Hart's Hope (30 page)

He flew, he rose up with the water into the ceiling of the cisterns, to the place where it strained itself upward into the rock to emerge in the Water House. He was trapped in the water and he could not breathe. He had not had time to take a proper breath, and so he must rise, he must rise and breathe—

But no, above him he knew was fire. He must go down into the water, and then he would live. So down he sank, waiting to find the bottom. But he did not find it. Instead he despaired and breathed in deep gasps of water. But it was not water. It was pure air. He opened his eyes.

He was lying on the back of the Hart, but he was not weak now with the loss of blood. He reached his hands, took hold of the antlers, and lifted his head free from the nest of thorns. Then he swung himself down from the Hart's back.

“Orem,” breathed Flea.

“My lord Little King,” said Timias.

Orem touched his throat. The wound was gone; the scar was gone; his neck was whole and new, as it had been before he ever had the vision of the Hart.

“I've worn the true crown,” he said. He still could feel the horns surround his head, though they weren't there.

“You're alive.”

They stood and watched the Hart as it stamped its hoof. The head lowered; only then did they realize that it meant to charge them.

“Name of God, doesn't it know we saved its life?” cried Timias.

There was no time for an answer. They scrambled for the downward path and scurried and tumbled along the narrow ledge along the riverside. They looked back only at the entrance to the hewn passage. The Hart was clearly visible, pacing back and forth along the platform of rock, tossing its head.

“How will it get out of here?” asked Flea.

“He knows the way,” said Orem, though he didn't know why he was so sure of that.

Orem let Flea lead them, since he had come this way twice. Like Orem, though, the others were thinking more of the future than of getting out of this path under the Palace. “What do they expect us to do now?” Timias asked.

“Not
us
,” said Orem, “but I'm glad you're willing to share the burden.”

“Did they mean that you're really Palicrovol's son?” asked Flea.

Orem nodded. “They showed me—how it came to be.”

“She's doing nothing that she hasn't done before,” said Timias. “
Who's
doing it?”

“Beauty,” said Orem. “She means to renew herself. By killing me and using my blood.”

“Well, at least you've had practice now,” said Flea.

“But she's never killed a husband before,” Timias said.

It was only then that Orem put together everything that he had learned. She has done nothing that she hasn't done before. More potent than a stranger's blood is the blood of a husband. He had got there before and stopped. But what is more potent than the blood of a husband? To a woman, the blood of her child. And a child who has taken no nourishment except from the mother's breast. Avenge your nameless son. Orem had a nameless sister, years before. Palicrovol's daughter, and Beauty had killed her for the power in her. Orem guessed it all at once, and believed it, too, and damned himself for a fool for thinking all this time that
he
was the one who was doomed. Youth! he cried out silently. Youth, my son, my son.

“Leave me!” he shouted to his friends. “Get away from me!”

They hesitated only a moment, but the agony of his face told them to obey. When they were gone, Orem leapt out of himself, and with his savage inward teeth he gnawed at all the magic he could find, exempted nothing, ravaged through the Palace where Queen Beauty was the strongest and undid her work wherever he could find it. Blinded her, loosed her bindings; he cared little now whether it was Craven that he freed or Weasel. He found the power and unmade it, and he could not, would not be stopped.

And at last the only power was in Beauty herself; all the other magic of the Palace was engulfed and gone. But this was where he meant to come all along. To the smiling face that held his son and meant to kill him. Layer upon layer he unwrapped her; she tried to flee but he followed. She attacked, she moved, she feinted, she tried to disappear but he was there, unmaking her at every step. He had never felt so large, and she was small as he chased her here and there in the labyrinth of sparks and smells and seas of taste and hearing. I will save my son.

And then nothing.

Nothing at all. He could not find her. He was back inside his body and could not escape. All he could taste or touch was in himself. He opened his eyes. Beauty stood above him, looking down. She held Youth in her arms. “Papa,” said the boy, reaching for him.

“Youth,” Orem whispered.

Beauty smiled. Orem understood. Hadn't Gallowglass warned him? He had gone too far; he had told her who he was; he was bound. She could not destroy his gift, but she could turn him in upon himself, where he could do her no more harm.

“Always you,” she said to him. “I should have known the Sisters would betray me. Did you join them again? No matter. In another week I'll separate them. And you, Little King, you'll be here to watch my work. You know at last how it's done, I think. Only
you
were stupid enough to take so long to guess the price.”

“Do you want to hear a story, Papa?” asked the child.

He would have killed her with his hands, except the guards had him, and carried him away from the son who was his life, away from the frozen smile of his wife.

How the Little King decided to help with the death of his son.

T
ORTURE

You were outside the city when they carried him to prison, Palicrovol. Your armies were gathering at Back Gate, where the towers were fewest, as if the towers meant anything. As they brought Orem up the Long Walk to Corner Castle he could see your banners. He had protected you so long that you had begun to hope, hadn't you; and even now he had cost the Queen so much that she could not attack your wizards or your priests, could only bind Craven, Weasel, and Urubugala again, then hold the loyalty and courage of her guards and hope that you'd delay just seven days.

And you delayed. Because you did not believe that it was not a trap. You waited, outnumbering Beauty's troops—a hundred of yours for every one of hers. You could have piled corpses of your fallen men to scale the walls and still had enough to sack the town and take the Castle. She could not have stopped you then, for she hadn't the strength. You could have come to her, and all the power she had could have barely turned a sword. How would you have killed her then, Palicrovol? Fire? Rope? Drowning? Any would have served—or what, had you a plan to use them all? If you had acted then, King Palicrovol, your grandson would still be alive, for as Beauty said, until the year was up he was not ripe.

But you delayed, and gathered your armies, and waited, and waited, while others took the only path, the impossible path, the hopeless path to bring her down before she was unassailable again. You could have stopped her, Palicrovol, but once again it was your son who saved you. Think of that, too, before you slay him for daring to sit upon your throne.

They kept him in the Little Donjon, and the keepers there perfunctorily tortured him, because that was what prisoners were sent there for. He wondered as they pulled his arms from his sockets if this was what had made the man scream; it did not make Orem scream. Was it the suffocation? Needles in the soles of his feet? The binding of the testicles? The broken glass forced into his mouth that cut his tongue and filled his mouth with blood that he dared not swallow—was that what broke the other man? It did not break Orem.

For he did not dwell inside himself now. He dwelt in the body of a year-old child whose mind was five times that age, whose heart was bright, whose life was all rejoicing; Orem lived in Youth, and only watched his own agony from a distance, almost unconcerned. He had once drawn a sword through his own throat, he remembered. But the pain of that had been erased. All the pain was gone, was locked away somewhere and he could not remember where. Only the child's kiss on his lips, only the small arms around his neck. I never knew how a father loved a child until now. How did my father find the strength to ride away from the House of God and leave me? And when the pain was worst, Orem dwelt again with his father, and was four again, and saw the world from his father's shoulders, gripping the golden hair of his father's head as the world bounced up and down.

It was his comfort then, that Avonap had been his father. What if Orem had learned fatherhood from you, Palicrovol? He would have thought then that fathers do not love their sons. He would think that a father is a King, and decrees a man's death because he usurped his place. And then, when he is told that the usurper was his son, the King doubles the reward for his capture, for now he knows his son is guilty of incest as well as treason. How long would Orem have lived in Corner Castle, Palicrovol, if he had learned fatherhood from you? Not long enough to save your life, I think.

U
RUBUGALA

On the sixth day Urubugala came to the Lesser Donjon. It had all been a mistake, he said. Orem was not supposed to be tortured; the Queen sent her apologies.

Orem lay on his soft bed—for excepting the tortures it was a comfortable prison—and listened to Urubugala, comprehending little, caring less. Why did this small black man keep talking? “Go away,” Orem whispered.

“Listen to me,” said Urubugala. “Of course she ordered it. But today it stops because tomorrow is the day she means to kill your son.”

Orem turned his face away.

“She can't hear us—you saw to that, she has no Searching Eye now. There's a way, only one way that we can stop her, but with your help it can work.”

“There's no way,” said Orem. “She's bound me. I can't get my power outside myself.”

“I know she bound you,” Urubugala said. “I taught her how.”

“You taught her!”

“She came to me in terror as you savaged her and tore it all from her and she forced me to tell her how to bind you.”

“She forced you not at all,” Orem said. “I had freed you first, before I ever set myself against her.”

Urubugala shrugged. “Then she didn't force me. If I hadn't taught her how to bind you, then she would have had to kill you to save herself. So you owe your life to me.”

“I don't want my life,” said Orem. “My son is going to die.”

“Yes. Tomorrow,” said Urubugala, brutally. “Your son has no hope, he never had hope, and Beauty warned you not to love him. We all warned you not to love him, but you did, for Hart knows what reason. How can we undo that? You chose it yourself, Little King. But there's still a way that when Queen Beauty kills your son she'll destroy herself as well. Listen, Little King. You know who I really am; can you doubt that I know what's possible and what is not? The Queen will do the rites that put her power into the child. All that she is she'll take out of herself and put in him. And in the moment that the Passage is complete, she'll cut him and drink the living blood, and through the blood receive back all herself, a hundred thousandfold increased.”

In vain Orem cried out and buried himself in the bed, to shut the vision from his mind.

“Little King, if you do the rites along with her, but secretly, so she cannot see, then at the moment of completion, when all her power goes into the child, yours will also go. Yours will also go, Little King, Little Sink, and all the power will seep away into the earth, and when she drinks, there will be nothing, for her power, her life itself will die with the child.”

Orem heard, though he did not want to hear; he thought, though he did not want to think. “No,” he whispered.

“Damn you, boy! Why not!”

“If Youth is dead, what is the rest of it to me?”

“Doesn't it matter to you that you're the only one in the world with the power to stop her? That the gods themselves are at your mercy? Why do you think they brought you here? Why do you think that you're alive at all?”

Orem rolled over, looked at the dwarf eye to eye, inches away at the edge of the bed. “I don't know why I'm alive,” he softly said. “Once I thought I was myself, just myself, free to make what I liked of my life. But now I know from my conception on I've never been myself, but just a tool. As Beauty brought forth a daughter and a son to use for tools, so God and the Hart and the Sisters brought me forth. How are they different? If my son is not to be saved from the Queen, I at least can save myself from the gods.”

He looked into Urubugala's eyes, waiting for the argument. But it did not come. The dwarf's eyes filmed over with tears. “You dreamed of freedom, did you?” he whispered. “So have I, for three hundred years. But you're not the only one who'll pay a price for Beauty's end. Beauty's power has sustained the four of us for centuries. Weasel, Craven, Palicrovol himself, and me. When her power goes, what sustains us then?”

Orem had thought that Weasel would simply become Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin again. As she had been on her wedding night. It had not occurred to him that the intervening years would also be restored.

“And yet,” said Urubugala, “we'll gladly pay that price.”

“If I do what you say, it'll still depend on Beauty killing him.”

“Yes.”

“Then won't we be consenting to his death?”

“What is the price of freeing all the world? One small child. What is the price of enslaving all the world? That same child. Either way dead.”

Orem covered his face with his hands and wept.

W
EASEL

That night Weasel Sootmouth came to him. He did not speak, for there was no need to speak. She took the clothing from him and anointed him with balm, and gently rubbed his swollen shoulders, and changed the bandages on his feet. For an hour she labored over him. And then she covered him again, and sat beside him. He reached his hand for her, and she took it.

“Weasel,” said Orem, “how can I give less than you?”

Weasel said nothing to that. What could she say? She only leaned and kissed him on the hand, which set him weeping again, for he was weak and ill and could not bear such tenderness. He talked then, talked until he could talk no longer, told her all that had happened below the ground and all above, told her of the gods, of the tortures, above all of his son, how he loved his son.

And when all was said, and Orem drifted off to sleep, still he held her hand. She pulled it back, but he clung to her weakly and said, “I love you.”

And she said to him, because he was so young, so innocent, and so in pain, “I also. Love you.” She said it because it was true.

She left the Lesser Donjon and went to Urubugala, where he waited with Craven in the Palace. “He'll do it,” she told them.

“If all goes well, he'll hate me forever,” Urubugala said.

“Why is that?” asked Weasel.

“I lied to him,” he said.

“What did you tell him?” Weasel demanded.

“I won't tell you, Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin, or you would tell him the truth, and then I think he would fail us.”

“Why can't you believe, Urubugala, that some of mankind will act better if they know the truth than if they do not?”

“Experience is my only teacher,” Urubugala answered. “Men are better when they know nothing.”

“Then what of you, Sleeve, who know everything?”

Urubugala shrugged. “I'm just the Queen's little black dwarf.”