have fallen down sinkholes or otherwise disappeared. It is said that in the last century an entire troop of scouts wandered by mistake across that meadow-scape, boys in their first training. Twenty boys went in, only five came out again, and they had no idea what had happened to their mates.
THE MYTH:
Then Great Alta took the girl child by the hair and turned her around ten times. “Now,” quoth she, “you are a queen.”
“I have no throne,” said the girl.
“Make one. Or take one,” quoth Great Alta. “Or do without.”
“Can I do such a thing?” asked the girl.
“Can you not?” Great Alta replied.
four
Usurper King
THE MYTH:
Then Great Alta saw the girl on the ground and she was weeping.
“What ails you?” quoth Great Alta.
“I want my mam,” cried the girl.
“You are too old for the nipple, too young for the grave. Mother yourself,” quoth Great Alta.
THE LEGEND:
There is a story they tell of the hundred-day king that when he returned from over the sea he killed his mother and father, his sister and brother all on the same day. And when the soldiers came to take him to the judgment room, he cried them merci.
“For I am an orphan child,” he said. “And the last of my line.”
So they showed him merci who had showed none to others. And from that day forth it is said in the Dales: He is as merciful as a hundred-day king, meaning someone who has absolutely no thought for others.
THE STORY:
Jemson found the throne a hard seat.
He sent for pillows and tried them each in turn, pillows garnered from all the bedrooms and sitting couches in the castle.
Corrie heard of the search when a server came to his room and demanded his bed cushions, for he had been confined to the one room since the day the seven Garun ships had sailed into the harbor and taken the castle with scarcely a blow dealt.
“A hard seat indeed,” Corrie said, and laughed. “And he will find it harder still in the days to come. Here—take them with my blessing. Jem will find no good in them.”
Trying to curry favor with the new regime, and being somewhat of a toad, the server reported this conversation to the new council chief, a Garun, who in turn told Jemson.
At the news, Jemson’s face turned a variety of colors, all shades of red, starting with a flush at the neck. He was finding his brother less of a help than he had hoped, than he had counted on. “Blood,” he had warned the Garuns, “that is mine will not be spilled.” By that he had meant Scillia was fair game, but not his mother or brother. But when his mother had not returned, nor Scillia, and when Corrie had proved intractable, Jemson had to change his plans. He did not make new plans easily.
“What …” he asked, thinking he was crafty in the doing and not realizing how transparent he was, “do you advise?”
The Garun was the same Sir Rodergo Malfas who had come across the sea thirteen years earlier to take up the young prince. He had molded him, child and man, with an ease that was laughable, though he was always careful not to laugh at Jemson to his face. Jemson did not take teasing well. And any laughter he counted as ridicule, whether it was meant or not.
“My King,” Malfas said, making such a low obeisance it was almost an insult, “your brother will not change. He can only gather around him those malcontents and wishers-of-ill. Best you put him with the others in the dungeon.”
“But he is my brother,” Jemson said. He had half expected this advice from Malfas, indeed hoped for it. But faced with it in truth, he had a sudden qualm.
“He is therefore your chiefest enemy,” Malfas explained. Sometimes he thought it would have been easier to work with the brother; he at least had brains and a sly wit. But it had been Jemson who had been gifted them, and Jemson they had trained. Art is inborn, craft outborn, the Book of Battles said. “We will not have him killed. Just … controlled.”
“Good. I do not want him killed. He is of my …”
“Your blood is sacred to us all, my king,” Malfas said, stroking his elegant moustache and smiling indulgently.
“Then dungeon him,” Jemson said, glad to have had his mind made up for him. “And let’s get on with the coronation. You may call me king all you like, but I am not yet so in the eyes of my people.”
Malfas nodded. “I will be but a minute,” he said, and went out into the hall to call the guard for that particular duty.
The guards who came to take Corrie to the dungeon were Garuns as well. Few of the Dale soldiery had come willing into the new army. Those who had not been killed or imprisoned on the day the Garuns sailed into Berick Harbor, were long since fled to the woods.
Corrie was not surprised by the sudden imprisonment. Indeed, in the weeks he had been confined to his bedroom, he had already managed to contact the two or three still-loyal servers in the castle—a cook, a scullery, and a girl whose father was one of the forest soldiers. He sent messages through them to his sister, though he did not expect to hear back from her. His comments on the guards and Malfas and Jemson were quite specific. He gave Scillia numbers and locations of the soldiers as best he could determine. He gave her his thoughts on the castle staff morale. While he did not consider himself Jemson’s chief enemy, no matter what Malfas might think—for he too held sacred the bonds of blood—he considered himself Scillia’s chief spy. Family, more than mere blood, and the safety of the Dales were first in his thoughts.