Seven Princes

by John R. Fultz

  “Thank you, Queen,” she said. “Might I know your name?”

  “Indreyah,” said the Mer-Queen. “Perhaps there is something that can ease your pain. We laid Vod’s bones to rest in a cairn not far from here. My warriors will retrieve them, so you may bury him on land, among those he loved. Do you wish this?”

  Sharadza nodded. The Mer-Queen spoke with her general, and he set off to put soldiers in charge of the exhumation.

  “Swim with me in the coral gardens,” said Indreyah. “We rarely get a visitor from the dry world. Tell me the news of the landwalkers and their kingdoms.”

  They skimmed along a great oval passage and out into the glow of rainbow anemones and groves of wafting seaweed. Fish, eels, and stranger creatures swam about the walls of living coral. Sharadza walked on the golden sand while the Mer-Queen hovered along beside her.

  “Your kingdom is beautiful,” she told Indreyah. “How long have you ruled the sea?”

  “I am old, child,” she said. “Old as selfish Iardu. Yet my memory fades. I sometimes recall being… someone else… something greater. Yet I am content here, with my people. This is the best of all worlds, among the endless bounty of the sea.”

  She is of the Old Breed, Sharadza realized, but she does not remember it. She has carved her niche here in the Living World, and carved herself to fit it. Her True Self has taken root in this form in this realm. She has found herself by forgetting herself, creating the world she most desired. Perhaps this is what all living things do, sorcery or no sorcery.

  “Iardu… said that he loved you.”

  Indreyah halted, the webbed spikes along her spine shifting, the tiny gills on either side of her slim neck pulsing. The brightness of her eyes faded a moment, as a pond might darken when a cloud hides the sun.

  “Long ago, I believe he did,” she said. A wall of pink anemones waved their tentacles along the garden wall. “That is why he stole the Pearl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jealousy,” she said. “I loved the sea… and Iardu loved me. For a while he was enough, but I could not stay away from my true love… and he would not follow me into its depths. I founded an empire here while he sat brooding on his island. At times he would come to me, always tempting me to leave my people behind and return to the sunlit world. He could never accept my marriage to the sea. My responsibilities here. He was insistent that I be his, so I banished him from the ocean… but he never forgot his obsession.”

  “Is that all love is?” asked Sharadza. “Obsession?”

  Indreyah caressed the sea-plants as she moved along the coral maze. “Perhaps,” she said. “You ask wise questions, Sharadza.”

  “What happened? With the Pearl?”

  “Iardu’s last desperate attempt,” said the Mer-Queen. “He sent Vod to steal it, knowing it was an object of worship that my people cherished above all else. Aiyaia was the Sea God’s daughter, and she made the Pearl in an age now forgotten. Iardu took the Pearl, using Vod as his hands, thinking I would come to his island and beg – or bargain – for its return.”

  “And did you?”

  “No,” said Indreyah. “I would not play his game. He might capture me forever with his magic if I left my own realm. So I let him keep the Sacred Pearl, for all the good it did him.”

  “He told me he betrayed you…”

  “So he did. Wicked, selfish Iardu. He could not shape me as he shaped the rest of the world. This he could not stand.”

  “Perhaps he truly loved you,” said Sharadza.

  The Mer-Queen shook her head. “True love seeks not to possess, but only to share itself.”

  “What about my father? Why did he steal your Sacred Pearl for Iardu?”

  “Who can say but Iardu himself? You might visit his island and ask him yourself.”

  Or find him in the streets of Udurum telling stories to drunken laborers.

  “I will ask him,” Sharadza told the Mer-Queen. “By the Gods of Earth and Sky, I will.”

  The mer-folk brought her a great chest of stone banded with rusted iron, some relic of a sunken ship. Salt-crusted emeralds decorated the lid, and inside (said the Queen) lay the giant bones of her father. She did not have the heart or stomach to look at them. She trusted the word of the Sea-Folk on the matter. The Queen granted her a cadre of warriors to carry the chest to the shore, then it would be up to Sharadza to bring it the rest of the way home.

  Indreyah offered her the hospitality of the palace for as long as she wished, but already Sharadza was growing cold in the marine depths, and she craved the fresh air and open spaces of the surface world. The Queen gave her a necklace of tourmalines and opals, dazzling in all the colors of the sea. At its center hung a fish-shaped talisman of dark jade, carved with the intricate skill of the Sea-Folk.

  “This amulet will keep you safe beneath the waters,” said the Mer-Queen, “and grant you passage among the People of the Sea. And if you wear it while you sleep, we may speak together in dreams. Do you wish this?”

  Sharadza nodded her assent and embraced the Queen.

  “I can give you only my thanks,” she said, “and the friendship of Udurum.”

  Indreyah smiled at her. “That is more than enough.”

  The Sea-Folk watched, astonished, as she took the form of a golden eel, and the chest-bearers swam after her toward the upper waters. For some while they glided just beneath the surface, coming at last upon the white sands of a Stormlands beach. She was not sure exactly where, but somewhere on this same coast lay the port town of Murala.

  She walked from the sea in her true form, shedding seawater like liquid sorcery. The mer-folk, eight of them in all, carried the chest onto the beach and set it gently on the sand, where its great weight sank a few fingerspans deep. The lid-stones gleamed in the sunlight, reminding Sharadza of her mother’s green eyes. The Sea-Folk said farewell in their bubbly language and dove beneath the waves.

  She sat down on the wet sand, one hand on the lid of the chest-coffin, and wept. It was a clear day on the shore, and no boats or wandering villagers were around to witness her sorrow. It would not have mattered. She cried until she was done with crying. Then she stood, breathed in the crisp, salty air, and stared past the dunes toward the green plains.

  At least there could be a funeral now. At least there could be a final acceptance of her loss. Her brothers would bear their sadness with grace. Fangodrel might not even care, or would hide his feelings in scrawled verse. Her mother had already wept enough. For her, too, this would bring a welcome closure. One final bout of grief and their lives could find a new pattern.

  Why, Father? she asked the trapped bones. Why did you march off to death, believing it was the Sea Queen who tormented you? I must know the answer.

  She laid her forehead upon the chest and reminded herself that Vod was an Uduru, a Giant. She was the daughter of an Uduru. Her heart pumped Uduru blood throughout her limbs.

  The part is the whole…

  Now she stood three times the size of a man, a full-grown Uduri Giantess. The sea wind caught up her black hair like a tangled mass of ravens’ wings. Her face was hardly changed, but her Giantess feet sank to the ankles in the sand. She lifted the massive chest onto her shoulder like a sack of flour and marched northward.

  A flock of white gulls flew above, an aerial procession for the dead King’s homecoming.

  16

  The Blessings of Winter

  The benevolent rains of fall gave way to the season of cruel ice-storms. The northern wind swept across the walls of New Udurum and took up residence in its frosty streets and courtyards. The branches of trees in the royal gardens were sheathed in crystal, and the brown carcasses of plants were frozen in perpetual decay. The black towers themselves took on a silvery skin, and the cobbled streets of the city became a dangerous place for men and horses to walk.

  After the siege of each icy tempest, the Giants went forth along the streets breaking up the ice with bronze shovels and stamping boots. Uduru did not
mind the cold of winter that kept humans huddled about the warm hearths of their houses. Even in the depths of the icy season commerce thrived, and the Central Plaza swarmed with fur-wrapped traders, vendors, and commoners. Outlying farms slept through the season, but those who stored and preserved their produce did a fine business. The smokes of the blacksmiths’ stalls mingled with the effluvia of five thousand chimneys. The city steamed in its thin mantle of ice.

  Shaira watched the flow of trade from the highest window of her tower. She hated the winter and its frigid onslaught. The season reared its death-colored head each year and breathed a sea of frost across the northern world. She missed the blessed heat of the desert and the gentle shade of palm trees… the breeze of the delta and the fragrant winds blowing through the Valley of the Bull. It seemed another world, a vision that had faded centuries ago, as if it was never real. The desert was gone now, and so was her life in sunny Shar Dni.

  The Queen sat alone in a padded chair, the empty bed immaculate behind her and as cold as the ice along the window’s casement. She had grown used to the absence of Vod these past months… the yawning void in her life that was once filled only by his presence. The touch of his rough fingers, the strength of his embrace. The end of these things she had learned to accept, and the constant ache that never truly left her heart.

  As the frosted city bustled far below, her eyes were dry. She had gone beyond sorrow. She sat enthroned in the iron tomb of loneliness. Her children were gone, like her husband. They might all be dead. Vod was certainly dead, she needed no oracle or herald to tell her that. She had known when he marched off to the sea that he would never return. She might have accepted that terrible loss, but this new one was unacceptable. Her fine boys, her loving daughter… all fled, and some at her own request.

  Tadarus, Fangodrel… sent south with their cousin to stir the cauldron of war. Vireon… lost on a hunt with his Uncle Fangodrim. Not even the First Among Giants knew where he had run off to, or could guess his fate. “North,” was all he could say. “The lad ran north, fast as the wind. I searched his trail for days and lost it in the snows of the highlands.” She should have forbidden him to go on the Long Hunt, but she had thought it would take his mind off the loss of his father. Vireon was supposed to be her rock, her pillar of strength now that Tadarus was gone. Where was he?

  Sharadza. The deepest cut in her heart was made by her rebellious daughter. Off in the night like a guilty thief, leaving only a pitiful scrap of parchment to explain herself. Where had she gone? Whatever path she took would lead to the sea, where Vod had gone. The girl actually thought she could bring him back from the Curse of the Sea Queen. Now that curse might claim her as well. How could she be so selfish and hard-headed?

  Was I that naïve and petulant when I was sixteen? No, surely not. She had been the daughter of Tadarus I, King of Shar Dni, and duty was her all. It was not until she turned nineteen that she hatched her plan with Vod… but that wasn’t her fault. The Gods had intervened. She had never wanted to marry the decrepit Emperor of Uurz – it would have been like marrying her own grandfather. Perhaps that is what Sharadza needed to take her mind off the death of Vod. She needed a fine Prince to marry. She needs a good husband.

  Gods of Earth and Sky, please let her return safely from whatever fool’s journey she has taken. I’ll see her married and happy before another year turns. Perhaps one of those Twin Princes of Uurz would suit her needs. Emperor Dairon would certainly not refuse Shaira’s offer. His sons were young and strong… one a warrior, one a scholar. There was variety for her daughter, an element of choice that Shaira herself never had. Until that day she had chosen Vod and sent him on his journey…

  Shaira came down from her tower perch only when the duties of queenhood demanded it. There was some mumbling from her human advisors, suggestions that she make herself more visible. She could not hide away forever if she hoped to keep rule over a city of Men and Giants. The Uduru she kept at court said nothing. It was not their way to intrude on a woman’s grief, however long it might last. Besides, they lived far longer than Men, so they could afford to wait out the length of their little Queen’s sadness.

  “Isolation is not good for the soul,” said Aadu, Priest of the Sky God. “You must accept the company of others.”

  She heard the wisdom in his words, but ignored it.

  “Your daughter will return, Majesty,” said Tolomon, Viceroy of Trade. “She is only a girl; she will not go far. Homesickness will bring her back before long.”

  Tolomon was a well-meaning fool.

  “Vireon will come back to us when he is ready,” said Fangodrim the Gray. “He knows the forest better than any man or Giant. My guess is he’s run off to forget the city for a while. You know he loves the Wild more than any of his girls.”

  She wrapped a shawl of worry about herself and stayed in her private chambers most days, sleeping or staring out the southern window at the tiny folk of Udurum, the basalt ramparts, and the black mountains along the horizon. Her servants brought spiced wine, or tea steeped with calming herbs. She drank them all, tasting nothing, her eyes roaming the heavy clouds. She waited, like green stalks wait in the frozen earth. Should spring arrive, she might sprout forth again. Or shrivel in the dirt of her own despair. She did not know.

  The first real snow laid a blanket of white across the black stones and high walls. The great trees became pale monoliths, the streets filled with slanting drifts, and the brilliance of morning came early. In the sparkling light of that pristine dawn, Vireon approached the city gates with a train of blue-skinned Giants at his back.

  Shaira’s servants washed her black locks and dressed her in a regal gown of purple and sable, her neck and wrists hung with silver. She endured their ministrations impatiently, rushing them through their duties. Not daring to smile until she set her own eyes on her youngest son. How else could she believe it was true?

  An audience of Men and Uduru filled the throne room well before she entered. There, in the midst of smiles and expressions of wonder, dressed in the crude skin of some snow-beast, stood Vireon, blue eyes blazing. The crowd spread like water, and a cheer went up to the rafters, the bellows of Uduru making stone and girder tremble.

  Vireon rushed toward her, and someone else rushed behind him. He held the hand of a strange woman with wild hair the color of ripe corn and even wilder eyes. She wore the mottled furs of woodland creatures, and a cloak of dark wolfskin.

  Vireon let go the woman’s hand and embraced his mother. She shivered at the touch of his cold skin, as if he’d not been near a fire in days. Yet beneath that chill beat the blazing heat of his heart, a sweet medicine for her injuries. She grabbed his big hands in hers, rubbing them.

  “My son,” she said, locking his eyes with her own. About the dais where the double throne sat empty (like the much greater single throne behind it), the eyes of her advisors grew large as they caught the rays of her smile. “You are cold.” She turned to a steward. “Bring hot wine for my son and his… guests.” The steward rushed off to rally the servants.

  “Mother,” said Vireon. “I missed you. I’m sorry to have left you so long.”

  She hugged him again. “You are back now,” she said. “The Gods are good.”

  “Mother,” he said again, taking the wild girl’s hand. “This is Alua.”

  He said the name in a way that told her everything. This was no casual dalliance he had found in some hidden village and dragged home to please his manly hunger. He gave her name as he might give a precious jewel into his mother’s hands, or a holy object from some distant temple.

  The wild girl blinked her coal-black eyes. They sparkled like the morning snow. She said nothing, so Shaira spoke in her place.

  “Those who are close to my son’s heart are close to mine,” she said. She took Alua’s hand. Cold, like Vireon’s skin. The girl lowered her eyes and smiled. Demure as a Princess. Or too ignorant to behave otherwise. “Welcome to Udurum,” said the Queen.

  “I have
much to tell you,” said Vireon. She saw a sadness swimming in his eyes, a hungry fish gliding beneath the surface of a frozen lake. “What word from Tadarus?”

  “No word,” she told him. “Certainly he and Fangodrel have reached Uurz by now.”

  Vireon’s lean chin sported a half-grown beard. It made him look a bit older, more like Tadarus. Or perhaps it was the raw concern on his face. He worries for his brother.

  “Has there been no messenger confirming his arrival?”

  “No word from Uurz has come,” she said. His questions brought back her cloud of worry. “What troubles you?”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning away. “I miss my brothers… that is all.”

  Now her eyes fell on the blue-skinned Uduru standing in the hall. Some of them were possibly human men or women, for their height was much less. They sweltered and sweated beneath cloaks of thick fur, and the Giants of Udurum stared at them in silent wonder, marveling at their indigo skin, and waiting for the Prince to explain them. That time could be postponed no longer. When Vireon spoke, she realized that the tallest blue-skins were all female.

  “Cousins!” announced Vireon, stepping onto the dais. “Where is my uncle?”

  Fangodrim the Gray made his way through the crowd, smiling. “Prince!” shouted the First Among Giants. “Your hunt went on far too long!” Giants rumbled with laughter as Fangodrim and Vireon embraced. Shaira took her seat on the throne behind her son, who commanded all the eyes in the room.

  “I am sorry for leaving you in the forest,” Vireon said to his uncle. “But as you will see, my hunt has been a good one.” Fangodrim stepped aside and Vireon addressed the crowd. The wild, silent Alua stood with her hand in his. They seemed inseparable. Shaira decided not to worry about this unless it became necessary.

  “Uduru! People of New Udurum,” Vireon began. “These are the women and children of the Udvorg!”

  A wave of astonishment flowed across the hall. The city Giants, mostly sentinels and palace staff, rubbed their beards and stared at the blue-skins, who stood blinking and resigned. The smaller ones looked afraid, some clinging to the skirts of the Giantesses. Shaira did not know the word Udvorg, but it seemed some of the Uduru did. Or they half-remembered it.