Luap had never thought of his father as a king with problems. Whatever the king's problems, they could not have been as great as those he gave Luap. It gave him a strange feeling to hear him spoken of, as an archivist might write of a figure of history. In his mind he could see the very phrases that might be used of such a king.
"And his brother and brothers-in-law, and his cousins—all would have been glad to have him die without an heir. As in fact he did, before you were grown."
"But—but then the king Gird killed was not my father?"
"Oh no. Although when Gird told me you were the king's bastard, that's who I thought of, naturally. It was the simple answer, and like so many simple answers, it was wrong." Arranha shook his head, presumably at his own foolishness. "Seeing Dorhaniya again brought it back to me, and then I realized the child's face would grow into one very like yours. The king Gird killed was . . . let me think. First there was his brother, but he died in a hunting accident. So-called. Then his eldest sister's husband, who caught a convenient flux. The king Gird killed was the fourth, or fifth, since your father, a cousin."
"But she said she knew him—when she was talking about mistakes—"
"Well, she knew all of them. So did I. Her father was a duke, her husband one of the cousins—not one who became king; they killed him, I've forgotten how. She did know your father—"
"Does Gird know?"
"Know what?"
"That the king he killed at Greenfields—the king who defiled the Hall—was not my father?"
"I . . . I would have thought so, but . . . perhaps not."
Does it matter?
was clear on his face, then his expression changed. "I see. Of course he must be told, in case he doesn't know. You are not
that
man's son; you would have been the heir, but of a different man. A better man than that, though not much wiser. I'm sorry, Luap, but your father was, for all his troubles, a blind fool. I said it then, and spent a year in exile for it, and I'll say it now, to his son."
"He . . . didn't hate me?" It took all his courage to ask that; it was the deepest fear in his heart, that he had somehow earned his father's hate. Against it he had mounted a fierce defense—it wasn't his fault, it wasn't fair.
"Esea's light! No, he didn't hate you. He put all his hopes on you, but understood only one thing to hope for, and pushed too hard. He was desperate, by then, but that doesn't excuse him."
"No." Luap stared at the pavement under his feet. He had held that grudge too long; he was not ready for a father who had had problems of his own, who had been desperate, who had placed a kingdom's weight on the hope that his latest bastard would grow to have the tools of magery. He was not ready to consider how a king might be trapped by something more honorable than his own pleasure. "My . . . mother?" For the instant it took Arranha to answer, he held the hope that she had been mageborn too.
Arranha gave a minute shrug and spread his hands. "I'm truly sorry; I know nothing about her. When I saw you, she was nowhere in evidence. A tutor had you in hand, and bragged to the king of your wit."
"I don't remember her." He said that to his locked hands, staring at his thumbs as if they were the answer to something important. "I never knew—except that I couldn't ask. It made them angry."
"I daresay it frightened them as much as anything. You know the peasant customs: the mother's family determines lineage. We overrode that, whenever our law intruded into the vills, but quite often the peasants evaded our law one way and another. If you had found your mother, if she had claimed you, her people might have helped her get you away and hide you."
"But she didn't." Luap strained for any memory of his mother, forcing himself to imagine himself an infant, a child just able to stand. Surely he would remember who had suckled him, that first deep relationship; surely he could raise it from the deep wells of memory. A face hovered before him, dim and wavering like the reflection of his own in a bucket of water.
Arranha shrugged again. "It's likely she couldn't. She may have been sent far away; she may have died. That I don't know. Your problems were not her fault, Luap, any more than they were yours."
Too much too soon. His mind ached, overstretched with new and uncomfortable revelations. He had had it all organized, he thought, his past tidied into a coherent tale of childhood wrongs and struggles flowing logically into the conflicts of his adult life. He had constructed it of his own pain, his own understanding, and he had become comfortable with it. Now he must revise it, and found he was unwilling to do so. Tentatively, somewhere in his head, a new version began to take shape, safely remote from the other . . . something he could revise, to bring it into conformance. A tragic king, struggling against destiny—an equally tragic peasant victim, a child doomed from the start to be less than anyone's hopes, including his own.
He spent the rest of that day pretending to write, hoping no one would ask what he was doing. He wanted no supper, but knew that if he did not eat with the others, someone would ask questions. So he forced the food down, complained with the others of the heat, and spent a restless night by his window, staring at a sky whose stars held no messages for him.
The old lady returned days later, as Arranha had predicted. In those two days, Luap had struggled to regain the balance she had disrupted. Arranha had told Gird which king had really fathered him; Gird had grunted, scowling, and then given Luap one of his looks.
"What difference d'you think it makes?" Gird had asked. Luap felt abraded by the look and the question, as if the mere fact of stating his real parentage had been an evasion, or a request for something Gird could not approve. He realized he'd hoped for understanding, for Gird to move toward a more fatherly or brotherly relationship, but now he saw that could not happen. Anything that reminded Gird of his father's blood and rank—even this, which should have made it better—aroused the old antagonism.
This day she came early, before the late-morning heat. He heard, again, her voice below, and went down to meet her.
Be gentle
, Arranha had said; he wasn't sure he could be gentle, but he could be courteous. She wore a dress equally costly, but different, from the day before, more blue and less green in its pattern. Lady Dorhaniya's servant gave him another warning look, as he led them toward an inner room on the ground floor. He had no idea what it had been, but recently it had housed scribes copying the Code from his originals. These, at his nod, left their work gladly enough. The room had a high ceiling and tall narrow windows opening on a court shaded by trees and edged with narrow beds of pink flowers; it held night's coolness and the scent of the flowers as well as the tang of ink and parchment.
"No need to climb the stairs," Luap murmured, offering her a chair. Lady Dorhaniya smiled, but tremulously. Clearly she had something on her mind.
"Thank you, young man. Now let me just catch my breath—"
"A drink of water?" The scribes kept a jug in their room; he poured her a mug. She took it as if it were finest glass, and sipped.
"You should sit down, young man. What I have to say is . . . is very important to you."
Luap tried to look surprised. "I thought perhaps you'd come about something in the Lord's Hall."
"No. It wasn't that." She peered at him, then sat back, nodding. "I wasn't wrong, either. I may not be as young as I was, but I've not lost my memory, for faces. Tell me, these men call you Luap, but do you know your real name?"
"I've always been told it was Selamis," Luap said.
"Ah. You have reason to wonder?"
He shrugged. "Lady, by what I was told, my mageborn father chose my daily name, and gave me no other—common enough with such children."
"You know that much," she said, her eyes bright. "Do you know which lord fathered you?"
"I've been told it was the king," Luap said with more difficulty than he'd expected. "But many bastards dream of high birth."
She bent her head to him, in so graceful a movement that he did not at first recognize it as a bow. "Then I will confirm what you were told: you were the king's son—not this recent king, but Garamis. I saw you many times as a small boy, and you have the same look about the eyes you had then. Your mother was, it's true, a peasant lass—a maidservant in the summer palace—but some said she had mageborn blood a generation or so back."
Even knowing it was coming didn't help. He felt the same helpless rage and fear that had overwhelmed him while listening to Arranha. This old lady, so secure and decent, had
seen
him, remembered him. She had seen his mother, no doubt; she had known his father. He shivered, and looked up to find them both staring at him. The old lady's servant—Eris, he remembered—had a look he could interpret as contempt.
"Does it bother you?" Lady Dorhaniya asked. Her eyes were altogether too shrewd. "You were a charming boy, very well-mannered, and you've grown to a charming man. . . ." It was almost worse, though he could not explain it. If he'd been a bad child, cruel or wicked or dull, that could justify what had happened to him. If his father had been the last, most wicked king, that could justify what had happened to him. But he could see, against the inside of his eyelids, the child he had been, the child she was now describing so carefully . . . the child who wanted so much to please, the child alert to the wishes of those who cared for him. "—you brought me a little nosegay," she said. "So thoughtful, for such a young boy. . . ." He had learned that from a mageborn youth, a few years older, and found it impressed ladies visiting; he had made nosegays for all of them. "—and recitations. Your father had you stand up one night before dinner, and speak the entire text of
Torre's Ride
. You must have been nine or so, then—"
That he remembered; it had been just before he was sent away, and at first he'd thought it was because he'd made an error. His tutor had scolded him for it. He had known, then, that the king commanded that performance, but not that the king was his father. And then the steward had come, with a false smile on his face, to take him to an outlying vill and deliver him to the senior cottager.
"—Just before your dear father died," Lady Dorhaniya said. "I don't expect you remember it. They closed the summer palace, and I suppose you went somewhere else."
She could not know where "somewhere else" had been—to someone like her, the closing of one palace meant the opening of another. His mind, running ahead on its own track, tripped on the memory of "—your dear father died," and came back to the present. "He died after that—not long after that?"
"Yes, that's what I was saying. Before Sunturning, it was, and then Lorthin took the throne, and sent my dear husband into exile for a time. So of course I wouldn't have been to the summer palace even had it been open."
"What—" His mouth had dried; he swallowed and tried again. "Did you know my mother—I mean, her name?"
"You don't remember—? Oh—yes; they sent her away when you were just walking. Her name . . . no, I don't . . . but she was a comely lass, never fear. Darker haired than your father, but with red in it; that's where you got the red highlights in your hair, and your eyes are more like hers. Your face is his, brow, cheek and chin."
That didn't help; she seemed to realize it, for she made one of the meaningless comforting sounds old ladies make, and reached to pat his knee. "There, young man—young prince, I should say, for you alone survive of the royal blood, though it won't do you much good. You've nothing to fear in my memories of you. . . ."
But I do, he thought, feeling himself squeezed between intolerable and conflicting realities. Already I have much to fear from you, and I can't even tell what it is . . . but I feel it. "I . . . don't remember much," he said with difficulty. Even as he said it, details he had forgotten for years poured into his mind as pebbles from a sack, each distinct. Yet it was not a lie, for he could not remember what he most wanted to at the moment, what this old woman had looked like, which of the many noblewomen she had been. He could not remember what she remembered; he had nothing to share, no memories that would make sense to her.
"I expect you remember more than you want, sometimes," she said, surprising him again. He had scant experience of old women, and none of his own background; when he met her eyes, they seemed filled with secret laughter, not unkind. "Most men remember the bad things; my husband, to the day he died, remembered being thrashed for riding his father's horse through a wheatfield near harvest. Yet in his family he had the reputation of being a rollicking lad no punishment could touch. You look now as you did then—sensitive enough to feel a word as much as a blow. That's why I thought, perhaps, my memories could help you. Show you the way you seemed to others—"
"No!" It got past his guard, in a choked whisper; then he clamped his lips tight. Tears stung his eyes. He swallowed, unlocked his jaw, and managed to speak in a voice nearly his own. "I'm sorry, Lady Dorhaniya, but—that's over. It's gone. I don't—don't think about it—"
She sat upright, her lips pursed, her expression unreadable. Then, as if making a decision, she nodded gravely and went on. "Prince, you cannot put it aside that way. It's true, the world has changed; you have no throne, and no royal family to sponsor you. But you must know your past, and make it your own, or you cannot become whatever Esea means for you."
The god's name startled him; he started to say that he was no worshipper of the Sunlord, but stopped himself. Instead, he said, "I swore that I would give up all thought of kingship."
She nodded briskly. "Quite right, too. Pursuing such a claim could only bring trouble to the land and people. And you have had no training for kingship. But this does not mean that Esea has no path lighted for you."
Luap shrugged, easing tight shoulders. "As Gird's chronicler, scribe, assistant . . . it seems clear to me that this is my task." Listening to himself, even he could hear the lack of completion; he was not surprised when she shook her head.
"For now, prince. For now, that is your task, and see that you do it in the Sun's light! But you have more to do—and don't laugh at an old woman, thinking me silly with age." For an instant, she looked almost fierce, white hair and all, though he had not laughed, even inside. "You have a position no one else can share: you are the royal heir, though you have no throne. But you—and only you—can lead your own people—"