Narim urged Kells and me toward the horses. “I don’t think he can answer you. We’ll take—”
I lurched forward out of Kells’s hands and lunged for the worried face, mustering all the words I could find and willing them to my useless tongue, trying to make them loud enough that someone could hear. “Roelan ... understands. Elhim always do ... everything ... I ask. I count ... on it.”
Hands dragged me off of him.
“Don’t worry, Davyn. We’ll take good care of him.”
While Kells and his cohorts draped me on a horse, I caught a glimpse of a puzzled Davyn standing alone in the stableyard. I squinted to see if he held a crumpled paper in his hand, but he swam out of sight too quickly. But my hands were empty when they tied them around the horse’s neck so I wouldn’t fall off, and with only such precarious security did I set out on the journey to the lake of fire.
DONAL
Chapter 32
As I was growing up, I never thought it strange that my best friend was a legend. An heir to a throne is never sure of his friends—a lesson learned when I was five and a playmate stabbed me with a poisoned dagger. It was in the three weeks I was confined to bed recovering, alone because all my playmates were banished or executed, that I was introduced to my father’s cousin—my cousin—Aidan MacAllister.
My nurse first spoke of him as I continued to make her life miserable with my incessant complaining: my stomach hurt, my head hurt, my bandages itched, I was bored, I hated broth, I wanted to go riding, why wouldn’t anyone come to play with me, and why couldn’t I do whatever I wanted. “It’s the gods’ own wrath on my poor head that they took Aidan MacAllister from the world,” she said, after threatening to tie me to the bed if I would not be still, as my father’s physicians had commanded. “He’s the only one ever made you civil. Had you singing like a nightingale, he did, on a day when you had me in worse misery even than this.”
Of course I demanded to hear the story, especially when she plopped her hand over her mouth and cursed herself for mentioning a name my father the king misliked hearing. “Well, His Majesty never forbid the gifts to be here,” she said. “I’ve even seen him stare at ’em himself as if maybe the answer to the mystery was in ’em. So he couldn’t mind too much me saying who it was gave’em to you.”
Such words did nothing to cool my new fever. I was very persistent.
So she told me of my anointing day, and from a high shelf she pulled down a bell, a flute, a drum, and a painted music box. “He sent you these in the years before he disappeared.” I was fascinated and made her tell me more while I watched the tiny mechanical soldiers march around in a circle as the music box played its tune. So I learned of Aidan MacAllister, beloved of the gods, a musician who could transform the hearts of men, my father’s cousin who had vanished from the earth when he was but one and twenty.
To hear one has a relative on such terms with gods is a profound experience for a five-year-old, and I would not rest until I learned everything that any servant, groom, chamberlain, or tutor could tell me. Everyone older than ten had a story about him. For half a year, I pestered them ... until the day I asked my father if he knew where his cousin had gone. “You were his only family and his king. Didn’t he tell you?”
I’d never seen my father so angry—and he was not a soft-tempered man. His fury wasn’t so much directed at me as at the courtiers and servants who were listening. “It is no matter where he’s gone. He was nothing like these foolish stories that make him out a magician or a god. I’ll not have him spoken of. He’s gone and forgotten, and that’s the end of it.”
Well, that was not the end of it for me. I would admit that perhaps the legend was not wholly accurate, because my father said so. My father was the king, and I believed he was never wrong. But I was still obsessed with Aidan. On that same afternoon, as I groused and mumbled about my studies, old Jaston, my tutor who had also been my father’s tutor and so had met the legendary Aidan, brought me a small, brass-bound box along with my lesson books. “Here’s something as may interest you, Prince Donal. Yours by right, but perhaps best kept private, as you’ll see.”
In the box were some thirty letters, seals unbroken, all addressed to me. Jaston helped me sort them by the dates marked on them and helped me read the first one, as I was not a precocious reader.
To my boisterous young cousin,
I’ve had a mind to write you since our harmonious meeting a few weeks ago. It was such a pleasure and delight to make your acquaintance. I hope you’ve not tormented your good nanny in like fashion again, but rather sung the chorus we made together. The counterpoint was quite nicely done, I think, and tells me that you are indeed as much my family as your father’s.
I’ve traveled quite a long distance since we met, and someday you may enjoy visiting this land beyond your realm where men wear trousers that look like skirts, and women wear gold rings poked right through their ears. It is called Maldova and is set high in the most gloriously beautiful mountains. ...
Those letters became my most precious possessions, read over and over again through the years until the paper was as soft as cloth. They were filled with adventure and wit, and an education about people and places and all manner of things a man could learn from them. I knew Aidan MacAllister far better than I knew anyone, for my father had little time for me, and no one else dared speak so freely to the crown prince of Elyria. Some of the letters had drawings or sketches on them, and almost all of them had snippets of musical notation attached. Aidan said he composed them especially for me.
Though I asked him repeatedly for one, my father refused to supply me a music master. But when I was nine I became friends with a squire who could play the lute and knew how to read the markings of music. I swore him to secrecy, and he spent a whole night playing my cousin’s melodies. I had never heard anything so wonderful in my life. Even in my friend’s awkward playing, I felt as if each phrase were plucked on strings right inside of me. It made me think my cousin knew me as well as I knew him, and I believed that if he walked into a crowded room, I would recognize him instantly, and he would recognize me.
I devised all manner of explanations as to where Aidan MacAllister had gone and what he was doing. Mostly they were things holy and mysterious and fine. Sometimes I thought he was playing a joke on everyone, and sometimes I wondered if he was just tired and had decided to rest for a while. Never, ever, did I believe he was dead. Too much of life was crowding out of his thirty letters.
When I was thirteen I came of age, and reading and writing and mysteries gave way to more serious matters. I had very little time to think about Aidan MacAllister, for I rode as my father’s squire, apprenticing at warcraft and statecraft until at seventeen I was given a command of my own. I was good at it, just as my father was. I knew it, and my father said it—as directly as he ever said anything complimentary. He had been king at eighteen, and his father at twenty, so I had to be ready.
Only once did I ever hear my father speak of his cousin. It was the night he came to my tent in the training grounds south of Vallior to order me and my troops to the Gondari border. My musician friend, now my adjutant, was playing one of Aidan’s tunes as my father walked in.
“Where did you learn that?” my father demanded.
“I’ve heard it was composed by a famous musician from long ago, sire,” said my diplomatic friend, keeping his head bowed and his knee bent.