I was not quite certain what to say to this, but after some thought, I managed a commonplace.
“May the Pilgrim enlarge your sight.”
“Sometimes, I think I see far too much.”
Trumpets sounded a sennet from a gallery. Floria withdrew her arm from mine.
“My sister comes. Perhaps you should withdraw.”
I bowed. “As you wish, highness.”
“Try not to get in any brawls,” she advised. “And if you do, do not involve me.”
“Your highness, I shall try with all my heart to obey.”
I fled the palace, very much afraid that I had become the hobby-horse of a fifteen-year-old girl with nothing better to do than to meddle with the lives of her inferiors. I was already persecuted by Orlanda, and I felt that the scrutiny of another powerful being was a great injustice.
* * *
Now there was nothing keeping me in Howel but the few tasks remaining. I called upon the Roundsilvers to say good-bye and to thank them for their kindness, and they wished me joy of my knighthood. I returned to the palace to collect the title to my manor, and to the office of the King-at-Arms to certify my knighthood and to register my coat of arms. Which, in the strange tongue of the heralds, part Loretto, part Osby Lords, part Aekoi, is this:
Azure, a galleon argent a chief fir twigged argent, in chief three pens bendwise sable.
Which is to say a blue shield with a white ship thereon, and a white stripe across the top, with a jagged border resembling in outline the twigs of a fir tree. In the white stripe are three black quills.
Which is a play on words, if you like: Quill-in-fir. Even the herald-pursuivant laughed.
On my final afternoon in Howel, I went to the theater to see The Red Horse, or the History of King Emelin. The vast theater was built for spectacle, with an enormous wall built behind the stage that featured marble columns, balconies, niches for heroic statues, and the apparatus for making actors fly. The ancient statues of gods and heroes that had once filled the niches had long been looted, but they had been replaced by figures in a more modern style, one of which had been dressed to represent King Emelin himself, caught in the act of witnessing his own triumph.
It was a revelation to see the play with the audience of more than a thousand people instead of a hundred or so folk at court, and when Sir Bellicosus and his cronies came out, the laughter seemed to shake the heavens. The clowns had sharpened and enlarged their performance since the premiere in the autumn, and the play was somewhat less of a pageant, for Blackwell had altered a few of the scenes to create more movement. Blackwell himself had recovered from his quinsy, and spoke out in a fine loud voice from amid his warrior’s padding.
“You did not view The Nymph,” said Orlanda.
“I never cared for the play,” I said. The comedy had played the previous afternoon, apparently with great success.
Orlanda was seated beside me, wrapped in dark green gown that shimmered with silver stars. Her red hair was upswept into a complicated knot adorned with emeralds and pearls, and the air about her was fragrant with the scent of hyacinths.
I looked behind and along of her, and no one seemed to have noticed this verdant nymph appearing in their midst, right in the middle of a bright May afternoon. Apparently, she presented herself to me alone.
Somehow, I was not surprised. I had been expecting her any day.
“Have you come to congratulate me on my knighthood?” I asked.
“Foolishly I believed the Queen decided such things,” said Orlanda. “I had thought that the hatred I had carefully nurtured in her breast would prevent her from giving you rewards.”
“Neither of us, then, calculated on a meddling little girl?”
“I will not overlook her again.”
She unfurled her fan of peacock feathers and stirred the warm spring air. The peacock eyes gazed at me, green and blue and indigo.
Laughter rolled up from the audience at the antics of Bellicosus. Her lip curled in disdain. “You have a gift,” said she, “for showing mortals as they really are, scheming and blundering in their vain, useless way to catastrophe.”
“And yet here we are,” said I. “A theater full of catastrophes, all aglow with laughter.” I viewed Bellicosus and his crew, begging the bandits for their lives. “Perhaps it is healthy for us to laugh at ourselves.” I turned to her. “Have you ever laughed at yourself, my lady?”
She did not answer, but continued her inspection of the clowns. “You achieved honors,” she said, “and it was for the one thing you did not boast of. Did you ever expect to be rewarded for modesty?”
“It is a route to fame I had not considered.”
Orlanda looked at me, a shadow darkening the green eyes. “Has war changed you, Quillifer? Has it made you reticent?”
“It has made me reticent about war.”
“Perhaps, then, some mite of wisdom has wormed its way into your brain?”
I shrugged. “That may be. To myself, I seem less wise than before.”
I looked at the stage, at Blackwell marching onstage as the doomed prince Alain, soon to be snuffed by the hero. “Do you remember our conversation outside the foundry in Innismore? I spoke of the old epics, where the air is filled by invisible members of your tribe, all whispering into the ears of men, and laying their schemes with mortals as their pawns. If that is true—if such as you are everywhere—then how can human life have meaning? What means human ambition if it is but the prompting of a god?” I shrugged. “How can Berlauda be a Queen, a true monarch, if you or your like urge her to love and hatred, and the inclinations of her own heart are not her own?”
“You have gained wisdom, then. It is what I have said all along. Human ambition is worse than futile; it is delusion.”
Applause roared up from the stone core of the old theater. I waved a hand. “Yet here we are, futile though we be. Watching our dreams parade themselves before us, on a stage that was dreamed by another people long ago. We are still here, after all this time, dreaming and laughing and beating our hands together in approval of the shades that play before us. Where are your people?”
Her expression was hooded. “We lost interest in your dreams long ago.”
“Our ambitions may be futile, as you say. Our very thoughts may not be our own. We may have no more freedom of action than those actors, who speak aloud poetry written by others, and stand and strut on the stage where they are told.” Orlanda looked down at the stage, her lip curled in something like derision.
“Yet,” I said, “as the actors must believe the lines when they speak them, we have no choice but to act as if we have freedom. Necessity is a cold mistress, but Liberty inspires delightful bed-play.”
“Finely phrased,” said Orlanda, “but finely phrased delusion.”
“What whispers in your ear?” said I. “Is there something greater than you that plays with your heart-strings?”
Orlanda’s eyes remained on the stage, where Prince Alain led his armies off to their fated, doomed encounter, and King Emelin marched on to give an inspiring speech before battle.
“Master Quillifer,” she said, “I propose a game. I shall thwart you, and hurl obstacles in your way, and amuse myself with your delusions and evasions and your antics. And this game shall continue till you die.”
I considered this. “How is this different from the game you have played these last months?”
Her peacock-feather fan fluttered in the air. “It differs in that I play it not out of anger, but for the sake of amusement.” She looked at me, and I saw that very amusement glitter in her eyes. “Come now, Master Quillifer, to defeat mortals is nothing for you. But to defeat me is achievement indeed.”