Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley Fantasy Magazine, Volume 2

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I think I may throw a scare into a few villages on my way home. If rumor spreads that there is a giant in the land, perhaps some other of my people may hear of it and come seeking me.” He sighed, his eyes showing little hope. “But in all the years I lived there with Gutwort, none of the gnomes, fairies, or elves we encountered had heard of another giant since the death of my mother.”

  Amberly could not control her tears. “I cannot bear to think of you so alone. Could I not come with you? Would it not be better to have a friend, even if that’s all I can ever be?”

  The sweet face of the huge creature smiled gently. “No,” he said sadly. “You would grow old and die long before my house was completed. You would live your life in a forest grotto, without family, friends, or companions. I would have the joy of your company, but not at the cost of your life and fulfillment.

  “Here… in a while… you’ll find someone of your own kind you can love. With him you will have children… a family… and know that your life has had some meaning. I cannot take you from what fate surely meant for you to have.”

  They said sad good-byes one early morning when the cavern was most beautiful. Amberly doubted she would ever go there again. It had stopped being simply a means of exit from the castle. It was a magical world called Carrowyn… a name that no one else would ever know.

  Amberly went on with the business of being a princess. Her duty was to marry well, to benefit the kingdom, and to bring honor to her family name… then to raise strong sons for her husband’s kingdom.

  But the arrangements she herself had made specified that she would marry for love… a man of her own choosing. A man she agreed to marry would have every right and reason to believe he’d found favor in her eyes. And she did not know if any man ever could.

  Torn between a genuine sense of who and what she was, and her responsibilities to that position… and the love that would forever lie between her and whatever man she accepted in marriage… Amberly tried desperately to think of a way she could give back to her father the authority to make the choice for her.

  It would have been easy except for her pride, which would not allow her to appear to have been unable—because of being a female—to accept the responsibility she’d demanded.

  She watched Prince Derro Silverlance of the Kingdom of Fairland approach the throne. Shall it be he? she thought. He’s handsome enough. And it would be a good alliance.

  “My lady,” he said… loud enough to be heard, but not so loud as to give the impression that he was performing for the benefit of the court. He bowed low… gracefully, but not delicately. He was a man familiar with the courtly graces, but he was a man.

  “Prince Derro,” she responded, extending her hand for his kiss. “We are honored at your presence.”

  “Oh, no, my lady,” he said politely, “the honor is entirely mine. We in Fairland had heard rumor of your. beauty, but I’d not expected a goddess out of legend.”

  It was a pretty speech, but others before him had used it… or variations of it. Amberly was aware of the fact that she wasn’t ugly, but she hardly considered herself in the goddess category. She smiled the expected smile and bowed her head demurely. It wasn’t proper, even for a princess, to accept such praise as though it were expected.

  “After all the knights and heroes who have presented themselves to you,” Prince Derro continued, “and not stirred your heart, it is bold and presumptuous of me to consider that I might be the one to win your favor. But I’d not be worthy of my title if I did not make the attempt.”

  “Am I a prize, then, to be sought as proof of knightly valor?” she asked, not totally in jest.

  “A prize, yes,” he responded, his eyes sincere. “Worthy of the greatest deeds. I come because I do not wish to spend the rest of my life wondering if you might have been mine if only I’d had the courage to try.”

  “And what brave deeds have you performed,” she asked, “other than risking my refusal?”

  The prince smiled acknowledgment of her barb, seemingly pleased that she was not so gullible as to be won by flowery declarations.

  “It is customary to bring an offering,” he replied. “But I would beggar the Kingdom of Fairland and not be able to tempt you with treasures more than have already been offered by the brave men before me.

  “You’ve not been swayed by silks from the East, the ivory tusks of elephants, nor even—it has been said—by jewels stolen from a dragon’s hoard. A throne carved of a single block of jasper has been offered to you, as well as a cloak of golden gryphon feathers. I have no such treasures. And it would hardly be complimentary of me to assume that if you did not love me, you could be purchased with a gift of sufficient value.”

  Behind him, four lackeys eased down the stairway what appeared to be a carriage swathed in velvet. No one had yet offered a royal coach… but he had just finished saying he wasn’t intending to try buying her favor.

  As they drew it forward over the slate paving of the great hall, Amberly could see that the wheels were ordinary in appearance, neither carved nor gilded. She awaited his explanation.

  “I will someday be king of Fairland,” Prince Derro said. “But until then I cannot offer you its wealth. What I offer is myself, my love, my devotion, and proof that I would brave anything in your service and defense.

  “I found no dragon, no gryphon to conquer in your name. But I bring you evidence of my valor.”

  The velvet draperies were whipped from the cart, and Amberly stared into the glazed eyes of Brontharn of Carrowyn.

  He could not see her. His head, alone, was all the cart contained. Brontharn would build no castle… nor would he live out his long life in loneliness. If he were in truth the last of his kind, then giants walked the earth no more.

  “Father?” the princess said, her voice barely a whisper.

  “Yes, my dear?” the king replied from his throne beside her. He clasped her outstretched hand, marveling at how cold her fingers were.

  “I will wed,” Amberly said to him and to the hushed assembly. “Anyone. Anyone you choose.” She looked into Prince Derro’s uncomprehending eyes. “Anyone at all… but him.”

  No one in the kingdom ever guessed the reason for her tears.

  About Phyllis Ann Karr and “The Robber Girl, the Sea Witch, and the Little Mermaid’s Voice”

  Phyllis Ann Karr was born in 1944 “to wonderful parents.” Among the stories her mother read to her were Anderson’s fairy tales, and “The Snow Queen” was one of her favorites, largely because of the Little Robber Girl.

  She lives in Wisconsin with her husband, and is getting back into one of her earliest enthusiasms, amateur theater, playing one of the poker buddies in a community theater production of The Odd Couple.

  The Robber Girl, the Sea Witch, and the Little Mermaid’s Voice

  Phyllis Ann Karr

  There was the time I made a friend out of a little opera singer.

  Say “opera singer,” and people think of a large body standing in the middle of the stage singing arias and duets with other large bodies. But my friend was only in the chorus, with a body not much bigger than a child’s and a voice not much bigger than her body, although it was a good, sweet little voice, and earned her just about enough money to put a little roof over her head and a little porridge in her bowl.

  The way I befriended her was by putting my pistol to the head of a rich young rogue who tried mistaking her for another kind of woman one night on her way home from the Opera House. I helped myself to his purse for my pains, and gave him a kick into the bargain, which may have helped teach him his lesson. Or maybe not—some people never learn a thing. I went away and spent his money somewhere else, but not before taking the time to see my new little friend home safe and promising to look her up if I ever came back to her city.

  I found myself back in her country after about a year. During that year I had had adventures, and I was carrying three new prize possessions in my pockets, along with a comfortable supply of mone
y.

  I had robbed a rascally magician and in his wallet, along with his coins, I found some lotion in a vial just big enough for the label that read, in tiny handwriting: “To See Spirits, One Drop On Either Eyelid. To Hear Spirits, One Drop In Either Ear. To Talk With Spirits, One Drop On The Tongue.” There was so little of the lotion that I hadn’t tried it yet.

  Then I’d been on a ship that was attacked by pirates. When they boarded, I kept them off with my pistols until a fellow passenger and I got clear, and he was so grateful he gave me one of the necklaces he had that a great wizard had made for him out of seahorses’ eyes and fish’s gills. Whoever wore one of those necklaces could breathe under any amount of water, so we were both able to swim ashore, stopping on the bottom whenever we needed a rest.

  The last of my prizes was a pack of cards. Not just any cards. Oh, no! Every court card had the face of some famous personage, and all the faces could sing and talk. Those cards could always win for anybody they happened to like, and the only reason the gypsy, whose mother’s they had been, let me trade him two horses—I had three at the time—for them was because they had taken a dislike to him, and the king of clubs was missing, besides.

  Well, when I got back to her city, I found my friend the little opera singer flat in her bed, with a doctor bending over her.

  “She has been very, very sick, this little one,” he said, “but I think that at last she is on the mend. Only providing, however, that she has good food, warm blankets, and the will to get better.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?” said I, thinking that everyone always has plenty of that kind of will.

  “You see,” said the old leech, “her voice is gone. She can whisper, yes, and with time and good nursing she may someday be able to murmur a little, but I fear she will never sing again.”

  With that, he left some medicine and went off on his rounds of other patients.

  As I said, my purse was pleasantly heavy just then, so I went out and bought food for her bare cupboard, a couple of bottles of good wine, two goose-down feather beds, and a supply of wax candles. When I got back, lit the candles, propped my friend up for dinner, and wrapped her in one of the feather beds, I saw she was crying.

  Her tears rolled down all the time I fed her and got wine and medicine into her, and at last she whispered to me, “You might as well have let him have his way with me last year. Without my voice, it is the only way left for me to earn my living.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” I told her.

  “No, it isn’t,” she whispered back, shaking her head weakly. “I don’t have the legs for ballet, or the fingers for sewing, and I’m not like you, to live by my wits and hardiness. I have only one thing left to sell, and… I think I would as soon be dead.”

  That sent a chill through me, but I told her things would look better in the morning, and she wasn’t to be a little fool in the meantime. Then I got a sleeping draught into her, laid her down and tucked her in snug as a caterpillar in its cocoon, and hoped she’d have good dreams. And then I wrapped myself up in the other goose-down feather bed and settled in to keep watch.

  I got out my talking cards to play a little patience, but they grumbled so loudly at the splinters in the table and the dumb “plebeian” king of clubs I’d put in from another pack, that I was afraid they’d wake the little sleeper up. So I put them away again and let the bottle of wine keep me company all alone.

  Back when I was just a robber brat I had learned that getting drunk can be dangerous, and that taught me how to make a good friend of wine by sipping it just a little at a time. No, it wasn’t the wine that made the air in the garret room shimmer around us toward midnight. It wasn’t the wine that made the candle flames curtsy like tiny dancers in flowing silk skirts, or that seemed to brush the cracked windowpane from the inside.

  I’ve hobnobbed with Death in person—I can tell when the air is full of something not quite canny. Deciding it was time to try my lotion, I put a drop on each of my eyelids, one in each of my ears, and one on my tongue.

  No, it wasn’t canny, what was in that little room with us; but it wasn’t frightening, either. Over my singer’s bed a fair young woman was hovering, so beautiful I might have thought she was an angel, except that she had no wings. In fact, I can’t say for sure whether she had a real body, or just a long gauzy robe that flowed like the candle flames. It seemed to be flowing around limbs and a trunk, as fine as anybody could ever imagine, but it was as transparent as her face and hands and long lovely hair, and I couldn’t see anything through the gauze but the shadowy garret walls. What she was, was a glowing outline against the beams and shadows and flaking whitewash.

  She was stroking the sleeping girl’s forehead, and smoothing the pillow in its worn, patched pillowcase.

  “Hello,” I said softly, standing up but feeling quiet. “You haven’t come to take her, have you? I’ll give you a fight if you have.”

  The spirit looked at me and shook her head. “No—to give her all the help that lies within my power to give. How is it that you can see me?”

  I showed her the lotion. “But who are you?” I asked.

  “I am one of the children of the air,” she replied, still stroking my friend’s forehead. “We go wherever we can, bringing fresh breezes, soothing dreams, and every other healing thing we can. In this way, we earn souls as immortal as those of human beings.”

  “It isn’t a bad plan,” I remarked. “I know plenty of people born with souls who don’t know what to do with them.”

  “I fear not. Whenever the children of the earth cause us to shed tears of sorrow at their naughtiness and mischief, it lengthens our time of trial. But by giving this poor child all the help that lay within your power,” she added more happily, “you are helping me, also, to earn my soul and fly to Heaven all the faster.”

  “Oh, so we’re ’the children of the earth,’ are we?” I observed. When the spirit nodded, I went on, “Well, it’s some comfort to know we’re doing all this double good in the world, but it’ll be a lot better if we can help her to some purpose. Did you happen to be here when the old leech told me about”—I glanced down to be sure my friend was still sleeping—”her voice?”

  The air-child nodded again. “I used to have a very sweet voice,” she mused, “or so they said. If only there were some way…”

  “You’ve got a pretty nice voice now.”

  “All of the children of the air have sweet voices, but only other children of the air—and folk who use magic lotion—can hear us. That would be no use to a mortal singer, but if only there were some way I could give her the voice I had when I was a mermaid, I’m sure she could go on earning her living in the opera.”

  “So you used to be a ’child of the sea’?” I asked.

  “Yes. I fell in love with a human prince, and sold my old voice to the sea witch for a draught that divided my tail into a pair of the props that humans call legs.” She sighed. “He was very kind and very handsome, and if he had married me, he would have given me a soul at once.”

  “I think I’ve heard about you,” I told her. “But they say he did marry you.”

  “What? Who says that?”

  “Oh, people. The people who tell these tales and make plays out of them.”

  “But what do they say happened to the princess he really married?”

  “Who? Oh, you must mean the one he almost married—the way they tell it—but you found out just in time that she was the old sea witch in disguise, out to cheat everybody.”

  I saw tears, transparent as the rest of her, form in the air-child’s eyes and roll down her clear cheeks, like dewdrops if dewdrops could roll down a soap bubble without breaking it. “But the princess was so good and kind! It was not her fault that she had not actually been the one who rescued him from drowning, and she made him so loving a wife! They were happy together all their lives, and they always remembered me—even before they knew my whole story. And now that they are both in Heaven, they look forward to the day I join
them again. How can people make up such a wicked tale about her?”

  “Be careful,” said I. “Lengthening your time of trial, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, because of the people who make up such tales! And the sea witch was surely very unpleasant, but she was fair and kept her word, and never broke it at all until my sisters begged her and sold her their long hair for a way that I could turn back into a mermaid, after all. It was a very wicked way, and I’m grateful I did not take it, but it was the only way she had it in her power to offer me. How can people twist it all around?”

  “Snip snap snurre, basse lurre!” said I, seeing another tear ready to roll, and hoping to head it off. “It’s simply the way of the world, and no good crying about it. Just tell me how to get there, and I’ll go visit the old witch and see what I can do about getting your voice back for my friend here.”

  “But the sea witch took my voice by cutting off my tongue,” the air-child said doubtfully. “I was only dreaming—I don’t see how we could give it to this little singer, at least while she still has her own tongue.”

  I answered, “You can be sure that the witch wouldn’t have been content to take your voice away from you if that was the end of it completely. Anyway, we can try. I think I’ve already had a few glimpses of your people, the time I had to swim back from a pirate attack, and I’ve been wanting another look at the bottom of the sea ever since, so it might as well be now, and we’ll see if we can’t do a good turn while we’re about it.”

  “Oh, are you one of the people with a necklace of enchanted fish’s gills and seahorses’ eyes? I heard about it from some of my sisters of the air, the ones who stayed around you when you wore the necklaces, so that you could breathe. But the sea witch is very unpleasant. Her garden-forest is full of polyps that can catch a grown merman and hold him fast, and her house is made from the bones of drowned humans. Are you sure you want to face her?”