The Magician of Hoad (5 page)

“My oldest son… Prince Betony Hoad,” the King was saying to her mother from somewhere under his helmet, gesturing with a pale hand, while the round-faced Prince smiled a curious, wincing smile, as if, by naming him, his father had struck him a blow. Linnet wondered about the third Prince, the mad one. Was he out among the tents somewhere? He was almost never seen; indeed, some stories said he ran on all fours, like a dog, and Linnet’s father had told her, sounding slyly triumphant, that the Prince’s madness was a sign of some sort of flaw in the King’s power.

They had arrived in a city of tents and pavilions whose streets and landmarks were constantly changing. They passed through a series of shelters made of rags and sticks put up by poor camp followers, who included women and little children, and then through a whole market of booths for peddlers and money changers, burning torches and braziers flaring dangerously in the early evening. Temporary smithies… kitchens… painted wagons and herds of
horses… everything enchanted Linnet as they rode into Tent City. The gypsies of Hoad, those mysterious Travelers (mostly called Orts in Diamond because they were the leftover scraps of a people who had lived in Hoad before the King’s people took command of the land) stood braiding ribbons into the manes of the horses they had already sold. They looked up as the newcomers rode by but did not smile. The wind, lifting strands of rusty hair from Linnet’s forehead, smelt of freshly bruised grass, but under this innocent smell there was a taint that made her wrinkle her nose a little, an edge of decay that came and went, so that, sometimes, she thought she must be imagining it.

Linnet had believed she would stay with her father and mother and attend all the King’s parties, so she was furious when, after a few hurried hugs, kisses, and promises, she and Lila were led in another direction. Yet her disappointment was blotted out almost at once, for there were so many new and amazing things to be seen on the crowded, muddy tracks running between the tents. In spite of weariness Linnet wanted to laugh aloud, not because things were funny but because they were so surprising.
Tomorrow
, she thought still later, as she tumbled to sleep,
tomorrow I’ll be part of it all. Tomorrow will be nothing but excitement and surprises.

But next morning she found she was expected to study just as if she were at home, not with Luce, who was beyond study, but with the third Prince, the mad one. He was a whole two months younger than her, and though nobody was supposed to say so openly, everyone knew there was something wrong with him.

Carrying her quills and book, Linnet stumped crossly after Lila to a pavilion on the edge of the city of tents. Inside, with a small, folding frame set up in front of him to serve as a desk, sat Dysart, Prince of Hoad.

He had rough, wavy, mouse-colored hair that stood on end like a puppet’s wig, a big nose, and a wide smile. His right eye was a light clear blue, while his left was hazel, so it was as if two different people were looking out of the same head. As she came into the tent, he caught her expression and burst into wild laughter. Later she was to think someone had stolen part of Dysart’s life, and he filled the empty space by laughing, and that she had been able to tell this from the first moment she ever saw him.

His laughter died away as she stalked by him without another glance.

“You’ve brought only one book,” he said curiously.

“It’s all I need,” Linnet replied, noticing with alarm, however, that he had a whole pile of books beside him, some of them wrapped in silk and velvet, as if they were treasures. Suddenly she didn’t want the mad Prince to know her book was her only book, and though he continued to stare at her with undisguised interest, she refused to look back at him.

“People say you’re fierce—they say you were born with teeth like needles,” he said inquisitively. “Go on, show me. Smile!”

“And people say you’re a fool,” Linnet retorted. Then she was ashamed, partly because her words made her seem rough when she wanted to be graceful, and partly because she sounded unkind. But he answered in an unexpectedly
patient voice, as if he were correcting a mistake he’d corrected many times before.

“Not a fool. Get it right: I’m mad,” he said. “There’s a difference between a foolish Prince and a mad one.” Then he laughed again.

The wall of the tent beside him sucked in, then billowed out again, as if the very weave of the canvas were breathing. Dysart’s careful pile of papers swarmed up into the air around his head. He grimaced and made an odd barking noise at nothing, while the papers drifted down around him.

In the next few days Linnet studied the endless history of Hoad, but she was also part of ceremonial entertainments, standing beside her father, feeling his strong hand holding hers as the clowns and fools of Diamond performed their dances, or catching her breath as teams of campaigners, led by the warriors known as Dragons of Hoad, clashed with one another in mock battles. Linnet cheered for Luce, who rode with the Dragons, and hoped he noticed her out of the corner of his eye as she urged him on.

They were living in a city so mixed that Linnet might see, all within a few yards, ladies sitting in chairs of gilded leather or working men with heavy yokes over their shoulders carrying lavatory cans and buckets of kitchen refuse out beyond the boundary of Tent City. Linnet learned to tell the campaigners of County Glass in their green jackets from those of County Doro, who wore long leather coats with the fur turned in, and to recognize all the banners along with the Lords they represented… the seven Lords
of the seven counties of Hoad: Argo, Dante, Glass, Isman, Doro, Bay, and her own county, ambivalent Hagen.

From the edge of the camp she could stare curiously across the battered plain to the other city… the camp of the Dannorad. The King and his older sons passed like mirages of gold and silver between the two cities, for in a great pavilion between the camps, men of both Hoad and the Dannorad, maps spread between them, were working in and out through the natural lace of valleys and spurs that knitted the lands together. As the victorious one, the King of Hoad could have demanded everything, but Lila declared (just as if she knew all the secrets of the golden pavilions), that the King wanted a peace that would
hold
— something stronger than the frail truces of the last two hundred years—and was prepared to be generous to former enemies, for generosity seemed as if it might forge a true reconciliation.

In the evening the two tent cities entertained each other with banquets and parties given by firelight, the King’s parties being the grandest of all, and there the Dukes of the Dannorad and the Lords of Hoad sat together, talking and laughing as if they had not spent so much of their recent history trying to kill one another. Out from the shadows came clowns on stilts, jugglers, acrobats, fools, freaks, and fireeaters. One of the King’s bodyguards always stood behind him, ready to taste the King’s wine or to guard his back.

“That’s an Assassin,” whispered Lila dramatically.

Linnet had heard of the Assassins, even in Hagen. They were the bogeymen of Hoad, faces masked in white paint like the faces of dangerous clowns. It was said they never
died, that their heads held no brains, only a space in which a King might lodge an order, and that once the King had put a name in that space, nothing could save the man to whom the name belonged.

Prince Betony Hoad had a constant attendant of his own, Talgesi, not an Assassin but a young man of his own age who had once been his whipping boy and had taken all his beatings for him, for no nurse or tutor was allowed to beat the heir to Hoad while his mother was alive. Both Prince and servant wore the same expression. When one smiled, the other smiled. Occasionally Betony Hoad might murmur something aside to his companion, and they would look into each other’s eyes as if they were the only real people in a world of ghosts.

Not all the fallen campaigners had been buried. The scent of their decay (the very scent that had greeted Linnet when she first rode onto the battlefield), carried in on the south wind, was part of every spectacle and public occasion. For all that, as the excitement and strangeness of Tent City worked their spell on Linnet, she found herself unexpectedly touched by another magic.

Partly because she didn’t want to admit that Dysart might know more than she did, she began to read and to learn the rhyming histories of Hoad by heart. Reciting couplets she had learned the night before, she smiled across the tent at the third Prince, triumphant because she was just as clever as he was and could be part of the wide world whenever she wanted. Though she was Linnet of Hagen, a county that seemed closer to the sky than to the rivers, plains, and beaches of the rest of Hoad, she too could invoke the King
and the Hero, those vast spirits made tangible in Dysart’s father and the warrior Carlyon. The Hero was particularly glorious at present because single-handedly he had killed ten soldiers of the Dannorad, avenging the massacre of every single man, woman, and child in the remote Hoadish village of Senlac.

Without quite meaning to, Linnet became a Dysart watcher and saw how a mischievous wind, which no one else seemed to be able to feel, followed the Prince like a playful dog, fluttering his papers, tumbling the world a little whenever he walked by. The left side of his face didn’t quite match up with the right. It was not just his differently colored eyes that gave him this unbalanced look; he had an odd smile in which the right side of his mouth curled up more than the left, yet when he wrote or turned pages he used his left hand. He was so lopsided, Linnet found it easy to understand why he was only brought out on occasions when royal children were traditionally displayed like banners. Yet, during their studies, whenever Dysart recited the tales of Hoad or talked about Diamond, the King’s city, or quoted old aphorisms about the King and the Hero, he seemed to pull himself into a different shape and to become somehow… not handsome, exactly, but remarkable.

“What’s so wonderful about Diamond, anyway?” Linnet asked him one afternoon. “It’s not the only city in the world.”

“It’s the King’s city,” he answered, interrupting her just as she was about to talk about Hagen’s Rous Barnet, her own city. “Diamond’s the shape of the King.”

“And your father just happens to be King,” Linnet cried
derisively. “I suppose you think that makes you great too!”

Dysart stared down into the pages of his book as if he could see indecipherable words swimming like fish behind the lines of ordinary print. When he spoke again it was in an odd, uncertain voice—as if he were trying out a new idea as much on himself as on her.

“No,” he said. “Kings have sons, but Princes don’t have fathers.”

“You can’t have sons without fathers!” argued Linnet.

“But what if the King hates us all?” Dysart said doubtfully. “Betony says he does, because a long time ago, before my father’s father and brothers died, before he ever dreamed he’d be King, he was married to a woman from the Second Ring of Diamond… she wasn’t noble or rich, but he loved her. When he became King, he had to give her up because the Queen of Hoad has to be noble.”

“Did your father have to be King, then?” Linnet asked. “If he loved the first one best? He could have stepped back.”

Dysart was silent; then he gave a long sigh.

“More than anything, everyone wants to be King,” he replied, “but you have to be next in line. My father was the next in line, whether he wanted to be or not, and when the time came, he…” Dysart paused. For once he didn’t smile. “Anyhow, the time came, and being the chosen one, he
did
want it,” he added. “I think when it came to him, he wanted it so badly that wanting altered him. He gave up his first life. He gave up being one man and turned into another. He turned into a King.”

Earlier they had been given the task of writing a poem thirty syllables long, in the approved style. Dysart had written:

The man in the crown
Rides by. Moving beside him,
Stretching before,
His dark and breathless shadow
Engulfs the bright, breathing land.

Days became a week… three weeks… and Linnet grew bored with the city of tents, the distant, glittering King, and the cold wind with its taint of decay. She began to long for home. But perhaps everyone had grown weary. Lila told her one evening that, on the very next day, there was to be a break in the negotiations. Lords who lived close to the plain would get a chance to go back to their homes for a few days. Even the Hero was going to ride back to Cassio’s Island. And though the King was staying on the battlefield, along with his sons, there were to be festivities. On the next day there was to be a picnic, and both she and Prince Dysart were to take part. Linnet was delighted. She was longing for something to happen: She was longing for changes.

Out on his farm in County Glass, Heriot Tarbas was sitting on his own in a corner, playing cards. He was draped in a thick woven rug with a hole for his head and slits for his hands. A chilly wind was blowing around the courtyard, but apart from any wind or weather, he was now in the habit of covering himself up as much as he could. The cats suddenly looked up, then flattened themselves to the ground and fled, but his little cousins clustered around, staring in amazement at the stranger who rode into the courtyard, staring at his long, green coat edged with fur and his boots, so soft and polished they looked as if they were made of silk rather than fine leather. He wore gloves, and the fingers of the gloves were crowded with rings. His face was far older than his short, bright chestnut curls might have suggested.

Heriot stared like everybody else at this shiny insect of a man, out of place yet utterly commanding in the Tarbas courtyard. His authority sat on him so naturally that everything around him immediately grew subservient, yet his
voice, when he spoke to Joan, was gentle rather than commanding. Heriot couldn’t hear all that was being said, though he gathered that Great-Great-Aunt Jen’s presence was being demanded. What he could make out was an unfamiliar accent, much quicker and more clipped than the family voices, and more careful.