Abruptly he crouched down and somersaulted away, out the door and gone.
The elves continued jeering and laughing at his japes for another hour, just as if he hadn’t left.
After the queen’s orgies that night, Agnes lay on her pallet thinking as hard as ever she had thought before. Frederic had been speaking directly to her — she was sure of it. Was it rolling into a ball that had rendered Frederic invisible to the elves? Or was it simply his bold, spit-in-your-face self-confidence?
Agnes felt anything but bold. But the challenge had been put to her. She had to follow Frederic’s example, curl into a ball, and roll outside. Either she would survive or the guards would kill her. It was as clean and simple as that.
So she rolled herself into a ball and tumbled off her pallet and out of the tent. The demon-hounds crouching by the salient did not even see her, though their eyes darted everywhere, their nostrils flared, and their ears were pricked for sounds far subtler than those she made.
Agnes somersaulted out into the moonlight.
Out on the grassy sward and down the bank she rolled, out of sight of the guards. When she came to a halt, she was not surprised to see Frederic tumbling to meet her.
“It certainly took you long enough,” he said.
“Unlike you,” Agnes replied tartly, “I can’t simply do and say whatever I want, whenever I wish.”
“And whose fault is that? The elves have no concept of reality save what they see reflected through us. I’ve been trying to explain that to you since forever.”
“Do you know what happened to Richard? The queen —”
“What befell Richard would not have happened if he hadn’t allowed it.”
“She keeps him in a jewel around her neck!”
“He was the oldest. He had the choice of staying and protecting us as best he could, or a safe life of cosseted slavery, and he chose wrong. It was despicable of Melisaundre to offer such a choice to someone so weak, of course.”
“You understand everyone so well,” Agnes said bitterly.
“I think we have argued enough for one night,” said Frederic. “Be sure to somersault your way back to your pallet. It confuses the elves when we rotate or spin, and somersaults short-circuit their brains entirely. I suspect that, like paper dolls, they’re not completely suited to life in three dimensions.”
He tumbled away.
Agnes stood motionless for a long time. The tents of the armies of Elfland stretched away to the horizon as numerous as blades of grass in a meadow, and the queen’s tent sat at the very center of the camp. A lunar moth fluttered raggedly past, and Agnes reflected that they two — she and it — were equally free and purposeless. Yet the lunar did have a purpose: to procreate, to lay clutches of tiny eggs on the leaves of trees. She had no such destiny; in its place she was forced to watch the futile carnival of Melisaundre’s endless couplings.
Now that Frederic had given her the key to freedom, she didn’t know what to do with it. Where would she go? During waking hours, she could find the other children, for they were held close to the elf-queen’s court, in case her whim required them. But when the revelries wound down into exhaustion, they were packed away to the fringes of the camp, to tents pitched among the ogres, dwarves, and other enslaved races.
She would not find the children tonight. And tomorrow, after the marching was done, their tents would be pitched elsewhere.
Nor could she escape into the outside world. There was nothing there but wilderness and ruins. Perhaps there were still people huddling fearfully in caves, as she once had. But what point was there in resuming that wretched and untenable existence?
Frederic, with his unique way of thinking, might be free, but Agnes was not. All the world was her prison.
Still, she had learned something tonight, and who could say it would not turn out to be useful? Clutching the knowledge tight to herself, Agnes tumbled back to her humble pallet at the foot of Queen Melisaundre’s luxurious bed.
Months passed, possibly years. Agnes had no way of measuring time: marks on paper, knots in her lacings, any accounting whatsoever eased away while she slept, leaving no trace.
At last there came a day when the armies did not march. The camp swarmed with activity. Elves flew into the nearest abandoned city and plundered it of building materials. Draft-giants hauled wagonloads of stone and enormous timbers. An arena arose in what had been a meadow the night before. Bleachers surrounded the oval of grass. Tall white walls soared upward and were decorated with clusters of the severed heads of ghastly inhuman creatures that Agnes had never seen alive.
Queen Melisaundre came silently out of her tent and gazed upon the arena. Then she turned to Agnes. “So,” she said. “The day has arrived at last.”
Agnes did not ask, but the queen answered her anyway: “You idiot child! The day we contend in battle and one of us kills the other, of course. Whatever happens, it will be a relief to be free at last of your constant witless questioning.”
Agnes knew she needed to control her response. Anger the queen would understand, and know instinctively her most effective response. Fear and defiance as well. But disregard? How could anybody dare ignore so dangerously mercurial a monarch? Agnes yawned and walked off, leaving Melisaundre speaking sharply to empty air.
She found Frederic in a brocade tent the color of dried blood, with jacquard dragons in its weave. Inside was a library whose stacks went on forever, dwindling into dusk. Bespectacled hobgoblins clambered up and down ladders, fetching and returning leather-bound manuscripts. Trolls stood by like bookstands, holding out dictionaries and volumes of encyclopediae.
Frederic sat at a small table, reading.
“What’s this about me killing the queen?” Agnes asked. Somehow, she did not doubt it could be done.
Frederic shut his book. “It’s time. I can read these grimoires without the queen’s scholars now. So we no longer need her.”
“You mean we could have been free of her before this and you did nothing?” Agnes was accustomed to holding back her emotions, but now she found herself quivering and white with rage.
“Yes, of course, long ago. You’d have noticed this yourself, if you hadn’t been mooning over Richard.”
Agnes slapped him as hard as she could.
One side of Frederic’s face began slowly turning red. His voice remained mild, nevertheless. “I deserved that, I suppose. However, when we are married, you must not hit me again. It’s not conducive to marital harmony.”
“Married!?”
“Married.” Frederic stood. He was taller than Agnes, which had never been the case before, and when he took off his glasses, as he did now, he was not entirely unhandsome. He was, Agnes realized with a shock, an adult, a man. “This has nothing to do with your personal feelings. Or mine, really. Agnes, you are the only human capable of assuming the elf-queen’s role. But you have, as yet, no idea of how to wield power, and you know it. I, on the other hand, do; so we must be wed.”
“It would be a loveless marriage.”
“That will change,” said Frederic, “if we want it to. We need each other. Our strengths are complementary; the weaknesses of one can be negated by the other.” His face was as pale and expressionless as the moon. “As a basis for marriage, need is stronger than love.”
Agnes thought back to all she had learned from the elf-queen’s advisors and political philosophers and realized that it was true: Need was a very strong bond indeed. Those same sources, however, had also taught that once needs were met, such bonds would dissolve like fairy dew.