The Oddling Prince Read online

  Praise for The Oddling Prince

  A Publishers Weekly Top-Ten

  Spring Science Fiction,

  Fantasy and Horror Pick

  “In The Oddling Prince, Nancy Springer has written a small, perfect epic, three words I did not think could ever live well together. And yet here it is: romantic, heroic, moving, satisfying—and not an overblown farrago of words. Read it—and believe.”

  —Jane Yolen, author of The Emerald Circus and Sister Light/Sister Dark

  “The Oddling Prince is Nancy Springer at her very best. If you don't know her work—which seems most unlikely—The Oddling Prince is the perfect place to start!”

  —Peter S. Beagle, author of Summerlong

  “In The Oddling Prince, Nancy Springer juggles the tropes of fantasy and folklore with skill and wit, exploring kingship, brotherhood, friendship and heroism of many kinds while telling a story that kept me up far too late finding out what was going to happen next to characters I really cared about.”

  —Delia Sherman, author of Changling

  “Lyrical and lovely, The Oddling Prince feels both fresh and like a classic ballad that's been part of the English canon for centuries.”

  —Sarah Beth Durst, author of the Queens of Renthia series

  “The Oddling Prince is fantasy at its best. Lyrical prose, memorable characters, and a haunting story bring to life the never-were worlds of Calidon and Otherland. Filled with magic, fabulous horses, swordplay, and treachery—at its core, The Oddling Prince is about the power of love. This skillfully wrought novel reminds readers of why Nancy Springer is one of our top fantasy writers. A must-read book!”

  —Vonnie Winslow Crist, author of The Enchanted Dagger

  “What a thrilling yarn! Fast-moving, full of surprises, and yet infinitely satisfying. Every time you think you know what's going to happen Springer pulls a new but perfect rabbit out of the hat. The Oddling Prince is one of those great books that'll be reread over and over again.”

  —Brenda W. Clough, author of How Like A God and A Most Dangerous Woman

  “I loved this so much. It felt a bit like Juliet Marillier’s stories with the peaceful pacing, fae elements, vibrant medieval Celtic setting, and very little violence. 5/5 stars.”

  —A Page with a View

  “This very well could end up being my favorite book of the year. 5/5 stars.”

  —Way Too Fantasy

  Praise for Nancy Springer

  “Ms. Springer’s work is outstanding in the field.”

  —Andre Norton

  “[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.”

  —Anne McCaffrey

  “Nancy Springer writes like a dream.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Nancy Springer is a treasure.”

  —Ellen Kushner, author of Swordpoint

  “Nancy Springer’s kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.”

  —The Salem News

  On Fair Peril

  “An exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.”

  —Lambda Book Report

  “Moving, eloquent . . . Fair Peril is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth.”

  —Locus

  On Larque On The Wing

  “Satisfying and illuminating . . . an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Irresistible . . . a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.”

  —Kirkus

  On Chains of Gold

  “Fantasy as its finest.”

  —Romantic Times

  On I Am Morgan le Fay

  “Nancy Springer has created a world of beauty and terror, of hard reality and dazzling magic.”

  —Lloyd Alexander, author of The Book of Three

  Selected Books by Nancy Springer

  Book of the Isle

  The White Hart (1979)

  The Book of Suns (1977; expanded as The Silver Sun, 1980)

  The Sable Moon (1981)

  The Black Beast (1982)

  The Golden Swan (1983)

  Sea King

  Madbond (1987)

  Mindbond (1987)

  Godbond (1988)

  Tales from Camelot

  I Am Mordred (1998)

  I Am Morgan le Fay (2001)

  Tales of Rowan Hood

  Rowan Hood: Outlaw Girl of Sherwood Forest (2001)

  Lionclaw (2002)

  Outlaw Princess of Sherwood (2003)

  Wild Boy (2004)

  Rowan Hood Returns (2005)

  The Enola Holmes Mysteries

  The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006)

  The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (2007)

  The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets (2008)

  The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan (2008)

  The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline (2009)

  The Case of the Gypsy Good-bye (2010)

  Standalone novels

  Wings of Flame (1985)

  Chains of Gold (1986)

  A Horse to Love (1987)

  The Hex Witch of Seldom (1988)

  Not on a White Horse (1988)

  Apocalypse (1989)

  They’re All Named Wildfire (1989)

  Red Wizard (1990)

  Colt (1991)

  Damnbanna (1992)

  The Friendship Song (1992)

  The Great Pony Hassle (1993)

  The Boy on a Black Horse (1994)

  Larque on the Wing (1994)

  Metal Angel (1994)

  Toughing It (1994)

  Fair Peril (1996)

  Looking for Jamie Bridger (1996)

  Secret Star (1997)

  Sky Rider (1999)

  Plumage (2000)

  Needy Creek (2001)

  Separate Sisters (2001)

  Blood Trail (2003)

  Lionclaw (2004)

  Dusssie (2007)

  Somebody (2009)

  Possessing Jessie (2010)

  Dark Lie (2012)

  My Sister’s Stalker (2012)

  Drawn into Darkness (2013)

  Short Fiction

  Chance and Other Gestures of the Hand of Fate (1987)

  Stardark Songs (1993)

  As Editor

  Prom Night (1999)

  Ribbiting Tales (2000)

  The Oddling Prince

  Copyright © 2018 by Nancy Springer

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.

  Cover art “Warrior Heart” Copyright © 2011 by Brian Giberson

  Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: James DeMaiolo

  ISBN: Print: 978-1-61696-289-0

  ISBN: Digital: 978-1-61696-290-6

  To Oddlings Everywhere.

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  SPIRITS COAXED AND CALLED, sang and sighed in the wind outside the benighted tower where I sat beside my dying father, the king. The king! Six feet tall, golden bearded, and strong as a bear, but struck down in his prime by—by a visible mystery. On the third finger of his left hand glowed the uncanny thing, the ring, its own fey
light enough to show me my mother’s still, white-clad form on the other side of the bed.

  How the ring had come onto my father’s hand, no one could fathom. Only a month ago, on a fair spring day when the furze bloomed yellow and the thistles raised their crimson heads, we had gone a-hawking, he and I and our retainers, to the hills high above the sea. The hawks had flown well, so that we each carried a brace of grouse or hare slung from our saddles. But that afternoon as we rode homeward down ferny glens, the king, my father, had noticed the ring shining, no color, all colors, on his hand. We had all halted to gaze upon it and exclaim over it and wonder at it, for when he tried to slip it off to show it to us, it would not heed his touch or obey his will. It stayed where it was like a scar. And how it had come to be there, on the finger nearest his heart, he knew not, nor did any of us.

  How or why it had sickened him, no one knew either. But since that day, he had not been able to eat, or sleep, and fever burned him away from within, until now, four short weeks later, he lay gaunt and senseless. Many men, strong and wise, had tried to remove the ring, with unguents, with spells, by main force, but it would not stir from his finger. To cut the finger off, to mutilate the personage of the king, would have doomed some portion of Calidon, his kingdom, to be hacked away, destroyed by the barbaric Tartan tribes ever threatening from the Craglands. This could not be. Yet for some reason no one knew, the ring had doomed the king.

  My father. How could he lie dying?

  Wait!

  I sprang to my feet, snatching up a candle for better light, and yes! For the first time in many a day, my father had opened his eyes. And he looked straight at me. But those were not the brave bright eyes I knew; their blue was like shadows on snow.

  “Bard?” Mother called to him by her pet name for him.

  His dim gaze shifted to her. “My true love,” he said in a voice that seemed to echo from a great distance, “it is time. Only let me touch once more your face.”

  She pushed her white head drapery back over her shoulder, knelt beside him, and lifted his hand—for he had no strength to do it himself—she lifted his right hand to her face, and kissed it, and laid it against the flowing seal-brown hair at her temple.

  Then I understood that this was the lucid interval sometimes granted to great men before their—death. . . .

  Such a rebel storm surged within me that it thundered in my ears. I snatched up my father’s hand lying inert outside the bedclothes that swaddled him to his neck. With both hands, I seized the ring and pulled. I could feel the ring’s glowering heat and its sullen, mocking defiance as I tugged, tugged, without moving it an iota. Cursing it, I strained against it to the utmost, and it flickered like small lightning, stinging my fingers as if in warning of what it could do to me if I persisted. I gasped, yet gripped all the harder—

  “Aric, no!” my father’s faraway voice commanded. “Will it help us if the freakish thing takes you too?”

  I ceased the struggle yet still held his hand. “But this cannot be,” I cried. “You cannot leave! Your throne, your people, we need you!”

  Many folk adored him, but none so much as I. Perhaps a few minds within the castle were sufficiently scheming to think that I, his only son—indeed, his only living child—had somehow done this thing, so that I, a mere youth seventeen years of age, could take his throne in his stead. But if they thought such evil, they were sorely wrong. I knew myself unready to succeed him. A prince I was, yes, but in looks no more than passable—no comelier or taller than most men—and in prowess, no better with sword or lance or horses or—or anything. I had quested nowhere, had wooed no true love, I was—I felt myself nothing compared to my father. I loved him. I would have given anything, anything, my own fingers cut off, to make him well and strong again.

  “Aric,” he bespoke me gently, “you are my beloved son and my living pride. It is hard, but you will do—”

  Do what, I never knew, for even louder than the keening of the wind around the tower rose cries from the courtyard below, the shouts of guards and, worse, the screams of men in terror, warriors who would face battle-axes without a whimper now shrieking fit to tear their throats out.

  “It’s Death come in,” moaned one of my mother’s handwomen from the shadows at the back of the room.

  “Hush,” my mother told her.

  “Invaders,” Father muttered. “Bastard Domberk can’t wait till I die. Aric—”

  I gripped his hand hard, dropped it, and ran out of the room, for lacking the king’s leadership, all the castle was my responsibility. At breakneck speed I leapt down the tower steps, through the great hall and out toward the courtyard’s torch-lit darkness.

  But I halted on the wide stone steps of the keep, struck dumb by the sight before me.

  A rider. On horseback.

  Only one single rider and horse.

  But they were such a rider and such a horse as no mortal had ever seen.

  In the middle of the courtyard, the rider and his horse stood like a great alabaster statue surrounded by a multitude of pale ovals, the frightened faces of guards and soldiers with their swords out, or their pikes raised, or their bows with arrows nocked to the drawn strings. Yet he, the horseback rider, sat at ease among them as if on a coracle floating amid water lilies.

  A slim youth. Perhaps no older than I.

  He drew no weapon.

  His hands stirred not from the reins.

  He gazed straight ahead of him as if in a dream.

  He and his milk-white steed, both horse and rider far too beautiful to belong to this mortal world, shone in the night. They glimmered head to foot as if they carried moonlight within them.

  My neck hairs prickled at the sight. My heart halted like my feet, like my staring face, and for a moment I felt as if it might stop entirely. But I could not weaken; a king’s son is not permitted to weaken, ever. With all the force of my father’s authority, I shouted at the guards and soldiers. “Hold! Fall back!” I commanded. “Would you attack one who offers you no harm?” For the honor of my father’s hospitality was at stake, be the visitor mortal or—or otherwise.

  Only too willing to fall back, still the men-at-arms did not lower their weapons. And they continued to cry out, “It’s fey!” “Uncanny!” . . . across the moat treading on top of the water, through the iron of the portcullis and the wood of the gate . . . “It’s not of this world. Belike it’s Death!”

  If it were death, then fair was the face of death. When I took command, the stranger shifted his gaze to me, and I could have fallen to my knees, for I looked into the face of a god, an angel, I was terrified—yet in the depths of his brilliant eyes, I thought I saw something of need, even of yearning.

  I, Aric son of Bardaric, I must be strong. Forcing myself to hold my head high, I stepped forward onto the circle of cobbles that had opened around the visitant, I walked to him, I stood by the shoulder of his lambent, swan-necked steed. “If you come in peace, then welcome, stranger, whoever you may be,” I told him, looking up into his—handsome is too weak a word—into his glorious face. “Welcome to Dun Caltor. I am Aric of Caltor.”

  “And I am called Albaric. Prince Aric,” he replied, his voice low yet so surpassingly resonant that it silenced the shrieking of the onlookers and even of the wind, “I would speak with King Bardaric, your father, if I may.”

  “The king lies dying.” Somehow I said these words steadily, watching the fey rider’s luminous face.

  He swallowed hard, stroking his steed’s thick white mane as if for comfort; although calm, he seemed much moved. “I thought so, yet I hoped not,” he said when he could speak. “I must go to him at once. If I alight, will you take me to him?”

  “Perhaps, provided you mean him no harm.”

  “I intend for him all good. Will you take me to him at once? Before I alight, I need your promise.”

  I gazed into his eyes for a moment, and even though my heart still quivered in terror—no, in awe—I sensed greatest honor there. I judged, decided,
and nodded. “I will take you to him. You have my promise.”

  At the moment I said it, the great white steed snorted, pawed the cobbles so that sparks flew, and reared straight up, giving forth such a blaze of light that shouts and screams alarmed the night once more, my eyes winced, I stepped back, and when I looked again, the horse was gone as if it had never been, leaving behind yet greater hubbub in the courtyard.

  And Albaric.

  For Albaric remained. Glowing all over with a whisper of white light, he stood on the cobbles, levelly facing me; we were of the same height. He wore a plain, unadorned tunic, leggings and boots, yet stood like a lord of Othergates, even while something in his gaze implored me as if he were a waif.

  I could barely find my voice. “Come with me,” I whispered, beckoning, and with awareness of his presence prickling in the skin of my back, I led him up the wide stone steps into the keep.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  “DOES FATHER YET LIVE?” I demanded, entering the tower room where the king lay, where in the dark rafters hung the shadow of death.

  “Yes. But he has closed his eyes.” My mother spoke with quiet dignity even as she sat with her white head-linen trailing and held Father’s right hand, the one without the ring. In the bed, his face wasted to the bone and nearly as white as my mother’s linen, my father seemed lifeless to me, like a carving of stone. My mother’s handwomen huddled in the back of the room. All were so silent that I could hear my father gasp for each shallow, struggling breath.

  Or they were silent until I walked in, Albaric a step behind me. But at their first sight of him, they shrieked and cowered, pressing their backs to the wall, the whites of their eyes like hollow moons, their faces contorted—I could see them, for Albaric’s fey glow lit the dim room like a sconce of candles. And in that white light, the black death hanging overhead showed too plainly, a bat-winged, faceless enormity far larger than the tower, oozing through the stonework.

  But my mother did not scream, and she moved only to turn her head, looking at me and at the strange visitor I had brought with me.