Celia was twelve years oldon the day she cursed her brother. She had two brothers, but she didn’t count Roric, the middle child, because no one did. He was a thin sour weasel who glared at her whenever he saw her, and almost not a real son of the house. His mother—there had been three wives in a row, one to get each child—had just been a temporary mistress, common-born; Father hadn’t meant to marry her at all. Everyone knew that her son didn’t really matter.
But Celia’s oldest brother, Argent, whose mother had been the daughter of an earl, mattered in every way there was. He was Father’s heir and the best knight in the world, so everyone said. Argent was very handsome, too, with black hair that curled and blue-grey eyes, and he’d played with Celia ever since she’d been born. He’d been trained at home, instead of being sent to the king’s circle, and she’d run after him as soon as she could run.
The summer war had been over since before Celia had been born—Father had won it for Prosper, which was how he had become Grand Duke Veris—and now onlythe summer games took place instead, but Argent trained just as hard as if his life depended on it. Each day Celia hurried through her work so she could go sit in the hall that faced the training yard, even though it was cold in winter and hot in summer, and watch him at his endless sword and javelin drills and riding exercises. Sometimes he would toss her shrieking in delight up into the air, and run around the yard carrying her on his back, and he dressed her up and braided her hair like a doll, and when she was older, he taught her how to dance and ride and shoot a bow. She never got very good with the bow, but he was patient, and even when all her arrows ended up scattered flat over the ground, at least ten feet away from the target, he only laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Celie; if anyone ever tries to hurt you, I’ll be there to stop them.” And she said, “Do you promise?” and he said, “On my honor, my lady,” and bowed to her deeply, just like a knight out of a summer story.
When Argent turned nineteen, Father armed him in fine steel and let him go to the summer games, and almost at once every song-spinner who came to Castle Todholme—and many of them came, because they all hoped to get a bit of story from Father, or at least to be able to say, “Grand Duke Veris, who lately hosted me at Todholme,” the next time they told one of the stories about the end of the summer war—began to say that he was the best knight in the world. He had won three challenges against summerknights on his first day, and they’d started quarreling amongst themselves for the right to face him.
Celia would rather have had him back home, but it was a consolation to have such stories about him. And they pleased her father, who was very hard to please. She could only please him herself with courtesy, if guests came and she hosted for him like a great lady, so their cups were always filled and the conversation never flagged, and they told her father that she would grace the tables of a king. Then when they left he would tell her, “You behaved well,” and give her some money to buy a new dress, and she would use half the money for the dress, and the rest to buy a book full of summer stories. But her father was even more pleased when people told him that Argent was the best knight in the world.
Summer in Prosper lasted almost five months, longer than in the rest of the mortal world, because they shared a border with the Summer Lands. They could grow an extra crop each year, and make wine and silk and sugar, so it had made them much richer than all their other neighbors. But that year Celia grudged every minute of sun and summer rains, and flicked away every gleambug that she saw, just in case the superstition about them getting annoyed and ending summer early might be true. She was so happy the day she woke up with the wind blowing too-sharp through her bed hangings and heard the servants putting up the autumn walls outside.
But Argent didn’t come home right away. After two weeks, a song-spinner brought them the news that he’d been an honored guest at the closing feast, and Summer Prince Elithyon had given him a magnificent gift: “ ‘For the champion Sir Argent, a blade to match his virtues,’ ” the spinner said grandly, quoting the prince, “ ‘silver his name, gold his grace, and steel his courage,’ ” and said that it had been woven of all three metals together by a great summerling spell-smith.
It was two more weeks after that song-spinner had been and gone, with a fat purse and a firsthand account of one of Father’s battles to reward him for rushing to bring them the news, before Argent finally came home. The weather had truly turned; when autumn did come to Prosper, it came with a vengeance. Celia had moved to her rooms in the winter towers, and that night she was kneeling at the windowsill with her candle already blown out so her nurse wouldn’t lecture her about staying up again. She saw him coming along the road in the moonlight, and she knew it was him by his riding, even though he was alone when he should have had an escort of her father’s men, and he went to the small gate by the stables to be let in.
She didn’t even stop to put on slippers or a gown over her shift; she dashed down the stairs to the mezzanine landing, and saw him standing below in the hall. She was going to call down to him, but then she didn’t, hesitating. He looked different and somehow strange. He’d grown,and was wearing new armor, and his face was very hard and beautiful and still. She heard old Unter tell him that Father was in the library, so instead she crept along the mezzanine, shadowing them as they walked to the next hall and peeking over at Argent some more all the way, hoping he would stop seeming strange to her.
But in the library, as Father rose to greet him—he was even smiling a little, more emotion than he almost ever let himself show—Argent waited by the door, holding it open until Unter, disappointed, went back out instead of staying with them for the welcoming cup. Then Argent went and stood before Father, and he didn’t take the cup when Father held it out.
Father stood holding it another moment, and then the same hard stillness came into his face, too. It was familiar there, though. He put the cup down. “Well?” he said.
Argent said, “I’m not staying.” He paused a moment and then said, “Do you remember when you took me to the town court, when I was a boy?” Father didn’t answer, but peering down at his face through the narrow bars of the mezzanine railing, Celia could tell that he knew exactly what Argent was talking about. Argent didn’t wait for him to say anything. “You almost never went there at all. That was work for your magistrates to do, not you yourself. But that day we went, and you judged the first case yourself. They’d—taken two men together.”
Drawing away a little from the railing, Celia huddledherself in small and close, arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She knew what Argent was talking about, and she also knew she didn’t want to hear any more of what he was going to say. She wanted to leave, and she couldn’t bear to leave.
“One of them was the son of one of your men at arms. The other one…I think he was a merchant’s son. I remember them begging you for mercy. You didn’t give it. You ordered them caned on the spot, right there in the court. I remember every blow, the screaming. And afterwards, you stripped them of their names, to spare their families the shame of them. And you ordered them taken to the border of your lands and thrown out, never to return, on pain of death.” Argent said it all so calmly, so steadily, like giving a patrol report, one dull thing after another, but Celia wept for him, her mouth pressed tight to keep the sound in, tears leaking down her face and falling hot on her shift. Her belly was aching.
“I was only twelve,” Argent went on. “I barely evenknew,yet. I didn’t understand what you were trying to do. All I understood was that there was something wrong with me, the same thing that was wrong with them, and you were showing me what it meant. What you had to do about it. And I didn’t see anything I could do to stop being wrong, because I hadn’t done anything to start. So afterwards, I was only waiting for you to come and take me, to do the same.”
Father flinched. The small jerk of movement was loud as bells. Father never moved except when he meant to; he never fidgeted or twitched or stirred except to say something, even just with a raised brow or a tilt of his head, and then he always meant to say it. But he hadn’t meant to flinch.
“I was soterrified,” Argent was saying, with an odd sound of wonder in his voice, as if he couldn’t believe the scale of his own fear even now. “Nothing has ever frightened me since. Everyone calls me brave, but it’s only that nothing else comes close enough to that fear. I lived with it for three days and three nights,waiting,until I couldn’t bear it any longer. And then I went into the gardens and I took nightshade, which Father Mullin had told us never to eat, because it was poison, and I ate a handful of it. I didn’t want to die, I was afraid of dying, but I thought it would be better to be dead. Do you remember? I was very ill after.”
Yes,Celia wanted to whisper.Yes, I remember.It was a vague, half-forgotten terror in her mind: the time when Argent had almost died. She’d been five years old, and she’d already loved him more than anyone else in the world. She remembered the hushed voices and the priest and the physician coming and going and talking, and her father simply vanishing out of the world, into Argent’s room, for three days and nights, until they had been told that Argent would live.
“When I woke, you were there,” Argent said. “And I thought you’d come to take me.” Father flinched again. “I remember begging you:please, don’t.I swore I wouldn’t ever. I couldn’t tell youwhatI wouldn’t do, because I didn’t really know. But I would have said anything, promised anything. And then,” his voice dropped almost to a whisper, so low that Celia could barely hear it, and only because there wasn’t another sound; if Father breathed, she couldn’t tell, “you kissed my brow. You told me to hush. You said that everything would be well, and I only needed to rest and get my strength back. It felt like—a pardon. A miracle. I was—grateful.”
He was silent after, for a long time, and Father didn’t speak either. He didn’t say a word at all. “I do understand, now, what you meant to do,” Argent said finally. “You didn’t mean to frighten me to death. You only meant to teach me, so I’d never forget, what I wasn’t allowed to have. Towant.And it worked well. I did understand, afterwards, that the only thing I could want was the sword. That if I wanted anything else…” He didn’t finish. He paused a moment, and then he went on, a little unsteadily, “So from this day, I will never again use your name, to spare you my shame. And I return to you the sword you let me carry, so long as I was fit to be your son.”
He had two swords on his belt, one on either side, which Celia had half noticed. He took one off, the sword Father had given him when he’d ridden away to war, in itssheath of leather and silver, and he laid it on the table. The other one he wore had a narrow hilt made all of metal, three bands that gleamed in different colors of gold and steel and silver, woven together like a braid. “And I will go now, away beyond the border of your lands, and never return again. Farewell, Your Grace.”
He turned and walked out of the library, and left the door open behind him. Father still didn’t say anything. He didn’t tell Argent to stop or to wait, and didn’t tell him he was sorry. He only stood behind the table, looking down at the sword, and his face was as blank as an unwritten page.
But Celia crept along the mezzanine back to the hall, and then as fast as she could, she ran down the stair and through the inner court, bare feet slapping on the stones and the wind biting through her shift. She just made it out into the stable yard as Argent reached his horse, tied up and waiting, and she called out desperately, “Argent!”
He stopped. His hands were on his saddle, and for a moment she almost thought he would just finish mounting and go, that he wouldn’t even answer. Then he did turn to look at her, slowly. But his face was still so hard and strange, and she halted in the middle of the yard halfway to him, forlorn. He stared at her almost as if he didn’t know her. “Celia,” he said slowly, and it was—polite;he might as well have saidLady Celiainstead, the way the guests and the servants did.
She couldn’t say anything back to that. She only stoodand stared at him dumbly, and the prickling tears started out of her eyes and came down her face. But he moved a little when he saw them, a small jerking that made him look more like himself. “Celie,” he said again, a little wavering, and then he was Argent again, not just a stranger with his face.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come home,” she said, half pleading, half accusatory. “I’ve been waiting all summer.”
He said slowly, “I’m sorry,” but she knew at once, with a terrible hollowness like someone had scooped out a space under her ribs, that it was just more politeness. He didn’t mean it truly.
“No, you’re not,” she said, barely above a whisper, her throat tight. “It doesn’t really matter to you.Idon’t. If I mattered, you couldn’t go away forever, without even saying anything.” It was horrible to know that she didn’t matter to him, but she saw it too clearly not to know. He hadn’t given her a single thought. He’d only come to take revenge on Father and go away again. The only reason she even knew he’d come at all was becauseshe’dbeen up. Waiting. She asked helplessly, even knowing it was stupid and would only make it worse, “Whydon’t I matter?”
“Youdo,” he said, and she wanted to believe him, but then he said, “Celie, I can’t stay, it’s his castle—” and she lost her temper and ran at him and hit him with both her fists, high on his chest.
“Shut up!” she said. “Shut up, you liar.” He caught her wrists, holding her hands away from him so she wouldn’t bruise them on his armor, but she glared up at him past them. “Do you think I’m stupid? What if I say I want to go too? What if I ask you to take me away with you, so I don’t have to marry that fat old duke?” He stared back, caught without an answer. “I’mnotstupid. Now that you’ve cast off your name, you don’t owe anything to Father, to anyone. You’re going to take your magic sword and go have adventures, and all the boys you like, and you’re casting me off, too, because I’d only get in your way,” she said, savagely, and was glad to see Argent flinch, the same way that Father had flinched. She was burning with anger, more because he’d tried to lie to her than anything else. It was bad enough that hewascasting her off; it was bad enough that he didn’t care. He didn’t need to tell her insultingly stupid lies on top of it.
