The Oddling Prince

by Nancy Springer

  “It is a sad and shameful day,” added Garth’s strong old voice from behind me, “when mounted warriors lurk in ambush like brigands to rob travelers.”

  “It’s worse than that, Garth,” I spoke quietly over my shoulder to him, but the enemy heard.

  “Indeed it is,” sneered the foremost foe. “Prepare to die, puppy Prince!”

  But before the words were out of his mouth, Bluefire charged with the speed of a falcon in flight; had I not been holding his mane, he might have left me behind. It was the sneering man who needed to prepare to die. Bluefire leapt and struck him like a lance, unseating him to trample and crush him. As for me, even though I had gathered that these were no random raiders, it took a moment for my wits to catch up with those of my horse, and Bluefire had already struck to kill as I raised my sword, fending off an attacker’s strong blow by instinct. After that, it was nothing but clash of metal upon metal, strike and parry. There was no time to think. I felt more than saw Albaric fighting close by my side, his sword a falcon of death, darting and swift. I became aware that my men-at-arms had made use of their pikes, charging and unseating three more of the enemy—but then another six warriors armored in chain mail appeared! Cowards indeed, they had been waiting, concealed behind the trees, and how many more might there be?

  Now it was often two swords of theirs to every one of ours. No chivalry. And no room to maneuver in that strait passageway between thick walls of forest. The pressure of two attackers unseated me; with a cry, I fell. Instantly, Albaric leapt to join me on the ground, taking a sword slash while defending me as I got to my feet, then setting his back to mine so that no one could take either of us from behind. Mounted foes charged us—but while Albaric’s cob bolted, as any normal and sensible horse would do, Bluefire reared and attacked the attackers! No one on horseback reached us, but Albaric and I fended off swordsman after swordsman, I felt my helmet dented by more than one blow, and I saw the blood spurt as I nearly beheaded an enemy, I smelled it, felt its hot splash, and hardened myself as it sickened me. I fought on against a red blur of flashing swords and took care not to think either of living or of dying.

  But suddenly I was hacking at air. Not yet daring to lower my sword, I blinked, clearing blood or sweat or hell knows what from my eyes, looking about me.

  Bodies, some of them groaning, crowded the narrow byway beneath forest shadows. Some of them strangers, some not.

  “Albaric!” I cried.

  “Right here.”

  We turned to look at each other. He had taken a gash from cheekbone to chin.

  “Your face,” I choked.

  “It’s nothing. Are you hurt?”

  “No more than you. Bluefire saved us.” Now the horse stood browsing at the low boughs as if nothing had happened.

  “That blue stallion and you two,” said a hoarse and panting voice, “fought off more of them than I could count.”

  I turned, crying, “Garth!” He crouched with both of his arms wrapped around his stomach. I ran to him, eased him to the ground, and yanked off my armor and my tunic to wrap the latter around a wound I could scarcely bear to look at.

  “You and your friend made a two-headed monster,” Garth managed to say. “My Prince, I am sorry I ever doubted him.”

  “Hush. Save your strength.” I looked around wildly for help. Albaric, I saw, stood with his sword dangling from his hand, staring down into the blank-eyed bloody dead face of one of our guardsmen, and I sensed that he needed me even more than I needed him. He was watching the gray ship sail; he was walking into the sundering sea. He who had been born not from a mortal woman’s pain but amid milky white without a cry, he now stood awash in red, stricken that he yet lived. I felt all of this in him yet could not go to comfort him; there was no time.

  At least I did not need to call upon him. Other figures stirred, shadowy, beneath the trees: outlaws, alerted by the clamor of battle, coming to loot the bodies. “You!” I commanded with a shout. “Come here!” Most of them ran away, but two came into the open and walked hesitantly toward me. Not all outlaws are evil; many are innocent victims of a lord’s spleen. I looked into the eyes of each man and saw fear there, but no ill will.

  I lowered my voice. “Water,” I demanded of one who had a flask. He gave it to me; I held up Garth’s head and tipped it to his lips. After he drank a few swallows, I told the man, “Stay with him, help him; I will reward you.” To the other, I said, “Come with me.” We began to make the rounds of the dead and wounded. Those close to death, we left to die. But we found one big fellow lying face to the ground, crying in a droning way, like a weary child. At my direction, we rolled him over to see what ailed him. He made no move to assail us or prevent us as we stripped the chain mail off him. But we saw no wound beneath it, and no blood. Instead, we saw a tabard of black and copper green.

  I knew whose were those colors.

  “Domberk,” I breathed, and the image of artless little Marissa swirled wildly in my mind.

  I looked down on the Domberk man-at-arms, his face red and contorted. I looked him in the eye. “Why?” I demanded.

  He covered his face with his hands. I yanked them away.

  “Do you wish to live?” I suppose it sounded like a threat, but truly it was more that I cried for understanding.

  “I will die no matter what you do to me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I am broken. Within.”

  I nodded, believing him; many a strong man had been known to die after battle without a visible wound. Thinking how dry his throat was—for mine, too, felt parched from the panting of combat—I took the flask still in my hand and tilted it to his mouth, giving him water.

  His eyes widened, and he gazed at me.

  I waited until he was finished drinking. Then, “Warrior, if you wish to die with honor,” I addressed him quietly, “tell me truth. You men of Domberk awaited us in ambush here?”

  This time, he did not try to hide his face. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we were so ordered by our lord.”

  “Again, why?”

  “To kill you, Prince Aric.”

  I felt a great chill, as if gripped by a hand of ice; I managed not to shiver, but I could not speak. I only stared at the man.

  “Lord Brock wanted you out of the way,” the fellow rasped, hoarse again.

  I gave him more water. “Why?”

  “Because,” the man spoke on slowly, “having heard that King Bardaric seemed less than strong after his illness, and that you had gone traveling, the lord seized the opportunity.”

  I gasped. “Domberk did what?”

  “Marched upon Dun Caltor.”

  CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH

  MY MIND FROZE in the grip of those words, but my body kept moving. I stood, not knowing where I was going, and walked to a still figure with a dripping sword.

  “Albaric.”

  He looked dazedly at me. I poured water down the wound upon his face, then gently, with my hand, I tried to clean the blood away.

  He blinked, then sheathed his dark-stained sword. From a far fearsome place, he came back to me, saw me, and somehow knew at once how badly I needed him. “Aric! What has happened?”

  “Domberk.” I led Albaric toward Garth so that I could tell them both, wasting fewer words. “This ambush came from Domberk. Lord Brock is marching on Dun Caltor. I must ride there at once.”

  “And I,” Albaric said.

  “With me then, on Bluefire,” I said, “for no other horse can keep pace with him.”

  “My Prince,” Garth protested, “what will you do at Dun Caltor?”

  “I will know when I get there.” I pulled two golden coins from the pouch hanging at my belt and gave one to each of the two silent outlaws who looked on. “I wish you to take good care of him.” Meaning Garth, who, I feared, might not live, but I would not leave him to die alone.

  The men nodded.

  “Speak. Promise.”

  “We promise. We’ll carry ’im t’our hut,” s
aid one with a countryman’s thick burring speech.

  “Aye,” said the other. “But what. . . .” He gestured with his head toward those who lay wounded.

  My other guardsmen were dead. But some of Domberk’s henchmen still lay moaning. “I haven’t the heart to give them the death blow, as I ought,” I admitted. “If any will live, let them live. The horses, the supplies, take what you wish. If brigands will loot, let them loot. Only care well for Garth.” I bent over the faithful guardsman and kissed his forehead, much as the royal youth must have kissed the friend left behind in the song called “Troth.” Then I stood to shout, “Bluefire!”

  Rare is the horse that comes when called, but this stallion displayed a fey loyalty to Albaric and me. When he trotted to me, I stripped the nonsensical bridle off his head and threw it to the ground, then the saddle; the less weight Bluefire bore, the better. Albaric vaulted onto the steed’s bare back and gave me a hand to mount behind him.

  “Farewell, my Prince,” said Garth faintly.

  “Prince!” blurted one of the outlaws in gruff surprise as Albaric and I galloped away.

  The Domberk dastards had indeed felled a bushy tree across the trail; no ordinary horse could have passed it, but Bluefire soared over without an instant’s pause, galloping on. No ordinary horse can travel ceaselessly at a gallop, either; walk and trot are the way to cover long leagues of open country. More than ever, I felt eerily sure that this steed was not entirely of this world.

  Albaric lifted Bluefire’s mane, combing it with his fingers and holding it in his hands to coax him to slow to a canter, more for our sake than his; weary from battle, it was all we could do to ride the gentler gait.

  “Where did Bluefire come from, Albaric?” I blurted. “Do you know?”

  He nodded, but did not speak for a moment, only became deeply still. I could feel his inner focus turn to something other than himself or me, and by that, and Bluefire’s fox-pricked ears, I knew that he and the horse were having one of their silent conversations. I felt sure that he was asking the horse’s permission to tell me. Then, relaxing and drawing breath, he spoke, his voice soft and windy in my ears from the speed of our passing. “Bluefire is a horse of sky, from the vast herds that gallop atop the clouds, accompanying the winged golden horses of the sun. Sometimes, if you watch the shifting sky with patient eyes, you can glimpse them. I had been lucky to do so a few times, so I guessed. . . . Do you remember how I sang to him when we first met?”

  “Yes. The crest of his neck, friend of the rainbow.”

  “Something like that. But I did not then understand that sky is like sea, an Otherwhere rife with strife and mishaps. Lightning was not his friend. An errant bolt struck him to the ground when he was only a colt and had not yet earned his wings.”

  “So, like you, he cannot go back to his home?”

  “Say rather, my brother, that his home, like mine, is with you.”

  Much moved, I laid my head for a moment against Albaric’s neck, and my hand on Bluefire’s flank.

  After I lifted my head, I kept silence and tried to pay attention. We sped along the wilderness track for what was left of that day, and a few times Bluefire snorted and plunged into his headlong gallop again as I glimpsed arrows whizzing behind us. Heedless of the outlaws, we forged on until at last, as the sun sank low in the sky, we reached the fringes of the forest and I saw a hut, perhaps that of a charcoal-burner or a woodcutter.

  “Let us stop there a few minutes, Albaric.” I pointed.

  As we rode up, a peasant woman came to the doorway and stood trembling, her hands wrapped in her apron, her children clinging to her skirts.

  “Water, my good woman, please,” I coaxed her as Albaric and I dismounted stiffly from Bluefire. “We mean you no harm.”

  But she seemed frozen in place, wordless. “Never mind. There’s the well, brother,” Albaric told me, taking me by my bare arm—having given my tunic to Garth, I rode naked to my waist and chilled, barely noticing, for memories of bloody combat chilled me also, and fear of what lay ahead at Dun Caltor.

  Albaric cranked the windlass and drew up a bucket of water. After we drank, splashed some upon our wounds, and washed off our bloody swords, we gave the rest to Bluefire, who had been vehemently grazing. No one with any sense would give water to a horse after a long hot gallop; ’twould cause colic. But Bluefire was no ordinary horse. Scarcely sweating, he dipped his muzzle into the bucket as delicately as if he were a lady sipping mead.

  “Your face, Albaric,” I murmured, still wincing at the sight of the gash, dreading lest it fester to kill him.

  “Hush. You need to eat.” He reached into the pouch hanging at his belt, then placed money in my hand. “You’re not such a fright as I am. Give the poor woman a coin and ask whether she has any food to spare.”

  The setting sun dappled the sky with shining clouds and made everything seem golden, including, I suppose, me. As I offered the coin and made the request, the shaking peasant seemed scarcely able to comprehend. Making no move to grasp at the money that would make her rich, only flinching as she looked up at me, she whispered, “Are ye mortals?”

  I laughed, mocking not her but myself and company. “More or less. Please, my good woman.” I pressed the gold piece into her hand, knowing she would be able to buy a year’s worth of provisions with it. “Some apples, or bread?”

  “There be oat bread,” piped up one of the children suddenly. “And berries.” The mother stood aside and let the little ones, who had somehow lost all fear, take care of us.

  So we rode on at a walk, munching oat scones and juicy brambleberries. Mortal comfort, as Albaric would say.

  The sun set, and at the same time, a full moon rose. Only when the moon is full do moon and sun face each other across the world that way, one lifting his rays like reaching arms as he sinks, the other arising to gaze from too far away, like lovers parted, doomed never to embrace.

  “Better?” Albaric asked as we finished eating.

  “Yes. You?” Already before I asked, I knew the answer.

  “Not—not so much,” he admitted. “Something sickens me.”

  “Blood, perhaps, and death?”

  “Yes. Swordplay in earnest is no play, my brother.”

  “You saved my life.”

  “You save mine every day. But this—men fighting, killing—this ugliness—why? I do not understand.”

  “A nobleman must seek glory in war and win followers to fight for him.”

  “But why?”

  I struggled to answer, realizing I did not understand, either; I only accepted what I had been taught from birth. My father—our father—had been the youngest of four brothers: Ardath, Lehinch, Escobar, Bardaric. Yet he, the last in line, had won the throne. Glory? Or bloodshed? “Each one wants what the other one has,” I said at last.

  “Glory is another word for greed, then?”

  “It would seem so.” A new thought, and not a comfortable one.

  If Domberk took Dun Caltor, Albaric and I would have a father no more.

  “We had better ride through the night,” I said.

  “You hope to reach Dun Caltor ahead of Domberk? Warn the king?”

  “On this marvel of a horse, yes, it is just possible.” We had been gone seven days, but our course had circled around Dun Caltor; we were not too far away. “If Bluefire can see in the dark,” I added in woeful jest, for—wending through woodlands and cantering across moors in the night—if the horse stumbled into a pit and lamed himself or broke a leg, we were lost.

  “I will ask him,” Albaric responded, and he sat once more motionless and focused. Bluefire tossed his head and snorted.

  Albaric relaxed. “Our Bluefire sees his way by night as readily as he does by day,” he reported, matter-of-fact.

  Weary beyond marveling, I simply resumed my figuring. “So,” I said slowly, “to march upon Dun Caltor from Domberk would take Lord Brock—seven days? Eight? We do not know for sure when he set forth, but if he was at all dela
yed—as is commonplace during a march—perhaps we might get there in time to sound the alarm.”

  “Perhaps.” Albaric sounded as colorless as the moonlight. “But if we are too late?”

  “Then at the very worst, I expect to find Domberk’s army laying siege to Dun Caltor.” I knew the castle to be almost impregnable. “Our father is the most fearsome of warrior kings. And I will think of something—some way. . . .”

  Feeling a chill, I let talk go. Bluefire lifted into a canter, speeding us through darkness.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH

  THINKING HAD GOT ME NOWHERE by the time the sky put on dawn’s blushing glamour, but in the slowly growing light, I could see that Bluefire had brought us to the outer woodlands around Dun Caltor, the oak and hazel groves where lads herded the pigs. “We are almost there. Walk,” I whispered to Albaric, and Bluefire slowed, setting his hooves down quietly in the forest loam.

  Then as we came to the edge of a meadow, we could see the towers of Dun Caltor rising in the distance.

  And at the sight, my heart seemed to stop for a moment, and I tried to say it, “Stop,” but I had no breath and could not get the word out of my mouth. Albaric knew anyway, or Bluefire, for at the edge of the trees, hidden in their shadows, the horse halted.

  Albaric whispered, “What is it, Aric? You’ve turned to stone.”

  Still I could not speak, staring at Dun Caltor, for atop its stone towers waved flags, and even at the distance, I could see that they were not as they should have been.

  Not bold banners of slate blue-gray and crimson.

  These were narrow flame-shaped flags snaking in the wind, and against the sky they looked black, but I daresay there was poison green in them also.

  Finally, hoarsely, I managed the words. “Domberk has taken Dun Caltor.”

  For one who knew almost nothing of the ways of war, Albaric reacted swiftly and with wisdom. Turning Bluefire, he retreated into the woods.

  Stupidly, I protested, “But this cannot be! Domberk could not have defeated Caltor so easily; it is impossible.” Unthinkable. Unnatural . . . and into my head spun crazed echoes of Lord Kiffin’s plaint: stillborn lambs, carrots, peas. . . .