Wrede, Patricia C - SSC (18 page)

"Please, it's almost
dawn," the prince said. He gestured toward the window. The sky beyond was
visibly paler. "Kiss her and break the curse, so that I can see the end of
this before I must go." His eyes were on the girl's face again, and this
time Arven did look away.

"Please," the prince
repeated after a moment.

Arven nodded without looking up.
Awkwardly, he bent and kissed the girl full on the lips.

For a long moment, nothing seemed
to happen. Then there was a grinding sound from somewhere below, and a loud
crash, and the girl heaved a sigh. Her eyelids flickered, then opened. As she
looked at Arven, an expression of puzzlement crossed her face. She sat up, and
glanced around, and saw the prince. Their eyes locked, and she stiffened, and
Arven knew that, somehow, she understood.

"Thank you," the girl
said.

"Thank him," said the
prince. "He broke the curse. I did nothing."

Arven made a gesture of protest
that neither of them saw.

"You came back," the girl
told the prince with calm certainty. "That is a great deal more than
nothing.''

The prince went still. "How
did you know?"

"I know." She rose and
brushed her skirts, then gave the prince a deep and graceful curtsy. The prince
stretched out a protesting hand, and the girl smiled like sun on morning dew.
"And I thank you for it."

"You should blame me. If I had
done it right the first time, there would have been no need for these makeshifts."

"True." The girl's smile
vanished and she looked at him gravely. "I think perhaps you owe me
something after all, for that."

The prince gave her a bitter smile.
"What is it you want of me, lady?"

"Wait for me."

The prince stared, uncomprehending,
but Arven understood at once. It was what he had asked of Una, at the last.
Wait
for me, if you can.

"It won't be long," the
girl continued. "I can feel it."

"You have a lifetime ahead of
you!" the prince said.

"A lifetime can be two days
long; it needs only a birth at the beginning and a death at the end." The
girl smiled again, without bitterness. "By any usual reckoning, I have had
more than my share of lifetimes."

"The spell. . ."

"Was unraveling. If you had
not come, I should have slept another hundred years, or two, dying slowly with
no company but dreams. I have learned a great deal from my dreams, but I prefer
waking, if only for a week or a month."

"I see." The prince
reached out as if to stroke her hair, but stopped his hand just short of its
unattainable goal. Arven could see the curve of the girl's shoulder clearly
through the prince's palm. He glanced at the window. The sky was lightening
rapidly.

"Then, will you wait?"
the girl asked again.

"I will try," said the
prince. He was almost completely transparent by this time, and his voice was as
faint as the distant breeze that rustled the trees outside the keep.

"Try hard," the girl said
seriously.

Arven had to squint to see the
prince nod, and then the sky was bright with dawn and the prince had vanished.
The girl turned away, but not before Arven caught the glitter of tears in her
eyes. He rose and picked up the candle, unsure of how to proceed.

"I have not thanked you,
woodcutter," the girl said at last, turning. "Forgive me, and do
believe I am grateful."

"It's no matter," Arven
said. "I understand."

She smiled at him. "Then let
us go down. It has been a long time since I have seen the dawn from the castle wall."

The harper would have you believe
that it was all for the love of sweet William that my sisters came to hate,
each other so, but that is not true. They were bitter rivals from the time we
were very small. His song misleads about other things, too; it does not mention
me, for instance. "Two sisters in a bower," it says, not three,
though the harp spoke of me and the harper himself stood beside my chair that
day when he and his harp turned our clean grief to bitter poison. As for what
the song says of William—well, the harper did not write that part himself, so
he is not wholly to blame. I could forgive him for that, but not for what he
said of my sisters.

Anne was the eldest of us three.
Everyone who saw her said she was born to be a queen, with her long black hair
and dark, flashing eyes, and her intelligence and force of will. When first
they met her, people came away thinking that she was tall; it was always a
shock to them to see her again in company and find that she was barely average
woman-size. Eleanor was the tall one; after she passed Anne in height, she made
me mark the lintel of our chamber every week for two years, until she finally
tired of taunting Anne. In other ways, too, Eleanor was Anne's opposite: her
hair was golden, and her eyes a clear, cornflower blue. If Anne was born to be
a queen, Eleanor was meant to be a rich duke's pampered wife, carefree and merry.

And I? I am Margaret, plain Meg, in
all things the middle daughter. My hair is thick, but it is an ordinary brown.
My face is pleasant enough, I think, but that is a far cry from my sisters'
beauty. My father calls me the quiet one, when he thinks of me; my mother says
I am too much on the sidelines, watching and thinking and saying little. By the
common wisdom, it should have been I who was jealous of my sisters, but I loved
them both, and even when we were children it hurt me to watch the spiteful
tricks they played on each other.

They loved me, too, in their own
ways. Sometimes, rarely, one would even give up tormenting the other if I asked
it, but such occasions grew less frequent as we grew older. The last time I
tried to intervene was when Anne was fourteen and Eleanor twelve.

Eleanor had spilled ink on her best
dress and laid the blame on Anne. Anne said nothing when our tutor punished her
for it, but her lips were stiff and white about the edges. I did not know,
then, that Eleanor had lied about the ink, but I knew that something was very wrong.

That afternoon, I missed them both,
a circumstance so unusual that I went looking for them at once. I found them
outside the curtain wall, in the far garden beside the river, where the briars
are left to ramble as they will. Anne had Eleanor's favorite gown—not her best
one, which had the ink spilled on it, but the blue silk the color of her eyes,
with the white roses embroidered about the neck—and was waving it beside the
thorns while Eleanor wept and snatched at it, trying to keep it from harm.
Neither of them saw me as I came near.

"You lied to Master Crombie,"
Anne said, waving the dress. "Admit it."

"You know whether I did or
not," Eleanor said. "Give me my gown!"

"Lies are beneath the dignity
of our house," Anne said coldly. "One who bears our name ought not to
lie."

"Eleanor!" I said, and
they both turned to look at me. "Is it true?"

"Is what true?" she said,
but her eyes slid away from mine, and I knew that Anne was right, that Eleanor
had indeed made up the tale she told our tutor.

"She told Master Crombie that
I had ruined her gown," Anne said in a grim tone. "It was not true
when she said it, but I will make it true now." And she made to throw the
fragile blue silk among the thorns.

"No!" I said, and she
paused and looked at me.

"You take her side?"

I shook my head. "No. What she
did was wrong. But what you would do will not make it right."

"I will tell Master Crombie
the truth," Eleanor said suddenly, her eyes fixed on Anne's hands.

Anne turned, looked startled, and
her grip loosened. Eleanor darted forward and seized the gown, then whirled
away, laughing. "Silly, foolish, to be so tricked!"

Anne's lips went white, and she
lunged forward. I was just too late to stop her. With all her might, she shoved
Eleanor into the briars. Eleanor screamed in fright and pain as the thorns
scratched her and tore her skirts.

"Now the things you told
Master Crombie are true, after all," Anne said to her. "I have made
them so."

"Anne!" I said. "How
could you? Eleanor, be still! You will only hurt yourself if you thrash
about."

"Let her hurt as much as I did
when Master Crombie whipped me for her lies," Anne said.

"She might have been hurt far
worse," I said as I went to help Eleanor out of the briars. "Men have
been blinded in those thorns." I kept my voice as calm as I could, though
I was deeply shocked by both their actions. I think they saw it, but neither
would apologize, or admit to being in the wrong, and from that day, whatever
power I might once have had to stop them hurting one another, I had no longer.

I do not know what tale Eleanor
made to account for her scratches and the rips in two of her gowns, but I know
it was not the truth, for neither she nor Anne was ever disciplined for it.
Indeed, if I had not been there myself, I would not have known why Eleanor no
longer wore her favorite blue gown. Perhaps I would not have noticed the
increased tension between my sisters, either. No one else seemed aware of it,
though to me the atmosphere in the schoolroom seemed to grow daily more fraught
with anger and resentment.

So I was happy when Anne was
finally old enough to put up her hair and move on to grown-up things, for it
meant that the fights between her and Eleanor all but ceased. I thought their
enmity must end with growing up, and for a few years it seemed to do so. I made
my own transition to the world of feasts and dancing smoothly. I watched Anne
with her suitors, but, as befits a younger sister, I sought none of my own
until she should have made her choice.

And then William came to court.
"Sweet William," some of the verses say, and another song styles him
"bonny William, brave and true." Well, he was bonny enough, with his
gray eyes and hair like the silk on corn, and he had a tongue like honey, but
from the first I did not like him. I had spent my early years watching my
lovely sisters wound each other with comments no one else could see were
barbed; perhaps it gave me a distrust of beauty and sweet words. But if that
were so, Anne should have been armored even better than I, and she loved him
from the moment he bent to kiss her hand before leading her out for their first
dance.

"Isn't he handsome?" she
said to me that night as we made ready for bed. "And kind. And a little
shy, I think."

"He didn't seem shy to me when
he was flirting with the serving maid," I said.

"Meg! He did no such
thing." Anne sounded really distressed. "You're making it up."

"I know what I saw."

"He may have talked with her,
but it was just to put her at ease," Anne said. "I told you he was
kind. You must have misinterpreted it."

"I suppose I might have,"
I said, though I was sure I had not. Anne's expression lightened at once, and she
went on singing William's praises until the maids came to put out the
rushlights. She did not seem to notice my lack of response, or if she did, she
put it down to tact or sympathy. But I do not think she noticed. She was too
full of William.

"He is not the only man who
courted you this evening," I said at last. "Robert brought you roses,
and Malcolm—"

"Feh to Robert and Malcolm and
all the rest," Anne said. "William is my choice, and I'll have him or
no one."

"You can't mean that,
Anne!" I said, appalled. "It is too sudden."

"Oh, I'll not be so hasty
before the court," she said. "Did you think I meant to claim him
tomorrow? We'll have a decorous courtship, and when he speaks to Father at
last, no one will be amazed or put out. But I wanted you to know."

"You've not planned it out
between you already?" I said. "After only one meeting?"

Anne laughed. "You are a
goose. Go to sleep, and dream which of the men you will choose to look kindly
on when I am settled. Robert, perhaps, since his roses made such an impression
on you."

I threw a pillow at her. It was not
until later, when she was asleep, that I realized she had not answered my
question.

Anne was as good as her word. Over
the next six weeks, she let her partiality for William begin to show, slowly
but certainly, so that soon there was no doubt in anyone's mind that William
was to be my father's first son-in-law. Before the court, she was discreet;
when we were alone and private at night, she filled my ears with William's
excellencies. They planned for William to make a formal request for her hand
before the assembled May Day Court, in another month. And then Eleanor's
birthday arrived, and she put up her hair for her coming-of-age feast.

I should have guessed what would
happen. Gossip travels on the air in a king's hall; even in the schoolroom,
Eleanor must have heard of Anne and William and their coming handfasting.
Coming, but not yet concluded. Hating Anne as she did, as she had for so long,
it was inevitable that she would try to spoil her happiness.

In all fairness, she did not have
to try very hard. William took one look at Eleanor and fell as hard and far as
Anne had fallen for him. And he was not in the least discreet about the change
in the object of his affections. Indeed, it must have been plain even to Anne
that he had never truly cared for her, for he had never treated her with half
the tenderness he used toward Eleanor.

When I saw how it would be, I went
to Eleanor and begged her to relent, for all our sakes. She smiled at me and
shook her head. "It is too late for that. William loves me, not Anne."

"Yes, but the pair of you need
not flaunt it before her," I said. I was angry, and sore on Anne's behalf,
and I spoke more sharply than I had intended.

Eleanor looked startled. "Is
that what you think? That we have been brandishing our affection apurpose?"

Then I saw that she had not; it was
only her usual heedlessness. I said, "It is what Anne thinks."