by Diane Zahler
Immediately she was all concern. “Oh, Your Highness!” she exclaimed, pulling a rather coarse handkerchief from her dress pocket. “Whatever is wrong? Oh please, don’t cry! Here, wipe your tears—come sit with me.” She led me to a fallen log beside the lane, and I mopped my face with the rough cloth, trying to control myself. She patted my shoulder and murmured soothing words, and at last my sobs stopped. I blew my nose.
“I have ruined your handkerchief,” I said shakily.
“It was not much to begin with,” she assured me. “I am terrible at embroidery—see the uneven stitches?”
I looked, and almost had to smile. “You are very nearly as bad as I am,” I observed, and Riona laughed.
“Now, will you tell me what is wrong? Has your wicked brother teased you past all enduring?”
At the mention of Cullan, tears threatened again, but I took a deep breath and said, “I wish he could tease me. I wish he would tease me until I screamed. But he is gone. They are all gone.”
Her eyes widened in alarm. “Gone! But where? Why?”
“The new queen has sent them off to school. I don’t know where,” I answered, my voice trembling.
Riona looked at me sharply. “To school? But Cullan said nothing to me! Oh, that is very strange, and very sudden.” I could see she was now quite distressed, and I wondered how strong her feelings were for my brother.
“Did Cullan tell you what I fear about the queen?” I asked.
She nodded. “That is why I was coming to you. He said you wanted me to see her. To see if I could tell. . . .”
“Yes!” I said. “Can you? Will you? I am so afraid that she will somehow keep my brothers from returning. I need to know what she’s capable of doing.”
“I can try,” Riona replied, rising from the log and brushing off her skirt. “But even if I am able to tell what she is, I don’t know what I can do for you, or for your brothers. I am only half a witch, you see, though it is on my mother’s side.”
“Is that good, to be a witch on your mother’s side?” I inquired, rising as well. We started back up the lane as a fine misty rain began to fall.
“It gives me more power, as a woman myself,” she explained. “When only one parent is a witch, it is strongest in the children of the same sex. But I have not done much with my inheritance. I use it mostly for healing, with the herbs from my garden and wild plants from the woods.”
“Perhaps you could teach me a little of your art,” I said, surprising myself with the suggestion. I scurried to keep up with her, for her legs were long and she moved quickly.
She looked at me sidelong. “I did not think you liked to study,” she said with a small smile.
I scowled. “Did Cullan tell you that? It’s not true, not at all. I don’t like to learn the things that Father and my governess believe a lady should know—they are all so boring! But I should love to learn something useful, and healing sounds very useful indeed.”
Riona smiled again. “Cullan thinks you can do anything you set your mind to doing,” she told me. “He has great confidence in you.”
“Does he?” I asked breathlessly. “Really?” The thought warmed me through, and I suddenly felt very much better as we hurried to get to the castle before the rain began in earnest.
“I think I should probably not introduce you to the queen,” I said to Riona as we tried to neaten our clothes. I felt a little awkward. “She might find it . . . odd if I did.”
Riona laughed and twirled around, her damp overdress flapping about her. “Am I not dressed finely enough for her?”
I giggled. “She is very elegant. I can’t imagine that she would greet anyone wearing muddy shoes—or wearing wooden shoes at all, for that matter.” Immediately I realized how rude I sounded, but Riona did not seem to mind. In fact, she was not offended at all, and I found that I was beginning to like her very much.
“I can try to view her from a distance,” she said, pulling up the hood of her cloak so that I could barely see her face. We went back to the door where I had exited, and Ogan let us in after making certain the way was clear. I led Riona up the stairs and through the long halls, looking for the lady Orianna. She was not in any of the staterooms, nor upstairs in her bedchamber. We descended to the vast kitchen, and as we went down the stairs I heard her giving complicated and exacting instructions to the cook for a formal dinner. I could tell, from the number of courses and quantities she laid out, that she meant to invite many lords and ladies.
Riona and I lurked behind a door, trying hard to glimpse the queen’s face, but her back was to us. When at last she had finished giving orders, she spun around more quickly than we expected, catching us by surprise. She frowned at me.
“Meriel, what are you doing down here?” she asked, taking in my rain-spattered dress. Then she turned to Riona, who pushed back her hood. Her gaze met Lady Orianna’s. I watched the queen’s face carefully. Her eyes narrowed as Riona looked long at her, and color rose in the queen’s cheeks, the first flush I had seen on her pale skin.
“Who is this girl?” she demanded, turning back to me.
Caught off guard, I stammered, “A—a new maid. A kitchen maid. I was showing her where to go.”
“I did not approve a new maid,” Lady Orianna said imperiously.
I improvised wildly. “She was hired before you came, but she could not start right away.”
Lady Orianna glanced again at Riona and then turned back to me, shaking her head. “I do not want her here.” Then to Riona she said, “You are dismissed.” Riona pulled her hood up again and nodded meekly.
“And you will go to your room,” Lady Orianna said to me. “I am sure that your governess is looking for you.”
I curtsied. “Yes, milady,” I said in what I hoped was a humble voice, though my fists were clenched. Riona and I turned and ran to the cellar stairs, down them, and along the hall to the side door. Ogan stood aside once more.
“I must go,” Riona hissed. “You were right. She knows what I am, and I know what she is. She must not see me again. Come to me at my home when you can. Take the second right-hand path before town. Good-bye!”
“Farewell,” I whispered, pushing the heavy door open. She slipped through it into the rain-soaked afternoon and was gone.
The next day I was desperate to get out to see Riona, but Mistress Tuileach waylaid me and insisted I spend time practicing the art of the tea service. In the ladies’ salon I paced impatiently as she showed me the proper way to pour. I spilled the tea, of course, for my hand shook with urgency, and I knocked over the milk and scattered the sugar onto the table as well. Finally Mistress Tuileach threw up her hands.
“Begone, child!” she exclaimed. “You are more trouble than you are worth.” I snatched up my cloak, surprised that she would let me leave against the queen’s orders. As I left the room she called after me, “Be sure you are back before sundown. The queen expects you at her dinner and ball tonight!”
I turned back. “A ball? She is giving a ball? But she has only just arrived!”
Mistress Tuileach nodded. “I believe that she planned it after her wedding in Ardin. It is to be her welcoming party.”
Without replying I ran down to the cellar. Ogan stood at attention by the door, and I asked, “Will you let me pass?”
“I will, Your Highness, for your brothers’ sake,” he said, and I looked at him sharply. Then I recalled the many times he’d played tennis with Aidan and hunted with Cullan. He too must be distressed that they were gone. I nodded, ducked once more under Ogan’s raised lance, pushed open the door, and dashed down the lane toward town.
The lane curved at the foot of the hill on which our castle perched. The fields below were bright with autumn green and gold. About a mile away was Tiramore, the largest town in the kingdom, its rooftops red tiled and its chimneys puffing smoke.
Off to the right I could see the shimmer of blue water under sunny skies—Heart Lake, so named for its shape, like a child’s cutout for St. Valentine�
��s Day. It was fed by a spring that some said bubbled up from the lands of Faerie below the earth. Mist hovered over the water on its narrow, far side, never burning off even on the hottest, sunniest day. People were always telling of glimpses of strange beasts or magical bonfires there, though neither bone nor burnt offering ever remained to prove the rumors true. Cullan scoffed at these stories and often wooed girls at picnics on its shores, claiming that the lake’s shape was a natural invitation to romance. I had never believed the tales either, so I decided to take the footpath that skirted the lake, for it was a shortcut to Tiramore.
When I reached the lake, I saw the ducks and geese that often swam upon it, looking for water plants or insects to eat and raising their babies in the weeds at the water’s edge. There was also a flock of swans, which I had not seen there before. White, serene, majestic, they glided on the surface and were reflected in the water below, so it seemed almost that there were ten swans swimming rather than five.
The path came near to the lake where the swans floated. As I approached the place where path and water were closest, a most peculiar thing happened. One of the swans reared back until it was almost standing on the water and began to beat its wings wildly. The sight was so unexpected, the clamor so loud, that I stopped in my tracks and stared. One by one, the other swans followed suit, until there were five swans upright on the water’s surface, flapping their wings with a noise like thunder. They were very beautiful and very fierce, and I stood motionless, afraid to continue past them.
At last they stopped flapping and lowered themselves to the water again. Carefully I started walking, but one of the birds paddled to the lake’s edge and pulled itself onto the land. Awkwardly it waddled to the path in front of me, blocking my passage.
I had heard that swans could be foul tempered, even violent, so I backed away. The bird followed me. I backed still farther, faster, as the swan came at me. My shoe caught on a root and I fell to the ground, and without warning the swan extended its long neck, nipped hard, and with its sharp beak pulled off my necklace.
“Give that back!” I cried, incensed. The swan’s head moved from side to side, almost as if it were saying no. “It was a gift from my brother! I will have it back!”
I put out my hand, and much to my amazement, the swan gently lowered the necklace into my palm. Confused, I looked into its eyes.
“Are you someone’s pet?” I asked it. In reply, the swan laid its head on my arm. Hesitantly I stroked it, and the swan stretched its neck in a way that suddenly reminded me of Cullan stretching in his bed two mornings before, when I had wakened him. No, I thought, it cannot be so. But I asked anyway.
“Are you . . . can you be Cullan?”
In answer, the swan laid its head on my arm again and looked up at me. Its eyes were green, not black, as other swans’ eyes were, and they danced with a light I knew well. Indeed, there was no doubt about it. They were my brother Cullan’s eyes.
4
The Ball:
And What Was Learned
I ran then, as fast as I could, my heart hammering in my chest. Past the lake, through the meadow, down the path to where it rejoined the lane outside town. I skimmed past the first turnoff on the lane and took the second, as Riona had instructed. My thoughts skittered crazily, but my feet remembered her directions.
The path led through a small wood and then emerged into another meadow, dead-ending at a little stone thatch-roofed cottage. I hammered on the front door, gasping for air.
The door was opened by a dark-haired, blue-eyed boy about my age who looked vaguely familiar. He stared at me as I stood disheveled and out of breath.
“Oh,” I panted, “this must be the wrong place. I am looking for Riona.”
“Princess Meriel?” the boy said in a tone of disbelief.
“Yes, yes,” I replied impatiently. “Do you know Riona? Does she live nearby?”
“She lives here,” the boy said, motioning me to enter. “I’m her brother, Liam. I treat the horses and dogs at the castle when they are ailing.” He paused, and I wondered if he thought that I should recognize him, or feel embarrassed that I did not. I waited, and finally he said, “Riona is in the back, tending her plants. What—?”
But I had already pushed past him and dashed through the tiny house to the back, where the open top half of a Dutch door revealed an enormous garden. There were raised boxes of herbs in front, and behind them were plants and flowers of all sorts. It was not at all like the elaborate, manicured garden we had at Castle Rua, with its boxwood hedges trimmed in topiary shapes and banks of roses in carefully chosen shades of pink. The flowers here looked like wildflowers to me, but it was clear that they had been carefully cultivated. Their colors blended together in a vivid mix that somehow excited and soothed the eye at the same time.
I could see Riona bent over one of the herb boxes, and I shoved open the bottom part of the door and ran out to her. At my approach she looked up, shading her eyes against the sun with her hand.
“Your Highness!” she said, surprised. “I did not think to see you so soon.”
“Oh, Riona!” I cried. I could barely get the words out. “It’s terrible—something dreadful has happened. The queen has—they are all swans! Oh, how could she?”
“Slow down,” Riona urged me. She rose and led me to a little stone bench. On the back of the bench a crow perched, and to my surprise it did not move when I sat to catch my breath. It stared at me with a single beady eye; its other eye was missing.
“Liam, bring water!” Riona called to her brother. To me, she said, “Now, begin again. I can’t make sense of what you’re saying.”
I took the cup the boy offered me and drank. Then I said, a bit more calmly, “The queen has not sent my brothers to school. I think that she has cast a spell and changed them into swans. They swim on Heart Lake.”
Riona stared at me, and I feared she might laugh at such a wild pronouncement, for it sounded quite daft even to me. But she did not laugh. Her expression was filled with dismay. Even the boy looked very serious.
“That is a cruel enchantment,” he observed. “What did they do to anger her?”
“They existed!” I snapped, focusing my rage at him. The crow moved from foot to foot, uneasy at my tone. “She wanted them out of the way for good—and this is how she has done it!”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, a little abashed. “I didn’t know.”
Riona made a visible effort to shake off her distress. “We should go to see them,” she decided, leading me back through the house to the front door. She pulled a cloak from a peg on the wall and handed another to her brother. “I can judge then what might be done.”
“Can you break such a spell?” I asked her as we started back up the path.
“I doubt it,” she admitted. “Not by myself. But that doesn’t mean the spell cannot be broken. I just have to find out how.”
When we reached the lake, I could see the swans, across the water from us now. Perhaps, I thought desperately, they are actually just birds like any other birds. Perhaps I was wrong. But I could see my brothers in them all too well. The swan that I guessed was Darrock swam stiffly upright, patrolling the edges of the lake. The Aidan swan paddled in circles and figure eights, displaying his agility. The Baird swan stopped to listen when a bird sang, while the Druce swan swam as if deep in thought, studying the plants and insects of the lake’s edge. And the swan that was surely Cullan saw us and paddled as fast as he could across the lake, clambering out on his webbed feet and waddling to meet us.
Wordlessly, Riona went down on one knee, and the Cullan swan laid his sleek head on her bent knee. She stroked his smooth feathers while Liam and I—and the other four swans, who had come up behind Cullan—looked away, both moved and embarrassed.
When we turned back, we could see that Riona’s face was tear streaked, but her mouth was set with purpose. She stood, and the swans clustered around her, their long necks straining upward.
“There, there,” sh
e said soothingly to them. “We shall find a way to fix you. Don’t worry. You will not be swans forever!” She put her palm out to the Cullan swan, and he touched it with his dark beak—a swan kiss. Then all the swans struggled back into the water, where they floated nearby, watching us with their human eyes, green and blue as my brothers' eyes had ever been.
Riona turned to me and said, “You are quite right, Princess. These are your brothers. And I am sure it is the queen’s work. I could see that she had a great power.”
“I shall tell Father!” I cried, but Riona shook her head.
“That would be unwise. If she has enchanted him as well, he will never believe you. You may find yourself in danger from her if she learns that you’ve discovered what she has done.”
I shivered. “I should not like to swim in the cold water and eat bugs,” I said, watching as my brothers drifted on the lake.
“Then try to stay away from her, and heed your thoughts,” Riona warned me.
“My thoughts? Can she read minds, then?” I asked uneasily, for I had thought many terrible things about Lady Orianna in the days since she had come.
“Only if you think directly at her,” Liam said. I looked at him, puzzled, and he elaborated. “She cannot simply go into your mind and hear all that you are thinking. You have to address her with your thoughts, as if you were speaking to her.”
“I might have done that, once or twice,” I admitted. I recalled a moment, the day after she arrived, when I had not gotten out of her way quickly enough and she had stood before me and looked at me head to foot, her eyes full of criticism. I had thought, You, Madam, should not judge me. You are not as beautiful—or as young—as you believe yourself to be, and she had pulled back with a gasp, turned on her heel, and left me. Now I realized that she had heard that statement as clearly as if I had spoken it aloud.
Then I noticed that the sun had nearly sunk in the west, and I said, “I must get back. The queen has ordered me to appear at her ball, and I don’t want her to wonder where I have been.”