The girl stared, and said, “Ma’am—are you sure? That doesn’t sound like anyone here.”
Moon dropped heavily into the nearest chair. “Why am I not surprised? Thank you very much. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
The girl nodded and closed the door behind her. Moon put out the candles, climbed into bed, and lay awake for an uncommonly long time.
In a gray, wet dawn, she dressed and shouldered her pack and by the simple expedient of going down every time she came to a staircase, found a door that led outside. It was a little postern, opening on a kitchen garden and a wash yard fenced in stone. At the side of the path, a man squatted by a wooden hand cart, mending a wheel.
“Here, missy!” he called out, his voice like a spade thrust into gravel. “Hold this axle up, won’t you?”
Moon sighed. She wanted to go. She wanted to be moving, because moving would be almost like getting something done. And she wanted to be out of this beautiful place that had lost its heart. She stepped over a spreading clump of rhubarb, knelt, and hoisted the axle.
Whatever had damaged the wheel had made the axle split; the long splinter of wood bit into Moon’s right hand. She cried out and snatched that hand away. Blood ran out of the cut on her palm and fell among the rhubarb stems, a few drops. Then it ceased to flow.
Moon looked up, frightened, to the man with the wheel.
It was the man from the hay wagon, white-haired, his eyes as green and gray as sage. He had a ruddy, somber face. Red-faced, like the woman who’d—
The woman who’d helped her last night had been the one from the hay cart. Why hadn’t she seen it? But she remembered it now, and the woman’s green eyes, and even a fragment of hay caught in the wild hair. Moon sprang up.
The old man caught her hand. “Rhubarb purges, and rhubarb means advice. Turn you back around. Your business is in there.” He pointed a red, rough finger at the palace, at the top of the near corner tower. Then he stood, dusted off his trousers, strolled down the path and was gone.
Moon opened her mouth, which she hadn’t been able to do until then. She could still feel his hand, warm and calloused. She looked down. In the palm he’d held was a sprig of hyssop and a wisp of broom, and a spiraling stem of convolvulus.
Moon bolted back through the postern door and up the first twisting flight of stairs she found, until she ran out of steps. Then she cast furiously about. Which way was that wretched tower? She got her bearings by looking out the corridor windows. It would be that door, she thought. She tried it; it resisted.
He could have kept his posy and given me a key, she thought furiously. Then: But he did.
She plucked up the convolvulus, poked it into the keyhole, and said, “Turn away, turn astray, backwards from the turn of day. What iron turned to lock away, herb will turn the other way.” Metal grated against metal, and the latch yielded under her hand.
A young man’s room, frozen in time. A jerkin of quilted, painted leather dropped on a chair; a case of books, their bindings standing in bright ranks; a wooden flute and a pair of leather gloves lying on an inlaid cedar chest; an unmade bed, the coverlet slid sideways and half pooled on the floor.
More, a room frozen in a tableau of atrocity and accusation. For Moon could feel it, the thing that had been done here, that was still being done because the room had sat undisturbed. Nightshade and thornapple, skullcap, henbane, and fern grown bleached and stunted under stone. Moon recognized their scents and their twisted strength around her, the power of the work they’d made and the shame that kept them secret.
There was a dust of crushed leaf and flower over the door lintel, on the sill of every window, lined like seams in the folds of the bed hangings. Her fingers clenched on the herbs in her hand as rage sprouted up in her and spread.
With broom and hyssop she dashed the dust from the lintel, the windows, the hangings. “Merry or doleful, the last or the first,” she chanted as she swung her weapons, spitting each word in fury, “fly and be hunted, or stay and be cursed!”
“What are you doing?” said a voice from the door, and Moon spun and raised her posy like a dagger.
The king stood there, his coat awry, his hair uncombed. His face was white as a corpse’s, and his eyes were wide as a man’s who sees the gallows, and knows the noose is his.
“You did this,” Moon breathed; and louder, “You gave him to the King of Stones with your own hand.”
“I had to,” he whispered. “He made a beggar of me. My son was the forfeit.”
“You locked him under the earth. And let my teacher go to her . . . to her death to pay your forfeit.”
“It was his life or mine!”
“Does your lady wife know what you did?”
“His lady wife helped him to do it,” said the queen, stepping forward from the shadows of the hall. She stood tall and her face was quiet, as if she welcomed the noose. “Because he was her love and the other, only her son. Because she feared to lose a queen’s power. Because she was a fool, and weak. Then she kept the secret, because her heart was black and broken, and she thought no worse could be done than had been done already.”
Moon turned to the king. “Tell me,” she commanded.
“I was hunting alone,” said the king in a trembling voice. “I roused a boar. I . . . had a young man’s pride and an old man’s arm, and the boar was too much for me. I lay bleeding and in pain, and the sight nearly gone from my eyes, when I heard footsteps. I called out for help.
“‘You are dying,’ he told me, and I denied it, weeping. ‘I don’t want to die,’ I said, over and over. I promised him anything, if he would save my life.” The king’s voice failed, and stopped.
“Where?” said Moon. “Where did this happen?”
“In the wood under Elder Scarp. Near the waterfall that feeds the stream called the Laughing Girl.”
“Point me the way,” she ordered.
The sky was hazed white, and the air was hot and still. Moon dashed sweat from her forehead as she walked. She could have demanded a horse, but she had walked the rest of the journey, and this seemed such a little way compared to that. She hoped it would be cooler under the trees.
It wasn’t, and the gnats were worse around her face, and the biting flies. Moon swung at them steadily as she clambered over the stones. It seemed a long time before she heard the waterfall, then saw it. She cast about for the clearing, and wondered, were there many? Or only one, and it so small that she could walk past it and never know? The falling water thrummed steadily, like a drum, like a heartbeat.
In a shaft of sun, she saw a bit of creamy white—a flower head, round and flat as a platter, dwarfed with early blooming. She looked up and found that she stood on the edge of a clearing, and was not alone.
He wore armor, dull gray plates worked with fantastic embossing, trimmed in glossy black. He had a gray cloak fastened over that, thrown back off his shoulders, but with the hood up and pulled well forward. Moon could see nothing of his face.
“In the common way of things,” he said, in a quiet, carrying voice, “I seek out those I wish to see. I am not used to uninvited guests.”
The armor was made of slate and obsidian, because he was the King of Stones.
She couldn’t speak. She could command the king of Hark End, but this was a king whose rule did not light on him by an accident of blood or by the acclaim of any mortal thing. This was an embodied power, a still force of awe and terror.
“I’ve come for a man and his soul,” she whispered. “They were wrongly taken.”
“I take nothing wrongly. Are you sure?”
She felt heat in her face, then cold at the thought of what she’d said: that she’d accused him. “No,” she admitted, the word cracking with her fear. “But that they were wrongly given, I know. He was not theirs to give.”
“You speak of the prince of Hark End. They were his parents. Would you let anyone say you could not give away what you had made?”
Moon’s lips parted on a word; then she
stared in horror. Her mind churned over the logic, followed his question back to its root.
He spoke her thoughts aloud. “You have attended at the death of a child, stilled in the womb to save the mother’s life. How is this different?”
“It is different!” she cried. “He was a grown man, and what he was was shaped by what he did, what he chose.”
“He had his mother’s laugh, his grandfather’s nose. His father taught him to ride. What part of him was not made by someone else? Tell me, and we will see if I should give that part back.”
Moon clutched her fingers over her lips, as if by that she could force herself to think it all through before she spoke. “His father taught him to ride,” she repeated. “If the horse refuses to cross a ford, what makes the father use his spurs, and the son dismount and lead it? He has his mother’s laugh—but what makes her laugh at one thing, and him at another?”
“What, indeed?” asked the King of Stones. “Well, for argument’s sake I’ll say his mind is in doubt, and his heart. What of his body?”
“Bodies grow with eating and exercise,” Moon replied. This was ground she felt sure of. “Do you think the king and the queen did those for him?”
The King of Stones threw back his cowled head and laughed, a cold ringing sound. It restored Moon to sensible terror. She stepped back, and found herself against a tree trunk.
“And his soul?” said the King of Stones at last.
“That didn’t belong to his mother and father,” Moon said, barely audible even to her own ears. “If it belonged to anyone but himself, I think you did not win it from Her.”
Silence lay for long moments in the clearing. Then he said, “I am well tutored. Yet there was a bargain made, and a work done, and both sides knew what they pledged and what it meant. Under law, the contract was kept.”
“That’s not true. Out of fear the king promised you anything, but he never meant the life of his son!”
“Then he could have refused me that, and died. He said ‘Anything,’ and meant it, unto the life of his son, his wife, and all his kingdom.”
He had fought her to a standstill with words. But, words used up and useless, she still felt a core of anger in her for what had been done, outrage against a thing she knew, beyond words, was wrong.
So she said aloud, “It’s wrong. It was a contract that was wrong to make, let alone to keep. I know it.”
“What is it,” said the King of Stones, “that says so?”
“My judgment says so. My head.” Moon swallowed. “My heart.”
“Ah. What do I know of your judgment? Is it good?”
She scrubbed her fingers over her face. He had spoken lightly, but Moon knew the question wasn’t light at all. She had to speak the truth; she had to decide what the truth was. “It’s not perfect,” she answered reluctantly. “But yes, I think it’s as good as most people’s.”
“Do you trust it enough to allow it to be tested?”
Moon lifted her head and stared at him in alarm. “What?”
“I will test your judgment. If I find it good, I will let you free the prince of Hark End. If not, I will keep him, and you will take your anger, your outrage, and the knowledge of your failure home to nurture like children all the rest of your life.”
“Is that prophecy?” Moon asked hoarsely.
“You may prove it so, if you like. Will you take my test?”
She drew a great, trembling breath. “Yes.”
“Come closer, then.” With that, he pushed back his hood.
There was no stone helm beneath, or monster head. There was a white-skinned man’s face, all bone and sinew and no softness, and long black hair rucked from the hood. The sockets of his eyes were shadowed black, though the light that fell in the clearing should have lit all of his face. Moon looked at him and was more frightened than she would have been by any deformity, for she knew then that none of this—armor, face, eyes—had anything to do with his true shape.
“Before we begin,” he said in that soft, cool voice. “There is yet a life you have not asked me for, one I thought you’d beg of me first of all.”
Moon’s heart plunged, and she closed her eyes. “Alder Owl.”
“You cannot win her back. There was no treachery there. She, at least, I took fairly, for she greeted me by name and said I was well met.”
“No!” Moon cried.
“She was sick beyond curing, even when she left you. But she asked me to give her wings for one night, so that you would know. I granted it gladly.”
She thought she had cried all she could for Alder Owl. But this was the last death, the death of her little foolish hope, and she mourned that and Alder Owl at once with falling, silent tears.
“My test for you, then.” He stretched out his hands, his mailed fingers curled over whatever lay in each palm. “You have only to choose,” he said. He opened his fingers to reveal two rings, one silver, one gold.
She looked from the rings to his face again, and her expression must have told him something.
“You are a witch,” said the King of Stones, gently mocking. “You read symbols and make them, and craft them into nets to catch truth in. This is the meat of your training, to read the true nature of a thing. Here are symbols—choose between them. Pick the truer. Pick the better.”
He pressed forward first one hand, then the other. “Silver, or gold? Left or right? Night or day, moon—” she heard him mock her again, “—or sun, water or fire, waning or waxing, female or male. Have I forgotten any?”
Moon wiped the tears from her cheeks and frowned down at the rings. They were plain, polished circles of metal, not really meant for finger rings at all. Circles, complete in themselves, unmarred by scratch or tarnish.
Silver, or gold. Mined from the earth, forged in fire, cooled in water, pierced with air. Gold was rarer, silver was harder, but both were pure metals. Should she choose rareness? Hardness? The lighter color? But the flash of either was bright. The color of the moon? But she’d seen the moon, low in the sky, yellow as a peach. And the light from the moon was reflected light from the sun, whose color was yellow although in the sky it was burning white, and whose metal was gold. There was nothing to choose between them.
The blood rushed into her face, and the gauntleted hands and their two rings swam in her vision. It was true. She’d always thought so.
Her eyes sprang up to the face of the King of Stones. “It’s a false choice. They’re equal.”
As she said the words, her heart gave a single terrified leap. She was wrong. She was defeated, and a fool. The King of Stones’ fingers closed again over the rings.
“Down that trail to a granite stone, and then between two hazel trees,” he said. “You’ll find him there.”
She was alone in the clearing.
Moon stumbled down the trail, dazed with relief and the release of tension. She found the stone, and the two young hazel trees, slender and leafed out in fragile green, and passed between them.
She plunged immediately into full sunlight and strangeness. Another clearing, carpeted with deep grass and the stars of spring flowers, surrounded by blossoming trees—but trees in blossom didn’t also stand heavy with fruit, like a vain child wearing all its trinkets at once. She saw apples, cherries, and pears under their drifts of pale blossom, ripe and without blemish. At the other side of the clearing there was a shelf of stone thrust up out of the grass. On it, as if sleeping, lay a young man, exquisitely dressed.
Golden hair, she thought. That’s why it was drawn in so lightly. Like amber, or honey. The fair face was very like the sketch she remembered, as was the scholar’s hand palm up on the stone beside it. She stepped forward.
Beside the stone, the black branches of a tree lifted, moved away from their neighbors, and the trunk—not a tree. A stag stepped into the clearing, scattering the apple blossoms with the great span of his antlers. He was black as charcoal, and his antler points were shining black, twelve of them or more. His eyes were large and
red.
He snorted and lowered his head, so that she saw him through a forest of polished black dagger points. He tore at the turf with one cloven foot.
I passed his test! she cried to herself. Hadn’t she won? Why this? You’ll find him there, the King of Stones had said. Then her anger sprang up as she remembered what else he’d said: I will let you free the prince of Hark End.
What under the wide sky was she supposed to do? Strike the stag dead with her bare hand? Frighten it away with a frown? Turn it into—
She gave a little cry at the thought, and the stag was startled into charging. She leaped behind the slender trunk of a cherry tree. Cloth tore as the stag yanked free of her cloak.
The figure on the shelf of stone hadn’t moved. She watched it, knowing her eyes ought to be on the stag, watching for the rise and fall of breath. “Oh, what a stupid trick!” she said to the air, and shouted at the stag, “Flower and leaf and stalk to thee, I conjure back what ought to be. Human frame and human mind banish those of hart or hind.” Which, when she thought about it, was a silly thing to say, since it certainly wasn’t a hind.
He lay prone in the grass, naked, honey hair every which way. His eyes were closed, but his brows pinched together, as if he was fighting his way back from sleep. One sunbrowned long hand curled and straightened. His eyes snapped open, focused on nothing; the fingers curled again; and finally he looked at them, as if he had to force himself to do it, afraid of what he might see. Moon heard the sharp drawing of his breath. On the shelf of stone there was nothing at all.
A movement across the clearing caught Moon’s eye and she looked up. Among the trees stood the King of Stones in his gray armor. Sunshine glinted off it and into his unsmiling face, and pierced the shadows of his eye sockets. His eyes, she saw, were green as sage.
The prince had levered himself up onto his elbows. Moon saw the tremors in his arms and across his back. She swept her torn cloak from her shoulders and draped it over him. “Can you speak?” she asked him. She glanced up again. There was no one in the clearing but the two of them.
“I don’t—yes,” he said, like a whispering crow, and laughed thinly. He held out one spread and shaking hand. “Tell me. You don’t see a hoof, do you?”
Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue Page 15