Split Heirs (15 page)

Chapter Sixteen

“I need a food taster?” Prince Arbol asked doubtfully.

Queen Artemisia nodded emphatically. “Yes,” she said, “you do. You need
this
food taster.”

Arbol eyed the hooded figure. “Dad doesn't have a food taster any more,” the prince pointed out. “He threw the last one out the window because he didn't hand over the pasties fast enough. Why do
I
need one?”

“Because
you
,” the prince's royal mother informed her, “are a Hydrangean prince, not just a Gorgorian usurper.”

“I am,
too
, a Gorgorian!” Arbol shouted, offended.

“Yes, you are,” the queen agreed hastily, “worse luck. But you are
also
my child, and therefore a true scion of the Royal House of Old Hydrangea. And you will have to learn to behave accordingly. Really, dear, must we have this argument every time I see you?”

The prince did not answer that; instead, she said, “I'll throw him down the stairs if he annoys me.”

Wulfrith, who had listened thus far in silent befuddlement, snorted. If this gawky idiot tried to throw him anywhere, Wulfrith might just forget about the ban on sorcery and turn him into a newt, or a carp, or something.

Or maybe he wouldn't; he didn't have his staff with him, or any of the other trappings of a wizard, and if he tried using Clootie's new spell he might wind up with a rhinoceros, or some other inconvenient creature.

But the prince didn't look any bigger than he was himself, so maybe, Wulfrith thought, he just wouldn't
let
himself be thrown down any stairs.

The queen had mentioned that Wulfrith bore a resemblance to the prince, and Arbol did have a certain odd familiarity, Wulfrith had to admit. There was a resemblance to the queen, his mother, of course, but it was more than that.

“Can I see him with that silly mask off, so I know who I'm talking to?” Arbol asked.

Queen Artemisia hesitated.

This was an awkward moment. Sooner or later, her daughter would have to find out what was going on, but surely, she didn't need to know yet…

“I mean, for all I know, Mom, you could have a
girl
under there!” Arbol said.

Artemisia, who had been drawing a deep breath in preparation for making a speech, choked suddenly and bent over, coughing. Prince Arbol and Wulfrith watched her nervously, not knowing what they should do, but the fit passed quickly, and with it, some of her caution.

“All right,” she said, “you can see him without his mask. Arbol, my child, this is your new food taster. He says his name is Wulfrith.”

Wulfrith was unsure whether to bow first, or to take off the mask, so he attempted to do both simultaneously and managed to tangle the mask in his hair and poke himself in the eye with a thumb, but a moment later he had the silly thing off and was able to stand upright and look the prince in the eye.

Those eyes
did
look familiar, and quite a bit like the ones he saw in the mirror.

“Mom,” Prince Arbol said, startled, “he looks like
you
!”

Wulfrith blinked.

“Actually,” the queen said, as she stared at her two children, “Wulfrith looks like
you
, dear.”

He really did. The resemblance was uncanny, even for the children of a single birth. The scholars who had tutored her as a child had taught Artemisia about identical twins, but these two
couldn't
be identical, she told herself. They weren't the same sex, and her teachers had insisted that identicals were identical in that, too.

But there could be no doubt at all that they were siblings. And seeing two of her children together for the first time in more than fourteen years produced a very strange mix of emotions in the queen, leaving her unable to say any more for a moment.

“He does?” Arbol studied Wulfrith, who returned this scrutiny. “I guess he does, a little.”

Wulfrith snorted again. He had seen himself in mirrors any number of times, during various magical exercises, and he could see that he and Arbol looked a
lot
alike. What had made it less than immediately obvious was that the prince was a real person, not just an image
—
and of course, even with a mirror, Wulfrith had never seen himself from the side before.

“Is that why I have to be a masked food taster?” Wulfrith asked. “So people won't get me confused with Prince Arbol?”

The prince's face suddenly lit up. “Oh, Mom,” he said, “I know! You wanted him here to take my place, so I could go off hunting, and nobody would know I was gone! He can sit through all the boring stuff here in the palace!”

Caught off-guard, Artemisia said, “Uh…”

Sometimes, she reminded herself, she forgot that her daughter was not stupid. The child didn't bother to think if she didn't have to, but she was not stupid.

And it appeared that her brother wasn't, either.

“Is that it?” Wulfrith asked doubtfully. “I don't know about that. I don't know anything about being a prince.”

“Of course not,” Queen Artemisia acknowledged. “You've been a shepherd all your life, haven't you?”

“Well…” Wulfrith began uncertainly. It was really very inconvenient, this whole business about wizardry being illegal. “Not exactly a
shepherd
…”

“Whatever.” The queen waved away the unimportant details of rural job classifications. “In any case, my dear Wulfrith, my dear,
dear
Wulfrith, of course you'll need to learn a great deal about palace life
—
but yes, I had hoped that you might be willing to fill in for my darling Prince Arbol at certain…functions.” Artemisia hesitated, then added, “Not right
away
, of course.”

“I guess,” Wulfrith said, unenthusiastically.

“I think,” Artemisia said, “that you two should get to know each other a little better. If Wulfrith will be filling in for you, Arbol, he'll need to know more about
you
, as well as about being a prince.”

“Okay, Mom,” Arbol said. “We can go practice with swords together! Dad says that's the best way to get to know a man
—
try to hack his head open, and you'll either see his brains or you'll get an idea how he thinks.”

“No!” Artemisia shouted.

“We'll use the wooden ones, Mom
—
honest! I won't kill him!”

Wulfrith threw the queen an alarmed glance.

“
No
, Arbol! No swords, at least, not yet! A food taster isn't supposed to fight, he's supposed…supposed to eat. And Wulfrith would have to keep his mask on, we don't want anyone to know we have a substitute for you, and that wouldn't be fair, would it?”

“Maybe if we enlarged the eye holes?”

“
No
, I said. Wulfrith doesn't know how to fight
—
do you, Wulfie?”

“No, ma'am. Uh…shepherds don't use swords much.” And wizards, he thought, have better weapons
—
at least, the smart ones.

“Oh, all right.” Arbol looked at the new food taster. “What
do
you want to do then, Wulfrith?”

Wulfrith lit up. “We could study together, in the library,” he suggested.

Arbol frowned. “The library?”

“The big room with all the books,” Wulfrith explained.

“Oh.” Arbol was puzzled. “What do you do, throw them at each other?”

“No, silly, you
read
them!”

“Hey, don't call me silly! I'm the prince!”

“I'm sorry,” Wulfrith muttered, glancing at the queen, uncomfortably aware that he had made an error in etiquette, and that he was bound to make many more. The stories all said that palace etiquette was very important and very complicated.

“Well, that's okay,” Arbol said. “So you like reading?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Wulfrith will be staying in the library, for now, when he's not with you or up here visiting me,” the queen interjected. “He won't be bothered there.”

“That's for sure!” the prince agreed.

“Maybe I can learn about being a prince by reading some of the books,” Wulfrith suggested.

Artemisia sighed. “I'm afraid you'll find them out-of-date,” she said. “But it can't hurt to try.”

“Well, come on,” Arbol said, heading for the door. “I'll walk down there with you, and maybe you can show me a good book to read. One with lots of pictures of swords and horses.”

“Put your mask on, dear,” the queen said, as Wulfrith followed his sister.

The lad obeyed, and then had to scamper to catch up; the prince's idea of “walking” was what Wulfrith would have considered a fast trot. He wondered what Arbol would call a “run.”

Even more dismaying was the fact that Arbol kept up a steady stream of chatter the entire way. “It'll be great having you around here,” the prince said. “Sometimes it seems like people avoid me, because I'm the crown prince, you know, and I'll be king when Dad dies, which I hope he never does of course, I like him a lot, even if he is kind of a slob, and of course he killed my grandfather, the old king, did you know about that? His name was Fumitory the Twenty-Second, which is one of those fancy old-fashioned Old Hydrangean names, and I think I'm supposed to have one of those too, except I don't, I mean, Arbol's a good old Hydrangean name but it isn't so prissy, except maybe I really do have a fancy name, I mean another one, because someone told me once that my name was supposed to be Helenium, which I think is a really stupid name, don't you? This is the library, isn't it?”

Wulfrith, a trifle out of breath, nodded. Without thinking he waved his hand in a simple opening spell, and the heavy gilt-and-enamel doors swung wide.

“Hey!” Arbol demanded. “Who did that?”

“Um…I did,” Wulfrith admitted.

“But you didn't touch the door, I was looking!”

“No,” Wulfrith said, shamefaced, “I used magic.” He hastened to add, “I'm not a wizard or anything, nobody needs to cut my head off, it's just a trick I learned.”

“Hunh.” The prince looked at her masked companion, then at the door. “Maybe you
are
a girl, after all. I mean, real men don't do magic
—
that's women's stuff.”

“I'm not a girl,” Wulfrith replied, a bit hurt.

“'Course not,” Arbol agreed, stepping into the library. “I was teasing a bit. You can't be a girl
—
you look too much like me!”

“That's right,” Wulfrith agreed, following.

The library was equipped with several tall, narrow windows, squeezed in between towering bookshelves, but all of them faced southeast, and the afternoon was winding down toward evening. Combined with the fact that nobody had washed the glass in fourteen years, that left the room dim and shadowed.

Seeing how gloomy the library had become, Wulfrith once again acted without thinking, and lit the half-dozen nearest candles.

(That was a very simple spell; it involved using three-finger sign language to sweet-talk a fire elemental through an invisible window into the nether realm. Clootie had never gotten the hang of it, which still mystified Wulfrith.)

Arbol stopped dead in her tracks.

“Was that more magic?” she demanded.

“Oops. Yes, sir,” Wulfrith admitted.

“Well,
stop
it! I'm a prince, I can't be seen with some limp-wristed sissy who uses magic! Act like a man!”

“Sorry.”

In the candlelight, Arbol looked around at the endless shelves and stacks of dusty, sometimes mildewed volumes.

“A lot of books,” she remarked.

Wulfrith nodded.

“Are any of them any good?”

Wulfrith blinked in surprise. “Um,” he said. “Um.” The concept of books not being “any good” was entirely unfamiliar. Some books were better than others, of course, but these were all
books
, which meant learning and wisdom and wonderful words, stories and spells and ancient lore.

Arbol ignored her companion's discomfiture and pulled a thick folio off the nearest table. She squinted at the faded title, and then, unable to puzzle it out, opened the book at random. She read a few lines.

Wulfrith, watching her, saw her lips moving. Whatever other positive traits the prince might possess, she was clearly no scholar.

Well, reading was one of those things that one could do just as well alone, Wulfrith reminded himself.

“This is all about somebody named Pollestius, who offended a woman by wearing a ruby ring on the wrong finger,” Arbol said, slamming the book shut. “Who cares about that?”

Wulfrith, although he wondered why a lady would care where someone wore a ring, had to admit that it didn't sound terribly exciting.

“What about this one?” he suggested, pointing to a volume he had noticed before,
A Compendium of Mystic Rituals
. He hauled it down from the shelf and opened it.

Arbol took one look at it, then sneered, “It's more magic!”

Wulfrith had somehow failed to realize that people who didn't approve of
practicing
sorcery would not care to
read
about it, either. After all, he liked reading about adventures and battles, but he wouldn't care to be involved in any.

“Oh,” he said.

“Listen,” Arbol said, “I have other things to do
—
I think it's almost time for my riding lesson, and we're going to do peasant-trampling today. You go ahead and look around here all you want, and maybe you can find some good stuff for me, for when I come back.”

“All right,” Wulfrith agreed, looking hungrily at the vast expanse of leather and cloth bindings. “It's been good meeting you, Prince Arbol.”