by Jane Yolen
It was then that she saw something odd and shining in the right-hand fireplace, the largest of the two. Going over to examine it, she kept losing the light each time she put her hand toward it. Only at the last moment did she glance up and there, way at the top of the vast chimney, she saw what was casting the light. The moon was shining down, for at the moment it was right over the chimney opening.
She knew the moon rode across the sky at night, following its sister sun. Could she climb up the inside of the chimney with the moon as her guide?
Is it possible? Is it dangerous?
She thought: Surely chimney cleaners managed. Those sooty fellows who came around twice a year, spring and fall with their apprentices and ropes. With their funny way of speaking, and strange songs.
She couldn’t hope to be as fast or as knowledgeable as they, but it was all that she had.
Racing back to the sinks, she found several large knives set out to dry for morning use. She grabbed up two and tied them with twine around her neck. She also tied two of the candle stubs—the other two had already burned down to puddles of wax. The twine was sufficient for tying the knives but not strong enough for a climbing rope.
Still, it was then or never. She ran back to the chimney, but a bit more carefully because of the knives around her neck, and felt around till she found some stone steps jutting out.
Slowly, with infinite care, she started to climb.
She was about fifteen steps up, when the stone juts stopped and she realized she was barely halfway up to the top, and the moon had already moved a quarter of its bulk off the chimney opening.
“No,” she whispered to herself, then louder, “Nooooooooo!”
She was making too much noise to hear the sound of the door opening below, and too far up in the surround of stone chimney. But when a woman’s voice came halloing up, calling “Girl? Girl!” Snail was so startled, she could have fallen down, which would surely have killed her, but luckily she was standing with her back firmly planted against the chimney wall.
“I will get you out of here,” came a voice. It was soft and strong at the same time, and so convincing, Snail was ready to climb down at once. She was tired of being without help, and here was help offered. Only later did she realize that she’d been bespelled.
She untwined the knives from her neck and dropped them into the echo chamber of the chimney, and followed them but slowly, backing down each stone step until she was at last on the chimney’s floor. Then, picking up the knives, she turned.
The queen stood there, a lantern in hand.
Snail knew then that she could trust her entirely.
“I will get you out and set you on the road, girl. It is the least I can do for my son.”
“Snail, Majesty, they call me Snail.”
“Not any kind of name for my son’s only friend,” the queen said. “I shall call you Nomi instead. It means ‘loyal one’ in the Old Tongue. You must use it for your escape.”
“Nomi,” Snail said, though she was thinking, No-me. Not me. And indeed, in the queen’s presence, she did not feel herself at all.
The queen nodded at Snail, the very smallest gesture, barely perceptible. In return, Snail dropped practically to the floor in a deep curtsey. “I will try to be worthy of the name, Majesty,” she said.
* * *
THE QUEEN LED HER to a hidden passage through the wine cellar and thence through the walls, their way lit by only the lantern the queen carried, which threw awful shadows—some short as foxes, some tall as dragons.
All, Snail thought, seem to have teeth.
When they finally reached a door, the queen stopped and handed the lantern to Snail.
“Here, Nomi, hold it high.”
Snail did as she was told, and the queen took a large chain from around her waist, on which hung about three dozen keys. She fit the smallest into the keyhole and opened the door. Once it was open, the queen took the lantern back.
The cool air and the smell of freedom was as filling as a meal. Snail breathed it in and out several times.
“There,” the queen said, pointing, “go east toward the rising sun, and quickly, but do not run or otherwise call attention to yourself. There you will find a royal graveyard. Look for the tomb of the kings. You can say your good-byes there.”
“Is he gone then?” Snail asked, her eyes unaccountably filling with tears. “Is the prince gone? So soon?” She wondered that she’d felt nothing—no tremor, no cold around the heart—whenever the moment of his death had been. Not much of a friend, then! she thought.
“Gone,” the queen said, her voice low but without a single quaver.
Snail was surprised at how little the queen seemed affected by her son’s death. Of course, the queen hadn’t actually seen him since he’d been seven years old and surely the Unseelie queen would have acted just as coldly. Both of them had an army of servants to raise their children. Not like ordinary folks who actually dandled their babies on their knees. Even the trollwife had fed the child herself, not needing a milk nurse to do the job for her.
“I shall say a prayer to Mab for his soul,” Snail whispered, and surprised herself by meaning it.
The queen said nothing in return but simply pushed Snail out of the door, then locked it behind her.
Snail heard the snick, and then the path unfolded before her. She took one step, then another.
Pausing to look at the large brooding castle behind her, Snail told herself she was glad of the escape. But then another thought crossed her mind. I left him to die alone.
It didn’t matter that she’d had no choice. That the king had commanded and the guard had obeyed. All that mattered was that Prince Aspen had died and she hadn’t been there as witness, to lend him some kind of strength.
She began to weep, but as the sun was already touching the horizon with a red glow, she knew she would have to get going before someone came into the kitchen and discovered that she was gone.
So, still weeping, she headed east, walking quickly but not running, as the queen had commanded, letting the freedom beneath her feet begin to heal her pain.
* * *
THE SUN WAS barely over the horizon when she got to the royal cemetery, its stone monuments like teeth in a beryl green mouth.
Near her was a tall stone tree on which a verse was carved.
Unveil thy heart, thou faithful tomb.
Take this new treasure to thy trust,
And give this baby princess room
A while to slumber in the dust.
“Poor mite,” she whispered. It mattered not if it were a baby princess or any baby, the loss made her sad.
Farther on, an ornately carved tombstone in the shape of a harp, read:
Here lies the fair maid of the east
Who loved the souls of man and beast,
But beastly indeed was the fever.
Only her harp did never leave her.
She wondered if that meant they’d buried the harp with her, which seemed a shame. A good harp was difficult to make.
But she didn’t see any mention of kings on the close-by tombstones. Snail guessed that the kings and queens weren’t buried under these simpler headstones, but in the chapel that she could see was at the end of the path, an elaborate thing that looked like a little castle.
She hurried toward it, and when she was close, saw that it had green men and dragons entwined in stone on the columns. But she hesitated to go in. Aspen wouldn’t be buried in there. He was a third child, not a king, and died as a traitor. Surely the queen meant something else.
Glancing about for some newly turned earth that would signal a newly dug grave, she found it on the far edge of the graveyard. She ran toward it, tears again in her eyes, and so didn’t see that there was a huge lump of overturned soil in her way. She stumbled and began to fall, the open gravesi
te yawning before her.
Something grabbed her arm and kept her from tumbling six feet down, probably landing on her head.
“Are we even in the rescuing race yet?” asked a familiar voice.
She turned, gasped. “But your mother said you were gone.”
“So I am,” Aspen told her. He was dressed oddly in multicolored rags and a red floppy hat with bangles hanging from it. He should have looked ridiculous, but he looked older somehow. Graver. Steadier. Snail didn’t think it was the clothes.
“My mother convinced me, in between her tears, that my death would not actually stop the war,” Aspen said. “In fact it might further provoke it.” He frowned. “Though now I do not see how it could. My mother . . .”
“She’s very convincing, your mother,” Snail said, as Aspen’s voice trailed off. She remembered the queen’s voice coming up the chimney. “I thought she meant you were dead, when she said you were gone.”
“And so we should be . . . gone on the road,” he said. “It was Mother who found me this minstrel outfit. I have fresh clothes for you, too.”
“I don’t need . . .”
“It is a disguise,” he said. “You cannot be wandering the road as a midwife. That is what everyone will be looking for.”
“But that’s what I am,” Snail said, “just as you are a prince. And what will we be if we are not those people?”
“We will be dead.” His voice was like a sword at the throat. “And dead we will not be those people either, and with no chance to be any other.”
“But . . . but . . .” She wondered why she should suddenly be sniveling about this when what he said made perfect sense.
“So you see, that is why I am not a prince now, but a minstrel, a wandering troubadour, a thing of song and patches.” He waved his hand airily, but his voice still held that princely snootiness. She guessed there was no disguising that.
“Well, can you sing?” she asked.
“No, I was hoping you could. I play the lute. It may be my one accomplishment.”
She suddenly saw he was holding a modest instrument in his other hand, not nearly as ornate as some lutes she’d seen, with only a cherub carved in the top end, and badly carved at that. For one thing, it was cross-eyed, and for another, its nose was smashed, as if it had been in a fistfight.
“I can’t sing, but I can pass the hat, Serenity.” She looked at him dubiously.
“It will do,” he said. “And you will have to call me Karl.”
“Karl?” She smiled. “It suits you about as well as those clothes.”
He grimaced. “Which is to say not at all. But the name, like the clothes, will have to serve.”
“I’m Nomi.”
“Loyal?” Aspen grinned. “I see my mother’s hand in that.”
She handed him one of the two knives. “Your mother is . . .”
“Yes, she is,” he said, and grinned.
* * *
SHE CHANGED INTO the new clothes behind the chapel with the prince—Karl, she reminded herself—standing watch at the front. The gown his mother had sent along was of a soft mauve wool with lace collar and cuffs. It was more elegant than anything she’d ever owned, more like something a lady’s maid might have worn, or a minstrel’s minion. She doubted it would wear well on the trail.
Gone, too, were the striped stockings, and in their place she put on the dull black ones that he’d handed her. The shoes were still her own. The ones the queen had sent were too small and not made for walking. But she tied them around her neck by their laces in case she could barter them at a market town for something more suitable.
The midwife wear was too easy to identify, so they buried it in the open grave under a shower of loose dirt and stone. With luck, a coffin would soon be set down upon it and the grave closed for all eternity.
And with that they were off, weaving their way through the old monuments, and back into the living world.
It was now full day, the sun lightning the sky and with nary a cloud to shadow it, so they would have to be careful.
ASPEN LEADS THE WAY
Snail followed close behind Aspen, apparently trusting his knowledge of the countryside to lead them. It made him feel almost like a hero from the old nursery tales Lisbet had entertained him with way back when.
The feeling lasted about two minutes.
I don’t know why I should feel heroic, he thought bitterly. All I have done is carry us from one disaster to the next. And I do not even know where we are going.
Sighing heavily, he stopped and turned to look at Snail.
“I have no idea which direction we are to go,” he admitted. “And now, because of me, we are hunted in two kingdoms. Perhaps you should go ahead on your own.”
She laughed, though with little mirth. “Nomi at your service, Serenity.”
“Karl,” he said. “You have to remember I am Karl now.”
“Then you will have to start talking like Karl the minstrel and not Aspen the prince,” she told him.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, to start with, you sound like the toff you are, always saying things like ‘I am not’ when you should be saying ‘I’m not,’ and ‘I am’ when we underthings say ‘I’m.’”
“But I do not talk like—”
“Don’t.” She laughed. Clearly she was laughing at him.
“Oh.” He bit his lower lip. “I shall try.”
“I’ll try.”
“You, too? Oh wait, I see.” He managed a smile back at her. Then he said seriously, “I still do not know . . . er . . . don’t know where we should be heading.”
“Maybe we could stay with the trolls again,” Snail said.
Aspen thought he saw a merry glint in her eyes.
“I . . . I’m sure the father would love to have us for dinner.” He chuckled at his own retort, though he thought they both might be on the edge of hysteria.
“Neither one of us is fat enough for a meal,” she pointed out.
He had to reluctantly agree she was right.
* * *
THEY WALKED ON in silence for a bit, quickly leaving the cemetery and entering a wide field of barley where they scattered a family of partridge. The hen cackled at them with a great deal of anger before first flying toward Karl the minstrel’s hat and then zigzagging away.
At the far end of the field, Aspen clambered over a low rock wall, then reached back for Snail’s hand to help her over. He held on to her hand longer than he had to.
“There’s a war coming,” he said slowly, savoring the new way of talking.
“I know.”
Her face was solemn. It was, he thought, a pleasant face, not beautiful like the twins, Sun and Moon. Not unreachable like theirs. But readable. Reliable. And loyal.
The woods had closed around them now, like a mother’s arms, and that slowed their pace to a crawl. With it came a comforting darkness. Aspen knew it would make them safer even if, at the same time, it slowed them down.
“A war I started,” he said it as if it were a confession, not to a human priest or to a dungeon master, with the hope of redemption or the ceasing of torture. Just said as one would to a friend.
He heard Snail snort and turned to look at her.
“You did no such thing!” she said derisively. “Remember what your mother told you.”
“But I—”
“You were used by the drow, that Jack Daw. Manipulated. Almost killed!”
“That’s true. But it was my responsibility—”
“Your responsibility?” she was almost shouting now. “You were a child! And where were your parents?”
“Shhhh!” he cautioned. They might be in the woods, but it was no guarantee they were alone.
In a softer voice she asked, “Well where were they?”
“W
ell, they were—”
“A thousand leagues away! And to your new family you were only a hostage, not a son, not a boy, but a piece in a game. A game of war. By Mab’s heart, Serenity. I mean, Karl, I was raised an orphan, and I got more parenting from Mistress Softhands than you ever did from . . . from . . . anyone!”
“Maybe, but I—”
“No maybes, you—”
“Do not interrupt me again!” Aspen roared in exasperation.
“Now who’s too loud?” Snail snapped, and then said quickly, “I’m sorry, Your Serenity.” She didn’t sound exactly sorry, though.
He shook his head. “No, Snail . . . er . . . Nomi. Not like that. I’m Karl, the minstrel, remember? And I just want a chance to speak.”
“Go ahead then, Karl, speak as long as you need to.”
He saw a small glow ahead, and guided them into a stand of wide-spaced birch and luminescent moss. The glow from the moss turned everything green-grey and black, as if the sun had been replaced by a witch moon while they’d talked.
He could see Snail’s face clearly now, and tried to read her expression. Angry? Hopeful? Expectant? He had no idea. Instead, he took a deep breath. “Everything you say is true. But I believe in . . .”
He stopped. What do I believe in? What am I? Am I still a prince? Or am I truly Karl the minstrel now?
“I believe in nobility,” he finally said. Then, “Did you just snort again?”
“I did,” Snail admitted. “I couldn’t help it. My experiences with the nobility have been . . . less than, well, noble.”
Aspen was about to argue for the nobility, but he stopped and forced himself to think. He thought about the nobles he knew: cruel Sun and Moon; manipulative Jack Daw; his father the king, who had sentenced him to death; King Obs, who would have adopted him as a son and killed him just as quickly.
“Mine, too, I suppose.” He shook his head. “But I don’t mean the nobles themselves, only what they are supposed to represent.”
“And what’s that?”
He thought about that for a moment. Tried to put it into words. “I believe in a nobility of purpose,” he said.