Kingdom of Ruses

by Kate Stradling

  Viola squeezed her palm and watched several more drops of blood fall into the well.

  “That’s more than enough,” said the Prince. He quickly stowed the knife into his belt and dumped the contents of the bucket over her bleeding hand. “I didn’t think you would be the sort to be so overzealous.”

  “The Prime Minister has been a Moreland for seventeen generations,” Viola replied breathlessly. “If what you say is true, my family has been slowly killing the land all that time. You say it’s more than enough, but I can’t see how I can even begin to compensate for so much abuse.”

  He was massaging the magic into her hand, working a spell of healing over the wound she had inflicted, but he looked up at these words. The expression in his eyes startled Viola to her very core—it seemed to be one of complete adoration. “It is enough,” he told her, “that you feel that way.”

  Uncomfortably she averted her own gaze to the well. “Am I enslaved to the earth now?” she asked. “Am I enslaved just as it was enslaved to me and my family?”

  The Prince studied her for a long moment before he answered her question. “The second type of blood-bond is not one of enslavement,” he said reverently. “It is one of support. By returning your own blood to the land, you give it testimony that you will work for its good. You and the earth are not enslaved to one another. You are mutual partners who will work for the good of one another. The land knows now that Viola Moreland will do what is required of her for the betterment of Lenore. But we’re not finished yet,” he added. He released her hand and proffered the bucket to her once more. “Bring up another measure of magic, if you would.”

  Viola cast him a dubious glance but did as she was told. Down into the well went the bucket, and up it came again with the same amount of magic in it as before. Viola frowned at it.

  “Patience,” said the Prince, and he seemed to be holding back a laugh. “It took centuries to deplete, so you must give it a little time to regenerate.”

  “What are we doing now?” Viola asked, annoyed that he could read her thoughts so well.

  “You said you knew the spell for good health. Dip your fingers and trace the pattern on that tree there.” He pointed to a particularly tall specimen nearby. “Yes, really,” he added upon seeing her confused expression.

  Viola set down the bucket and dipped her fingers as she had been told. Then, she stepped forward to the appointed tree and traced the correct pattern directly onto its bark. She cast an inquiring glance over one shoulder.

  “Say the spell, then,” he prompted.

  Viola licked the last bit of magic from her fingertip and intoned, “Valeto.” She pressed her fingers to the tree and felt magic rush from her into the bark.

  “No,” said the Prince. “That’s all wrong. Why are you using that foreign tongue? That’s part of the reason your spells are so weak.”

  “It’s what Father taught me,” Viola argued. “Charlie uses the same incantation, and he’s quite accomplished.”

  If anything, her protest made his expression even more severe. “You’re not your Father, and you’re certainly not Charlie. Here, try it again on the next tree.” He held the bucket for her to dip her fingers. “Your pattern is perfect—yes, just like that. Now the words to say—and don’t argue with me, please—are in the old tongue: wes thu hæl. Say it.”

  Viola spared him an uncertain glance but nevertheless followed his instructions. “Wes thu hæl,” she said as she touched the pattern.

  The experience was completely different. Magic flared through her, burning and icy at the same time, and flowed into the tree in front of her. Some of the leaves seemed to perk and the branches looked somehow stouter. Viola blinked as she drew back her hand and wondered why such a difference had occurred.

  With some surprise she realized that the Prince was standing at her elbow. He surveyed her work with a satisfied look on his face. “Good,” he said. “Now we just have to do that to the rest of the trees around the well.” Then he held up the bucket for her to dip her fingers again.

  “Why are we doing this?” she asked, mystified.

  He was busy tracing the spell-pattern into the next tree over. “It’s part of giving back, using the magic for the earth’s benefit rather than your own. Under normal circumstances this should be done once a year, but you’ll probably need to do it more often than that at first, while the well renews its strength. The ground offering I gave earlier should be done once a month, by the way. Wes thu hæl,” he said to the tree.

  “Where did you learn this?” Viola asked as she dipped her fingers again.

  “From my parents,” he replied.

  “There are wells of magic in Melanthos?” she asked curiously.

  He flinched, and did not immediately answer. “Not those parents,” he said at last. “My parents in the forest. My true parents.”

  Viola didn’t know what he meant, but she felt instinctively that she could not ask. His shoulders were stiff and his manner had changed from easygoing to distant in that brief moment, a clear warning that this subject was off-limits. Silence yawned between them as they worked their way around the clearing, the stillness punctuated only by their softly spoken spells. Because of the vegetation and young saplings, Viola had never noticed that the well was surrounded by a ring of old-growth trees. When she lifted her head to ask about this, she found the Prince wholly focused upon his work, a closed expression on his face.

  She swallowed her question and kept working.

  As they came to the last tree, the Prince finished the incantation and handed the bucket to Viola. “Sprinkle the rest of this on the surrounding plants,” he told her.

  She wasn’t sure how to go about it, except by dipping her fingers in and flicking the magic from them, so she did just that. She observed the forest as she went. Already it seemed somehow brighter, more radiant here. At first she thought it might be a trick of the light—it was close to noon, and the sun was higher than when they had arrived—but there was something more to it than just sunlight. There was more vitality in the air, she thought, more of a sense of the forest not as a collection of plants, but as a living creature.

  When she had distributed the last of the magic, she turned to find the Prince standing at the head of the path. “Is that all?” she asked.

  He nodded curtly. “It has to rest. So do we. Come along, then.”

  She tucked the bucket under one arm and followed, still feeling that awkwardness in the space between them. As they neared the hedge-door, his pace slowed until he finally stopped. Viola stood behind him, waiting.

  “It’s the leaders of Melanthos that are vultures,” he said at last. “The people there are just scraping by in order to survive, pathetic and weak. My birth parents were like that, doing everything in their power to protect themselves. I don’t consider them to be my family anymore.” He turned golden eyes upon her, and Viola appraised his somber face.

  “They failed to protect you?” she ventured carefully, certain that there was a very painful event buried beneath his calmly spoken words.

  For a moment he considered her question. “It’s complicated,” he said at last. “We’re not all blessed to be born to parents as honorable as your own, Viola. When the change came upon me, mine wanted nothing to do with me—superstition, perhaps. My parents—my true parents—told me I shouldn’t judge my birth family, because they didn’t understand, because they were afraid. But…” His voice trailed off, and he suddenly shook his head. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

  With those simple words, he dismissed the subject. For a moment Viola stood in silent contemplation of everything he had said. There was much she did not comprehend.

  He rudely interrupted her thoughts by loudly clearing his throat. She looked up, startled, and he inclined his head toward the hedge-door as though to say, “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  He really was far too good at that arrogant gesture, Viola thought as she started forward with the key. It was almost as tho
ugh he really were the Eternal Prince rather than some strange impostor who had merely stumbled upon the job at the right time.

  Chapter 7: Viola Knows Both More and Less Than Expected

  He is a curious creature. I don’t know if that ritual at the well will really help it to produce more magic, but I do hope so. After we finally returned to the palace (sneaking past Mother again), all he wanted to do was read about the nifaran, and all I wanted to do was take a nap. I’m not used to casting so much magic in so little a space of time.

  This business of a “change” that he mentioned keeps plaguing my mind. He spoke it casually enough, as though I should be entirely familiar with what he was talking about. I’ve noticed that he has the habit of doing that, though, so I’m not sure whether I really should know, or if that is merely his way of speaking. Whatever sort of a change it was, it must have been quite significant for his parents—his birth-parents, that is—to disown him, as I gather must have occurred. Perhaps the change was him learning how to affect arrogance and superiority. I might’ve disowned him as well.

  I should scratch out that last part, as it was wholly ungenerous. I still find him troublesome, and I can’t understand why Father has taken him so much into trust. And I still want to know his name, because calling him “your Highness” is just making things confusing in my own mind. I’m starting to believe that he really could be the Eternal Prince, and I don’t know what we will do when he finally leaves, for he said himself that he will only stay for a short while.

  If that is the case, we must make good use of him while we can. I do hope he intends to stay for the midsummer festival, for that doppelganger is the most troublesome to conjure—it must be able to walk and to wave, and it has to last for longer than an hour or two, most of the time. Last year’s was rather feeble, but I think that’s because Charles put so much effort into conjuring those cursed griffins from the gargoyles on the palace’s main tower and wasn’t paying as much attention when he created the Prince. If the current Prince stays long enough, we won’t have to worry about that.

  Charles must speak to him about it, though, for I refuse to make him think I want him here any longer than necessary. He acts familiarly enough with me as it is.

  “Come help me with this passage, Viola,” said the Prince.

  Viola looked up from her journal to where he sat on the balcony above. He was poring over a book that was at least three hundred years old, she knew. “Try reading it aloud,” she suggested so that she could avoid having to climb the stairs. “Some of the older texts you can make out if you read them aloud.”

  He cleared his throat. “‘A NIFARA’—I can understand that word well enough, because it’s in all capitals—all right, then, ‘A NIFARA yf a cnichen maft nane, a yumin hwo haf fuffrid ded—”

  “What?” Viola interrupted incredulously. “You sound like you’re talking with marbles in your mouth!”

  “That’s because this is absolute gibberish. I’m just reading what it says: ‘a NIFARA yf a cnichen maft nane’—”

  “Cnichen maft nane?” she repeated with a skeptical glare.

  The Prince’s shoulders stiffened. “Come look for yourself, if you don’t believe me,” he replied. “You’re the one who said these books are perfectly intelligible.”

  She hesitated, wondering if he could possibly be bluffing about the text so that she would have to come up and help him. She would never know unless she looked at it herself, though. “I should make you come down here,” she grumbled.

  “Are you questioning an order from your Prince?”

  A disgusted noise clicked in the back of her throat and she shut her journal with a snap.

  “What’s that you’re writing in, anyway?” asked the Prince.

  “Never you mind,” Viola replied, and she tucked the journal safely away in a pocket. She made her way up the staircase to the second floor, where he sat next to the balcony. His vantage point, she noticed, gave him a perfect view of most of the room, including the door to the main entrance and the one to his bedchamber. She wondered if he had chosen that particular spot on purpose or by chance.

  “Where is it?” she asked. She folded her arms and peered down at the book upon the low table in front of him.

  “Here, see?” He pointed to a particular passage. “‘A NIFARA yf a cnichen maft nane—’”

  “A NIFARA is a creature most rare,” Viola interrupted. “You’re utterly misreading the script. The ‘s’ is that long mark that looks like an ‘f’ but isn’t crossed—do you see?—and the ‘r’ looks like an ‘n’ but with a longer first stroke—sort of like a cross between an ‘n’ and a ‘p,’ or like an ‘r’ that’s too big for the script, if you want to look at it that way—and most of the vowels tend to interchange with one another. Cnichen maft nane, indeed,” she finished scornfully, but when she shifted her glance to the Prince, she discovered that he was watching her with a steady intensity that suddenly unnerved her.

  “If that’s all…” she began, fully intent upon making her retreat.

  He caught her wrist before she could move away. “Read the rest of it,” he said, and that intense expression had all but vanished from his eyes. “I don’t want to have to muddle through all of that when you’re right here and can understand it perfectly. Come on, then.”

  Before Viola could react otherwise, he had pulled her down next to him on the sofa and dragged the book into her lap. She realized with embarrassment that he had an arm around her shoulders—not exactly around her shoulders, as it was actually resting on the back of the sofa, but close enough that if she leaned back at all, it would be draped around her. She kept her spine perfectly stiff.

  “Read to me, please, Miss Viola,” he said in his most imperious, Prince-like voice, and his eyes shifted to gaze out across the library below.

  Fighting the urge just to humor him, she flipped the book closed to look at its cover. “I don’t remember reading this one when I was younger—it doesn’t have any pictures, though, so I probably skipped it. Some of the bestiaries have lovely illustrations, you know.”

  “Quit stalling and read,” he told her with a narrow glare.

  Viola turned back to the correct page and cleared her throat. “‘A NIFARA is a creature most rare, a human who has suffered death before his time and for whose death the earth itself weeps, and in so weeping resurrects the body to new life.’ That’s interesting. I don’t recall hearing anything about the earth weeping in the other accounts I’ve read.”

  “Keep reading,” he said, perturbed at her interjection.

  “Fine, fine. ‘This newly come creature’—how droll, ‘newly come’ written as one word—‘wields magic most powerful and commands many other magical creatures found here in this most noble book.’ The author thought a lot of his own writing, didn’t he?”

  “Viola,” the Prince growled in warning.

  She rolled her eyes, perhaps enjoying herself just a little too much. “‘To all sorcerers who seek greater power than the earth’s blood may give, you need only capture a nifara and drink his blood instead. Then shall you be imbued with his power and rule over all he rules, and he shall have no power against you…’” Her voice trailed off as the words took root in her mind. “Is that the enslavement bond you were talking about earlier?” she asked the Prince, and she noticed a hard set to his jaw even as his eyes would not meet hers. “If the nifaran actually did exist, this seems like it would be a cruel thing to do to them, enslaving them for their power.”

  His gaze snapped up. “What do you mean, ‘if they actually did exist’?” he demanded. He seemed almost offended that she would make such a statement.

  Viola suppressed a laugh. “It’s a myth, of course,” she said. “Everything in this book is a myth—all of these books! There’s no such thing as a nifara, or a griffin, or unicorn, or bonnacon, or manticore, or any of the dozens of other creatures they’re talking about. They’re all myths, creatures invented to maintain a sense of wonder in the people, to maint
ain a sense of control for those in power… What is it?”

  He stared at her in open-mouthed astonishment, his golden eyes wide and unnerving. At her query, though, he snapped his mouth shut and shook his head. “You really believe that,” he said with amazement. “I had thought you were merely being discreet before, but you really do believe that.”

  “Discreet?” Viola echoed in confusion.

  “Does it say anything else about the nifaran?” he asked intently.

  Her eyes traveled back to the page and its jumbled script. “It continues, ‘Beware of his counterpart’—this must be a warning to the sorcerers who are enslaving a nifara, I should think—‘for nifaran dwell in twos and when you subjugate only one, the other shall have power to kill you.’ Well, I should think so,” said Viola with a nod. “Oh, but he’s taken that into account. ‘If at all possible, you must capture both and subjugate them. Then, their lives shall be prolonged, and your power will grow to enormity.’ I don’t think I like this writer very much.”

  “Does he say anything more?” the Prince asked wearily.

  “Only a description: ‘In appearance, the nifara looks human except for his eyes, which are bright like jewels and finely shaped. He may walk among men, but he will speak with the old tongue…”

  Viola’s voice trailed off, and her gaze suddenly leapt to the Prince’s face, to his golden eyes that stared back at her with keenness, as though willing her to understand. They were golden and bright just like the cat’s eye brooch he wore…

  She recoiled violently from him. As she scrambled up from the couch, she dropped the book in her haste. It landed on the floor with a thud, its pages askew beneath the weight of the cover. Her heart pounded in her ears as disbelief curled through her. The Prince, meanwhile, simply stared up at her, waiting to hear what she would say.

  “You…” she started, hardly believing the words that were poised on the tip of her tongue.

  He leaned forward, his eyes piercing. “What is it?”