A Knot in the Grain (7 page)

He stopped and turned his head a little that he might roll one brown eye back at her. She slipped off his back and stood hesitating. Then she laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Very well.” He stepped forward, and she kept pace at his side.

The golden twinkle resolved itself into a ring of torches set on slender columns in a semicircle around a small, bare courtyard before a great stone hall. The stag walked without pause up the low steps to the door, a door high and wide enough even for his branching crown. Still she kept pace, and before her was a vast chamber, dimly lit by a fire in a hearth at its far end. There were several tall chairs before the fire, and from the shadows of one of them a tall narrow man with pale hair stood up and came toward them. “Welcome, child,” he said to her; and to him, “Thank you.”

She did not care for the big hall; it was too large and too empty, and the shadows fell strangely from its corners; and the last roof she had stood under had also been of stone—she shuddered. She would not pass these doors. The man saw the shudder and said gently, “It's all over now. You're quite safe.” She looked up at him—he was very tall—and wanted to say, “How do you know?” But if she asked one question, a hundred would follow, and she was tired, and lonely, and had been trained never to ask questions.

She did not remember if it was the stag or the tall man who showed her to the long narrow room with the row of empty beds in it; she woke up burrowed in blankets in the bed nearest the door, with sunlight—late-morning sunlight, she estimated, blinking—flaming through the row of windows high above her head.

Her sleeping hall, she discovered, was built out from one wall of the great central chamber she had peered into the night before. The tall man sat on the front steps she had climbed, her hand on the stag's shoulder, the night before; his long hands dangled idly between his bent knees. He looked up at her as she stepped from the sleeping hall; his hair blazed as yellow as corn in the sunlight. He wore a plain brown tunic over pale leggings and soft boots, and around his neck on a thong was a red stone. She turned away from him; around her on three sides were trees, and on the fourth side, the great grey hall; overhead the sky was a clear, hard blue. She lowered her eyes, finally, and met the man's gaze; he smiled at her.

“I am Luthe,” he said.

She did not answer immediately. “I am Ruen. But you know that, or I would not be here.” Her voice—she could not help it—had a sharp, mistrustful edge to it.

Luthe spread his fingers and looked down at them. “That is not precisely true. I did not know your name till now, when you told it to me. Your … difficulties … were brought to my attention recently, and it is true that I asked, um, a friend if he would help you out of them. And I asked him to bring you here.”

“A friend,” she said, the edge to her voice gone. She closed her eyes a moment; but there was little she cared to remember, and she opened them again, and tried to smile. “It is pleasanter to thank you—and him—without thinking about what, and how much, I have to be grateful to you for.” She paused. “I would like to declare, here, today, that I have no past. But then I have no future either. Have you a use for me?”

“Yes,” said Luthe.

“I suppose you will now tell me that I may not forsake my past so? Well. I am not surprised. I never learned so much as … my uncle wished to teach me, but I did learn a little.”

“You learned far more than he wished you to,” Luthe said grimly. “Had you cooperated to the extent of idiocy, as would have pleased him best, he would not have had to disturb the weather for half the world to invent portents for his insignificant corner of it.”

She smiled involuntarily. She had never heard anyone speak with less than complete respect of the Regent; and these few words from this strange man reduced her uncle to nothing more than a nuisance, a bothersome thing to be dealt with; and suddenly her past was not the doom of her future. “That awful weather was
his
…?” She sobered. “But I am still a poor excuse for a queen, even if he is not a—an entirely honorable Regent.”

Luthe laughed. “You are wrong, my child. Only a real queen could call that poison-worm only ‘not entirely honorable.' The defects in your education can be mended.” He stood up, and bowed. “Which is the first item on our agenda. We will do our poor best to look after certain historical and philosophical aspects.…”He paused, for she was looking at him uneasily.

“Truly I am not good at lessons,” she said.

“You wouldn't know,” Luthe said cheerfully. “You've never had any. With me you will have real lessons. And your … um … lesson in practical application will be along presently.”

“Will I—may I—see my … the stag again?”

“Yes,” said Luthe. “He will return. Come along now.”

She sighed, but the custom of obeying orders was strong.

She had no way of knowing it, but visitors to Luthe's mountain often found themselves a little vague about the passing of the days. There was something about the air that was both clearer and fuzzier than the air she was accustomed to; she slept heavily and dreamlessly and woke up feeling happy. She learned a great deal in a very short time, and was astonished to discover she could.

“Do stop giving me that fish-eyed look,” Luthe said irritably; “I'm not magicking anything over on you. You have a perfectly good brain, once you are permitted to use it. Your uncle's absence provides permission. Now pay attention and don't brood.”

One morning Luthe announced, “No lessons today. I anticipate visitors.” She looked up in alarm. She had seen no one but Luthe since the stag had brought her here, and she knew at once that the visitors would have something to do with her future. She tried not to be dismayed, but she was still enjoying the novelty of enjoying anything, and dreaded interruption; the habit of pessimism was not easily shaken, even by Luthe's teaching.

Soon she heard the sound of … something … making its way through the trees around the courtyard where they sat. Just before she saw the great stag separate himself from the shadows of the trees Luthe stood up. The stag's footfalls were soft; the noise was made by someone who staggered along beside him, one arm over his neck. This man wore tattered leggings under a long white tunic, now torn and dirty, the left side matted brown and adhering to his side. The stag stopped just inside the ring of trees. “Oof,” said the man, and fell to the ground.

“You needn't have half killed him,” Luthe said. “You might also have carried him here.” The stag looked at Luthe, who shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Well, he is here, which is what matters.”

Ruen stared at the stag, who turned his head to return her gaze; but if he said anything to her, she did not hear it.

“Ruen,”
Luthe said, and she realized by his tone that he had repeated her name several times.

“I ask pardon,” she said, and snapped her eyes away from the stag's.

Luthe looked at her and smiled faintly. “Here is the practical lesson I promised you.”

She blinked, and glanced down at the man on the ground. He stirred and moaned; the moan had words in it. She knelt beside him, and his eyes flickered open, saw her, tried to focus on her. “Ugh?” he muttered. “Uh. Oh.” His eyes closed again.

“I suggest you get him to the nearest bed in the nearest sleeping hall,” Luthe said briskly, “and I will join you in a little time and tell you what to do next.”

The man on the ground was a lot bigger than she was, but she lifted one of his arms to drag it around her shoulders. He feebly tried to help, and she managed to get him to his feet. “Sorry,” he muttered in her ear. “Not feeling quite … well.”

They stumbled the few steps to the nearer of the two long sleeping rooms, and she hauled him up the few steps to the doorway, and tried to lower him gently onto the first bed; but his weight was too much for her, and he fell with a grunt. Luthe arrived then, and handed her warm water in a basin, and herbs and ointment, and long cloths for bandages, and a knife to cut away the stained tunic. She'd never dressed a wound before, but her hands were steady, and Luthe's patient voice told her exactly what to do, although he did not touch the man himself. The wound, or wounds, were curious; there were two neat round holes in the man's side, one of them deep and the second, a hand's length distant, little more than a nick in the skin. She stared at them as she bathed the man's side; they might have been made by a blow from a huge stag's antlers.

When she had done all she could to Luthe's satisfaction and could at last leave the man's bedside, the stag was nowhere to be found.

She slept in the bed next to his that night, with a fat candle burning on a little table between them, but he slept peacefully, and when she rose at dawn and blew the candle out, she stood looking down on the man's quiet face, and noticed that he was handsome.

Later that morning he awoke and, when he discovered her sitting beside him, said, “I'm hungry.” When she brought him food, he had pulled himself nearly to a sitting position against the bedhead, but his face said that it had not been a pleasant effort; and he let her feed him without protest.

On the second day he asked her name. She was tending his side and she said, “Ruen,” without looking up.

On the third day he said, “My name's Gelther.”

She smiled politely and said, “My honor is in your acquaintance.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Where I come from we say, ‘My honor is yours.' You must be from the south. And you must be of high blood or you wouldn't be talking of honor at all.”

“Very well. I am from the south, and I am of high blood. Both these things I would have told you, had you asked.”

He looked embarrassed. “I apologize, lady. It's a habit, I believe. I've been told before that I'm better at doing things than I am at making conversation. Although I'm not sure if talking to the lady who binds your wounds and feeds you with a spoon when you're too weak to sit up is making conversation.” She said nothing, and after a moment he went on. “The only Ruen I know of is a princess who disappeared mysteriously a few months ago.… I'm doing it again, aren't I?”

She nodded, but asked with a careful casualness, “What kind of mystery was she supposed to have disappeared in?”

She could see him considering what to tell her. “The tales vary. She was old enough to be declared queen, but she—there was something supposed to be wrong with her. This, um, ritual, might have cured it.…”

She laughed: the noise startled her, for she would not have thought that such a description of her uncle's perfidy would have struck her so. “I ask pardon. That ritual, had it been completed to expectation, would certainly have cured her.”

Gelther eyed her. “They do say the rite went awry somehow. And we always did think there was something a little odd about the Regent.”

“Yes.” She frowned.

Gelther said, half-desperately, “
Are
you that Ruen?”

“Eh? Oh, yes—of course.” Satisfaction and puzzlement chased each other across the young man's face. “But you heard that that Ruen had the mind of a child who could never grow up, which is why her name was not given her properly upon her name day, as a queen's should; but I seem quite normal?” Now embarrassment joined the puzzlement, and satisfaction disappeared. “I would not have grown up had I not been rescued and brought here.… But I almost wish I had not.”

Gelther said, astonished: “Why ever not?”

She looked at his open, bewildered face. “Because I do not know what I must do. When I believed in my uncle and not in myself, I needed do nothing. I see that my uncle is not as I believed; but I am not accustomed to practical matters—to action—and I am afraid of him.” She sighed. “I am terribly afraid of him.”

“Well, of course you are,” said Gelther stoutly. “I have heard—” He stopped, and smiled crookedly. “Never mind what I have heard. But perhaps I can help you. This is the sort of thing I'm good at—plotting and planning, you know, and then making a great deal of noise till things get done.”

She looked at him wistfully and wished she could feel even a little of his enthusiasm for what such a task was likely to entail.

Gelther was walking, slowly and stiffly, but walking, in five days, and had his first independent bath in the bathhouse behind the stone hall on the sixth. Luthe was never around when Gelther was awake; Gelther had asked, on that fifth day, when he went outside the sleeping room for the first time and saw nothing around him but trees, “Are you alone here?” His tone of voice suggested barely repressed horror.

“No, no, of course not,” she responded soothingly. “But our host is, um, shy.” She found the solitude so pleasant that she had to remind herself that not everyone might find it so.

But she did wonder at Luthe's continued elusiveness; she saw him herself every day, but always, somehow, just after Gelther had nodded into another convalescent nap. That fifth day, she taxed him with it. He replied placidly, “He's your practical lesson, not mine. We will meet eventually. Don't worry. You shan't have to explain my vagaries much longer.”

She showed Gelther the way to the wide silver lake, and they walked there together. “Where is your country?” she asked, a little hesitantly, for fear that he might think she was taking a liberty.

He laughed. “I thought you were never going to ask me that,” he said. “No … I'm not offended. I'm from Vuek, just north of your Arn—I meant only that I cannot understand how you have not asked before. I asked you at once—indirectly perhaps, but I did ask.”

She nodded, smiling. “I remember. That is different, somehow. You were the one in bed, and I was the one standing on my feet. You needed to know.”

He looked at her. “I always need to know.”