They settled who was to be mistress, and Freia leaned forward to the gryphon’s ear. “Prospero,” she said. “Find Prospero, Trixie. Home to Prospero.”
Trixie stamped uncertainly. Freia repeated the order. Trixie shook her head and tossed it back, trotted a few steps, crouched, and leapt upward.
Gulping, Freia closed her eyes as the ground spun away under them; gryphons ascend in a spiral when they cannot drop into a glide, and for a woman who hated heights one was as bad as the other. Trixie went up and up, circling steadily, and then struck off toward a pass Freia had not been through before. On glimpsing the direction, Freia bit her lip and closed her eyes again; she hoped Trixie knew what she was doing. Gaston had said there was only one way into and out of Montgard on the Road, and it wasn’t that pass, the Gatmon Pass where a trio of mountain streams joined and plunged in a seasonally spectacular cascade, a pass which she knew led out of Montgard to Logreia. But she had to trust Trixie’s instinct, which had led her to Prospero before, and so Freia hung on, glad not to have eaten, and the gryphon arrowed through the gap as the moon set behind them.
Freia’s head spun. She gripped Trixie’s harness tightly and dared another peek at the world. The world was hazy. She seemed to see three or four images at once, superimposed and shifting in dominance. She closed her eyes. It was the Road; Trixie had done it, and Uncle Gaston had a Gate he didn’t know about. Freia squirmed cautiously to half-lie against Trixie’s back and outstretched neck, and Trixie’s wings went up and down.
The Empress Glencora had written regularly to Luneté of Lys, dispensing advice and cautions and liberal dollops of fashion and gossip. Luneté had written back faithfully, assuring the Empress of Cambia’s good health, of Lys’s good estate, and of Luneté’s thoughtful implementation of the Empress’s and Lord Gonzalo’s counsel. Luneté wrote the Empress three letters for every one received, but that was all right; the Empress was understood to be busy and Luneté had taken seriously the Imperial suggestion that she write often.
The Empress, therefore, was well-placed to detect a note of disharmony in Lys’s letters. On a delicately spring-tinted late-winter morning, she set down the latest with a little frown. Something was absent from this letter, and the letter was so complete and self-contained that the Empress could not at first think what it was. After a moment, she sent her secretary to bring her all the letters from Lys, which was quickly done. The Empress riffled through them rapidly, skimming for a name, a word, paused pensively over a smudged, once-creased note carefully smoothed and flattened. When she had gone through them all, she set them aside and thought.
It was news, she thought, that the Emperor would be pleased to hear. He had only grudgingly blessed the Ascolet-Lys union, and when the hotheaded young Baron had turned out to be his own bastard by his late brother’s late wife, the subject had gone into a freeze, neither man nor realm to be mentioned in the Palace. There was no question of Dewar’s veracity. The sorcery was true; it had been done with the Well, and there was nothing but truth there—the Emperor had not even tried to deny it.
The Empress, directed not to recognize the relationship, had taken no special notice of the bastard Baron. He was a handsome fellow, and she privately thought he took after his sire, finer-featured in a way that recalled Cecilie, but even more after Panurgus himself, tall and passionate and immoderate. The Empress knew very well that an able bastard will often supplant an incompetent legitimate son, and she feared for Josquin in the future of politicking and jockeying that had not yet begun. Ottaviano was under a cloud, but clouds were known to break apart.
As did other things. The Empress set the matter aside for a few days, until she chanced to see Josquin starting off into the gardens on a mild morning’s walk. She sent one of her ladies to detain him, and Josquin found himself strolling with his mother on his arm, his own plans diverted.
“To what do I owe the favor of your company, Mother?” he asked, wondering if she had somehow found out what his plans were.
“I do not see much of you, dear, not when you’re in Madana,” said the Empress, “and you have only dined at home once in the past sixteen days.”
“Ah, well, Father doesn’t look fondly on me when I do, you know,” said Josquin.
“You are his heir,” said she. “He expects certain things.”
Josquin blinked. “Mother, if this is about marrying—”
“No,” said the Empress. “That will look after itself for now, I’m sure. We’ll find a suitable match in good time. Of course we can’t have you marrying too far down. Your cousin was just right, as far as rank goes.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about marrying,” Josquin said, a little desperately.
“We weren’t. But you cannot be deaf to some of the talk I have heard about Ascolet.”
“Ah,” said the Prince, understanding. “He is admired, yes. Marries in Sarsemar’s nose, gets her pregnant in short order and presents the Emperor with a joint heir-presumptive to Lys and Ascolet—albeit a girl—loses all his wars and keeps his title, and now he’s revealed to be the Emperor’s by-blow. Quite the makings of a popular hero. Is Father going to acknowledge him?”
The Empress stopped on the flagstone path. Sometimes Josquin was too frank, but on the whole— “He’s said nothing of it to me,” she said, “and the Baron of Ascolet has, thus far, done nothing to please him so much.”
“I gather he mostly chases round after his wife and his livestock. Funny to think of him playing the doting husband; I assure you he wasn’t during the war. Wild fellow—people said Dewar was wild, but the Baron’s far over him there, and a mean streak too judging by what happened to poor Lady Miranda. I suppose it all depends on whether one is seen or not.”
“I suppose,” the Empress said, not wishing to drift into an etiquette discussion. “Josquin,” said she, “I feel a great anxiety about the Baron and about you.”
Josquin squelched several hearty retorts to this. “You think he could supplant me?”
“It’s possible.”
“Not without Father recognizing him,” said Josquin. “And he won’t do that while Madana matters two straws. Think, Mother. You’re Madana. I’m Madana. Is Father going to insult you and all of Madana by admitting to an indiscretion with his dead brother’s dead wife? Not Father. The Baron’s got all he’s going to get. He’s got Ascolet and Lys—by proxy—and if he starts ogling anything more, one might posit Sarsemar, Father will whip him back quick. He’s too ambitious to be given any indulgence. I may be a brainless fop, but I think that much is obvious even to me.”
“Lys and Ascolet. He has much already,” the Empress said. “More than enough.”
Josquin shrugged. “Let him keep what he has, for good behavior,” he said. “If he can.”
22
PROSPERO CLUNG TO ODILE. HE COULD lose himself in her yet, though despair smothered him. Eight years of harvesting hunger and slow death had left him famished for any glimpse of joy; though joy was fleeting or unattainable in his desperate, violent coupling, he pursued it all the more frantically for that. Odile entertained him with her games and devices, novelties and old tricks and elegant arrangements of sensations. He hoped that Odile would conceive; perhaps a child out of her by him could redeem the place. But she remained slender, and he said nothing of it to her, though he talked to her of everything else.
In a frenzy of self-abandonment, he made love to her during the late-summer storm that screamed in from the sea to denude trees of leaves and uproot trunks, smash boats to kindling and lift houses and roofs apart, and Odile received his attentions passionately and listened as he cursed Dewar.
The storm passed. Prospero rose, sponged himself, went forth to face its ravages. The gaunt Argyllines came out and stared at their stripped wood and the tumbled trunks, the flattened gardens and fields and the ruined boats. It was the storm of storms, the hand of the Element battering its passive opponent earth; it scoured every sign of cultivation from the fields with its floods and
winds and drove a dike of earth and debris up to the city walls.
Prospero walked and looked, numbness settling in his soul.
“If only the Lady were here,” he overheard, never for his ears. “If only the Lady had not died. All was well when she was here, before the war.” Prospero ground his teeth and hoped that his ingrate daughter’s soul suffered.
The trees which had not lost all their leaves to the wind now quickly lost them to the salt which the storm had carried, and the grasses were yellowed and wintry before time. A few sheltered trees still bore fruit, and Prospero said they must pick it unripe and compost it, a hard thing for starving folk to do. The inexorable sun shone again on the land, and the arid wind blew, and the mud baked to brick.
Nearly half the town’s remaining population began to ready for journeys. Prospero forbade anyone to leave the place; only by all working together could the fields be salvaged, and the fishing-boats would be crewless if so many departed. The city gates were closed and barred by night, and by day the slow-moving, famished field workers were watched from the walls. Prospero persuaded, and whom he could not persuade he commanded, and whom he could not command he forced, still dominating them with words and will. None left the city, but the silence that hung inside the walls was as still as emptiness: a dull waiting silence, unbroken by protest or lament.
Ten days after the storm, the full moon rose, then darkened. At first no one noticed, and then a woman fetching water cried out and pointed at the bent shape of the moon’s sphere overhead: one edge had corroded, was caving inward. Soon the whole populace had left their long-houses and stood on the common, staring at this fresh distortion of natural order.
The shouts and shrieks attracted the attention of folk on the island, at Prospero’s tower, and they too stared. Prospero and Odile, on the top of the tower, watched too, neither speaking. The moon dimmed, tarnished, reddened.
“An omen,” Prospero murmured at last.
“A sign,” said Odile. “Dewar’s at work, I doubt it not: a threat, or challenge, my lord. Would that I might aid thee better to meet it.”
A boat pushed off from the mainland and hurried to the isle; two people left the boat and ran to the tower, ran up the stairs to Prospero as quickly as the hunger-weakness allowed. The door rattled open; Scudamor tripped on the threshold, gasping, and fell on hands and knees, jostled Odile and Prospero.
“Cloddish oaf; beware lest thou remain thus,” hissed Odile. “What—”
Behind Scudamor, even in the deep night-dusk, Cledie glimmered. She gazed, serene as always, at Prospero, then at Odile, then at Prospero again, and Prospero felt a cold, unhappy discomfort settle on him. She had returned, but he felt her draw away, repulsed. Odile did not finish her question.
Scudamor picked himself up, dusting his skinned knees, moved back, away from Odile. “Lord Prospero,” he said, “the folk are afraid of this night-in-night, and I beg you give me some words to comfort them.”
“The moon hath two halves, bright and dark, fair and cold,” Prospero said; “this night her darker face is shown. She’ll turn again. Fear not the dark; the mutable moon’s a tricksy bauble, in light and dark inconstant. Let them be calmed: ’twill brighten anon.” He halted; he could not think of more to say, though his words rang unconvincing to him.
Scudamor waited, as if expecting more; Cledie said nothing, her expression indistinct now in the gloom. “So shall I tell them, Lord,” said Scudamor at last. Cledie disappeared entirely in the darkness and the Seneschal followed her down. A torch-light flared in the stairs as the door closed behind him, sharp and yellow in the night.
Prospero returned his attention to the moon, nearly gone now; and he tried to think, despite the sudden pain he felt at glimpsing lovely Cledie: he could command her stay, but to what end? “The moon,” he said softly, hardly knowing he spoke aloud, “doth shine with borrow’d fire, lent by the resting sun: without that charity, her face, unveil’d by light, must show its true complexion.”
“ ’Tis artifice,” disagreed Odile. “The moon’s light is hers by ancient right, now clipped by jealous earth; without unnatural shade, illumined fair she rides her course. She shifts her aspect inasmuch she shifts her stance, and that’s full natural, for there’s nothing in the world appears the same from every side.”
“That’s true,” conceded Prospero.
“And see, dear lord, e’en as we speak, she gleams again: own that’s her true face, as she turns to gaze on us once more.”
Prospero stared at the slender, long-limbed crescent, steadily broadening, that marked the waxing circle of the moon. Had he not forsworn sorcery, he knew he’d feel great changes in the world. Such events were not causeless, nor did they simply end. “ ’Tis her true face; her wonted pallor shows she’s Queen of Night. We, though, dwell in the day; and paint her as she would, I’ll not take her to mistress, nor longer gaze and howl her majesty’s praise.” He turned away and went to the door, pulled it open, and went down in the torch-light; but Odile stayed behind to watch the moon.
The wind shifted that night. By morning, it had changed quarters and warmed, then fallen off altogether; no rain fell, but the air was milder, nearly summer-like. Three days passed, and a curious mist came to Threshwood. A greenish shimmer clung to the trees and bushes. New growth burst out to replace lost leaves, and flowers began to bud and blossom half a year off-step.
Prospero disbelieved; it could not be true; some greater, final horror must follow this hope.
The strange weather went on. Songbirds absent since the first hard winter now rehearsed liquid arpeggios among the untimely flowers. Some trees, the protected few whose fruits Prospero had spared, bore fruit and flower both at once, a strange sight; the rest blossomed abundantly. Mothweed grew everywhere and perfumed the air, springing up in cracks and nooks and waving delicate white flowers in the moist breezes.
Odile was not pregnant. Prospero could not find explanation for the second spring, and he prognosticated that it would end with a sharp frost and a long, hard winter.
But the trees hurried to turn time back to early summer. The thorns that had sprung up became softer—they bore flowers and then berries, small swelling red clusters. Opportunistic surviving seeds burgeoned in the fields, crowding out the weeds, and the Argyllines watched the crops and urged them mutely to grow.
Prospero, confounded, went down to the Spring, turning the key and descending for the first time since he had locked the door on it.
His eye found a faint glimmer that he could not be sure was not merely his desire’s invention. His hand, over the Spring, felt a firm, seeping pressure. It was not what it had been in former days, but it was there, more there than recently. Yet no water had risen, and he stood for a long time in the dark with his hand in the flow of power, wondering at its alterations, and returned to the upper world with a soothed serenity in his face that greatly reassured Scudamor and Utrachet.
These two were of the private opinion that the Countess was ill tidings and that the improvement in Argylle’s fortunes must be due to the return, in hiding somewhere but in Argylle, of Prospero’s son.
“He was a kind fellow,” Scudamor told Cledie and Utrachet in an undertone, as they stood on the tower watching the freakish spring greenery wave in a mild autumn breeze. A party of workers was digging unenthusiastically at the half-buried city walls.
“Kind to my lady, and good to my lord,” Utrachet agreed, “and a student of his father’s Art, and it seems we do need to have one.”
Cledie said, “The Countess likes him not at all. I’ve heard her.”
“She has no good to say of our Lady Freia neither,” Utrachet lowered his voice more. “You know—”
“I’ve thought—”
They looked at one another and gulped.
“Best not discuss it,” decided Scudamor.
“I miss our Lady Freia,” Utrachet said softly. “She was one of us, wasn’t she. And she never wanted to leave us.”
“She did n
ot leave us of her will,” Cledie reminded them; “Lord Prospero carried her away.”
“Something happened to my lord in that war,” Scudamor murmured. “He never had time for her after that. She was always chasing him, poor chick, and we were all working on the walls then, day and night.”
“We built well,” Utrachet said.
“But why?” Scudamor whispered. “She didn’t want walls.”
“She didn’t want the war,” Utrachet reminded him, and they glanced at one another for an instant before looking determinedly both outward at the Jagged Mountains to the north, where a veil of rain, the first since the terrible windstorm, was greying the whiteness of the peaks and working its way down among the forest’s blackened trees, toward them.
When later memory blurred history and compressed it, The Year There Was No Winter somehow became the first year of the world, in spite of everyone knowing about Prospero’s War and all that had happened before it. But people often think two things at once, and so that year, when the weather following the Great Storm held mild long enough for a small harvest of fall-sown vegetables and continued subdued and soft until spring came again in its proper place in the seasons, got mixed up with the year after Prospero’s Making, and blended itself with other events, until only the few survivors who had been Made by Prospero had a remote chance of keeping the story straight. Fortunately, one of these was Hicha, who kept a chronicle of all that happened for Scudamor, and she reported on the confusion and repeated the proper order of things in her account. So it was written down correctly, but never remembered.
The Year There Was No Winter puzzled Freia.
The journey to Argylle was long. Trixie haltingly felt her way, and Freia clung to her back and let the gryphon choose the route. They backtracked three times before attaining the wasteland Freia well recalled crossing with Trixie in search of Prospero, with Dewar on their way to find Prospero, with her father on their way to Landuc. Now she crossed it with Trixie again in search of Prospero and Argyle. It was wider than she remembered; there was no water to be found, so that she and Trixie both trembled with thirst before they reached a water-hole in the steep hills on the other side. There had been no hills before, and she thought she must be recrossing it in different places each time. It seemed the only reasonable explanation. Prospero had described to her how mountains were made. These didn’t look as if they had been pushed out of the earth recently, nor were there the hot rocks and black smokes that he had said made other mountains.
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 36