The Hostage Prince

by Jane Yolen

  Mind your station! he thought angrily, but did not have his breath back enough to say it.

  “And as I hold the steering pole,” the Sticksman said, “so it holds me.”

  “What does that mean?” Aspen managed to croak.

  “It means he can’t fight,” Snail said.

  Over the roaring water, Aspen heard a new sound. An eerie hooting, long and low, like the bottom note on one of Moon’s bone flutes.

  “Fight what?” He finally had breath again.

  “Them,” the Sticksman said.

  The hooting stopped, and the arrows as well, and in the relative silence, Aspen suddenly heard the shouts from shore turn to shrieks of surprise.

  And pain.

  “The mer,” the Sticksman added, a bit too eagerly.

  And, Aspen thought, with a bit too much satisfaction.

  SNAIL AND THE MER

  “Fish men,” the prince said. He sat up and looked over the ship’s side. “Good for eating, I warrant, though little else.”

  Snail couldn’t decide whether he was putting up a brave front or was really that stupid.

  Either way, I must have better eyes than him, she thought, or he wouldn’t say something so dumb.

  On the near shore, Snail could see that the young Border Lords standing in the shallows had begun thrashing and kicking in the water. Suddenly, one started to scream, high and womanish, before flopping facedown, as if being pulled under by an unseen tide. The others began to beat the water near him with the points of their swords, and one reached down to grab his arm, then backed away frantically.

  She saw the flash of an iridescent tail near the fallen warrior’s feet. A head lifted that was crowned with eely, green locks of hair. The creature’s shoulders, like that of a burly man in his bath, were bare. When it turned its head toward her, Snail could see it had a mouth full of sharp teeth.

  All at once, the sea around the young Border Lord’s body frothed and boiled, and then suddenly the body was gone, as was the mer, though his wake was pinioned by a shower of spears from the shore.

  When the young Border Lord’s tam popped up on the water’s surface a moment later, his companions set up a loud lament, but none of them waded back in to fetch it, not even the man who’d reached down to grab his friend.

  As she watched, something cold and wet, like the slap of a fish tail, seemed to wrap itself around Snail’s heart. She started to sit back down when, all at once, she was clutched from behind.

  She could feel the coldness for real now. It seemed to begin at the point where she’d been grabbed and radiate around to her front. She gave a little scream, and struck out with the small knife in her hand, even though she knew it would never be enough. Still, when her blade jammed into the creature’s arm, the mer screamed like a boggart’s wife in labor, a high, awful keening.

  At the same time, Aspen took aim at something with his sword, and swung hard, crying, “Duck your head, girl!”

  Without hesitation, she ducked, though she was simultaneously being pulled up and out of the boat. Aspen’s sword swished over her head but she never heard it connect. Nonetheless, the merman let her go.

  The knife must have stayed stuck in the creature’s arm, for it was pulled from her hand and was quickly gone, along with the mer, down to the bottom of the sea.

  Snail fell forward into the keel of the boat and lay facedown in a puddle of water. For a long moment she didn’t dare move, or at least not on purpose, though her entire body was trembling. She didn’t think it was from fear. She was well past that and into full-blown terror.

  “Girl!” It was the prince’s voice.

  Even shaken as she was, all Snail could think of was that the toffee-nosed fool could simply not remember her name.

  “Snail!” he cried, pulling her out of the puddle and turning her over. “You cannot breathe water, you ninny, so stop trying.”

  At that she thought, Ah, I have mistaken him. He does care, though he still talks funny. She opened her eyes, now befogged with the brine, then blinked rapidly about ten times. When she could see again, she noted that his face was white and shaken.

  “How did you do that?” he asked.

  “Do what?” She honestly had no idea what he meant.

  “How did you kill the mer?”

  “Kill it?” How could she have done any such thing? After all, the prince was the one who’d swung a sword at the creature, almost taking her head off as he did so. “But I thought that your sword . . . ?”

  He managed to look both shamefaced and alarmed at the same time. “Never connected. It was already . . . gone.”

  “The sword?”

  “The mer.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead.”

  “Dead?” Then she remembered. “I stuck it with the knife. The one I took from the ogre’s back.” She wondered where the other two knives had gotten to. “But it was such a small knife and would have made such a small hole.”

  “The ogre was bigger,” he mused.

  She nodded.

  They stared at one another, before the prince said at last, “But the mer wasn’t cut anywhere. Not anywhere I could see. It just seemed to . . . well . . . turn grey and die.”

  “Same with the ogre,” she said.

  The Sticksman, in his flat voice, intoned, “Arum.”

  “Cuckoopoint?” Snail said.

  “What are you two talking about?” The prince, himself, looked as if he was turning a bit grey.

  “Cuckoopoint and arum, one and the same. An herb. A poison,” Snail explained. “An extremely deadly poison,” she added, though she was thinking all the while: Honestly, princes know nothing about the real world.

  “On the blade?” the prince asked.

  All at once Snail’s mouth made an O. She grabbed off her apron, bunched it up, though careful not to touch any part of the pocket, and flung it into the river. “Of course! Of course! How could I have been so stupid.” She turned and washed her hands in the puddle beneath her, scrubbing as hard as if she were about to help at the birth of a baby. Part of her knew that if she’d been poisoned, she was already well past saving.

  She looked up at the prince who seemed astonished at what she was doing. “I could have touched the blade,” she said. “I could have cut you when I fell. I could have—” Afraid, ashamed, she broke into tears.

  “Look—we are both all right.” He held out his hands, palms up, toward her and tried to smile, but it was more grimace than grin.

  Why, she thought, he’s trying to comfort me. And almost making a job of it! Though Mistress Softhands would never have given him a passing grade.

  As the apron settled on the top of a wave, another merman—this one more silver than green—leapt high into the air as if to avoid the smock, almost hovering above it. He showed his teeth at them and hooted, then dove, effortlessly, back into the sea. But all around the boat, the water boiled for a long moment, and now Snail understood why.

  “Stay low,” the Sticksman said, his face furrowed as a tree trunk. “I believe they are afraid of you now, lady. They will soon be gone. But till then, best be safe.”

  Lady! Snail thought. He called me Lady! It was unthinkable. But perhaps, away from the Unseelie lands, not so unthinkable as all that.

  ASPEN LEADS ON SHORE

  Aspen sat low in the boat, eyes frantically searching the waters. But since Snail had killed the one who had tried to drag her overboard, there had been no more attacks by the mer—no flash of green tail or bubbling froth to signal another assault.

  Still, better caution than a coffin, his father had always said. So he kept his eyes on the waves and his head continually scanning left and right.

  Left and right, he thought, then corrected himself. Fore and aft, rather. He frowned. Or is it port and starboard?

  He had never paid much a
ttention to nautical terms, not liking water, boats, or sailors. And he had never understood the need to rename directions just because one was on the water. The language of the sailing men that he recalled from his childhood in the Seelie Court was as strange as the trader’s dialect, or the gabble of the Border Lords. Why can they not all speak alike? he wondered. Understanding would be greatly improved thereby.

  He snuck a glance at Snail, who was watching the water as anxiously as he. He wondered about asking her what she felt about language but he was not certain how to start the conversation.

  She is nothing like Sun and Moon. Yes, they are cruel, he thought, but they know their place in the world and the place of those around them. He was intimidated by them, infatuated with them, possibly under their spell—but he could certainly talk to them. Not that they often answered, except with scorn. But Snail, Snail was so . . . prickly. And she certainly didn’t know her place. Still, when he had thought her dead, facedown in the bottom of the boat, he had felt . . . bereft.

  Suddenly, Aspen heard a grinding sound and the boat stopped with a jerk.

  “We have arrived,” the Sticksman said. “Get out.” As an afterthought, he added, “Prince.” It was less a title than part of a command.

  Aspen gave a mighty leap over the side of the boat, landing onto a small spit that was half sand and half marsh. Glancing quickly around, he noted that the spit jutted from a thickly forested shoreline into the slow-moving shallows.

  No mer, he thought, and felt his heart resume its regular beat.

  Hearing Snail climb over the side with what sounded like a bit more decorum, he turned just as she landed in the sand. He was surprised at how light she was on her feet.

  “But where are we?” she asked. “Are we still in Unseelie lands?”

  Aspen shook his head. “No,” he said.

  He was trying to picture the map in Old Jack Daw’s apartments, where he had taken lessons in map reading since Jaunty had not thought it worthy of a hostage prince to know such things. “You are not going anywhere,” Jaunty had said, “for you must remain here for the rest of your life. And if you go on a hunt, or ride to hounds, the beaters will know where to take you.” That had made sense. The beaters were usually wolfmen and they certainly had the nose for the woodlands.

  But Jack had disagreed, and said otherwise. “A man should know the lands that surround him. A prince must know, for he may rule it all some day.” And even when Aspen had shrugged and pointed out that he was hardly likely to rule the Unseelie lands, Jack had said, “You have a crystal ball? You are a soothsayer? A seer?” And of course Aspen had had no answer for those questions.

  “Are we in Seelie lands then?”

  He was so caught up in memory that Snail’s voice startled him for a moment. “Not exactly.”

  “Well, where are we then?” She sounded a bit exasperated. “Your Serenity,” she added when he looked up at her sharply.

  See, he thought, prickly. He’d never met a prickly underling before. Except for Jack, of course. Even if he had been only a hostage prince, he was of the highest rank. And the underclasses should know their places. Except, for some reason, this girl did not.

  “Well,” he said, picking up a short, sharp stick and dusting the sand off of it, “that is not as easy a question as you might think.” Kneeling in the sand, he used the stick to sketch what appeared to be the outline of a fat, three-legged squirrel.

  “That,” he said, tapping the squirrel’s body, “is Unseelie land.” He scooted a bit to his right and drew a large circle, adding several circles atop and below it. “Those are Seelie lands.” He drew a thin line from the squirrel’s tail to a spot somewhere in between what might have been rocks or bodies of water. “This is the river path we took.” He looked up at the Sticksman, who remained on the boat. “Yes?”

  The Sticksman gave a shallow nod. “Yes.”

  Snail frowned down at the crude map. “Then you know where we are!”

  Aspen frowned at his map as well. “Not exactly.”

  “How not exactly?” Snail said loudly. “Don’t you princes study geography and mathematics and all that?”

  Somehow, “princes” didn’t sound like a compliment when she said it.

  “Well, yes,” Aspen said. “But Faerie geography is a tough subject. See here.” He tapped the stick on the sand map’s Unseelie lands and then the Seelie lands. “The lands held by the two courts are well known and well controlled. We can travel through them freely and easily.”

  He thought about their narrow escape from the Border Lords and the mer and coughed nervously. “Well, maybe not easily if one is trying to escape. But at least we did not get lost. However, the unmastered lands in between have a wild magic all their own and tend to . . .”

  “Tend to what?”

  “Well, they tend to move around a bit.”

  “A bit?”

  “Well, a bit more than that. The Shifting Lands.”

  Snail sat on the ground next to the map. “Wonderful.” She made it sound anything but.

  “It is no problem, though. I just have to remember the equations,” he told her, though his forehead creased as he tried to recall them. Those had been last year’s lessons, after all, and mathematics had never been his strong suit.

  Suddenly his forehead smoothed out again. “I’ve got it!” he said, and he spoke rapidly lest he forget it again. “The elevation of the spot times the number of the season squared gives us the L property that mostly governs the movement factor of forested lands.” He smiled at Snail, proud to have remembered such a complex equation. “If we had landed in the plains the calculation is much more complicated.” He scrawled some numbers in the sand and then bit his thumb. “I believe we are—”

  “You are in the Hunting Grounds,” the Sticksman said. He was right behind Aspen, looking down at the map.

  “I would have figured that out,” Aspen grumbled. “Eventually.”

  “I don’t think we have time for eventually,” Snail said. “We need to be going now.”

  “Are you not forgetting something?” the Sticksman said.

  Aspen looked down and then slapped his forehead. “Of course!” He drew a thin line equidistant from both lands. “The Borders.” He frowned. “Though those shift around a bit as well.”

  “No,” said the Sticksman. “My favor.”

  Aspen gulped. “Ah—that. . . . If it is within my power.”

  “You will travel far,” the Sticksman said. It wasn’t a question, and Aspen thought he could feel the power of prophecy in the creature’s next words. “And you will meet creatures old, odd, and powerful. You will ask each of them these three questions.” The Sticksman waited as if expecting confirmation.

  “Um, yes,” Aspen said somewhat awkwardly. “And these questions are?”

  “What is the Sticksman?” The creature paused not in hesitation but as if setting the words into Aspen’s mind. “How did the Sticksman come to be?” Another pause. “How does he come not to be once more?”

  “Very well,” Aspen said, though inwardly he thought the questions unanswerable.

  “If you receive the answer to any of those questions and do not return within a year and a day of learning the answers to share them with me, I shall consider our bargain unfulfilled.” The Sticksman leaned very low and fixed Aspen with his pale, pupilless eyes. “Then I would have to seek you out to exact payment.”

  Aspen did not know how the Sticksman could seek him out or what he meant by “exact payment,” but he definitely did not want to find out. Of course, if he never received any answers, then he would not have to return to this shore ever again.

  “I am a prince of Faerie and I have given my bond,” he said, trying to make the words true by saying them firmly. “A prince and his bond are sacred.”

  A traitorous thought suddenly came to him: Is not running from the
Unseelie Court breaking the hostage bond?

  But suddenly, for the first time, he realized that he had never given his bond. It had been given for him. He had been a child when he was turned over to King Obs and the Unseelie Court. He had had no say in the matter.

  For a man’s word to matter it must be freely given, he thought, by the man himself. And he had been no man, but a boy.

  “I give you my bond, Sticksman. I shall return with your answers when I get them.”

  He meant every word.

  The Sticksman studied Aspen for a moment more and then nodded once, apparently satisfied. He turned in a single fluid motion, walked back to the boat, and stepped easily over the high side. Then he stuck his pole in the sand and pushed off. The boat moved off the sand, slipping into the water, and going upstream as easily as it had down.

  Aspen knew it would soon be out of sight. But Snail had been right; this was no time for idle watching.

  “Come, girl,” he said. “It is time to enter the Hunting Grounds.”

  Then he strode manfully toward the forest, one hand on the hilt of his sword.

  He pretended that he didn’t hear her when she muttered, “Sure, but are we the hunters or the prey?”

  SNAIL ON THE PATH

  Snail thought bitterly, not two hours later, that they were neither the huntsmen nor the prey. They were, quite simply, the Lost.

  Or as she said to the prince, “We’re going in circles.”

  “How can you know that?” he asked sharply. “I do not know that!”

  “Because we’ve passed the same tree three times.”

  “We have passed a lot of trees. How could you possibly know one from the others?” He spoke witheringly and seemingly without real curiosity.

  “Because that’s the only tree with the initials BPS.”

  He looked oddly at her. “I did not see any initials on a tree.”

  She pointed to a white birch, and there—almost hidden by the leaves—were the very initials.

  “You can read?” Evidently, that was the thing he was most riveted by.