Split Heirs

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Wulfrith blinked.

  “Actually,” the queen said, as she stared at her two children, “Wulfrith looks like you, dear.”

  He really did. The resemblance was uncanny, even for the children of a single birth. The scholars who had tutored her as a child had taught Artemisia about identical twins, but these two couldn’t be identical, she told herself. They weren’t the same sex, and her teachers had insisted that identicals were identical in that, too.

  But there could be no doubt at all that they were siblings. And seeing two of her children together for the first time in more than fourteen years produced a very strange mix of emotions in the queen, leaving her unable to say any more for a moment.

  “He does?” Arbol studied Wulfrith, who returned this scrutiny. “I guess he does, a little.”

  Wulfrith snorted again. He had seen himself in mirrors any number of times, during various magical exercises, and he could see that he and Arbol looked a lot alike. What had made it less than immediately obvious was that the prince was a real person, not just an image—and of course, even with a mirror, Wulfrith had never seen himself from the side before.

  “Is that why I have to be a masked food taster?” Wulfrith asked. “So people won’t get me confused with Prince Arbol?”

  The prince’s face suddenly lit up. “Oh, Mom,” he said, “I know! You wanted him here to take my place, so I could go off hunting, and nobody would know I was gone! He can sit through all the boring stuff here in the palace!”

  Caught off-guard, Artemisia said, “Uh…”

  Sometimes, she reminded herself, she forgot that her daughter was not stupid. The child didn’t bother to think if she didn’t have to, but she was not stupid.

  And it appeared that her brother wasn’t, either.

  “Is that it?” Wulfrith asked doubtfully. “I don’t know about that. I don’t know anything about being a prince.”

  “Of course not,” Queen Artemisia acknowledged. “You’ve been a shepherd all your life, haven’t you?”

  “Well…” Wulfrith began uncertainly. It was really very inconvenient, this whole business about wizardry being illegal. “Not exactly a shepherd…”

  “Whatever.” The queen waved away the unimportant details of rural job classifications. “In any case, my dear Wulfrith, my dear, dear Wulfrith, of course you’ll need to learn a great deal about palace life—but yes, I had hoped that you might be willing to fill in for my darling Prince Arbol at certain…functions.” Artemisia hesitated, then added, “Not right away, of course.”

  “I guess,” Wulfrith said, unenthusiastically.

  “I think,” Artemisia said, “that you two should get to know each other a little better. If Wulfrith will be filling in for you, Arbol, he’ll need to know more about you, as well as about being a prince.”

  “Okay, Mom,” Arbol said. “We can go practice with swords together! Dad says that’s the best way to get to know a man—try to hack his head open, and you’ll either see his brains or you’ll get an idea how he thinks.”

  “No!” Artemisia shouted.

  “We’ll use the wooden ones, Mom—honest! I won’t kill him!”

  Wulfrith threw the queen an alarmed glance.

  “No, Arbol! No swords, at least, not yet! A food taster isn’t supposed to fight, he’s supposed…supposed to eat. And Wulfrith would have to keep his mask on, we don’t want anyone to know we have a substitute for you, and that wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

  “Maybe if we enlarged the eye holes?”

  “No, I said. Wulfrith doesn’t know how to fight—do you, Wulfie?”

  “No, ma’am. Uh…shepherds don’t use swords much.” And wizards, he thought, have better weapons—at least, the smart ones.

  “Oh, all right.” Arbol looked at the new food taster. “What do you want to do then, Wulfrith?”

  Wulfrith lit up. “We could study together, in the library,” he suggested.

  Arbol frowned. “The library?”

  “The big room with all the books,” Wulfrith explained.

  “Oh.” Arbol was puzzled. “What do you do, throw them at each other?”

  “No, silly, you read them!”

  “Hey, don’t call me silly! I’m the prince!”

  “I’m sorry,” Wulfrith muttered, glancing at the queen, uncomfortably aware that he had made an error in etiquette, and that he was bound to make many more. The stories all said that palace etiquette was very important and very complicated.

  “Well, that’s okay,” Arbol said. “So you like reading?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Wulfrith will be staying in the library, for now, when he’s not with you or up here visiting me,” the queen interjected. “He won’t be bothered there.”

  “That’s for sure!” the prince agreed.

  “Maybe I can learn about being a prince by reading some of the books,” Wulfrith suggested.

  Artemisia sighed. “I’m afraid you’ll find them out-of-date,” she said. “But it can’t hurt to try.”

  “Well, come on,” Arbol said, heading for the door. “I’ll walk down there with you, and maybe you can show me a good book to read. One with lots of pictures of swords and horses.”

  “Put your mask on, dear,” the queen said, as Wulfrith followed his sister.

  The lad obeyed, and then had to scamper to catch up; the prince’s idea of “walking” was what Wulfrith would have considered a fast trot. He wondered what Arbol would call a “run.”

  Even more dismaying was the fact that Arbol kept up a steady stream of chatter the entire way. “It’ll be great having you around here,” the prince said. “Sometimes it seems like people avoid me, because I’m the crown prince, you know, and I’ll be king when Dad dies, which I hope he never does of course, I like him a lot, even if he is kind of a slob, and of course he killed my grandfather, the old king, did you know about that? His name was Fumitory the Twenty-Second, which is one of those fancy old-fashioned Old Hydrangean names, and I think I’m supposed to have one of those too, except I don’t, I mean, Arbol’s a good old Hydrangean name but it isn’t so prissy, except maybe I really do have a fancy name, I mean another one, because someone told me once that my name was supposed to be Helenium, which I think is a really stupid name, don’t you? This is the library, isn’t it?”

  Wulfrith, a trifle out of breath, nodded. Without thinking he waved his hand in a simple opening spell, and the heavy gilt-and-enamel doors swung wide.

  “Hey!” Arbol demanded. “Who did that?”

  “Um…I did,” Wulfrith admitted.

  “But you didn’t touch the door, I was looking!”

  “No,” Wulfrith said, shamefaced, “I used magic.” He hastened to add, “I’m not a wizard or anything, nobody needs to cut my head off, it’s just a trick I learned.”

  “Hunh.” The prince looked at her masked companion, then at the door. “Maybe you are a girl, after all. I mean, real men don’t do magic—that’s women’s stuff.”

  “I’m not a girl,” Wulfrith replied, a bit hurt.

  “’Course not,” Arbol agreed, stepping into the library. “I was teasing a bit. You can’t be a girl—you look too much like me!”

  “That’s right,” Wulfrith agreed, following.

  The library was equipped with several tall, narrow windows, squeezed in between towering bookshelves, but all of them faced southeast, and the afternoon was winding down toward evening. Combined with the fact that nobody had washed the glass in fourteen years, that left the room dim and shadowed.

  Seeing how gloomy the library had become, Wulfrith once again acted without thinking, and lit the half-dozen nearest candles.

  (That was a very simple spell; it involved using three-finger sign language to sweet-talk a fire elemental through an invisible window into the nether realm. Clootie had never gotten the hang of it, which still mystified Wulfrith.)

  Arbol stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Was that more magic?” she demanded.

  “Oops. Yes, sir,” W
ulfrith admitted.

  “Well, stop it! I’m a prince, I can’t be seen with some limp-wristed sissy who uses magic! Act like a man!”

  “Sorry.”

  In the candlelight, Arbol looked around at the endless shelves and stacks of dusty, sometimes mildewed volumes.

  “A lot of books,” she remarked.

  Wulfrith nodded.

  “Are any of them any good?”

  Wulfrith blinked in surprise. “Um,” he said. “Um.” The concept of books not being “any good” was entirely unfamiliar. Some books were better than others, of course, but these were all books, which meant learning and wisdom and wonderful words, stories and spells and ancient lore.

  Arbol ignored her companion’s discomfiture and pulled a thick folio off the nearest table. She squinted at the faded title, and then, unable to puzzle it out, opened the book at random. She read a few lines.

  Wulfrith, watching her, saw her lips moving. Whatever other positive traits the prince might possess, she was clearly no scholar.

  Well, reading was one of those things that one could do just as well alone, Wulfrith reminded himself.

  “This is all about somebody named Pollestius, who offended a woman by wearing a ruby ring on the wrong finger,” Arbol said, slamming the book shut. “Who cares about that?”

  Wulfrith, although he wondered why a lady would care where someone wore a ring, had to admit that it didn’t sound terribly exciting.

  “What about this one?” he suggested, pointing to a volume he had noticed before, A Compendium of Mystic Rituals. He hauled it down from the shelf and opened it.

  Arbol took one look at it, then sneered, “It’s more magic!”

  Wulfrith had somehow failed to realize that people who didn’t approve of practicing sorcery would not care to read about it, either. After all, he liked reading about adventures and battles, but he wouldn’t care to be involved in any.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Listen,” Arbol said, “I have other things to do—I think it’s almost time for my riding lesson, and we’re going to do peasant-trampling today. You go ahead and look around here all you want, and maybe you can find some good stuff for me, for when I come back.”

  “All right,” Wulfrith agreed, looking hungrily at the vast expanse of leather and cloth bindings. “It’s been good meeting you, Prince Arbol.”

  “Yeah. See you later!”

  With that, Arbol departed, closing the door carefully behind herself.

  Wulfrith snatched off the ridiculous hood he wore, and began prowling the stacks.

  The books on magic were very tempting, but magic was not what was wanted, here at the palace. The prince apparently wanted adventure stories, or maybe books on combat or horsemanship; for himself, Wulfrith remembered that he was supposed to try to learn something about the business of being a prince.

  He wasn’t sure just where to start looking. There was so much here!

  It was then that he noticed a small alcove at the back, one that was dimmer and more shaded than the rest of the room, half-hidden behind a particularly complex tangle of shelving. Curious, he picked up a candle and went to investigate.

  At first glance the alcove was ordinary enough—three walls were lined with books, while a dusty table and threadbare upholstered chair stood in the center. Rather fewer of the spines had visible titles than the average, perhaps, but otherwise, Wulfrith saw nothing special about them.

  Still, it was a bit cozier and less daunting than the remainder of the Royal Library, so Wulfrith decided to check out a few of the books. He put the candle on the table and studied the nearest shelf.

  One title immediately caught his eye. Fortune was with him, he decided, as he pulled The Prince and the Pretty Peasant from its place. He blew off the worst of the dust, then opened it carefully.

  There was a finely etched frontispiece. Wulfrith’s eyes widened. He sat down suddenly on the chair, ignoring the cloud of dust and mildew that sprayed up on impact, and began turning pages. Choosing a paragraph at random, Wulfrith read:

  “Oh, my Lord, the Wench gasped, I grow faint, for ne’er before have I glimpsed One so Large! Certes, I fear that such as That could make me great Harm, but by the Blessed Goddess Concupiscia, I swear, ’twould perchance be Well Worth It. And with those words, she laid her back upon the Couch, her Skirts flung up to her Thighs.”

  Wulfrith looked at the illustration on the facing page.

  This was a long way from spells or stories of heroic virtue, but there was certainly a fascination to it. Wulfrith saw readily that this might not teach him much about being a prince, but still, he thought it would be very educational indeed. Quickly, he flipped back to the beginning and settled down for a long read.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Prince Arbol leaped from the saddle and swaggered over to the fifth newly fallen foe of the afternoon. “Had enough, Pentstemon?”

  “I had enough about three hours ago,” came the cranky reply. “What’s gotten into you, my lord?”

  Arbol just laughed and offered the fallen Companion a hand up. “You know I’ve always liked a friendly contest.”

  “Friendly!” Pentstemon spat out two teeth and part of his horse’s tail, which had somehow found its way into his mouth when Arbol’s sideways blow with the practice lance sent him tumbling heels over head off the animal’s rump. “If that was friendly, I’d hate to have you for an enemy.”

  The prince leered. “Exactly. That’s what Dad says is the whole idea behind kingship: Scare your allies into loyalty and your enemies into line.”

  Pentstemon shook his head. Then he thought maybe he’d better not. Too many things besides his teeth felt loose and ready to give way. He was one of the Prince’s favorite Companions—a corps of likely young men, all of the purest Old Hydrangean blood, all specially selected by Queen Artemisia herself.

  (King Gudge didn’t meddle much with the prince’s upbringing. He had been heard to say during many a royal “council meeting” that he didn’t much care what his queen did about bringing up Arbol so long as the prince picked up a proper measure of the traditional Gorgorian Three Bs: Beer-guzzling, Bashing-in-of-selected-skulls, and Bastard-begetting. “Otherwise I’ll have to kill him.”)

  Later on, after Arbol had dished out enough “friendly” wallopings for all of his Companions to have decided en masse that they had to leave him and go do their math homework (math homework was always done in the palace kitchens, where there were plenty of school supplies), Pentstemon held forth on the subject of the prince’s new friskiness.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he told the other Companions, “but there’s something odd about him lately.”

  His friends were too busy studying the mysteries of Addition by seeing who could convince the harried kitchen-wenches to bring them another keg of beer. (“We’ve only had two, darling, and if we have just one more that’ll just make four. No one’ll notice.”)

  Only young Salix felt like discussing the matter. (He’d had a bit too much to drink and had just demonstrated a Subtraction exercise all over the kitchen floor by taking away one lunch from one stomach.) Looking very pale and fragile he asked, “How d’you mean, odd? ’Shalf Gorgorian. Can’ get mushodder’n that.”

  “No, no, that’s not it.” By this time Pentstemon’s head felt secure enough for him to risk a dubious shake. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Be’er no’ try.” Salix giggled. “Cut’m ri’ off, Arbol would.” He made a vicious slicing motion with his hand. “Kaplowie!” He stared at his hand then, surprised that it had made such an inappropriate sound effect. “No. No’ kaplowie. I mean skoosh! Uh. Maybe I don’. Anyway.” He shrugged and toppled over backward.

  “What’s the matter with him?” asked Prince Arbol, joining the keg crowd.

  “The usual,” Pentstemon replied, a little puzzled by the question. Everyone knew about Salix. His drinking was as regular as clockwork—more regular, since the night King Gudge got it into his head to d
issect every clock in the palace. Busy councilors had been known to tell the time by whether or not the lad was still standing, and if he was down by measuring the length of the shadow cast by his nose.

  “Is he drunk?” asked the prince, kneeling beside the fallen Companion.

  Pentstemon frowned. He wondered whether he’d gotten more than his teeth knocked loose in that last bout with Arbol. “You don’t know, my lord?”

  The prince seemed to rouse himself from some sort of waking dream. “Well, of course I know he’s drunk!” Arbol leaped up and strode back and forth beside the gently snoring body. “I just meant shouldn’t we do something for him is all!”

  Pentstemon smiled. This was more like it! Last time the prince had found Salix in this state, he had arranged an inspirational tableau. On waking from his stupor, the victim found himself wearing a chamberpot on his head, hollowed-out pumpkins on his feet, and a frilly lady’s undergarment just barely covering his body. There was also a prize Hydrangean hog sharing his bed. Only Prince Arbol’s inability to find a voice-throwing mountebank in time for Salix’s awakening prevented the beast from asking, “Was it good for you, too?”

  “By all means, Highness,” Pentstemon said, offering Arbol free access to poor, unwitting Salix. “You get started, I’ll bring the hog.”

  “Hog?” the prince repeated, somewhat distracted. “Hogs are for swamp-cough. This won’t take but a moment.” He knelt beside Salix and passed one hand over the lad’s body. His fingers twitched and wiggled strangely.

  Salix’s eyelids fluttered, then lifted sharply. With a loud war-whoop, he sprang to his feet, thumped his chest, took several deep breaths and leap-frogged his way over every kitchen servant until he vanished up the stairs.

  Two of the remaining Companions ran after him. They returned shortly to report: “He’s galloped out over the drawbridge and into the fields. Last we saw of him, he was catching rabbits.”

  “Well, a little hunting’s good for clearing the head,” Pentstemon said.

  “He wasn’t on a horse,” said one.

  “He was catching them in his teeth,” said the second.

  Penstemon and all the other Companions stared hard at their prince. “What did I do?” Arbol demanded.