The Soul Weaver (33 page)

“Its inhabitants call this world the Bounded.”

“This
world
—” She sat down abruptly on a plain wooden bench next to the wall. To her credit she lost none of her color. “You really mean that, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“I heard a story once of another world . . .”

“. . . and a bridge of enchantment that joined it with our own.”

“I remember some of it. Such a wild tale . . . sorcery . . . other worlds . . . villainous creatures with no souls. I thought the woman must surely be mad.”

“That woman was my mother.” My mother had been astonished that King Evard had kept his daughter in the room as she told him about Gondai and the Bridge and the battle that had killed her brother.

“Your mother . . . truly? I couldn't believe my father would even listen to her. I thought it was only because she was related to his sword champion, the Duke of . . .” Her voice trailed away, and her gray eyes grew wide, staring at me again. “
That's
who you are! Duke Tomas's son!”

I bowed. “The stupidest boy in the world—at your service.”

Her brow wrinkled. “But the woman who told the story was not Duke Tomas's wife.”

“There was a mix-up early on. He wasn't really my father, but my uncle. His sister, Seriana, was—is—my mother.”

She shook her head. Her hair was curling as it dried and a few of the curls fell down on her face. She didn't seem to notice. “Gerick. That was your name. And you were so unfriendly! You wouldn't say anything and wouldn't play anything I wanted. I told you about the cherry tarts to impress you. And later you were stolen by bandits. Everyone believed you were dead.”

“It's complicated. I didn't die.”

“So this is the world your mother told of?” She looked around the audience hall with new interest.

“No . . . or rather, I'm not exactly sure. It's a long story. Would you like me to show you how to leave the Blue Tower? That's probably enough strangeness for one day.” Then I could leave her to her own devices.

“Yes. Certainly. It might prove to me that I'm not your prisoner.” She popped up from the bench. “This is so odd. We played together. It seems a thousand years ago right now. This place . . . these people . . . You know . . . I don't care if it's complicated to explain where we are. I want to hear it. I'm not stupid. And I'm not some ninny who faints at the least fright. But, yes, show me how to get out of here first.”

Roxanne didn't stop talking the whole way down the length of the audience hall. Without giving me much time to tell her anything, she peppered me with questions, not always the ones I expected.

“Who is your friend that you care so much for him?”

“His name is Paulo. He was born in the village of Dunfarrie. My mother befriended him there, and four years ago he helped her rescue me from the people who abducted—”

“A common boy, then.”

“Those words have no meaning with respect to Paulo.”

“All right, all right. I can see not. Are you really as fierce as you say?”

I kept my eyes on the doorway at the end of the hall, wishing we were in the rotunda already so I could push her through the wall and be done with her. “My childhood was very unusual. I've done everything I say.”

She thought about that for a moment, her sidelong gaze feeling like fire on my skin. “There are a number of people who would say you are young to be a king, but I think it would be more accurate to say you are very old to be a year, ten months, and five days younger than me.”

The main entrance to the Blue Tower, where Paulo and I had first come through to visit the Guardian, was centered on a sheer curved wall, identifiable as a tower entrance only by the narrow silver band at its edges. I traced my finger over the outline to show her. “A dwelling in this world is called a fastness. They look like towers to us. But dimensions—height and width and depth—are measured differently here, so the interior spaces don't reflect the exterior shape. And though the interior doorways between rooms look familiar to us, those which pass through the walls do not. The women were exactly right. You have to think of yourself out. . . .”

I explained the passage to her as Vroon had explained it to me, and I described the thoughts I had used successfully. That was not easy, as I didn't even have to consider them any more. Then I gave her a demonstration. When I popped back in, she was already yelling at me.

“Sorcery! I should have known it! How is it
you
are capable of such wickedness?” The princess was flushed, whether with anger or fright I couldn't tell. “And how could you think that
I
—”

“It's not sorcery, though I'm sure to you it appears the same. But you and every person in this land can do it. And no one burns you for it.”

This time, she did turn pale. I thought she was going to run. But she just stared at me until my skin grew hot. “Well then,” she said at last. “Explain it to me.”

It took me a few moments to decide how much to say. I'd done a lot of thinking about the Bounded. Anyone in the Four Realms would call Nithea's healing practices sorcery, and the same for Zanore's route-finding, Ob's weighty words, and the whole business of towers that grew. Yet I'd felt no telltale prickles of enchantment when the healing woman had massaged my shoulder—twisted when the dead maintainer had fallen on me—and I could suddenly raise my hand above my head without passing out from the pain. And I summoned no power to think myself out of the Blue Tower. The “prickles” were a sign of the resistance of the natural world to the use of a sorcerer's power. So I had concluded that the Guardian had pronounced no magical winding to open the stone circle passage to the garden because no magic was needed. The fundamental nature of the Bounded was magic.

The princess's fingers tapped impatiently on her folded arms.

“Well, first you have to understand the distinction between natural law and sorcery. Natural law is the set of rules a world works by—which can be different depending on the world. Sorcery is the use of a particular kind of power to stretch or extend or nullify those rules. Going in and out of these towers has no more to do with magical power than does riding in a wheeled cart or sailing on a lake in Leire. . . .”

I tried to explain how things that would be inexplicable in our world and require a sorcerer's power to accomplish could be a natural part of another one. I felt as if I was making a muddle of it. Roxanne stared at the floor, listening, her frown deepening by the moment.

When I finally gave up and stopped talking, she glanced up. “All right, then. I suppose that makes some kind of perverse sense. Go on.”

I was astonished. I wondered briefly what she might say if I told her I'd melted rocks with lightning from the tip of my finger or had swum in the deeps of the ocean in the form of a fish. I stayed with nature. “So, the way to pass between these spaces we call
in
and the spaces we call
out
is to convince yourself which way you're going. Your mind's just not used to being in a world with a different set of rules, and it doesn't believe it when you tell it what to do. If you don't want to try it, I could—”

“No. I'm feeling a bit overstuffed with all this strangeness, and I'm tired of this dismal place and these lamps that are forever being turned up and down by creeping servants I never see. I need to walk in the sunlight. Maybe go riding.”

“Uh . . . perhaps there are a few more things you should know before we go out. . . .”

 

Roxanne was very determined, and mastered entrances and exits in short order. She seemed to accept my word that it wasn't evil. I supposed she had no one else to trust. However odd, I was at least someone she knew.

Once we were outside, she marveled at the green stars and massive lightnings of the Bounded, and called the towers “extraordinary” and “exotic.” This is not to say she was pleasant company. Mostly she complained about her awful robe, and the wind, and the too-large sandals they had given her for shoes, and the black dirt, and all the inadequacies of service in the Blue Tower. But even though I sensed how she was repulsed by many of the deformities in evidence, she never once showed it to those who crowded around us as we walked.

After a short walk, we headed back toward the Blue Tower. As we crossed the commard, a bent old woman with a jaw that bulged out like a bullfrog's throat dropped to her knees in front of me and kissed the toe of my boots. She wasn't the first Singlar to have done so that day.

Roxanne glared as I sent the old woman on her way. “They
worship
you! You must tell me how you've come here. I don't care how long or complicated the story. How is it you're their king? And why were you a prisoner?”

“I need to go—”

“It's
your
vile henchmen who brought me here, ‘King' Gerick, putting a bag over my head and taking me before a horrible man who wore a crown and acted as though he were a king, though he had no kingly manner about him—”

“And I would guess you told him who you were and what he could expect from your father if he so much as looked at you.”

Her eyes could have ripped the skin off a rabbit, but her tongue never slowed. “—and in his most disgustingly impudent manner, this vile man threw me into that dungeon, where those other beastly creatures would come and taunt me and look at me, and I refused to believe in them. I spent a great deal of time screaming, until I decided that I must be in the hands of Kerotean priests, and that everything was an illusion induced by their wicked potions and elixirs. I believed they were taking vengeance against my father by driving me mad, and I decided I wouldn't let them do it. So it's only right that you tell me what's going on in this place. Why are you a king?”

“It's all bound up with a prophecy or an oracle or something like that . . .”

I didn't explain about the Breach or the Lords or why I had come here. I just told her about the Guardian and his corruption, and how I'd come to the Bounded for my own reasons, but gotten caught up in their expectations. As I talked, we started walking again, across the commard and back into the city. It rained a little as we walked, but the air stayed warm and still. Roxanne didn't seem to mind. She kept her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the roadway as she listened. But she didn't miss a word, and she kept interrupting me with more questions.

“Is everyone here a cripple or were they made so by this Guardian?”

“They are as they are,” I said. “You could say this is a world of outcasts, leftovers, ones people in our world would find unacceptable. They weren't—”

“And those three monsters came and stole people like these from Leire”—she waved her hand to the growing crowd following us through the dark streets—“frightening everyone to death. Brought them here to live like this, as if this were something better.”

“Vroon and two friends were sent to our world to look for this king. They just thought . . . Well, they were trying to help, I think. The Bounded is a very new world. They have little experience to—”

“And then they make a boy their king!”

Having a conversation with Roxanne was like walking through a field of dartweed. You ended up getting pricked just about everywhere a needle could stick you.

“I've no intention of being their king forever. I just need some information from this Source. The Guardian was in the way.”

“So you're not going to stay here and sort out the mess you've made.”

“As soon as Paulo is well, I'll find out what I've come here to learn. Then I've got to go back, get some things straightened out. Make sure some people are . . . all right . . .”

“. . . and take me back.”

“That, too. But meanwhile, yes, there are some things need doing here, and as I upset the order, I might as well do them. Then they can name someone else to be king if they even need one.”

“So why was
I
brought here? Do you know what they did to my father? They don't have any prophecies about driving rightful kings mad or abducting princesses, do they? Whatever my failings, I don't exactly match what your odd friends were looking for.”

We had come to the commard in front of the Blue Tower again, but here was another mystery laid out right in front of me. “I know what happened to King Evard, and I asked Vroon about it. He swore they had never touched the king. He admitted everything else—taking the other people and taking you.”

I waved toward a set of towers we hadn't explored yet, and we set out that way. “What did you see on the night your father was attacked?”

Roxanne didn't balk at extending our excursion. She seemed to be all right about anything as long as she was talking. “It was the night of my birthday feast. We were going to have such a magnificent party—they were bringing Kerotean fire-eaters—but Mama had it announced that Papa was occupied with a messenger, and she needed to attend him. Half the guests stood up to leave. No one wanted to waste their time if Papa and Mama weren't there to see them ogling and coveting me. I was furious with Papa, so before the towels and water bowls were cleared away, I went looking for him. I couldn't find him anywhere he might be ‘receiving messengers,' so I went to his bedchamber. The guards didn't want to let me in, but I . . . insisted.”

That scene wasn't difficult to imagine.

“Papa was sitting on his bed, looking as if someone had hit him on the head, and a man was touching him . . .
arranging
him.” Roxanne shuddered. “The man was tall, dreadful—well I didn't actually see his face . . . and perhaps he wasn't all
that
tall. His size was unremarkable, in fact. He wore a servant's cloak with a hood draped down low. But I'll never forget his voice—soft, gentlemanly, whispering horrid things, calling Papa ‘the father of chaos.' ”