A Time of Changes

22

I was conducted to a pretty chamber and told that it was to be mine, and two servant-girls came to me, plucking off my sweaty seaman’s garb; they led me, giggling all the while, to a huge tiled tub, and bathed and perfumed me, and cropped my hair and beard somewhat, and let me pinch and tumble them a bit. They brought me clothes of fine fabric, of a sort I had not worn since my days as royalty, all sheer and white and flowing and cool. And they offered me jewelry, a triple ring set with — I later learned — a sliver of the Stone Chapel’s floor, and also a gleaming pendant, a tree-crystal from the land of Threish, on a leather thong. At length, after several hours of polishing, I was deemed fit to present to the High Justice. Segvord received me in the room he called his study, which actually was a great hall worthy of a septarch’s palace, in which he sat enthroned even as a ruler would. I recall feeling some annoyance at his pretensions, for not only was he not royal, but he was of the lower aristocracy of Manneran, who had been of no stature whatever until his appointment to high office had put him on the road to fame and wealth.

I asked at once after my bondsister Halum.

“She fares well,” he said, “though her soul was darkened by the tidings of your supposed death.”

“Where is she now?”

“On holiday, in the Sumar Gulf, on an island where we have another home.”

I felt a chill. “Has she married?”

“To the regret of all who love her, she has not.”

“Is there anyone, though?”

“No,” Segvord said. “She seems to prefer chastity. Of course, she is very young. When she returns, Kinnall, perhaps you could speak to her, pointing out that she might think now about making a match, for now she might have some fair lord, while in a few years’ time there will be new maidens ahead of her in line.”

“How soon will she be back from this island?”

“At any moment,” said the High Justice. “How amazed she will be to find you here!”

I asked him concerning my death. He replied that word had come, two years earlier, that I was mad and had wandered, helpless and deluded, into Glin. Segvord smiled as though to tell me that he knew right well why I had left Salla, and that there had been nothing of insanity about my motives. “Then,” he said, “there were reports that the Lord Stirron had sent agents into Glin after you, so that you could be brought back for treatment. Halum feared greatly for your safety at that time. And lastly, this summer past, one of your brother’s ministers gave it out that you had gone roaming in the Glinish Huishtors in the pit of winter, and had been lost in the snows, in a blizzard no man could have survived.”

“But of course the Lord Kinnall’s body was not recovered in the warm months of the year gone by, and was left to wither in the Huishtors, instead of being brought back to Salla for a proper burial.”

“There was no news of finding the body, no.”

“Then obviously,” I said, “the Lord Kinnall’s body awakened in the springtime, and trekked about on a ghostly parade, and went its way southward, and now at last has presented itself on the doorstep of the High Justice of the Port of Manneran.”

Segvord laughed. “A healthy ghost!”

“A weary one, as well.”

“What befell you in Glin?”

“A cold time in more ways than one.” I told him of my snubbing at the hands of my mother’s kin, of my stay in the mountains, and all the rest. When he had heard that, he wished to know what my plans were in Manneran; to this I replied that I had no plans other than to find some honorable enterprise, and succeed in it, and marry, and settle down, for Salla was closed to me and Glin held no temptations. Segvord nodded gravely. There was, he said, a clerkship open at this very moment in his office. The job carried little pay and less prestige, and it was absurd to ask a prince of Salla’s royal line to accept it, but still it was clean work, with a fine chance of advancement, and it might serve to give me a foothold while I acclimated myself to the Mannerangi way of life. Since I had had some such opportunity in mind all along, I told him at once that I would gladly enter his employ, with no heed to my royal blood, since all that was behind me now, done with, and imaginary besides. “What one makes of himself here,” I said soberly, “will depend wholly on his merits, not on the circumstances of rank and influence.” Which was, of course, pure piffle: instead of trading on my high birth, I would instead here make capital out of being bondbrother to the High Justice of the Port’s daughter, a connection that had come to me because of my high birth alone, and where was the effect of merit in any of that?