The Oddling Prince Read online

Albaric did not seem to hear the whimpering women or see my mother, nor did he cower under the canopy of death. His gaze had sped straight to my father’s wan face. One stride, and he folded to his knees at the bedside, grasping the king’s doomed, ringed hand in one of his own; with the other, he snatched something out of his tunic. Some sort of strand or thread; one could barely glimpse it in the weird light, but by his motions, it was plain to see what he did. He tied the filament around my father’s finger between the ring and my father’s heart. And then he began to wind it around my father’s finger in the same place, again and again and again ringing my father’s finger with this invisible thread behind the ring, and as if his motions had set a trance on those who watched, all the room grew silent, a silence as of bated breath.

  Gradually the thread must have built until it began to force the ring from my father’s hand, for the ring fought back furiously, blazing blood red and as bright as fire, striking out with swords of light. But it could not sting Albaric as it had done me, for he never touched it; he only wound and wound and wound the thread behind it—the filament so fine I could not see it—the uncanny strand that seemingly the ring could neither burn nor resist, for slowly, flaring blue darts of fury, so slowly that at first I could not be certain—perhaps I was only wishing it—no, truly the ring began to move.

  I gasped, blinked, continued to gaze, and yes, yes! The ring—surely it moved.

  And the thread with which Albaric forced it to move, that strand of wonder seemed never to cease, for he brought it forth, circling, circling, circling behind the ring to make it lose its clutch and creep, a frightening lambent thing slower than any snail, away from the flickering remnants of my father’s life. The ring’s smooth encircling band turned all ice-blue fire, then poison green, then a horrible black light I cannot begin to describe or explain. It was, I think, in extremis at that point, for Albaric lifted my father’s hand and the ring fell off. We all saw it fall. We all heard it clatter to the planking of the floor somewhere.

  Albaric sank back on his heels and spoke for the first time, sounding exhausted. “Let no one touch it.” And in that moment, as the ring fell, his light went out. Moon glory silvered him no more. He crouched in the shadow beside the bed, still fairer than any mortal youth had ever been, but otherwise ordinary now, a tired stripling in a woolen tunic and leggings.

  But the darkest shadow, the faceless black shadow overhead, had withdrawn.

  And my father took a deep breath, stirred in what had been his deathbed, and opened his eyes—this time fully. Eyes that sparkled like bonny blue skies. I think everyone cried out. I know I did. My father looked quizzically into my mother’s face as she bent over him, clutching both of his hands.

  “What in bloody blazes is going on?” he asked.

  And he sounded so much like himself, like the king before any dire thing had happened, that everyone in the room burst out laughing or crying or (speaking for myself at least) both. And Father looked like himself again also, the flesh lost to fever and starvation returned to him, his face firm and healthy again, his grip strong. “A wonder!” “A marvel!” “White magic!” “The most marvelous of wonders!” cried Mother’s handwomen, all astonishment and joy. Snatching up candles, they ran forth, crowding the door, jostling one another to be the first to spread the glad tidings throughout Dun Caltor.

  Meanwhile, Mother answered her true love placidly, “You were sick, dear.”

  Only a shadow among shadows—for the room had gone very dim in the light of a few oil lamps, and quiet, the wind no longer troubling the tower—without a word Albaric crouched rewinding his thread, gathering it in until it parted from my father’s finger with a tweak that made the king startle and look about him. “What was that?”

  “I, Sire.” Tucking the thread into his tunic, Albaric stood so that the king could see him—but why was he afraid? Unmistakably I saw him trembling like a peasant, although he stood like a lord, head high.

  Father looked at him, frowning, but only because he was puzzled.

  “This is he who gave you back your life,” my mother said with her heart in her soft voice.

  “Sire.” Albaric’s voice quivered like his limbs as he addressed the king. “Sire, do you not know me?”

  Father gazed at him, thinking deeply, unblinking. “Such a fair youth I should remember from anywhere in this world,” he said, “but I am all bewilderment. Who are you? Why have you—”

  But Albaric turned away, choosing that moment to bend and search the floor, perhaps to hide his face.

  There were many things I could have said, including his name. I felt for him, so I said nothing.

  “It matters not.” Albaric straightened, as steady as the earth now, with the fateful ring cupped in one hand. Like a living thing, it sulked in the hollow of his palm, dark and faintly glaring its own green-black glow.

  At first sight of it, my father stiffened, eyebrows alarmed. “Whence came that?”

  By way of answer, Albaric only said in a low, somber voice, “Sire, its power is great, and greatly dangerous, for it is a trickster. Command it, and it may obey you, but only as it chooses. To risk putting it onto your finger, or the finger of another, is to risk mortal peril.” Lifting the ring by grasping the outside of its circle, Albaric leaned across the bed to give it to the king.

  But Bardaric of Calidon did not at first accept it. Looking much shaken, he protested, “But how—why—”

  “It is yours,” Albaric told him. “You are the king.”

  Silently, Father let Albaric place the uncanny ring into his hand.

  Mother started to address Albaric. “Fair youth, we owe you more than any boon can ever repay. If—”

  She would have asked what we could give him, do for him, how best to bless his life. But she was interrupted as a great cackle of servant folk bustled into the tower room, bringing ale, fresh-baked oat bread, platters of mackerel, mutton, stewed herring, dried apples, and even expensively imported dried peaches—they came bearing every sort of delicate food, exuberant as if for a high feast. Laying the ring aside, the king sat up in his bed, at which there was great rejoicing, and for a while no one thought of anything other than serving the daintiest of food and drink to the king who had lain so near to death.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  SCANT MOMENTS LATER , I looked around to offer Albaric something to eat or drink, but he was gone.

  I bolted up from my seat at the foot of the bed. “Where did Albaric go?”

  Many eyes fastened on me, and my father was not the only one to ask, “Who?”

  “The—the visitant, the oddling! Where has he gone?”

  Folk looked at one another. An old manservant suggested in jest, “Perhaps he has disappeared in a burst of white fire, like his horse.”

  “What?” my father exclaimed. “What is this you say?”

  An odd hush followed, for no one cares to speak of the uncanny. But then the old man, commanded by the king’s gaze, began with stumbling speech to tell of what he spoke. Meanwhile I ran from the room and down the stairs, demanding of every servant I met whether they had seen the stranger. None had. I left the keep, crossed the courtyard, and spoke with the guards at the gate. No one had gone out, and certainly not the fey youth who had so recently come in without being admitted, who had ridden his magnificent white mount through metal and solid wood.

  “He could have flown away like a nighthawk, that one,” said one of the guards, “and we none the wiser.”

  But I remembered how he had required my promise before he alighted to the earth, and I sensed that without his eerie horse, he could not depart so readily.

  “If I may say it, you showed great courage, my Prince, facing him,” said one of the men in a diffident tone that was new to me. “At the sight of him, I could barely stand on my feet.”

  I felt only small pleasure, for my thoughts were on Albaric, and it seemed to me that it was he who had showed courage, coming here where weapons upraised had greeted him. I sensed gre
at courage in him, remembering how he had trembled as he said to my father, “Sire, do you not know me?”

  But the king had known him not.

  Why had he thought my father should know him?

  It seemed he had come here solely for that, to save my father.

  At what cost to himself?

  What was he?

  I began to see him in my mind like a reflection in water, mystery in its depths, and as the image formed, I began to sense where he might have gone.

  Back into the keep I ran, and back up the stairs of the King’s Tower. I glanced in at the door, meaning only to reassure myself that my father was well, but despite the servants standing in the way, he and my mother saw me immediately. “Aric!” Mother summoned, and my father demanded, “Aric, who was that youth?”

  “He is called Albaric. Whether he be born of woman or fallen from the sky, I know not. I must find him, Sire. Excuse me.” Again I bolted from the room, but this time I ran not down the stairs but up.

  Almost as if on level ground, I sprinted to the top of the tower and out into the night without a torch to light my way. But then, perforce, I stopped where I stood, so utterly in darkness that I fancied myself standing within the belly of black-wing death. I could see nothing, and a misstep might take me over the low, crenellated wall around the platform and send me plummeting to the crags and the cold fierce water far, far below—for, of course, the castle of the King of Calidon was set atop the rocky shore’s highest cliff, which jutted into the northern sea, defended on three sides by stormy waves. The King’s Tower, atop which I stood, was the tallest and most inaccessible, so impregnable that the king’s chamber was allowed the luxury of a wide, unbarred window of precious glass, a vista of boundless restless sky and water.

  Standing atop that tower, I hearkened but could hear only the roar and crash of breakers against rock as the sea wind made a mane of my hair, blowing fit to send the stars overhead sailing on their midnight ocean of sky—but I could not see the stars.

  Nor could I see Albaric, or hear him, yet I sensed he was up here with me. How, in the darkness? The same way I had known earlier that there were voices of spirits in the wind. One knows not with mind but with gut and spine.

  “Albaric?” I called.

  He did not reply. But my breath passed through me in a long, shaky sigh of relief and pain.

  Relief that he had not gone away.

  But pain—the pain I felt was his.

  “Albaric.” Quite sure of each step, I walked toward him, hands outstretched, until my fingers just grazed the unearthly fabric of his tunic. Then I stopped. I did not dare touch him further. With my other hand, I groped about and found stone. Yes, we stood directly at the wall, which terrified me, for what I sensed in him almost made me weep. His suffering was not simple but a vast and fearsome tangle of many hurtful thorns.

  “Listen, Albaric,” I blurted as if to a child, “it will be better, somehow. I promise you.”

  Silence. I heard his breath catch. Then he spoke, his melodic voice wavering between wonder and mockery. “Have you always been able to see in the dark, Prince Aric? Or can you hear this mortal thing, eye-water falling?”

  “Neither. But I know your light is gone. Have you ever before stood so benighted, Albaric?”

  Longer silence, as his pride surrendered to my touch and my hand settled to lie upon his shoulder.

  “No, never before in my—in my life,” he said quietly. “It is a weighty and frightful thing to have human life, to feel time passing. Aric, if I were to throw this body of flesh and bone off this tower, if it were to break on the rocks below, would I then be gone?”

  His words pierced me like a dirk between my ribs. If he questioned whether the soul survived after death, I failed to answer and knew no answer. Yet already I knew a deeper truth. With difficulty, I said, “Please do not, or I would go with you.”

  My hand slipped off his shoulder as he turned, his back now to the wall, facing me even though we were but shadows in the darkness.

  I asked him, “What are you, Albaric, that I feel your suffering as if you were my second self?”

  I think he could not speak, but I felt some of his anguish turn to wonder.

  Greatly I feared the sea, yet I told him, “I would leap into the sea for you.” Simplest truth.

  He whispered, “But—why?”

  “I know not. It is a weighty and frightful thing,” I said in sober jest, “to be willing to die for a stranger.” All the more fearsome to me because I had never—how had I known he was on top of the tower? How had I walked to him surely in the dark? How did I sense with certainty what he was suffering? No such powers had been mine until now.

  Nor had I ever before felt such compassion.

  “Prince Aric, I am all amazed,” he whispered, “for I thought perhaps you would be my enemy.”

  “How so, when you have saved my father’s life?”

  “You are a true son of King Bardaric.”

  “Yet he would have died as I watched. Bah.” The reason I could dimly see Albaric’s form, I realized, was because the utter darkness had at last lifted away, and truly it had been Death a-waiting. Looking up at myriad stars, I shivered with something more than cold. “Inside, come inside,” I coaxed. “Come downstairs and have something to eat, some warm milk to drink.”

  “Mortal comforts,” said Albaric with gentle irony, but he came with me.

  Hearing our footsteps descending, I suppose, my mother awaited us at the king’s doorway with a candle in her hand and many questions in her eyes—but in her eyes only. She would not be so indelicate as to speak them.

  She, Queen Evalin, would have been far more fit than I to rule had father died. A tall and beautiful noblewoman who did not depend on her beauty for anyone’s regard but measured everything in her mind, she should have been far more than wife or even queen; she was unfortunate to have been born female.

  Mindful of Albaric’s discomfort, I asked Mother, “Have you sent away the servants?”

  “Yes, and your father sleeps peacefully at last.” After a month of restless fever. “You came just in time,” Mother said humbly to Albaric. “A little longer and I would have been a widow.”

  Deep in Albaric’s throat sounded a sort of moan, and he turned his face away.

  “Time distresses him, I think,” I told my mother, “for he has known only a timeless place. Albaric, am I right?”

  Still facing away, he nodded.

  “And a body of flesh weighs heavily upon him and bewilders him with its wants.”

  My mother’s lips parted but she did not speak, staring at me.

  “Now you have perhaps weariness, a need for sleep?” I asked Albaric.

  He turned to me like a child. “Is that what it is, this wanting to lie down? I have never felt it in—in forever.”

  “And the heartache—is it because, now that your horse departed and your feet touch the earth, you cannot go back to—to forever?”

  “No, it’s. . . .” He hesitated before he spoke on, his tuneful voice very low. “It’s not that. I knew when I left that I could not return. Perhaps I delayed longer than I. . . .” With lowered head, he faced my mother. “Queen Evalin, for what—time—has King Bardaric been ill?”

  “For a month.”

  “Is that a large time?”

  “You mean long? It only seemed so,” said Mother.

  “It is not so very long,” I told Albaric. “There are twelve months in a year. I am seventeen years old. You seem to be about the same.”

  “Yes, I—he—” But whatever our guest from Othergates was trying to say, bewilderment stopped him.

  The concern in my mother’s eyes may well have matched that in my own.

  “Won’t you have a cup of mulled cider?” she offered Albaric. “Something to eat?”

  But he needed sleep worse than food. Taking a torch from a sconce in the wall, I led him downstairs, then along a passageway—the servants who saw us shrieked and fled, confound the
m—to my own chamber, where I guided him to my bed. I knelt to pull the boots off his feet. Never had I seen such boots, of leather so thin and soft it could have been skinned from flowers.

  “Prince Aric, no, please. I’ll do it. . . .” But he was too exhausted; he needed my help. I gave him my bearskin for covering; pulled the curtains of the canopied bed; set aside my own boots, belt, and sword; then laid myself down beside him with my clothes on, for I felt he was not ready to be left alone.

  “Do you mortals customarily sleep two to a bed?” he murmured.

  “Sometimes three or four.” There is not much room in a castle keep, so when I had been a lad, my bookmaster, my weaponmaster, and my manservant had all slept with me, each scratching his lice and fleas—a thought I pushed hastily aside, wishing I could keep such things from the newcomer forever. “Do you know how to sleep, Albaric?”

  He nodded. “We did it sometimes as a diversion, for the sake of the dreams. . . .” His voice faded.

  “Sweet dreams, then.”

  He actually laughed, albeit weakly. “I doubt it,” he murmured but then lapsed into sudden slumber, as if he had been stunned or had fainted.

  I lay wide awake and shivering from the sheer strangeness of it all, not from cold. Mine was a trembling like that which comes after the battle, from the surpassing joy of victory—my father lived!—but also from my own uncanny passions and the nearness of death, its motionless black wings far too close over my head as I had stood atop the tower.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  I DOZED PERHAPS A FEW HOURS around dawn and woke as if to a dream, seeing Albaric in daylight for the first time, gazing upon his face in amazement. How such a being could have come to my home, how his features could be so exquisite yet unmistakably male, how to describe—the seashell bones beneath the eggshell skin, the perfection—and yet breathing, warm, not merely breakable but somehow wounded within—I could scarcely comprehend the wonder of him.

  I got up quietly, bathed from cold water in a bowl, changed my clothes, and ate some of the oat scones and cheese and venison my manservant had brought me. But I did not then leave the bedchamber; I sat by the hearth waiting for Albaric to awaken, for who else would take care of him?