The Hero stands panting, gasping for water, no longer sure of his status. His sword feels right in his hand. The Monster is dead. Why is no one cheering and bringing him a drink?
At his feet, a girl sits in the dust of the hillside, cradling a ragged bundle of red fur in her lap. She is crooning to it, and stroking its bloody pelt.
IN THE END, he decides to return to Asteria.
The King of Illyria is dead, slain on a dusty hillside by a mysterious stranger while out hunting for his missing daughter, to bring her back to her duty. The Princess will become Queen of the land, now—its first female ruler from this line of invaders. She is assured the throne by virtue of the support of the Shifters, whose rights she has vowed to sustain at the price of their sworn loyalty, and a tribute of seventy-seven jars of pumpkin jam each year.
And she will be marrying an Outlander, a clever red-haired man with a beautiful voice, a nice line in verse, and a pronounced limp from a healing wound. Their time together in the storeroom had been short, but intensely romantic. The last of the Princess’s antipathy for Shifters had vanished away, and Reynard had realized two feet, when they were so well formed, were just as good as four.
They asked him to stay, of course. He’d make a wonderful ornament to their court, and a godfather to their children. He could help train the new queen in fighting, and later her children, as well.
But he is suddenly homesick for a place he never thought was home. He’d like to swim in the Asteria River again, and to fish in it, too. He’d like to sit in the orchards of Asteria, and pick apples from their trees. He’d like to taste the fine pastries of the Asterian court, and the sweet red wine.
He’d like to see the Elector again.
He takes two of the three hundred dromos from his purse, plus his winnings from last night’s game of something enough like euchre for him to have been successful with the younger set, and a gold hairpin from the grateful princess, and goes off to the Bazaar to see if he can find the Elector a really nice ruby ring.
There will be a Bazaar. There always is.
THE HIGH KING DREAMING
DANIEL ABRAHAM
THE HIGH KING is not dead but dreaming, and his dreams are of his death.
The sun is bright in the blue expanse of sky, the meadow more beautiful than it had ever been in life because he sees it from above. The banners of the kingdoms he unified shift in the gentle breeze: Stonewell, Harnell, Redwater, Leftbridge, Holt. The kings who bent their knees before him do so again, and again with tears in their eyes. The Silver Throne is there, but empty. The scepter and whip lie crossed on its seat. His daughter, once the princess and now the queen, sits at its foot, her body wrapped in mourning grey. The pyre on which his body rests has no fuel beneath it. No acrid stench of pitch competes with the wildflowers’ perfume. His beard is white, bright in the sun, and as full as frost. His shoulders are thick, as are his arms and his thighs. His eyes are closed, but his lips hold the memory of a smile. The blade Justice rests on his chest, weighing him down in death as it had in life. His cold fingers hold it easily. He is like a statue of himself, and the legend still unwritten below him should be Grace and Power.
He does not recall what brought him low, nor does it matter. He rose in an age of war when all nations stood against each other, and he forged peace. The Eighteen Peaks, snowcapped and bright in the spring sun, have not looked down on bloodshed in a decade. The keeps at Narrowford and Cassin store grain now. Any child may walk the Bloody Bridge at Hawthor and return across it at nightfall. Some lands he took at the point of a sword, some with a wise word, some by sharing grief with enemies who had expected their pain to draw forth only laughter, but with Justice in his hand and God in his heart, he remade the world into a better place than he had found it.
All the events of adventures of his life have strung together like individual steps in a long march that they might bring him here. But that march is not done.
In his dream, he sees the court’s cunning man, withered by years and buoyed up by an endless and sometimes vicious humor. He is wearing a robe of gold, as one might at a baby’s naming ceremony, and so he stands out among the mourners like a candle in darkness.
“Do not weep!” he cries, waving a staff wrapped with sage at the crowd. “Do you wail and beat your breasts when your father naps? Then do not weep! Stand tall and quiet! Be quiet, or take yourselves to the yard and play your games there. There is no call for sorrow here!”
King Abend of Holt rises, his hand on the hilt of his sword. “The High King lies dead, and you say there is no call to weep? What madness has taken you, old man?”
“The madness of knowing too much,” the cunning man says. “The High King is not dead, but dreaming. He waits now in places beyond our sight, but he is not gone. All of history remains before us, and we have lost him now only because he must rest. When he is needed, the High King shall rise and Justice shall again protect the land.”
His daughter looks up, and the devastation on her face falters. There is something like hope in her eyes. She looks to her father’s body, sobs again, and the cunning man’s staff raps her smartly on the shoulder. Smartly, but not hard.
“Would you wake him already?” he asks, and his eyes are gentle. The girl who was once the princess and is now the queen smiles as she has not in days. Perhaps that has been the cunning man’s aim all along. She holds out her hand, and the cunning man kneels. She stands, her mourning robes made glorious by the sun and the sky, by her beauty and her gravity. She climbs to the Silver Throne, lifts scepter and whip in her hands, and takes the throne for the first time.
One by one, they come before her. They bend their knees. They swear again the oaths they once swore to him. And to each of them, she says “When he is needed, he shall rise.” For some it is a comfort. For some it is a threat.
The High King dreams, and his dreams move on. Time is a different thing for him now, and he moves through it to places where the threads of fancy and prophecy are indistinguishable. He is aware of the meadow under a blanket of snow, and then he is not. He is aware of the sepulcher around him, dark and silent. Of his body, as cold and heavy as stone, and as immune to corruption. And then he is aware of nothing, not even of being unaware.
The war boils around him suddenly. Men are dying in the fields where the crops should grow. He sees the obscene, dancing light from the fires that consume Harraw and Gant. The rich land outside the Keep of Stormcoast is barren, its woods chopped down for fires, its grain eaten by the besieging army. From the battlements of the keep, the banner of Leftbridge flies defiant. From the besieging forces, Holt. His bannermen stand one against the other, and the land is churned into a lifeless muck.
His daughter sits the Silver Throne, looking half a child to him in the unkind morning light. Her skin is ashen, her eyes hold a weariness that speaks of her fright and her uncertainty. It is also night, and she is also with the cunning man, sitting on a low stool in his private study among the great webwork of his experiments. The High King wills his eyes to open, the dream to break. Even as he sees her rise from the throne, he tries to grip the pommel of Justice, as if the sword would pull him back to the world. He dreams that his fingers move and take their grip.
“Stop,” his daughter says, and he imagines that she means him. Another voice answers her. The captain of his guard. Of hers.
“Majesty?”
“Bring her to me instead.”