So she made up a story for him out of the numbers, about a troop of summer knights being defeated by spring lambs throwing horseshoes over a wall built out of sacks of flour. It didn’t make sense either, but at least he laughed, and then looked surprised at the sound out of his own mouth, and was able to work through the page from the beginning.
Even in just a few weeks, Roric was already looking better,happier.They told more account-stories to each other together, one step at a time as he came to each new number in the ledger, and the work of it stopped being a burden to him. He liked to make up rhymes, and sometimes he even sang them out loud—more often after he stopped looking guiltily at the door, afraid of being overheard and caught. And Celia understood, seeing the change in him, that it made hermatterto him. She wasn’t just a doll that he was playing with that he could put down carelessly and never really miss, like she had been to Argent.
That thought still stung, but not terribly, even though Argent had only been gone for so short a time. It was already much worse to worry abouthim,and whether he’d already vanished into the Summer Lands forever, doomed to live all his days without love. “I don’t want to stop caring about Argent,” she said, when Roric, jealous, tried to say she shouldn’t be upset. “It wasn’t all stupid. He did care about me, even if I cared more,” which now she could believe, with the sharp agony fading. “And it wasn’thisfault that Father doesn’t care about you,” she added.
Roric scowled at that, too, but then he spent the next two days bent over the big household ledger, and at the end of it he told her abruptly that they could afford to offer a purse of fifty silver coins for any song-spinner who came out of the Summer Lands and brought them a true story about Argent.
“Grand Duke Torvald offers thirty gold for the best summerling songs, and he usually gets at least ten each year,” Roric said, a little sullenly, as she stared at him. “We’ll hear whatever there is to hear, at least,” and Celia realized that he’d made himselfusefulto Argent, for her sake. She put down her embroidery and got up and went to him and kissed his cheek and hugged his thin shoulders while he flushed and stared at the ground trying not to show how much he liked it.
A few days later, though, she had to start worrying about herself, instead. The king’s reply to Father’s lettercame as quick as a messenger could have ridden to the capital and back. He told Father that he wanted Celia for the prince, which was only to be expected, and that he wanted her sent to the capital so she could be married right away, which wasn’t to be expected at all, when she was only twelve and barely become a woman. Celia was taken aback; it wasn’t a reasonable thing to ask. Even a proxy marriage would have been a little strange. She wasn’t some foreign princess, with her marriage the seal on an important treaty.
“He wants you under his control as soon as possible,” Father said, dismissively, and wrote back to say he couldn’t agree to have her married until she was eighteen, although they were honored by the betrothal.
Celia wasn’t sure she believed that comforting explanation. If that was what the king had been thinking, surely he’d recognize that Father was going to keep her underhiscontrol for as long as he could possibly justify, and there wasn’t any point asking. But she also couldn’t think of any other good reasons why the king would want to get her so young, which only left unpleasant ones. But she couldn’t get Father to put his own brain on the problem. He was still refusing to care about anything, since what he’d cared about the most was gone.
“You could use your magic,” Roric said, but Celia couldn’t see what todowith the magic. She could have smashed open a castle gate or blasted a dozen enemiesinto smoldering ash. She could have called down a hurricane or raised a flood. She could have raised the dead or cured the sick. Selina had done all those things, and when Celia read about them, she felt the magic still churning inside her, eager to answer, and could see just how she’d do it herself.
Or she could have marched into the capital and taken control of the mind of the king and forced him to tell her. But then she might as well simply crown herself the new Witch-Queen, and just accept that the rest of her life would be spent watching her back for assassins and her front for liars and cheats. Celia didn’t want that any more than Father had wanted it, back when he could have taken the throne himself. She’d been perfectly ready to marry Prince Gorthan, with Father and sorcery on her side to make it an equal match, and to work with him to make a happy and well-run kingdom, and a happy and well-run life for both of them inside it. She’d even let herself imagine, before the ominous message had come, that maybe she couldcareabout him, and he about her; she’d thought that she would ask him to, when they met, the way Roric had asked her, and see what he said. Now she was just afraid, and she didn’t even know what she was afraid of.
Roric did hire a passing song-spinner to quietly go to the capital and dig up anything he could about Gorthan, but when the spinner came back, all he could tell them was that Gorthan had a reputation for courtesy andcaution. He’d had a couple of common-born mistresses, pretty girls within a year or two of his own age, who had been very happy in their positions as far as anyone knew, and he’d ended the liaisons and arranged marriages for them with landed knights after they’d each borne him a bastard child. Neither of the children had lived past the age of two, but that was still a sensible thing for a prince to do, to avoid having one woman bearing him many children, and setting her up as a rival to a future queen.
He sounded as good as you could hope for, when you were marrying a throne, and a little uneasily Celia tried to believe that Father was right, and that the king had just thought it was worth a try to get her. Maybe he’d hoped that Father would want to get the match sewn up, and become the father-in-law of the crown prince right away. But she couldn’t quite convince herself.
After the song-spinner left them, no better off for his information, and she was sitting silently, Roric said abruptly, “We need to take over the estates.” When she looked at him in surprise, he said, “Father’s not doing any work anymore. I can see the accounts are getting into a mess. For now everyone’s still doing their work and paying their taxes, because they’re used to him watching, but soon they’ll notice that he isn’t. Then everything will start to fall apart, and the king will find out, and he won’t be afraid of Father anymore. We need to keep his reputation strong, and make sure we still have men and money, if we needthem. That’s all we can do for now, so we should do it. You can always kill them all with sorcery if you have to,” he added.
It was good advice. Celia nodded.
Celia told Unter to bringthings to them if Father didn’t do anything about them for a week, and he started bringing them almost everything. Anything that Father would have done in person before, Roric went out and did himself, taking Unter along, pretending that he was being trained to run the estates and Father was having him observed every step of the way. “Give bad orders once in a while, too,” Celia told him, “and then go back the next day and change it, acting sullen, as if Father’s overridden you.” Roric nodded.
Celia also wrote letters to every high-ranking noblewoman in the kingdom who didn’t have a daughter or niece of her own to resent Gorthan passing over, and humbly told them that her mother had spoken of them as wise and kind, and asked them for their advice to a motherless girl who was being advanced to a station beyond anything she’d expected. She got many replies, full of reams of bad and often contradictory advice—sometimes within the same letter—and to each one sent back effusivethanks and promises to follow the advice to the letter, and the small gift of a fine silk lace triangle embroidered by her own hand, the sort to be kept tucked into the top of a corset and unseen by others.
The Dowager Marchioness of Travinia, who lived at court and according to the song-spinners had a reputation as a poisonous harpy, wrote,Oh, I think you’ll do well enough on your own, little vixen, even if you do marry at sixteen. Save me a good seat at the coronation; I’m an old woman and my sight isn’t what it used to be.
Celia wrote back,My father would be honored to be your escort,to thank her for the warning, slipped subtly into the letter: so the king didn’t mean to wait past sixteen, and the marchioness didn’t approve. Celia didn’t much want to be married at sixteen herself, especially when Gorthan was so much older than her, but all in all she felt comforted. Thatdidmake some sense of the king asking for her at twelve, if he’d done it meaning to seem more reasonable when he demanded her at sixteen, so he could get her at least a year or two sooner than Father might have wanted to hand her over.
She also got a letter from Gorthan himself. It was too formal to tell her much about him, except that hewascautious, but at least there wasn’t anything awful in it, and there wasn’t anything suspiciously wonderful in it, either. He just wrote that he and his father rejoiced with all Prosper that the gift of sorcery had flowered once again, surelythe reward of her father’s courage and service to the kingdom. He thanked her for being willing to trust him with her hand, and hoped she continued in good health and humor until they met, which would be a day of great happiness for him and the whole kingdom.
She did use a little sorcery on the letter, enough to be sure that there wasn’t an outright lie in it. Of course all sorts of awful possibilities could still be lurking beneath those polite and careful words, but at least Gorthan wasn’t more resentful than glad about sorcery appearing in her father’s line, which she’d worried he would be, and he wasn’t wishing for her untimely death. It eased her mind. If nothing else, it really did make too much sense for the king and Gorthan to want her to bear him a child. They almost couldn’t want anything else.
The months slipped by quickly with the work that was now theirs. She turned thirteen in the spring, and a few weeks later, summer rolled back over Prosper like a golden wave. The Green Bridge appeared out of the river mists and the summer games began, and almost at once, song-spinners began to arrive at Castle Todholme to collect purses of silver for one story after another about the Knight of the Woven Blade, questing through the Summer Lands, none of which made Celia feel any better. They were all true, she could feel their truth even without using magic to check, and every single one was about nothing but elaborate heroics. Sir Argent had defeated agiant, three ettins, a pack of trolls; he’d rescued three different summerling ladies from terrible menaces; he’d climbed the Golden Mountain and defeated the serpent guardian to bring a cupful of water from the spring back to save an ailing summer lord who’d been poisoned by a lady that he’d spurned.
“Did Argent stay there?” Celia asked, unhappily, already knowing the answer even before the song-spinner said that he’d stayed only one more night at the summer lord’s castle before traveling on. Summer stories had a rhythm and a pattern to them, and she knew in her belly exactly how that oneshouldhave ended: with the summer lord rising healed and radiant from his bed to catch the hand of the heroic knight who had saved him, and asking him to stay forever as his honored guest. Her curse had broken the story: Argent’s story that should have been.
She tried again to send word to him, but no song-spinner managed to find him. The summer ended and the mists closed around the Green Bridge once more. A whole year gone, since Argent had left, and Celia wept the morning when she heard the autumn walls going up. In the sitting room that day, Roric gave her a blank sheet out of his papers, and she marked out all the weeks until the next summer, and crossed them off one after another as the year rolled past. The accounts and estate business came endlessly, but Celia and Roric told their way through them with more stories, and sometimes now Roric played thelute along. On her fourteenth birthday she received another letter from Prince Gorthan, almost exactly the same as the first, with wishes for her health.
The next summer brought even more of the dreadful, grand stories, so many of them that Roric had to lower the prize money, and soon they didn’t even have to pay any at all. Songs about the legendary Knight of the Woven Blade were sweeping around the kingdom and coming to Castle Todholme without any encouragement at all. Listening to them, full of the ever-greater and ever-wilder heroics Argent kept performing, Celia felt sick to her stomach with tears; she was back on the library balcony, listening to what Father had done to Argent, onlyshehad done it. She had told Argent what he couldn’t have, and left him with only the sword to love, chasing after a hollow glory he didn’t want.
The last of her own resentment was long gone; by now it was only a distant memory of something stupid and childish she’d felt, that had made her do something horrible to her brother, which she regretted desperately. “I have to go,” she said, low, at the end of that summer, watching the autumn wind blowing the rain into streaks like tears across the window of their sitting room. “It’s never going to work, sending a trader to find him. I’ll have to go to the Summer Lands myself. Next summer,” she added. “Before I’m married.”
She expected Roric to tell her not to be stupid. Itwasstupid for her to go to the Summer Lands. She was the daughter of Veris the Fox—an honored enemy, but the summerlings’ worst enemy all the same. And aside from that, they would be fools not to see that a sorceress made Prosper dangerously strong, maybe even strong enough to invadethem,in turn. The summerlings had magic of their own, but their magic was all in beauty and craft—fine delicate tools next to the sledgehammer of sorcery.
And even if the summerlings didn’t do a thing to her, she could easily get lost or hurt all on her own. Traveling alone in the Summer Lands was dangerous even for trained knights and experienced song-spinners, who were welcome guests. She’d never traveled more than a month away from Castle Todholme, and then it had been with Father and a large escort of servants and guards. She didn’t even like hunting or riding or long walks. Chances were that she’d fall into a corpse-flower maw or stumble over an archodile or just start walking around in circles without realizing and die long before she ever found Argent.
But instead Roric was silent, and then he said, “I’ll go with you.” She looked at him surprised. Argent hadn’t earned that from him. Argent reallyhadn’tcared about Roric at all, even to play with him like a doll, or give him the least bit of attention. And she knew that Roric was still resentful; he’d been running the estates for two years by then, with only her to help him, and Father still hadn’tformally named him the heir, or done anything to acknowledge his work at all. But Roric said, “You can’t do it alone. I’ll go with you, and we’ll try.”
They spent the rest ofthe autumn and the winter practicing, going on walks together through the mountains and hills around Todholme. Roric practiced the lute even more, and Celia read many books about the Summer Lands—accounts from song-spinners who’d been and come back again—and made a list of what was important to take and how to pack it, so the two of them could carry it all by themselves without the help of servants. But they didn’t get the chance. In the spring, right after Celia turned fifteen, another letter came, but this wasn’t from Gorthan. The king had sent Father a royal command to bring her to the Green Bridge, to be married in the old royal palace that stood near the border of the Summer Lands, at the great festival that would open the summer tourneys.
There wasn’t any good way to refuse. It was a formal command, with the wordswithout fail,and also a little too reasonable. King Morthimer had written that it was past time for Prince Gorthan to be married, and everyone in the kingdom would agree with that. He was nine-and-twenty, and he still didn’t have even a bastard child living.And more people than not would even agree with the king that fifteen was old enough for her to be married, since she wouldn’t bear her first child before sixteen.
