C. Dale Brittain (4 page)

They came up to her knees.
 
They leaped and frolicked like puppies, crying, “Karin!
 
Karin!” in shrill voices, snatching at her skirts and all trying to get closer to her than the others.

Even miserable she had to laugh.
 
“Yes, yes, I’m coming to visit you!
 
I have news you’ll like to hear.
 
Yes, I’ll tell you when we’re all inside.”

For ten years, the faeys had been the only ones with whom she could be not a princess, not a hostage, not even a woman, but only herself, Karin.

They poured back down the slope into the dell and gathered up the lights.
 
She went on her knees to crawl into the hillside behind them.
 
The stone swung shut, closing them in.

In all the years she had been coming here, she had never liked this disorienting moment when natural light was abruptly gone, leaving them all illuminated only by the faint green light that put weird shadows across their features.
 
She took a deep breath and shut her eyes, then carefully opened them again.

It always became better in a few minutes.
 
The faeys brought out wild strawberries and honeydew from the bees and ate happily, apparently not noticing that she was not eating hers.

“Yes,” said Karin.
 
“I told you I have something to tell you.
 
I’m going to become a queen.”

“A queen!
 
A queen!” the faeys cried in delight.
 
“And will that pleasant young man you told us about become your king?”

“I don’t see how he can.
 
But I love him, and I don’t want to marry anyone else.”

The faeys gave her more strawberries as though that would solve her problems and finally noticed she was not eating.
 
She ate a few to make them happy.

“And that’s not all,” she continued.
 
“I shall have to leave here, go back to the kingdom where I lived when I was little.”

This caused consternation.
 
“But how could you go away?
 
That would mean you’d leave us!
 
Don’t leave us, Karin!
 
Maybe we could come with you!”

She looked at them between exasperation and affection.
 
She had stumbled across the faeys when wandering at twilight the first summer she had come to Hadros’s kingdom, within a week of when her younger brother had died.
 
She had not then been much taller than they were, and the faeys had since told her she was the first mortal they had successfully tamed.

“If you came with me,” she said, “you’d have to leave your dell.
 
The trip is too long for a single night, and much of it is by ship.”

They had not thought of this.
 
They conferred urgently among themselves for a moment, then announced, “Then you’ll have to give up being queen!
 
That way you can stay here and still marry that nice young man.”

They gave her arm and hair reassuring pats, happy to have solved her problem so easily.
 
Karin shook her head.
 
She had come hoping the faeys might have some ancient wisdom to offer, but years of visiting them should have made her know better.

“The king here would like me to stay, I think,” she said.

“There!
 
What did we tell you?
 
You know you wouldn’t want to move away from us!”

“But he will want me to marry his son, rather than Roric, the man I love.”

For a reason she could not understand, there was immediately further consternation among the faeys.
 
They jumped up, knocking over their bowls, and several darted off down the tunnels while others started making little piles of pebbles in the dim green light.

“What’s happening?” she asked in a minute when no one seemed about to tell her.

One looked up from a pile of pebbles that kept falling over every time he tried to balance another on top.
 
“Is your Roric—
 
Is he sometimes known as Roric No-man’s son?”

“That’s right,” she said with a frown.
 
“He was found at the castle gates when he was a baby, no more than three months old.
 
The queen had pity on him, especially since she had no children of her own yet—or so I’ve always heard.
 
He was brought up as King Hadros’s foster-son and became one of his warriors, but he is a man without family.”

“Should we tell her?
 
You tell her.
 
Don’t you think she’ll be upset if we tell her?
 
We don’t want to upset Karin.
 
But queens have to deal with upsetting things every day.”

“What’s going to upset me?” she almost shouted.

“Oh, nothing!” the faeys cried together.
 
“Nothing at all!
 
Just something we heard, but it must have been another Roric altogether.
 
Nothing to do with you!”

She rose to her knees, as high as she could go in the cramped space.
 
“If you do not tell me at once,” she said resolutely, “I shall leave here and never visit you again.”

There was a horrified silence, then several spoke up, although hesitantly.
 
“Well, it’s probably nothing serious.
 
But maybe it’s better if—
 
We may have been mistaken, of course …”

“Tell me plainly,” she said grimly, “and tell me at once.”

Only one dared speak now.
 
“We’ve heard—
 
That is, someone said—
 
We’ve heard the Wanderers want him.”

This was so unexpected she sat down abruptly on her heels.
 
“But why would the Wanderers want Roric?” she asked in wonder.

“Well, you know,” said the faeys unhappily, “even you mortals must realize—
 
Even for the lords of voima, fate does not always go well.
 
Or for faeys!”

“Yes, I know the faeys have their problems,” she said absently.
 
“But—
 
But could it mean they need him because of who he is?”
 
Her face lit up in the green glow of the lights.
 
“Could he really be a son of a Wanderer all this time?”

“What?!
 
Why would you even think that?
 
Don’t think that!
 
It’s not right for mortals to have such notions!”

It had been a nice idea for about two seconds.

“They want him because he is a mortal, but one who has no ties with other mortals!”

Then they don’t know about me, she thought.
 
This was disconcerting; it was almost as bad to think that the Wanderers could have important gaps in their knowledge as it would have been to think that they were watching all the time.

“What use would they have for a mortal?”

“Maybe he can help them,” said one of the faeys slowly.
 
“We sense the time of upheaval is coming, the time even creatures of voima fear …
 
Soon we may have to seal our burrows against the outside world; sometimes we have to seal them for hundreds of years.
 
Would you like to stay inside with us when we do, Karin?”

She deliberately ignored this, not sure what upheaval the faeys could be talking about and certainly not wanting to be sealed up anywhere for the rest of her life.
 
“But how did you find out about Roric?
 
Do you speak yourselves to the Wanderers?”

“Not us!
 
No, not us!
 
Even the Wanderers don’t come into our tunnels!
 
Only faeys and mortals we invite.
 
And we only invite you!”

“Then who told you?”

Here their answers were so contradictory, so confused, that it was at best a guess that they might have learned this from the Weaver.

“And what do the Wanderers want with him?” she tried a third time.

But either the faeys really did not know, or the prospect of telling her was even worse than her threats not to see them again.
 
After a few minutes, agreeing somewhat reluctantly than she would indeed come visit soon, she crawled out, back into the dell, and pushed the stone shut immediately behind her, knowing the faeys would all be huddling far back in their tunnels until the threat of direct sunlight was gone.

She adjusted her cloak around her and hurried back toward the castle.
 
She had to speak to Roric as soon as she could get him alone, to discover if he knew anything of this.
 
For some reason she was still reluctant to tell him about the faeys, though he was certain to ask how she came by the startling information that the Wanderers wanted him.

Had he in fact already met a Wanderer himself?
 
His eyes had looked strange yesterday morning when she found him at the stables, but anyone who had escaped death and ridden all night would be wild-eyed, even without a conversation with the lords of voima.

There might still be some things, she thought, that he felt reluctant to tell her, as she kept the secret of the faeys.
 
They had had, both of them, to learn control, to use caution in a castle where they were at the same time family members and outsiders.
 
She passed the little valley where an oak’s low-spreading branches made a hidden bower.
 
It was here, three weeks before, that she and Roric had lain together for the first and only time, wrapped up in both their cloaks, laughing and kissing and pledging eternal love to each other.

Their future together had looked so hopeful then, and Roric had been so sure that Hadros, who had been a father to him his whole life, would raise no objections.
 
That hope had lasted until last week when he had finally decided the moment right to raise the topic.

Karin scraped the last of the porridge out of the pot and sat down to eat at the opposite end of the table from King Hadros.
 
“I went for a walk,” she said shortly when he looked a question at her.
 
Her firmly set jaw and lowered eyes kept anyone else from speaking to her.

The king’s sons were discussing the horses.
 
It was the season to bring the mares and the young foals in from pasture, to introduce the foals to humans and rebreed the mares, and almost time to start breaking the yearlings for riding.
 
She listened absently to their conversation as she finished breakfast and braided her hair.

“We’ll have to see how well the foals came out this year,” said Valmar with a laugh.
 
He was the king’s oldest son, two years younger than Karin, and had red hair and dark blue eyes with lashes that had always seemed to her too long for a boy.
 
She still thought of him as her little brother, even though in the last few years he had shot up from boyhood to young manhood.
 
Though most men stayed clean-shaven until marriage, he had managed to grow a somewhat patchy beard.
 
“And we’ll have to see if the mares will be satisfied to be covered by an ordinary stallion this time.
 
I’m afraid Roric’s troll-horse may have sired some of this year’s crop!”

His younger brothers, Dag and Nole, laughed too, then glanced toward her as though recalling her presence and stopped abruptly.
 
They all knew better than to say anything that could possibly be considered crude or lewd in her presence, but King Hadros did not seem to have noticed.

Valmar rose.
 
“Coming with us, Father?
 
Or is your knee still bothering you?”

Karin looked up sharply at that.
 
The king sat with one leg extended straight out from the bench.
 
“Oh, my leg is fine,” he said easily.
 
That was the leg, she recalled, that he had broken in the fall last year—or was it the year before?
 
“But perhaps I shall let you go ahead and catch up with you.”