Will Power

SCENE IX The White City

An hour had passed, an hour in which I talked a skeptical Renthrette through the details of my ghastly encounter bit by bit, over and over, as I worked to convince her that this wasn’t some bizarre prank. As the incident faded I expected to rediscover my sanity and find some ingenious way to dismiss it, but I didn’t. The visitation had happened and it had been a conscious force, not the product of some hallucinatory mushroom accidentally included in dinner: a dubious claim which was impossible to substantiate, of course, but one I was sure of nonetheless.

Renthrette was equally certain that this was a none-too-clever ruse on my part to justify fleeing for Stavis as the apparition had instructed. I told her that even if I did want to leave this bloody place-which, obviously, I did-we still had no idea how we would actually do that, so conjuring this spectral advisor just to change her mind made no sense. Go back to Stavis? Fine. How exactly? Which direction was it in? Did I have to summon a storm and a black carriage like the one which had brought us here in the first place, and, if so, how precisely was I supposed to do that? She grudgingly backed off, which was just as well, because I was on the verge of telling her that the thing which had come walking up to me in the forest had claimed to be what was left of Orgos, which would mean that he was already dead. If that was true. . Well, there seemed little point in confronting that possibility right now.

And there was one bit of evidence on my side. The bones hadn’t all collapsed into dust, and those fragments that remained-including part of the skull-looked to me more goblin than human.

“So what does it mean?” I asked, staring into the fire. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling of a deep cold in my bones.

“Mean?” said Renthrette distractedly. “It doesn’t mean anything. Not everything means something, you know.”

“Yes, it does,” I insisted. This was the one thing I had learned from my years in the Thrusian theater. Everything means something, even if you can’t control what that meaning is. If you ever doubt that little unimportant-seeming things mean something, try farting on stage during a tragic death scene. Trust me on this. “This means something.”

“Then, what?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ll make a guess,” I said, fiddling with a stick which had caught fire at one end. “Some goblin force, a spirit or something, crossed over from the other forest, from Sarak-Nul, I mean, and came looking for us. It was very specific in its choice of identity and there has to be a reason for that. It animated a goblin corpse, perhaps, and used my thoughts to clothe it, as it were, as a person I knew. I had been thinking of Orgos earlier-missing him, I guess-and it somehow seized my mental picture of him and fashioned its form accordingly. Something like that. It chose a person I respect, a person whose company I missed, and presented him as he exists in my head, which is why it got the swords wrong. When that mistake was revealed, the spell (or whatever it was) fell apart for some reason, as if the controlling force couldn’t sustain the illusion once I became suspicious. The question is, why go to all that trouble?”

“Maybe it was just some wandering ghost-” began Renthrette.

I cut her off, swallowing back the now ludicrous urge to say that I did not believe in ghosts. “No,” I said. “It had a purpose. It was trying to get rid of us by saying that we were in danger, out of our element, guaranteed to fail. . ”

“Whatever it was, it read you like a book,” Renthrette remarked, a sly little smile crinkling the edge of her mouth.

“Thanks,” I said. “But my point is that it was willfully misreading the Orgos in my head. He never would have said all that stuff about running away. That suggests real purpose. It wanted us gone enough to violate the disguise in a very risky fashion. There is more to this than meets the eye. If we are so impotent, why did it want us out of the way? If we are so obviously doomed, why go to the trouble of trying to get rid of us? Maybe we actually aren’t completely out of our element. Maybe we can do something aside from getting ourselves killed. . Tough to believe, but there it is.”

We continued our trek across the forest for the rest of the day. Renthrette led, sedate and watchful. I followed, glancing behind me from time to time in case that rustle of wind in the trees was actually the corpse of an old mate coming to share some thoughts on what we should do next.

The air was moist and cool, and wisps of mist still trailed along the forest floor and over the still, dark surface of the river. Then a rocky escarpment rose up on the bank and we had to turn from the water and into the forest to get round it. It was about thirty feet high, irregular, and creviced in ridges and craggy, tuber-like growths. A few withered bushes and weeds struggled out of the thin soil in its cracks, and boulders dropped from God knew where were scattered among the undergrowth. And in one horseshoe hollow was a cave. Its mouth was tight, only a few feet across, and inside was a dark tunnel that burrowed back toward the river.

Renthrette brought her horse to a standstill and I looked from her to the cave and back. “You must be joking,” I muttered.

“Quiet, Will.”

“Can we just get on and leave this adventurer stuff for the people with nothing better to do? Remember the last cave we spent the night in? Or our little jaunt through the cistern at the Falcon’s Nest? Two words: talking bears. And goblins. No, four words: talking bears and goblins. Riding them. OK, six words. . ”

She had already dismounted and was approaching the cave mouth cautiously, bent over to peer in. I stayed in my saddle.

“Don’t expect me to come,” I began. “Don’t expect me to help pull you out when a great set of grinding incisors grips you round the waist and. .”

But I had already dismounted, had even begun to follow, so this show of defiance had become futile even by my standards. She paused at the dark entrance, adjusted her grip on the axe I had given her, stooped further, and was gone. I hesitated, looked down at the crossbow in my hands, cocked it, and fitted a bolt into the slide. Then I bent over and stepped inside.

The cave was shallow and only the very back was completely dark. There was ash and charred sticks on the ground and, as I turned them over with the toe of my boot, I saw what looked like chicken bones.

“Here,” said Renthrette, from my left. She was holding a satchel made of coarse, olive-colored fabric. She upended it and a series of small packages spilled out onto the floor. I was stooping to pick one up when I caught a sharp aroma, momentarily unpleasant, then wonderfully familiar.

“Cheese!” I exclaimed. “Thank God. Look at this, Renthrette. Cheese. Good cheese at that. Real cheese that tastes of cheese, not that petrified rubber they gave us in the pub the other night. There’s a strong, crumbly white; a smoked; and, what’s this? Oh God. . a blue. Oh yes. Taste this, it’s superb!”

She gave me a superior look and I scrambled to my feet.

“Nothing else?” she said.

“Nothing else?! Taste this!”

“Is that all there is?” she demanded with slow patience.

“Eh. . no. There are a couple of small knives, a metal pot, a spoon, a cloth of dried herbs, and half a bulb of garlic. Oh, and a small onion. Great!” I enthused.

“Great,” she echoed halfheartedly, striding back out into the forest. I followed, nibbling contentedly on a sliver of the smoked. “Probably a hunter’s camp,” she remarked uninterested.

“I left the pot,” I said, guiltily. “I only took the cheese and the garlic. Come on, don’t be so damned moral. My need is greater than whoever can get hold of this stuff.”

“Whatever, Will,” she remarked with a slightly sour expression. “But keep that stuff downwind of me and don’t come breathing on me after you’ve eaten it.”

Fat chance, I thought. If it was only a matter of giving up garlic and onions, I’d have been living on celery for months now. Well, probably.

I was just pondering the wholly academic question of which of my appetites would have won out if I had been given the option when Renthrette’s horse turned sideways abruptly and pattered to a halt.

“What?. .” I began, but she waved me into silence with a sudden gesture.

She turned and hissed, “Get off the path!”

She led the way, pushing her mount into the trees off to the right. I followed, looking wildly around but seeing nothing. Then, as I slid from the back of my horse, landing awkwardly on my left ankle, I heard voices coming from up ahead. I couldn’t hear words, and the sound fluctuated as it carried on the breeze, but the language raised the hair on my neck. It was caustic and abrasive, dark and spiked like the head of a mace: goblins.

My horse flinched and I patted it desperately, pushing it farther into a thicket of tangled leaves and branches. Renthrette had already tethered hers and was on her way back, axe in hand in a way reminiscent of her brother Garnet, her eyes cautious and resolute like an animal’s. She slipped furtively past me and crouched behind the gnarled and heavy trunk of an oak. I bit my lip hard till the blood ran in my mouth, and pressed my horse further into cover.

There were four of them, dark and squat, armed with knives and long spears. Two of them wore half-helms, the others had hoods of leather. They were talking among themselves and laughing: nasal, rasping laughs which creased their eyes to nothing and set their heavy jaws lolling. Their skin was a grayish-yellow and thick, almost scaly, snake-like. Their limbs were short and powerful. I swallowed the blood in my mouth and froze, squatted in the dirt beside Renthrette, one hand on my crossbow, the other braced against the tree trunk. Renthrette looked at me and her face, though blank, seemed somehow to ask what I thought we should do. They would pass within fifteen feet of us in less than ten seconds. I held my breath.

Then one of the horses snorted. The goblins reacted immediately, their conversation evaporating in an instant as they went stock still, eyes and ears scanning the woodland. One of them paused and then began to inch along the path toward us, head down and spear horizontal. Renthrette tensed like a cat poised to spring. I glanced down at my weapon and stretched my index finger to the trigger. The first goblin’s yellow-green eyes met mine and his mouth fell open in a cry of warning.

I tried to aim, but Renthrette leaped in front of me.

She bounded out onto the path from the other side of the tree, the axe held behind her, ready to strike. He barely saw her before her blow connected. He screamed and fell forward. I jumped to my feet and leveled the crossbow at the next, whose eyes were on Renthrette. He wheeled his spear toward me too late and the bolt hit him between shoulder and neck.

Two more. Renthrette cut at one with her axe and it bit into the goblin’s spear, breaking it cleanly. He gripped the top half of the shaft with its metal tip like a shortsword and swung it at her. Simultaneously, the last closed on her and she took a step back. The crossbow was too slow to load and I dropped it, pulling a knife from my belt. It felt small and inadequate, but I had to do something.

Those creatures, I thought, must not touch her.

One of them was glancing warily around for other attackers.

I nodded pointedly, my eyes staring across the path and into the trees. The goblin closest to me, a thin, gray-skinned creature brandishing a scimitar, caught the glance but did nothing. I felt my bluff had been called. I glanced from the goblin back into the forest behind him and shouted-quite convincingly given how unoriginal the idea was-“Now!”

The goblin spun in the direction I was staring, raising his blade, and I launched myself at him, knife extended.

The leap was poor and I fell short, managing only to gash his leg as I fell. He shrieked with surprise nonetheless and collided awkwardly with the other one who, thinking he was under attack, stabbed blindly with the remains of his spear. The point caught his fellow just above the waist, bringing him to his knees as Renthrette flung herself at the other. They fell together, each clawing for the handle of the axe which had been torn free in the fall. The gray one, sensing I was upon him, turned and looked up. The blade of my knife was already sweeping toward him and his eyes met mine as it stabbed home through his vest. Almost simultaneously, Renthrette seized the axe, raised it and brought it down hard. There was a sickening splitting sound like a bursting melon, then silence.

I sat on the ground breathing hard.

“That was a terrible idea,” said Renthrette after she got her breath back, “that let’s-pretend-there-are-more-of-us thing. I couldn’t believe you actually tried that.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” I reposted.

“Barely,” she answered. “It’s a good thing the goblins weren’t exactly crack troops.”

I gave her a sardonic look. I still hadn’t got to her level of casualness when it came to carnage, and the idea that someone had, however briefly, really wanted to kill me, always left me a little disoriented.

“Never mind. With a bit of luck we’ll get ambushed by some real pros later in the day,” I remarked.

“They must have been a patrol, but they were pretty damn casual given the fact that they were in enemy territory,” she mused, ignoring me. She picked up one of the dead goblin’s spears and looked it over critically. “Odd,” she said.

“What?”

“See this little crosspiece just below the head? That’s to stop it going in too deep. It’s a hunting spear. Which means they’re either just using whatever weapons they can steal regardless of their purpose-always possible for the likes of them, I suppose. . ”

“Or?”

“Or they weren’t a military patrol at all.”

“Hold it,” I said, getting to my feet. “You’re saying they were here hunting for food?”

“There probably isn’t much that lives on their side of the river. Here there are probably deer, wild boar maybe. It’s probably their cheese that you have in your pockets.”

“So you don’t think they were looking for us?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, no.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “I suppose. Still, we had to attack. After all, goblins are goblins, right?”

“Of course,” Renthrette answered, but she didn’t look at me, and seemed strangely preoccupied.

We both fell silent and got on with readying our horses. We didn’t make eye contact at all for a while, though I can’t say what was going on in Renthrette’s mind. I’m not really sure what I was thinking, but there was something, a feeling of anticlimax or uncertainty. I think we both sensed it in each other but chose to keep quiet, holding the feeling at arm’s length as if we were warding off an unpredictable dog.

The forest ended quite suddenly two days later, and Phasdreille-the White City-was visible as soon as we stepped out of the trees. It was still a few miles off but it lay on lower ground and was spread out before us, gleaming pale and beautiful in the afternoon sun. We halted and looked at it, silent and hardly breathing. From here it looked sculpted out of alabaster, walled and towered like the citadel in a fairy tale. I had seen walled cities before but they always seemed so purposeful and strong. This place looked effortlessly unassailable, as imposing as Cresdon or Ironwall, but with a grace, an unearthly dignity that sparkled on its white stone and flashed off the glass in its windows like sunlight on a waterfall. It looked like a city such as might exist above the clouds, ruled by a benign monarch whose daughters sent their suitors on quests for dragons and treasure. . an impossible place.

“Now if we can’t get a decent piece of beef and some strong ale there,” I remarked, “there’s a problem.”

But my flippancy was strained and felt curiously inappropriate. Renthrette just stared off toward the white towers as if lost in a dream, or perhaps in a memory of childhood, when such places seemed plausible.

“It’s breathtaking,” she whispered. “Perfect.”

And, as my cynicism failed to kick in, I nodded.

We were there before sundown and the light had yellowed, turning the city to gold, which warmed and deepened as we reached a long, ornamented bridge. This spanned a wide moat filled by the Snowborne and it was broad and fair, supported on smooth arches with carved capitals and lined with marble balustrades. At its head was a gatehouse, with a pair of turrets filled with tall warriors with long, pale hair that rippled with their cloaks in the breeze.

“Who comes from Eventor?” called one of them.

“Renthrette and William from Stavis,” called my companion, who always rose to occasions like this, “friends to the fair folk and to Sorrail. We seek aid and bring news from the mountains.”

A door opened and three or four of them emerged.

“You have been looked for,” said one. “Sorrail has been here many days and is expecting you. Welcome to Phasdreille, the White City. Enter, before it grows dark, and seek him out in the house of the king. We will send word.”

The gates were framed with iron, burnished to a high shine, and paneled with a pale wood inlaid with brass, though whether this was decorative or defensive, I could not say. They opened easily, despite their great weight, and we walked our horses into the barbican and onto the twilit bridge without another word. Ahead of us, a rider cantered off across the bridge toward the gatehouse of the city, and we followed, gazing down to the river and up to the great, pale walls in an awed silence. At the far side we passed through another pair of imposing doors and entered the town.

Even with the onset of evening, the streets seemed bright and mythically fair, the city holding an air of serenity, as unlike the squalid bustle I had been used to in Cresdon as could be imagined. There was no one else about, but the city felt cleansed rather than deserted. All was quiet and peaceful, as if the very walls were watching paternally over residents who were sleeping or gathered around their hearths with their families, watching as they had for centuries.

Sorrail met us at the entrance to the king’s palace. He was handsome and smiling, pleased to see us, but he stood atop the little flight of marble steps with formal reserve. With him was an entourage of some sort, men and women dressed in vivid silks and adorned with bracelets and necklaces in which shone precious stones. They hovered at his back, their eyes upon us.

“You are most welcome to Phasdreille, home of the fair folk,” said Sorrail in a rolling, modulated voice that was addressed to those at his back as well as to those in front of him. “And to the court of King Halmir, son of Velmir, you are welcome, too. Enter and feast with us. Let us find you new raiment fitting to this place, and then you can tell us your news. For as the diamond should be cut, polished, and set in gold to show off its quality, so should the doers of virtue be clad in wealth and beauty so that their worth shines forth.”

At this slightly odd remark, there was a smattering of applause from those clustered around him. Their smiles flexed and deepened.

“Er. . thanks,” I said. “I could use a change and a bite to eat.”

There was a momentary pause, a series of fractional glances between them, and then more simpering smiles. If I didn’t know they were glad to see us, I’d say we were being condescended to. Sorrail bowed carefully at the waist, nonchalantly adding a little flourish of the hand that invited us in: very polished. He was barely recognizable as the ranger who had met us on the road.

Just as we were ascending the stairs, a distant trumpet call echoed through the air. Everyone paused and it was answered by another, closer this time.

“It seems,” said Sorrail, “that our horsemen have returned, and in triumph.”

His tone was low, amused rather than exuberant, as if he’d just heard that a friend had won a few coins at dice. The ripple through the entourage matched his own contented swagger. I shot Renthrette a bewildered glance. Her eyes were narrowed, confused, even surprised, but further speculation was abandoned as the drumming of horse hooves swelled to a deafening pitch. The courtyard before the palace filled with fifty or sixty blond riders, caped with white, fluttering cloaks and armed with silver-tipped lances. As another smattering of polite applause broke out from the assembly of the steps, I saw one of the riders who was not uniformed as the others. His helm was full and great horns grew menacingly from each side. He bore a heavy axe, a round, crimson shield, and sat astride a great white charger. His face was pale, almost white, and his hair, when he removed the great and terrifying helm, was short and brownish. He glanced toward us and his eyes shone green as emeralds.

“Garnet!” I exclaimed. Renthrette was already running toward her brother, who swung himself to earth easily, smiling. There they embraced as the unit’s captain ascended the stairs and bowed to Sorrail. I left them to their reports and hurried after Renthrette.

“Hell’s teeth,” I exclaimed, laughing aloud. “I never thought I’d be this pleased to see you!”

“Likewise,” he grinned over his sister’s shoulder. He extended his strong, thin hand and I clasped it briefly.

“I had heard you were around,” he said, “but we’ve had no news since you set out to rescue Orgos and Mithos.”

“How long have you been here?” asked Renthrette.

“Almost as long as you have, I think. I laid low in the Hide for a couple of days and then took a horse and whatever I could carry and came after you. When I got to the Black Horse I found you had already gone on ahead, but some ambassador chap said he could lead me to you if I served as his escort for a few miles. I’m not sure what happened next. I think I fell asleep in the saddle or something, I don’t know. It doesn’t really make any sense, but when I woke I was in sight of this place and there was no sign of the ambassador. I’ve been here ever since and, after Sorrail brought news of the rest of the party, I’ve been riding with the armies of Phasdreille against goblin encampments this side of the river.”

“Any sign of Lisha?” Renthrette asked.

“None,” said Garnet. “I don’t really know where we are, let alone where she might be. Until Sorrail arrived, I thought I was by myself. Still,” he added with a smile at the horsemen around him, “there are worse places to be. I mean, I missed you all and everything, but this place. . It’s just so, I don’t know, right. It’s like I should have been born here, or something. God, Renthrette, you are going to love it here. You’ll never want to leave.”

This last remark troubled me. Don’t get me wrong: You couldn’t fault the city. It gleamed with nobility and courage and light and truth and, well, fairness in every sense. In other words, it made concrete all that Garnet and Renthrette lived for. Here they were no longer the principled few struggling against a dark, self-interested, and vicious world. Here they were part of the majority and could be vicious on its behalf. Nor, I had to admit, could I really fault Sorrail. He was everything he had first seemed to be, and if Renthrette looked at him as the best thing since cold steel, I could hardly blame her. I had been a little confused by his odd, courtly greeting to us earlier and by the perfectly decked out little band that had been hanging on his exquisitely tailored coattails, but I suppose that was just the way things worked here. No, nothing had really shaken my faith in the place or its people but Garnet’s rapturous enthusiasm for them.

You see, Garnet is about the worst judge of pretty much anything that I have ever come across. He couldn’t tell a pint of stout from a cream sherry, and if he ever swore that someone was a great fellow, said fellow would probably slip something lethal in your pint (or sherry) before the night was out. This isn’t just sour grapes on my part. Garnet and I have not always seen eye to eye, I confess, but he can be very useful to have around. If you need someone hacked to pieces, he’s your man. Tell him that the friendly stranger across the room made a lewd remark about his sister, hand him an axe, then sit back and watch the fun. But analyze something and come to a shrewd conclusion? When camels write poetry.

Garnet is a terrible reader. I don’t mean he couldn’t pick up a menu and spot the salad; in fact, like his sister, he could wade through the most complex legal documents and figure out their details with alarming rigor and clearheadedness. What he couldn’t do was read between the lines. Just like Renthrette, who had told me that the apparition in the forest hadn’t meant anything, Garnet took things at face value. Neither of them looked too closely or asked too many questions, since that took valuable time away from getting their weapons bloody. They would leave this place and its rosy hue uncriticized because it offered such a neat solution to all their ethical problems. Here goodness was built in the stone of the city and the flesh of its people; across the river was evil. Their mission was clear.

Too clear for a charlatan, actor, dramatist, cheat, and liar like me to swallow without at least looking more closely at the label.

But what really burned me up was that they seemed to be right.

The royal palace came alive before dawn. Unfortunately, since we were due to meet the king today, that meant that the banging on the door at half past five in the bloody morning was supposed to be taken seriously. The journey had taken its toll and I had slept like a particularly exhausted log right until Garnet started bludgeoning my door down.

I crawled over, threw the bolt, and admitted him with a sour grunt. He was dressed in burnished armor that, even in this miserably low light, sparkled like a box of mirrors. He wore a tunic of immaculate white linen and a matching cloak. He was cradling his great horned helm in his arm and beaming like he’d just found a bag of gold in an alley. Or at least, that’s what would make me beam like an idiot. I couldn’t imagine, especially with my brain still fogged with sleep, what could make him so happy short of meeting the goblin king (if there was one) in single combat.

“Ready?” he chirped.

“Hardly,” I muttered, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and clambering irritably into a pair of trousers. “Do we have to meet him so bloody early? Couldn’t we, like, have lunch together or something?”

“No.”

“Dinner, then?”

“No,” said Garnet, still cheery and indulgent with that schoolboy exuberance that occasionally takes the place of his homicidal nobility. “That’s not the way of things here. But you’ll see. This is going to be one of the most fantastic days in your life, Will. Just wait till you see the court: the clothes, the sophistication. I could listen to them talk for hours.”

“Who?”

“The courtiers,” he laughed, like he was assuring a four-year-old about how good a piece of chocolate was going to taste. “You’ll be in your element.”

“Right,” I agreed hollowly, suspecting the chocolate was really spinach.

“Come on, Will. Are you going to put a shirt on?”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, parodying his childlike excitement. “That would be a wheeze.”

I dressed, irritably.

“You’re wearing that?” said Garnet, with a sour look.

“Evidently,” I said, checking to be sure. “Why?”

“Don’t you have anything. . you know, classier?”

“I thought we were adventurers,” I said. “These are adventurers’ clothes. Shirt and britches. Leather belt. Some bits of ring mail here and there to denote manly purpose. I thought you’d approve.”

“Weren’t you wearing them yesterday?”

“I was indeed,” I agreed. “We adventurers are hardy folk. But the britches are fairly clean and the shirt is not actually unpleasant. Yet. Maybe when the day heats up a little. .”

“Can’t you wash them?” said Garnet, like someone’s grandmother.

“Not now, and I didn’t have time last night. If I’d known you cared so much I wouldn’t have bothered sleeping at all, then I could have spent the night running something up in pink satin and lace.”

“Well, at least wash yourself. Here.”

He tossed me a piece of soap shaped like a seashell. I sniffed at it suspiciously. It smelled of rose petals, only stronger and powerfully sweet.

“It’s wonderful,” Garnet said. “All produced locally, I hear. There’s quite a lot of soap around. They are a very clean people. They bathe daily. It’s a sign of spiritual purity. But it’s not just about being clean; it’s also about elegance. Look how intricately that has been molded,” he said, nodding at the shell-shaped soap, “and smell the fragrance!”

“Yes,” I scowled. “Very nice. And the next time I want to go round stinking like an expensive whore I’ll put it straight to use.”

“Just get a move on,” he snapped. “And brush your hair.”

And so we left, him in front, striding off and making pleasant little bows every time someone passed, me straggling after him, doing up buttons and cursing quietly to myself.

We entered a large room, flagged with black and white marble like a chessboard and arranged with padded chairs and benches. There were torches and lanterns everywhere and it was like daylight inside, except for the wreath of smoke that hung about the ceiling. It was packed with men and women in silks and satins and jewels, many seated or reclining elegantly on pieces of furniture that looked like chairs with pretensions to couch-hood. Others were poised artistically against columns or leaning with studied nonchalance on mantelpieces. And all were engaged in hushed conversation. Occasionally there would be a ripple of laughter or a soft pattering of polite applause from restrained, gloved hands. Somewhere a wistfully plucked harp was accompanying a woman singing in a high, lilting tone about a lovelorn shepherdess.

“What the hell is this?” I breathed to Garnet.

“It’s a waiting room.”

“What are all these people doing?”

“Waiting,” he said, as if this was self-evident.

“For?”

“A summons from his lordship the king.”

“And us?” I pressed, losing patience.

“We wait, too.”

“Hold it,” I whispered, venomously. “Are you telling me that you dragged me out of bed before cockcrow so that I could stand around with this bunch of overdressed cretins for an hour?”

“More,” he said.

“What?”

“More than an hour. Probably several. But being here is half the fun.”

I gave him an oblique look. Was this a perverse brand of humor I had never glimpsed in my generally surly companion?

“I mean it,” he said, guilelessly. “Just watch and listen.”

Too exasperated to do anything else, I did.

Seated on one of the extended chairs close by were two ladies lounging elegantly in cream-colored lace and taffeta. They dripped with pearls and other forms of conspicuous opulence. One wore a necklace of the largest diamonds I had ever seen. Another pair of ladies sat beside them on velvet cushioned chairs. All four were turned to a pair of gentlemen who held court in their midst. Both were tall, lithe, and blond, one in a doublet of sea-green velvet trimmed with golden cord and matching hose, the other, an older gentleman, in royal-blue-and-silver silk. Both were immaculately groomed and wore trim beards that tapered to waxed points.

“My lord Gaspar,” said the one in green with a wry smile, “affects, I fear, a disposition toward my lady Johanna that he feels not. For as flames give off smoke, so love breathes forth the sighs of passion for all to see. It seems that though my worthy friend bewails his love for fashion’s sake, there is no passion like to mine for my lady Beatrice. I fear his mistress’s disdain has finally quenched his fire and smothered his smoke.”

The ladies smiled among themselves and waited for the elder to reply. He did, with the smallest step forward and the most casual positioning of one hand upon his hip. “My Lord Castileo,” Gaspar intoned, smiling, “embers and smoldering leaves produce a smoke most bitter and unwholesome to the senses, yet the heat from whence it rises is but a poor and mean thing at which one might not even warm one’s hands. The heart of a furnace burns pure and hot, consuming all and leaving little there to smoke withal. So my love for Johanna, like the core of the forge, blazes with white, undying passion, while yours for Beatrice, I fear, so cool and, doused with overlong laments, smokes merely.”

“And yet,” retorted Castileo, “are my words from the heart, not crafted in forges or furnaces where men beat out their labors with the sweat of their brows. My words, like my love, are natural and proceed thoughtless from my consumed heart.”

This met with another burst of applause. I turned, befuddled, to Garnet only to have my confusion increase. He was spellbound, hanging on every word with an awestruck expression on his face.

“What the bloody hell was all that about?” I breathed. Garnet didn’t respond, so I tried another tack. “This is what they do all day?”

“Yes. Isn’t it wonderful? Hush now,” he whispered, his eyes not straying from the peacocks in front of us. “Gaspar is going to respond.”

“The anticipation is crushing me,” I muttered, walking away in search of something more closely resembling entertainment.

There wasn’t any. I circled the room twice and, save for a little dice rolling here and there, that witty little study in who loves who more seemed the rule rather than the exception. A shepherdess in silk and rubies worth about a thousand acres of grazing land bewailed her lost love (“Alack the day, my Corin’s gone away”), and a curious species of high jump contest flared up for a while. But spoken words were the order of the day: elegant, polished, and memorized. They pretended they were making them up as they went, but I know a rehearsed performance when I see one, and I was looking at about twenty. But, there being bugger-all else to do, we sat there for about four hours and listened to what the fair folk did when they weren’t slaying goblins.

Renthrette had arrived midway through this study in futility, and her appearance took my breath away. This was not simply because she was beautiful, in a flame-colored satin gown and an extravagant diamond necklace, gold in her hair and crystal studs set into her bodice-though I suppose she was-but because I barely recognized her. She looked like one of them, blending in so well that it depressed me a little.

“Sorrail sent it,” she said simply, glancing with a kind of delighted uncertainty at her dress. “To help me fit in.”

“Quite,” I said, fitting in less and less by the minute. “Look,” I said, opting for something direct and virile to offset all this court culture, “shouldn’t we be doing something useful, like organizing a rescue of Orgos and Mithos or something?”

“Patience, Will,” said Garnet, a remark so out of character that I was still gaping at him when the liveried lackey who had just arrived started whispering to him.

“They’re ready,” said Garnet, eyes wide with delight. “The king will see us now.”

“Already?” I said. “I mean, I could listen to this I-love-you-more-than-he-does stuff all day.”

“Be quiet, Will,” said Garnet. And suddenly his eyes flashed with that dangerous impatience that I knew so well. It was, strangely enough, sort of a relief to see it. At least some things don’t change.