A Princess of the Chameln (27 page)

“Hagnild saw my aunt, the Princess Elvédegran of Lien . . .”

“Hush,” said Raff Raiz. “She has gone to the Halls of the Goddess . . . sixteen, seventeen years ago. Do not mourn for her. I know that my uncle Hagnild must have helped and comforted her in that place.”

“My own family has its dark side,” she said. “It was her brother Kelen who sent her into Mel'Nir. And Rosmer . . .”

“What an inflated reputation that man has.” Raff smiled. “The bogey-man, the torturer, the wicked magician . . .”

“The night-flyer, the eater of souls . . .”

She shivered even in sunlight.

“He is growing old, too,” said Raff. “His charms against age do not hold very long. He is like an old courtesan who must take every kind of disgusting treatment with mud and bats' blood and pigs' dung to remove her wrinkles. And he has a hidden enemy, crafty and strong, who thwarts him now and then and turns his art back upon the sender. At first one might think of Hagnild, but this is not his style at all: he could hardly do a harmful working. No, depend upon it, Rosmer's mysterious enemy is a magician out of Eildon or out of the Chyrian lands of Mel'Nir. Meanwhile he goes about very discreetly, proud but not overweening, seemly in dress, not given to display . . . the model of a statesman. Yet he spends part of his life in fearful places where he works his spells or in dungeons listening to the cries and confessions of those racked and burned by his command.”

“Is his parentage known?” asked Aidris.

“It is a secret,” said Raff. “He lets it be given out that he is of noble birth or else a demon, a creature not of woman born. But he is of flesh and blood. My father has cut him for the stone, using charm of sleep to ease the pain. My father's guess is that Rosmer is of humble birth . . .”

“I have wished that I was . . . of humble birth,” she said.

“It is not a comfortable state,” said Raff, stretching out in the sun and grinning up at her.

“Look!” she said. “There is a merchant ship coming into Westport.”

“Ah, perhaps it has come from the lands below the world.”

They swam and sunned themselves until they were brown as the rocks. Telavel took to rolling about in the sea waves. They kissed, and she ran home at twilight when the lamps were lit, feeling as if her love and kissing showed in her face. The old woman and the child did not notice; they lived in another world; she was no more than a summer visitor. The days drew out; at Midsummer, fires were lit along the shore and the fishers and farmers danced together and made a feast.

She did not dare think of the end of the holiday. She looked at Raff Raiz, traced his brow and his mouth while he lay dozing in the shade and woke him up so that she could see his eyes, slate blue. They lay in the sea swamps and the dunes, held each other close, free from all hindrance, far away from prying eyes. She was still, peaceful, even the memory of Ric Loeke's roughness had been stilled. They held each other close, and his breath quickened, just as hers did, and he turned aside and sat up, almost angrily. They sat side by side, and she suddenly began to weep, and he held her and called her his true love, forever his one true love, and she was ready to die at that moment. The day ended in a thunderstorm; they ran home across the sands with Telavel galloping ahead and the lightning striking the top of the rock, Nim's Head.

The next day she left Telavel in her stall, for it was rainy though still warm. She met Raff on the beach and they walked about; even the old beachcomber did not come out. A light stinging rain was falling; Raff led her to a rock pool, and when they were in the pool, with the rain still falling, it felt deliciously warm. Raff began to take off her shift that she wore for bathing; he was already naked. She said no . . . began to struggle . . . but he begged her to trust him. So they embraced, half floating in the warm pool; he caressed her and put her hands on his own body. They were overtaken by a strong magic, the strongest magic, spreading through their bodies like the rings that spread through a pool when a stone was cast into the water. They came out and shivered and dried each other. The magic was strong because they were together, because they loved each other, that was clear to her. There was no Shame or secretiveness between them; what they did seemed to be more than they might each have done alone, though perhaps it was a little like kedran love. Strangest of all, she was a virgin still, she had lost nothing but a certain innocence. She thought of Prince Terril and knew that she no longer kissed like a maid.

The summer came back; they swam and lay in the sun and talked and went back to the rock pool. But something worked in Raff Raiz; he was unhappy. On the first day of the dark of the moon, he met her on the shore dressed in his best suit of green with a velvet cloak. They climbed to the top of the rock.

“What is it?” she asked. “Dear love, what is it?”

“I must speak,” he said. “Aidris, I must ask you . . .”

“What?”

He did not look at her but gazed out to sea.

“Come with me,” he said. “Leave your life, as I will leave mine. You will not come back to the Chameln lands for years, perhaps it will never be. You have been orphaned and injured and driven into exile. You have wasted part of your life in waiting and hoping for a dream. Let Kedran Venn end her service. Come with me, and we will take ship to the lands below the world. We will stay together and live in a distant country and never return to Hylor. I will love and serve you my whole life long.”

She thought of nothing, every thought was driven from her mind. She looked at the ocean and the sky and felt the immanence of the Goddess. This was her dream . . . to be with him forever. To be away from Hylor. To travel into a strange land, to lose her name and her heritage and all that had pained and troubled her for so long. She put her arms around him and bent her head against his cheek and let herself live in the dream. They were so close at that moment that Raff knew even before she did, even before her tears began to fall upon his face, what her answer must be.

“It is
your
dream,” she said, when she could speak. “I would go with you over the whole wide world and be no one else but your love, your leman, but I cannot do it. I am the Heir of the Firn. I must work out that doom. I must do it for the people of the Chameln lands and for my father and mother who were struck down at my side and for the faithful followers of my house.”

“You do it for yourself,” said Raff Raiz sadly. “You are very stubborn.”

She hung her head.

“If you will serve me,” she said, “if you will help me bear our sorrow then pray you, love, sail to those lands alone. Let me think of you as free!”

“Perhaps I will do that, then.”

He tried to smile and took her hands.

“I have nothing to give you,” he said. “I have no jewels fit for a queen. Yet I will tell you a strange tale that contains a secret. It may bring hope and joy to your mother's house.”

“My
mother's
house?” she said, wondering. “The royal house of Lien?”

Raff Raiz smiled this time and began to tell his story.

“I met my uncle Hagnild several times as a child when my grandparents lived and he still came to Nesbath. Then the brothers were parted for a longer time. Suddenly, two years past, my father had a grave falling out with the Markgraf Kelen. I do not know the reasons . . . it was a matter of money and the carrying of a message. We were all together in Nesbath, and my father had word that he would be arrested and brought to Balufir, and that Pinga and myself would be taken as well. I might have run off and tried for the Chameln border, a few days away, but Pinga, poor soul, is delicate, so my father says, and not so easy to hide as one might think. He had little time, and in his haste to protect us, he called upon his brother Hagnild. He did this with the help of one of his scrying stones, an heirloom called Galimar.

“He told us we must go into Mel'Nir to a hiding place. He would not trust me with the instructions for our journey; he passed them directly to Pinga with the aid of sleep magic, for Pinga is gifted in this way and I am not. We took a boat in the dead of night, and I rowed down the channel of the river Bal where it flows by Nesbath, out of the Dannermere . . . or Danmar, as it is called in the Chameln lands. You must know that the Palace Fortress of Ghanor lies not far from the shore of the inland sea upon a high hill, and below, beyond the hunting preserves of the palace, growing right down to the shores of the sea, is thick forest, part of the great border forest. It is called Nightwood. It is dense and old and full of magic. No ordinary folk of Mel'Nir would enter it willingly.

“We rowed far out upon the Dannermere, Pinga and I, and then came into shore and rowed some way up a dark stream. We were deep in Nightwood. We tied up our boat at a certain giant swamp oak and followed a difficult winding path. Pinga knew the way perfectly, and we were welcome guests, the very trees bowing down to let us pass, though Nightwood is a fearful place. We came at last to a clearing in the very heart of the forest where there stood an old brown house. The door opened before we knocked, and an old woman welcomed us in. She told us her master would come soon and made us very welcome and comfortable. We sat by the fire and told her all sorts of gossip out of Lien, which she was especially pleased to hear.

“Then there was a call, outside, and I thought it must be my uncle Hagnild, but it was not. A young man came in, about sixteen years old, and bade us welcome heartily and set down a bag of game that he had been hunting. He lived in the cottage too, and the old woman made much of him, they loved each other, as if she might have been his grandmother. Two things were remarkable about this young man at a first meeting: he was very frank and pleasant in his manner, I liked him at once, and more to the point so did Pinga, who has a gift for such things. But the most striking thing about this young hunter was simply his size. He was a giant, at least seven feet in height, overtopping many of Mel'Nir's large warriors, and built in proportion. He had thick reddish-brown hair, blue eyes, and one shoulder slightly twisted . . . it could hardly be noticed unless he took off his tunic. His name was Yorath. What does that signify to you?”

Aidris shook her head, mystified.

“I know the old tale,” she said. “It is in a favorite book I had out of Lien. Yorath was a king's son who was hidden in a wolf's skin.”

“We all sat there,” said Raff Raiz, “and laughed and talked without a care, and Caco, the old woman, fed us dainties and called us her brave boys. Late in the night Hagnild came, riding Selmis, his pale mare. He was just as I remembered him, like my father but with sharper features, and his hair had grown pure white. His manner is rather grave, but he too looked on the young man Yorath with great affection. I would have said that the boy had been raised in Nightwood by these two, Caco the old woman, and Hagnild, the healer and magician from Ghanor's court. Yorath seldom left Nightwood, though he did speak of some time spent in the west of Mel'Nir.

“We spent more than a month hiding in that place and had a fine time with Yorath wandering Nightwood. Then my father sent word that the coast was clear again, and we rowed across the inland sea and met him in the Chameln lands. We were never sworn to secrecy by Hagnild, but he could see that we were children of a man who lived with secrets. I never spoke of my time in Nightwood to my father, but he could have had it all from Pinga.

“I heard nothing of Yorath's parentage, and of course I did not ask. But one thing told me the truth; I am sure it is the truth, and yet it is a great wonder. I went out alone with Yorath one day, Pinga stayed in the house. We went hunting with a boy called Arn, son of the nearby smithy, and then we had a swim in a forest pool. When we stripped off our tunics, I saw that Yorath wore a medallion around his neck. I had seen one exactly like it. You were wearing it that day in Musna village, and you wear it still. It is the silver swan of Lien.”

Aidris felt as if the breath were being squeezed out of her body. The elements of the tale all came together in a rush: Hagnild, the secret house in the forest, even the hated size of the young man, Yorath. She seized Raff by the hand.

“Yes,” she said. “It may be the truth. How it was done I cannot tell, but Hagnild is, after all, a magician. I feel it is the truth because of something my dear mother, Hedris, said on her deathbed. She said that she saw her dear sister Elvédegran, and that she held a male child in her arms and placed the silver swan of Lien upon its breast. This is that child, and Hagnild has saved him.”

“It might be proved a little,” said Raff. “I am sure the old woman, Caco, came out of Lien. Perhaps she served the princess. If Yorath
is
that child he will have a harsh fate . . .”

“He is the child of Prince Gol,” said Aidris, “and must share his heritage.”

“He is a marked child of the Great King's line,” said Raff Raiz. “It has been written and prophesied in Mel'Nir that Ghanor will die at the hand of a marked child of his house. My father says that such prophecies may be no more than a wish to get rid of the Great King . . . but Ghanor takes no chances. He would have had a child with a twisted shoulder killed at birth.”

“Oh, he is like a savage beast . . . they are all so cruel . . . how could your uncle stay in such a place?”

“They are men and women,” said Raff Raiz gently. “And Hagnild is a healer.”

Then she recalled why they sat there, and that Raff had told her the tale as a parting gift. She could have given him another secret to do with the House of Lien; but with a pang of regret for this failure of her trust, she knew she must not do it. She must not tell the name of Rosmer's secret adversary, the powerful magician who crossed his schemes, who lived for her in the world of the scrying stone. She thought of another scrap of knowledge that Raff and his father did not possess.