Wonders of the Invisible World (33 page)

Then he blinked again.

It took no small effort for him to shift his eyes from the world within the globe to the silent villagers of Byndley. Their faces, shadows and stars trembling over them, seemed blurred at first, unrecognizable. Slowly, he began to see them clearly. The wild-haired maker with his powerful face and the enigmatic smile in his dark eyes... The tall, silver-haired figure behind the bar, gazing quizzically at Reck out of eyes the color of the tranquil twilight within the globe... The woman beside the fire....

Reck swallowed, haunted again, for not a mention of time had troubled that face. It was as beautiful as when he had first seen it, tinted with the fiery colors of the dying wood as she walked toward him that day long before.

She smiled, her green eyes unexpectedly warm.

“Thank you for that look,” she said. There was Bettony still in her face, he saw: a glint of humor, a wryness in her smile. The faces around her, timeless and alien in their beauty, held no such human expressions. She held out her hand. Reck, incapable of moving, watched the globe float from his palm to hers under the sorcerer’s midnight gaze.

“I always wondered,” he told Reck, when the queen’s fingers had closed around her globe, “how you managed to escape me.”

“And I always wondered,” the queen said softly, “why you took this from me. Now I understand.”

Reck looked at the king among his mugs, still watching Reck mildly; he seemed to need no explanations. He said, “You have told your tale and been judged. This time you may leave freely. There’s the door.”

Reck picked up his pack with shaking hands. He paused before he opened the door, said without looking back, “The first time, I only thought I had escaped. I never truly found my way out of the wood.”

“I know.”

Reck opened the door. He pulled it to behind him, but he did not hear it close or latch. He took a step and then another and then did not stop until he had crossed the bridge.

He stopped then. He did not bother looking back, for he guessed that the bridge and every sign of Byndley on the other side of the stream had vanished. He looked up instead and saw the lovely, mysterious, star-shot night flowing everywhere around him, and the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn.

T
he
T
welve

D
ancing
P
rincesses

One day long ago in a faraway country, a young soldier, walking home from a battle he had fought for the king, found himself lost in a forest. The road he followed dwindled away, leaving him standing among silent trees, with the sun just setting at his back, and the moon just rising ahead of him. Caught alone and astray between night and day, he thought to himself, there are worse things that could be. He had seen many of them on the battlefield. He was alone because he had watched his best friend die; he had given his last few coins to another soldier trying to walk home with only one foot. But he himself, though worn and bloodied with battle, had kept all his bones, and his eyes, and he even had a little bread and cheese in his pack to eat. He settled himself into a tangle of tree roots, where he could watch the moon, and took out his simple meal. He had opened his mouth to take the first bite when a voice at his elbow said, “One bite is a feast to those who have nothing.”

He turned, wondering who had crept up so noiselessly to sit beside him. It was a very old woman. Her bones bumped under the surface of her brown, sagging skin like the tree roots under the earth. Her pale eyes, which now held only a memory of the blue they had been, were fixed on the heel of bread, the rind of cheese in his hand. He sighed, for he was very hungry. But so must she be, scuttling like an animal among the trees, with no one to care for her. There are worse things, he thought, than having a little less of something.

So he said, tearing the bread and cheese apart and giving her half, “Then feast with me.”

“You are kind, young soldier,” she said in her high wavery voice, and bit into her scanty supper as if it might vanish before she could finish it. After she had swallowed her last bite and searched for crumbs, she spoke again. “What is your name?”

“Val,” he answered.

“A good name for a soldier. Did you win the battle?”

Val shrugged. “So they say. I could not see, from where I stood, that winning was much better than losing.”

“And now what will you do?”

“I don’t know. My younger brother has married and taken care of the family farm and our parents while I have been fighting. I will find my way back and show them that I’m still alive, and then find something to do in the world. After all, someone with nothing has nothing to lose.”

“You have a fair and honest face,” the old woman said. “That’s something.” Her pale eyes caught moonlight and glinted, so suddenly and strangely, that he started. “How would you like to be king?”

He swallowed a laugh along with a lump of bread. “Better than being a beggar.”

“Then follow this road through the forest. It will take you into the next kingdom, where the king and queen there are desperate for help. They have twelve beautiful daughters—”

“Twelve!”

“None of them will marry; they will laugh at every suitor. The king locks them in their room every night; and every morning he finds them sleeping so soundly, they will not wake until noon, and at the foot of every bed, a pair of satin shoes so worn with dancing, they must be thrown away. But no one knows how the princesses get out of the room, or where they go to dance. The king has promised his kingdom and a daughter to any man who can solve this mystery.”

“Any man,” Val repeated, and felt a touch of wonder in his heart, where before there had been nothing. “Even me.”

“Even you. But you must be careful. The king is half mad with worry and fear for his daughters. He will kill any man who fails, even princes who might one day marry his daughters.”

The young soldier pondered that. “Well,” he said softly. “I have faced death before. No one ever offered to make me king if I survived.” He stood up. “There’s moon enough to see by, tonight. Where is the road to that kingdom?”

“Under your feet,” she answered, and there it was, washed with light and winding among the trees. Val stared at the old woman; her face rippled into a thousand wrinkles as she smiled.

“Two things. One: Drink nothing that the princesses give you. And two”—she touched the dusty cloak at his back—“this will make you invisible when you follow them at night. It pays,” she added, as he slid his pack strap over his shoulder, “to be kind to crones.”

“So I hope,” he breathed, and stepped onto the moonlit road, wondering if he would find death at its end, or love.

Death, he thought instantly, when he met the father of the twelve princesses. The king, wearing black velvet and silver mail, was tall and gaunt, with long, iron-gray hair and a lean, furrowed face. His eyes were black and terrible with frustration and despair. He wore a sword so long and heavy, it would have dragged on the ground at Val’s side. He kept one hand always on it; Val wondered if he used it to slay the princes who failed him.

But he spoke to the young soldier with courtesy. Val found himself soaking in a fragrant bath while a barber cut his hair. Then he dressed in fine, elegant clothes, though he refused, for no reasons he gave, to part with his torn, dusty cloak. He sat down to a meal so wondrously cooked that he could scarcely name what he ate. When night fell, the king took him to the princesses’ bedchamber.

The doors to the long chamber opened to such color, such rich wood and fabric, such movement of slender, jeweled hands and glowing hair, and bright, curious eyes, so many sweet, laughing voices, that Val froze on the threshold, mute with astonishment that any place so lovely and full of grace could exist in the world he knew. “My daughters,” the king said as they floated toward him, breasting the air like swans in their lacy, flowing nightgowns. “The queen named them after flowers. Aster, Bluet, Columbine, Delphinium, Eglantine, Fleur, Gardenia, Heather, Iris, Jonquil, Lily, and Mignonette. She could not find an appropriate flower for K.”

“Kumquat,” one with long, golden hair giggled behind her hands.

“Knotweed,” another said with an explosion of laughter into her nearest sister’s shoulder. Then they were all silent, their eyes of amber, emerald, sapphire, unblinking and wide, watching Val like a circle of cats, he thought, watching a sparrow.

He said, scarcely hearing himself, while his own eyes were charmed from face to face, “There are folk names for flowers, sometimes, that queens may not know. Kestrel’s Eye, farmers call a kind of sunflower, for its smallness and the color of its center.”

“Kestrel,” a princess with a mass of dark, curly hair and golden eyes repeated. Her beauty held more dignity and assurance than her sisters’; her eyes, smiling at the handsome young stranger, seemed full of secrets. “A pretty word. You might have been Kestrel, then, Lily, and Mignonette would have been you, if our mother had known.”

She was the oldest, Val guessed, and was proved right when the youngest protested, “But, Aster, I am Mignonette; I do not want to be Lily.”

“Don’t worry, goose, you may stay yourself.” She yawned, then, and stepped forward to kiss their grim father. “How tired I am, suddenly! I could sleep for a month!”

“I wish you all would,” the king murmured, bending as one by one they brushed his face with kisses. They only laughed at him and vanished behind the hangings of lace and gauze around their beds; they were as silent then as if they had already begun to dream.

The king showed Val a small room at the end of the bedchamber, where he could pretend to sleep as he waited for the princesses to reveal the mystery of their dancing. “Many men have come here,” the king said, “seeking to win my kingdom, thinking it a trifling matter to outwit my daughters and take my crown. They are all dead, now, even the jesting, lighthearted princes. My daughters show no mercy, and neither do I. But if you fail, I will be sorry.”

Val bowed his head. “So will I,” he answered. “How strange it seems that yesterday I had nothing to lose, and today I have everything. Except love.”

“That alone drives me mad,” the king said harshly. “They can love no one. Nothing. They laugh at the young men I put to death. As if they are spellbound....” He turned, begging rather than warning as he closed the door. “Do not fail.”

Val sat down on the bed, which was the first he had seen in many months, and the last he dared sleep in. He had just pulled off his boots when the door opened, and the eldest, Aster, appeared, carrying a cup of wine. She handed it to Val. “We always share a cup with guests, for friendship’s sake. My father forgot to tell us your name.”

“My name is Val. Thank you for the wine.” He pretended to take a sip while he wondered blankly how to pretend to finish the cup under her watchful eyes.

“A proper name for a prince.”

“I suppose it is, but I am a soldier, returning home after battle.”

Her brows rose. “And you stopped here, to try for a crown on your way. You should have kept going. There is nothing for you here but what you escaped in battle.”

He smiled, holding her eyes, while he poured the wine into a boot standing at his knee. “There are better memories here,” he said, and tilted the cup against his mouth as if he were draining it dry.

He stretched out on the bed when Aster left, and did not move when he heard the door open again. “Look at him,” one of them mocked. “Sleeping as if he were already dead.”

“I put a stronger potion into the wine,” another answered. “His eyes were far too clear.”

Then he heard laughter in the princesses’ bedchamber, and the sound of cupboards, chests, and cases being opened. He waited, watching them while he pretended to snore. They dressed themselves in bright silks, and lace and creamy velvet gowns; they tied the ribbons of new satin dancing slippers around their ankles. They took rings and earrings and strands of pearls out of their jewel cases, and they spun one another’s hair into amazing confections threaded with ribbons. Val had thought them beautiful before; now they seemed enchanted, exquisite, unreal, as if he had drunk the wine and were dreaming them. He was so entranced, he forgot to snore. Aster came to look sharply at him through the open door, but another sister only laughed.