A Strange and Ancient Name (32 page)

Ae-yi, even if that was true, he didn’t intend to spend his life in hiding on a boat. The fisherman had left Hauberin’s clothes spread out on a chest and the prince quickly dressed, the boat subtly rocking under his feet, then hurried out on deck, wincing as the first bright rays of early morning sunlight caught him in the face. Two sets of arms reached out to steady him: Alliar and Matilde, fairly radiating worry. Hauberin disentangled himself, insisting: “I’m all right, really. Thanks to this good man who plucked me from the river and gave me hospitality for . . . how long has it been?”

“A day,” Alliar said. “You’ve been missing a full day. During which,” the being added with blatant restraint, “the lady and I searched every corner of Touranne for you.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.” He enhanced that with a heartfelt mental apology, feeling Alliar’s angry, reluctant acceptance. “I . . . wasn’t in any condition to contact you.”

The fisherman shrugged. “Ye slept the rest a’ the night I caught you and almost all the next day around. Woke once to eat an’ take care of nature, didn’t say a thing, then went right back to sleep. Didn’t have the heart to wake ye; looked like ye needed it.”

“Oh, I did. But I kept you from your fishing. Let me—”

“Na, na, fish aren’t runnin’ right now; didn’t see any crew with me, did ye?”

“At least let me offer you something for your kindness.” Alliar held out several links of shining silver chain.

“Didn’t do it for reward,” the fisherman muttered, insulted.

“Then, why?” Hauberin wondered.

“Oh, I’m always fishin’ folk outta the river. Most o’ the poor souls already dead. Murdered, suicided, or just plain drowned. Pleasure to catch a live one this time.”

But Hauberin drew the man aside. “There’s more to it than that. What?”

The rough face reddened. “I really didn’t pull ye out for reward; couldn’t just stand by an’ watch ye drown.”

“But . . . ?”

“But after ye fell asleep, I took a good look at ye, at the . . . uh . . . ears an’ all, and . . . well . . . ye’re one a’ Them, ain’t ye? One a’ the Fair Ones?”

“Ah?”

“The . . . ah . . .”—the man’s voice sank to a murmur—“the Fées out of the Hollow Hills.”

Fées? He knew the word from his mother: it was the local name for his land. But what were these Hollow Hills? Were the humans confusing their antique burial mounds with places of Power? “Surely,” Hauberin said evasively, “such folk are just myth.”

“We both know better ’n that, beggin’ your pardon.
Someone’s
in that forest. Watching. Waiting. There’s been too many travelers feelin’ eyes on them. Too many sheep disappearin’—and children, for that matter.”

Hauberin hesitated, wondering what to say. Probably totally unmagical predators had taken those sheep and those poor children, too, but at least this once the fisherman was right about what he faced.

And you want a Faerie blessing on your boat, don’t you? If I had true Power in this Realm, you’d have that blessing and more, but . .
. “Yes,” he said at last, “I am of Faerie,” and the fisherman’s world-weary eyes were all at once open and innocent as a child’s.

Inspiration struck. “You must take the silver we offer,” Hauberin said in his most autocratic voice. “Keep what you will and spend the rest as honorably as you can, and it will bring you both good fortune and the good will of others.”

Expecting magic, the fisherman accepted those common sense words
as
magic. Red-faced and grinning, he clutched the silver links to him as Hauberin scrambled up onto the dock, followed by Alliar and Matilde.

Neither of them spoke to him for some time, stalking angrily along at his side. “Look you,” the prince said at last, “I told you I was sorry. I couldn’t sleep, the night was warm, the streets deserted, and I certainly didn’t expect thieves to attack me—”

“What else would you expect?” Matilde snapped. “Didn’t it occur to you the streets might be deserted for a very good reason?”

“I blamed it on human night-blindness. And those thieves wouldn’t have given me any trouble if it hadn’t been for the . . . Presence that suddenly possessed them.”

“Not
that
again,” Alliar muttered. ‘I thought we’d established that your so-vicious Presence was only a fever dream.”

“I wasn’t feverish this time!”

“Oh, no. You were, judging from the smell of you, totally drunk.”

“I wasn’t drunk!” Hauberin protested. “Oh, maybe I was, a bit, that first night, but after that—”

“After that you were, as the humans say, sleeping it off so thoroughly I couldn’t even find your aura. Dreaming up your nebulous Presence—”

“It was real!” But . . . was it? Standing there in the bright sunlight, over a day removed from that nearly fatal night, Hauberin couldn’t help a shadow of doubt: those
could
have merely been particularly blood-thirsty thieves; he
might
have been mistaken about any supernatural aspect—a forgivable mistake under the circumstances. But Alliar’s attitude infuriated him. “How dare you argue with me! And why won’t you believe me?”

“Because you aren’t making sense!” the being shouted. “How could that—that Thing have been real when nobody else—not me, not anyone at court—
nobody
has ever so much as
felt
the slightest hint of it?”

“Enough,” Matilde cut in coldly. “The two of you sound like little boys quarrelling. Alliar, keep your voice down before someone calls the guards. Hauberin, I don’t care whether you were drunk or sober. I’m truly glad you’re safe. But if you ever disappear without warning, if you ever frighten me like that again, I swear I’ll make you regret it!”

She stalked off. Fuming, Hauberin and Alliar followed her through the awakening city, dodging early-rising servants, children, and dogs. The cool morning air was full of noise: scraps of laughter and quick snatches of whistling, wagons clattering over the rutted streets, church bells clanging from all sides of Touranne. Merchants chatted with each other as they prepared for the day’s business, folding the bottom halves of the horizontal shutters that had barricaded their shops at night down and out to form tables for their wares, folding the top halves up to form awnings for their customers. No one seemed to mind that they cut pedestrian space in half in the process. In every open square, food sellers were busy with their stands or braziers, filling the air with the scents of frying meat and fish.

The prince, forcibly reminded that he was famished, stopped to devour two meat pastries from the first seller he saw (bewildering but delighting the woman with a silver link as payment), heedless of grease, gristle, or Alliar. At the being’s fastidious insistence, though, he returned to the inn to shed his fishy—and now greasy—clothes and take a quick tub bath.

“Tell me,” he asked the burly young servant who was lugging in buckets of hot water for him, “what do you know of the Fées of the Hollow Hills?”

The man put down the buckets so quickly water sloshed over the sides. Hastily crossing himself, he whispered, “Ain’t safe ta talk a’ them. Never know when they might be listenin’.”

“I see. They’re all around, then?”

That earned him a nervous glance. “They . . . uh . . . live in the forest north of here, in the Hills in the forest.”

“Ah. You’ve seen them, then.”

“Praise God, no. But they’re there, just the same.”

Hauberin sighed. Legends were stubborn things. Who knew what some human had seen however long ago to misplace magic in this magickless place? “Never mind,” he told the uneasy servant, “that’s enough water, thank you,” and shooed him out.

###

Clean once more, Hauberin paused in the middle of toweling dry his hair, all thoughts of mythical Fées replaced by the here and now, suddenly so nervous he trembled. The Presence hadn’t resurfaced; maybe the twin barriers of living water and sunlight had banished it; maybe he really had only imagined it. With any luck at all, the thing wouldn’t have a chance to resurface. After all this wild adventuring it hardly seemed possible, but very soon now, Hauberin thought, he’d be in the cathedral. Breaking the curse. Learning the truth about his grandsire.

And, Powers help him, about himself.

XXVI

DISTANT COUSINS

Hauberin had not expected to be impressed by any human building; after all, the castles he’d seen so far had struck him more by their massiveness than by any elegance of design. But after travelling through the narrow, crowded streets of Touranne, stepping gingerly around various wet or smelly obstacles, the impact of suddenly coming out into an open square and facing the massive cathedral was strong enough to stop him dead.

The Cathedral of St. Denis was as large as any castle, and still unfinished, one side covered with scaffolding. The smooth stone of the completed walls were palest gold in the sunlight, broken at regular intervals by panels of colored glass, and its twin spires stretched up to the sky. Hauberin guessed that the huge front doors, set in a beautifully carved arched doorway between the spires and thrown open for morning services, were either intricately worked solid bronze, or wood sheathed in bronze.

Then the sun cleared the buildings behind him, and he gasped. In the space above the doorway was set a great round window of colored glass, blazing into life as the light hit it, shards of bright reds and blues and yellows that must be breathtaking when seen from within the cathedral.

It was the window out of his grandmother’s memories. Exultant with terror and hope, the prince started forward—only to be blocked by Matilde.

“Not yet,” she said shortly. “First I want to know just what it is you’re hunting so desperately.”

Her eyes were those of someone who has, bit by bit, come to the edge of endurance. “You’ve earned an explanation,” Hauberin agreed. Quickly, he summarized the facts of his hunt, leaving Matilde staring.

“Melusine . . . ?” she murmured. “The Lady Melusine . . . was your mother . . . ? But that was so long ago . . .”

Hauberin laughed at her expression. “That would make me . . . what? Over a hundred of your years? No, believe me, I’m not anywhere near that old! Remember the tricks we can play with time.”

“Oh. Of course.” Matilde smiled slightly. “I always felt a little sorry for the Lady Melusine. I’m glad to learn she had some happy years.”

Hauberin nodded. “She and my father truly loved each other.”

But Matilde was staring anew. “Dear saints. We’re kinfolk.”

“Distant kin, yes.”

“Ha, and Gilbert’s your kin, too! Why, when I tell him—” She stopped as sharply as though she’d been struck. “If I can. If he’s still alive.”

“Surely they’ll have some news of him in the cathedral,” Hauberin said gently, and took her arm. “Come, we’ll go look.”

###

They found themselves in dim blue light and a haze of incense in a long central hallway (“The nave,” Matilde whispered to Hauberin and Alliar) flanked on either side by columns of sleek stone and the walls themselves beyond that. The vaulted ceiling was dizzyingly far overhead. Windows were set into the walls at regular intervals, some of them still empty or protected by wooden flanking, others filled with pictures worked in the brilliant colored glass these people seemed to favor. “That’s stained glass,” Matilde whispered, “and those are scenes from the Bible. You . . . all . . . do know about the Bible?”

“My mother
was
human,” Hauberin reminded her, “and—ah.”

The sun had just struck all the windows on one side of the nave into blazing color. As though that flare had been a signal, somewhere further into the cathedral the clear, achingly pure voices of human boys soared up into song. Dazed by the impact of visual and aural beauty, Hauberin wandered on, vaguely aware that Matilde, a solicitous Alliar at her side, had stopped to speak with one of the cathedral folk: a priest? Ah, no, the proper term, he thought, was monk, not that it mattered right now, not with the sunlight and color and song . . .

At last the young singers fell silent, and the prince came back to himself to find he’d sunk to a bench without knowing it. A gentle chuckle sounded to his right, and Hauberin turned to find himself facing a plain-faced middle-aged monk with the amiable, placid eyes of someone who is totally at home with himself and totally without imagination. “They sometimes strike me that way, myself,” the monk said cheerfully. “The boys do sing splendidly, don’t they? Even when just rehearsing.”

Hauberin nodded, too overcome for the moment to speak. But then, with a sudden tightening of his nerves, the prince remembered why he was here. The sharp tension must have shown on his face, because the monk blinked and asked gently, “Is there anything wrong, my son?”

Oh, there is, indeed.
“I . . . my grandmother left an important parchment here.”
So many generations back you’d think me
—
you’d
know
me—for something Other.
“It . . . uh . . . tells my mother’s parentage.”

The monk’s face lightened with understanding. “Her father, I take it,” he said delicately, “was . . . ah . . . not married to her mother? Is this a matter of inheritance? Because if it is, I’m afraid I’m not authorized to—”

“No. I . . .”
Oh, Powers.
“I simply . . . I must know who he was. Who . . . who I am.”

The monk sighed sympathetically. “We are all God’s children,” he murmured! “But you’ve hardly come to hear me preach to you. Eh well, I can’t see the harm . . . I can’t let you touch anything or take anything from the Treasury, you understand.”

“Of course. I only need to see the parchment.”

“Then come, my son. Follow me.”

He led Hauberin down the length of the nave. The prince wondered nervously if they were going as far as the altar with its elegant red and gold drapings and canopy, feeling his human disguise growing thin, because he hadn’t the vaguest idea of what one did at a human’s altar.

But to his relief, the monk, sandaled feet slapping gently against the stone floor, made a sharp right turn into a new hallway, shorter and broader than the first and ending in a second door to the outside. He turned again, this time to the left, and stopped before a ceiling-high iron grill that screened off a stairway leading down. Hauberin, every nerve tightening in response to so much deadly metal, fought such a struggle to keep from flinching away that it was a moment before he realized the monk was studying the narrow door set in the grill and murmuring: “That’s odd. How should the lock be open?”

“You’re not the only one who has a key, are you?”

“No, but . . . Ah well, come.”

Hauberin dove through the doorway as though through a ring of fire, wincing as his iron-wounds throbbed painfully in response, then followed the monk down to the low, vaulted undercroft, nearly stepping on the man’s heels as the monk stopped short on the last step, calling out indignantly: “Here, now! No one’s supposed to be down here!”

A figure in a dark, cowled cloak turned as sharply as a wild thing at bay. Hauberin saw a flash of wild, blank eyes—
bespelled eyes!
the prince realized in shock—then a ringed hand had snatched up a parchment and the figure was rushing at them. It bowled over the monk, who crashed into Hauberin. Hampered by the man’s flailing arms, the prince grabbed frantically at the fleeing figure, all at once knowing,
feeling,
that the parchment was his grandmother’s record. His hand closed briefly on the edge of the dark cloak, then the figure had pulled free, but not before Hauberin had a fleeting glimpse of the face beneath the cowl: “Gilbert!”

Oh, no, that was impossible, that was surely impossible. Struggling free of the spluttering monk, Hauberin hurried after the thief—and nearly crashed into the iron door the man had slammed behind him.

Powers, how am I going to—

But of course the thief hadn’t had the time to lock it. Hauberin kicked the door open with a safely booted foot and dove out, just in time to see his quarry dashing out the outer door. The prince ran after him, right into a crowd of visitors strolling into the cathedral. Leaving a chorus of indignant cries in his wake, Hauberin fought his way through them, struggling to keep the thief in sight. By the time he reached the outside world, the thief was already crossing the cathedral square, about to vanish into the streets beyond.

Damn you, no!

Hauberin threw all the Power he could summon after the man.

It wasn’t enough, not at that range, not with the Realm’s interference. The thief staggered, and something small dropped from his hand, but he recovered before Hauberin could reach him, disappearing into the maze of streets. The prince was left standing at the edge of the square, breathless and stunned with despair, blind to the curious crowd gathering about him.

Running footsteps made him turn to see Alliar and Matilde, she looking as hopeless as he felt. “Are you—” the being gasped, “was that—”

“The parchment?” Hauberin waved a hand. “It’s out there. Somewhere.”

The spectators, realizing the entertainment was over, slowly drifted away. One of them bent to pick up the small object the thief had dropped, but straightened empty-handed at Hauberin’s sorcerous glare. Muttering bitterly, “At least I’ll get some reward out of this,” the prince scooped up the little glinting thing: a signet ring.

In the next moment, he nearly dropped it again. The ring had a faint but very real
feel
to it. The aura of that alien, chaotic, hating Presence. “Here,” he said to Alliar. “Touch that. Tell me if
that’s
just my imagination, too.”

The being warily took the ring, then hastily handed it back, eyes wide. “My pardon. I should never have doubted—Matilde? What’s wrong?”

The woman was painfully pale. “Let me—let me see that. Oh, dear saints . . .” She looked up at them, stricken. “This is Gilbert’s ring. Don’t stare at me like that! It’s his signet, it never leaves his hand. I t-told him it was too big for his finger, I warned him he was going to drop it one of these days—Oh, God, he’s alive!”

And a thief. And bespelled.

“If so strong an aura’s clinging to the ring,” Hauberin mused, “that has to mean the . . . ah . . . Other had it,” and Gilbert with it, went the unspoken thought, “long enough for a link to have formed.”

“And we can use that link to guide us to both Gilbert and That,” Alliar continued. “Think it’s a trap?”

“Of course it’s a trap. But what choice have we?”

###

They rode out from Touranne in haste, Hauberin with the ring clenched in his fist, trying to ignore the unclean
feel
engulfing the signet, concentrating instead only on the faint psychic pull, like the thinnest of threads, guiding him on.

By midday they had left the open farmland surrounding Touranne behind, riding almost due north up through gently rising scrubland full of tree stumps and saplings, munching in the saddle on bread and cheese (eagerly provided by the innkeeper, glad to be rid of his troublesome guests), pausing only when the horses needed rest. By early afternoon, they were in the midst of true forest once more.

Hauberin dared take his attention from the signet ring enough to glance warily about. Unlike the gentle woodland through which they’d come on their way into the city, this was a rugged place, the land rising and falling sharply, full of rocks and twisting, ancient trees clinging fiercely to the broken ground. The air was cool and damp, rich with the scent of wet earth and vegetation; the steep hillsides glinted with moisture where they weren’t blanketed with ferns, and the horses’ hoofbeats were muffled by moss. Even though the sun was still almost fully overhead, the light was dim and green, diffused by leaves.

This, the prince realized with a silent laugh, could only be what the humans feared as Fée country. He could easily picture some fearful human traveler riding through this wildness at nightfall, reaching Touranne full of tales of lurking Things.

Matilde shuddered. ‘I wish it wasn’t growing so late. I hope we don’t have to stop in this forest for the night.”

“What, afraid?” Alliar teased.

“Of squelching,” she retorted. “This would be a dank place to camp.”

Hauberin silently agreed. But there might not be a choice; as the faint psychic thread led them through a narrow gully, dense forest on the left, an earthen ridge rising on the right, there was no doubt that the already dim light was fading rapidly. While darkness was hardly a problem, neither he nor Matilde nor, for that matter, the horses, were prepared to ride the day and night around, particularly over such broken ground.

And here I’d hoped to be done with this, one way or another, before I had to spend another night’s dreaming
—

Hauberin came sharply alert as the horses whickered and sidled uneasily,
feeling
a faint, strangely distorted Power brush his own, interfering with his concentration on the signet ring, catching a quick glimpse of glowing green eyes peering out from behind a tree on his left.

“Stay between us,” he murmured to Matilde, and added with studied calm to Alliar, “Over there. On your side. Watching us.”

“I see him. Look to your right.”

Hauberin glanced up as though by chance to see a second slender form stone-still in shadow on the ridge; it would have been totally invisible to human sight. “Well now, it seems they aren’t just legends after all.”

“They?” Matilde whispered. “Are those Fées?”

Invisible to
Powerless
human sight, Hauberin amended. “Probably. They don’t quite
feel
like anyone out of Faerie, though . . . An interesting problem, eh, Alliar?”

Matilde glanced sharply from being to prince. “This is hardly the time for a discussion! You’re not just going to ignore them, are you?”

The prince completely relaxed his concentration on ring and conversation, sending his senses roving delicately out, testing,
feeling
those mysterious other presences,
feeling
that oddly distorted Power of theirs rousing in response to his own before he could count them. He smoothly withdrew back into himself before any of them could accidentally snare him. However many there were—not as many, he sensed, as the Fées would have liked, more, certainly, than he would have liked—they were too many to fight. Nor, judging from the coldness he’d felt, were they in any mood for a parlay.

“Until we’re sure how many of them there are,” Hauberin said belatedly, “and why they’re watching us, ignoring them is all we can do.”