King of Swords (The Starfolk)

by Dave Duncan

  “There are other amulets,” his mother said.

  “Not as good as Saiph, Mom! How many names?”

  Rigel said, “More than a hundred, I think.”

  “Doggy!” the imp said, apparently a sign of approval. “Is the Minotaur’s name on there now?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t read.”

  Startled, Izar examined Rigel’s expression carefully for evidence of leg pulling, and then said, “Schmoor! I’ll teach you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can you sing?”

  “No.”

  “I can teach you that too!”

  “Not now!” his mother said. “If you’re bored, why don’t you just put yourself to sleep?”

  The imp shrugged, glanced out at the scenery, and surprisingly agreed. “Right. I’ll tell myself to wake me when we get to Dziban. But you behave! Remember, he’s a halfling.” He leaned his head against Rigel’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and immediately went limp.

  “Is he faking?” Rigel asked Mira, who could see him better.

  She was smiling, but saying nothing, playing the perfect servant. “Don’t think so. That’s the same trick you pulled in the Winnebago.”

  “I swear I will strangle him,” Alniyat said through clenched teeth. “Filthy-minded little pest! Why don’t you throw him overboard, as a favor to me?”

  “I could roll him up and tuck him under the bench,” Rigel said. With more room on the bench, he wouldn’t need to squeeze in so closely next to Alniyat, who didn’t appear to be enjoying the intimacy as much as he was. Had yesterday’s invitations in the Moon Garden been all a fake, or was she just putting it off until they were alone again?

  “That seems a little unkind.”

  Teasing was unkind too. He made more room on the bench by lifting the limp Izar onto his lap, wrapping an arm around him to keep him in place. Then he slid his other arm around Alniyat. She went rigid, and Albireo gaped in horror. Mira was intently studying the sky aft, her eyebrows set high.

  Alniyat had her lips pressed tight, but she did not tell the presumptuous half-breed to take his arm away.

  “That’s much better,” he said. It felt very good indeed, except that Izar weighed two tonnes. “How old is he?”

  “Nineteen.”

  End of conversation.

  Albireo said, “He was born in the year of black butterflies. Understand, Rigel, that starfolk take about twice as long to mature as earthlings do. They have plenty of time.”

  “And they never die? How does one recognize an old starborn?”

  “You never see one. They just fade. You might say they die of boredom, because they’ve been everywhere and done everything.”

  All the elves Rigel had seen so far had looked young and behaved like children or randy adolescents. “This morning a starborn was killed while trying to herd a chimera at Alrisha. Is that sort of suicidal behavior normal?”

  The swanherd winced at such crudity. “I would not go so far as to call it suicidal. Daring… ostentatious…”

  Gienah finished her long climb and dived into another great wheel of cloud. Rigel’s ears popped again. The swan emerged in salty wet mist, with breakers and rocks not far below. It seemed as though every link required a drop of about ten thousand feet, and he suspected that going in the reverse direction would do the same, because that would make as little sense as everything else in the Starlands.

  “I understand that Queen Electra rarely appears in public. How old is she?”

  “I am not sure.” Albireo’s manner implied that he did not wish to comment on that in present company.

  “Nineteen centuries,” Alniyat said. “Give or take a generation. Prince Kornephoros is a bit over half that; he’s starting to plan the celebration of his first millennium. She named him regent-heir about three centuries ago. Prince Vildiar is just past his five-hundredth birthday. He has no real claim to the crown except ambition and the argument that Kornephoros is too old to inherit, which is absurd.”

  “And the third claimant, Princess Talitha?”

  “Count Talitha is out for the best of all possible reasons—she doesn’t want the job. She insists that her reign would not last long enough to boil an egg. I don’t suppose the old darling has ever boiled an egg in her life.”

  “Good for her,” Rigel said. “But Electra must have been born while the Caesars ruled in Rome. If she’s so old, why does she only have three living descendants? A human ruler of that era would have thousands by this time.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Alniyat seemed more relaxed now. She had either decided to overlook the offending arm over her shoulder or was enjoying it. “Electra has many descendants, although starfolk do not reproduce as fast as humankind and many of us die by misadventure, as you guessed. The qualification to rule is a special talent called Naos. Are you aware of the grades of magic, halfling?”

  “I’m not aware of anything,” Rigel said except the warm pressure of the girl tucked into the crook of his arm, the sweetness of her scent, her silken softness, and the sheer never-let-this-end pleasure of being allowed to hold her. Nothing else mattered. Someone had come within a hair’s breadth of murdering him and all he could think about was her.

  “Magic comes partly from bloodlines, and partly from hard work. It develops in adolescence, like hair and eye color, and is graded by the six colors of the rainbow. Halflings can usually reach violet, rarely blue. You can perceive the names of the starborn so you already have a trace of talent, and with some training you may be able to strengthen it. Most starborn achieve green or even yellow. One does not ask, of course. Orange is rare and red extremely so, because it requires both innate talent and centuries of study. Your amulet must have been created by a red, and it has grown stronger as it aged.”

  “So does a starborn’s hair and eye color indicate his or her grade of magic?”

  “Oh no, except that they develop at about the same age.”

  Another silence, and this time Albireo broke it. “There is another kind of power, called Naos, which crops up unpredictably, with little regard for bloodlines. It is named after the legendary founder of the Starlands, who must have lived sixty thousand years ago, if she lived at all. The only three starfolk who presently possess Naos are—

  “By the way, those lakes down there are the Ascella Lakes. They have the most superb fly-fishing in the entire realm. I have even heard people say that there is no finer fishing anywhere in the continuum than the Ascella Lakes. Have you ever tried fly-fishing, Halfling Rigel?”

  “No,” Rigel said. “But I know a lure when I see one. What were you saying about Naos?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  This time the pause was chilly and lasted long enough to be uncomfortable. The swan flew on with its gentle rocking motion. Just as Rigel was about to comment on the mountains coming into sight ahead, Alniyat spoke up angrily.

  “The halfling was about to tell you that Naos magic, which the monarch requires to hold the realm together, confers a distinctive ‘mark of Naos.’ At present Vildiar, Talitha, and Kornephoros are the only three Naos starfolk.”

  Mira had been keeping a respectful silence, as befitted a slave, but now, surprisingly, she was smirking. “And does this mark of Naos have something to do with a starborn’s hair?”

  “And eyes,” Alniyat agreed. “He can’t dissemble when he’s asleep.”

  Rigel looked down at Izar’s head where it rested against his chest. The boy’s eyes were closed, and his huge ears were as limp as a spaniel’s. His scalp fur, while still white, had taken on a faint rainbow sheen, like the back of a CD or a milk opal. No adult elf at Alrisha had sported hair like that, nor any of the imps who had performed at the banquet.

  “So he was telling the truth after all when he told me to address him as ‘most noble’ Izar?”

  “No, he was not!” Alniyat stormed. “We have no titles below those of royalty. Izar is merely a starling like any other. He will become an adult starborn at fort
y-one. If he has developed the full mark of Naos by then, Electra will name him a prince. And it does look like it’s going to happen. I made him promise to dissemble while we were at Alrisha. It’s good for him to be just another imp around other imps sometimes.”

  “He wasn’t dissembling when a gang of them raided the kitchens yesterday,” Mira said. “The others knew what he was. He was giving them all orders, and even the biggest of them deferred to him.”

  “I will skin him!” his mother growled.

  “So Izar may be in line for the throne?” Rigel asked.

  “In a few centuries, maybe. Stars help the Starlands if that happens!”

  “He’s a good imp,” Rigel protested. “He has spark. Who’s his father?”

  “His father isn’t around much,” she said, suddenly sullen.

  “I sympathize. I never knew my father.” He might soon meet him at last, but he did not expect to like him.

  Alniyat sighed and nodded. “That may be part of the reason why Izar has taken to you like a cat to cream. It was your scars at first. Then the fight with the Minotaur. And that insanity just now with the dragonflies. But…”

  But nothing, apparently.

  Rigel smiled down at the child he held. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘role model’?”

  “Does it mean ‘hero’?”

  “I suppose it does.” He held her worried gaze. “I won’t betray his trust, starborn. I don’t prey on children! I have other weaknesses, but never that. If I have to find work in these Starlands of yours, I’d rather be a babysitter than an assassin.”

  “An easy choice, I’d think,” she said coldly.

  Izar twitched. His left ear was flattened against Rigel’s chest, but the right one straightened up. He blinked.

  Alniyat said, “That is Dziban straight ahead, home of Regent-heir Kornephoros.”

  Mira turned around to see and said, “Holy shit!”

  Rigel could not speak because his jaw was hanging open.

  Chapter 15

  Gienah was flying over scenery that could have been copied from some traditional Chinese watercolor—little thatched villages set in misty blue-green wetlands of lakes and paddy fields, while great sugarloaf peaks with impossibly steep sides soared in the background, an array of giants fading back into the distance. But the peak that was obviously their destination defied belief. It was capped like a mushroom with a vast and intricate web of crystal, shining in spikes of brilliance and flashes of rainbow. Towers and minarets and domes were massed all over the top, while the sides beetled out in ribs, arches, ledges, terraces, and buttresses, seemingly all constructed of crystal. Even beneath that, icicles of glasswork extended down the rock like roots, some almost reaching the lakes. The sheer size and impossibility of it grew ever more pronounced as the swan approached. Soon Rigel could make out battlements and staircases, balconies and windows, fountains and waterfalls.

  “That’s the Crystal Castle,” Izar remarked, stretching his pipestem arms and launching a huge yawn. Then he realized that he was sitting on Rigel’s lap and turned to grin at him with eyes of mother-of-pearl that shone as bright as that miracle hilltop city ahead. “Aren’t I heavy for you?”

  Rigel leaned close to one of the great bat ears and whispered, “Any minute now my bladder will explode.”

  Izar beamed. “Really?” He bounced sadistically a few times to find out.

  It didn’t.

  “You promised me,” Alniyat said, “that you would dissemble your hair and eyes the entire time we were at Alrisha. I am told you broke that promise.”

  Izar’s hair turned white as snow. “Well, it’s isn’t easy for me yet, Mom! When I get caught up in a game or something, I forget. And when some of the guys know, there isn’t any point in pretending for the rest, is there?”

  His look of innocence was so obviously fake that Rigel choked back a snigger that made Alniyat glare and no doubt raised him another hundred points in Izar’s approval.

  “We’re at Dziban now anyway,” the imp said breezily. “Why don’t you stop your dissembling and let the cute tweenling see who he’s cuddling?”

  “Oh, you just wait,” she muttered, but her anger was no longer convincing.

  Rigel was quite sure he already knew, anyway.

  The swan soared in under a vast arched roof and braked to descend into a long crystal pool. Waves surged up the sides, and then slopped back. Rising and falling in the swell it had created, the huge bird folded its wings and paddled to a landing stage. The servants who rushed forward to assist with their disembarkation were fully clothed and must therefore be human or halfling.

  “I wanna show Rigel the castle!” Izar demanded.

  “Can’t you even wait until we get ashore? Don’t forget your lute.”

  Izar retrieved his lute from under the bench and led the way up a gangplank to the quay. Alniyat issued orders. “Halfling Albireo, take the earthling and find accommodation for her. You, Starling Terrible, go and put your lute safely in your room and harpy word to your grandfather that we’ve arrived and would like see him as soon as possible; then come back here. Rigel will wait for you.”

  Izar glanced at her, and then Rigel, and then back again. His ears pricked up. “Are you going to kiss him?”

  “GO! Or so help me…” Her roar startled even him, and he fled.

  So then Rigel was alone with the woman who called herself Alniyat. This had to be the moment of truth—and he saw at once that she was still the businesslike Alniyat of the beach, not yesterday’s seductress.

  “Halfling, I am sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize for Izar, or you won’t have time for anything else.”

  “I am apologizing for me. That moment in the Moon Garden…”

  Oh, that moment in the Moon Garden! How had he ever managed to refuse her? “My fault. I started it! I quoted poetry at you. It can happen to anyone. Half the books that libraries throw out are stuffed with poetry raving about love at first sight. No one believes in it until it happens, but it’s as real as lightning.” He was babbling. Helplessly adrift in a strange new world, he had fallen hopelessly in love because a beautiful woman had shown him a moment’s pity. She had not intended anything more than sympathy.

  “I know,” she said softly. “But you still don’t understand how foolish I was. You must know by now that I am dissembling both my name and my appearance. All the other guests were doing the same—Muphrid runs that sort of party, opportunities for anonymous romance. Fomalhaut may have seen through me, because he’s a mage, but he wouldn’t betray me. I forgot that our ways are not your ways and you would not know all this. You must have thought me a terrible slut. I promise you that I do not normally go around vamping every handsome male I meet.”

  Handsome maybe, dumb for sure. He shrugged. “Singles bars, we call them.” And the word was fornication, not romance.

  She chewed her lip. “I had an unfortunate… Never mind. Yesterday a crazy mob tried to kill you, you said. Today, someone else did, and I am certain it was Hadar or one of his gang. If they had known my true identity, they probably would not have targeted Izar and me, although I am not certain of that. I do think it was your amulet he was after.”

  “He’d kill five people for a bracelet?”

  “Five or fifty or five hundred—no matter. That’s why I think Hadar was behind it. You said earlier that you would rather be a babysitter than an assassin?”

  Aha! That would be an honorable use for a sword. “Certainly! You have need of a bodyguard, my lady?”

  “Izar does. The moment I saw a boy wearing Saiph, I wondered if he might be man enough to use it as it should be used. I arranged for Izar to cut your hair because he has reason to fear halflings, and I wanted to see how the two of you got along. You passed that test, so I ran another, and you saw right through me. And as for what you did just now on the swan—I have never seen such courage in my life. I am forever in your debt.”

  “No courage required. It was my life I was s
aving. I had no choice.”

  “It looked like courage to me, halfling.” Alniyat’s wistful smile would have made the Mona Lisa weep. “I am sorry that I insulted you. Look.”

  As her dissemblance faded, he was amazed to see the glory of a fully developed mark of Naos. Her hair turned from silver to opal, but a far richer, fierier polychrome than her son’s, rippling with reds and blues and greens and gold. Her eyes flashed as if her irises were set with rainbows, too dazzling to look upon. Her true name was revealed… and it was what he had guessed it would be.

  He dropped to his knees so she could not see the tears prickling out from under his eyelids. Romeo’s chances with Juliet were far better than Rigel Halfling’s with Princess Talitha. Stop dreaming! Even if she were not a princess, she was Izar’s mother, and Izar was about the same age as he was. By elfin standards, Rigel was only a child, and she could be centuries old. But she had not looked at him as she would look at a child, and he had not felt like a child when he held her.

  “Up!” She glanced around. There were workers on the dock and more people walking in galleries high overhead, but no one was paying attention to the princess and the lovesick half-breed. “Halfling Rigel, I want you to guard my son.”

  It was a better offer than any he could have imagined. It held out hope of an honorable life in the Starlands, a life with some purpose. “Your Highness, I would be greatly honored to serve both of you, but you know I cannot defend against magic.”

  “Of course you can,” she said, smiling again. “We’ll load you up with amulets until you rattle.”

  It was too good to be true. Life had taught him to beware of good fortune. “You have known me for barely a day. How can you possibly trust me with such responsibility?”

  “Because I offered you a bribe few young men would have refused.” Her eyes not only shone like diamonds, they could cut as hard. “You did, so I already trust you more than I trust his present guard. I’ve noticed him wearing amulets I did not assign him. There may be an innocent explanation for that, or a very bad one.”