A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2 Read online

Sasha kicked the door open and tumbled out it, looking from outside as if he had been thrown at the door and it had sprung open under the blow. He rolled to his feet and ran off, arms and legs flailing, while his father flung the boot at him.

  “Sleep in the pigsty!” the King shouted. “It’s all you’re fit for!”

  He had landed out in the main courtyard, beside the stables, and all the boyars were there, mounting their horses to go to the guesthouse outside the Palace walls. There were no guest quarters in the Palace itself; there was only the inner building for the family, and the barracks built into the fortifying walls that surrounded it. In less gracious times, guests would have been housed in the Great Hall, sleeping on the benches and under the tables there. But for at least four generations now, life had been a good deal more gracious than that. There were guesthouses enough to hold up to a hundred important folk, with their servants and guards, and nothing could possibly be wanted from the accommodations. There was even a steam bath attached to each, and from the stink that had come off some of those rancid old men, they could well use it.

  The boyars hooted and tossed insults after him. He was laughing as he ran; he used Beast-Speech to call the Wolfhounds to him, so that it looked as if he were being pursued by the pack, when in fact, they were running with him.

  He hoped that his father would get the bride that he wanted. But if he didn’t—it would not be because of Sasha; it would be because The Tradition didn’t want that girl married into this family at this time.

  In order to keep up the pretense, he had to flail his way past the guesthouses, then through the village, inviting further insults from the peasants. This was why he had called the pack; they would protect him from anything like an actual attack. “Prince Borzoi,” the peasants called him, after the hounds he so often ran with. He’d even been known to sleep with them as a child, in summer, all of them tumbled together in a heap in the kennel. He didn’t do that now, of course….

  Though in a way, he missed it. The hounds were just about the only creatures on the Palace grounds that he didn’t have to keep up some form of pretense with.

  Once out of sight of the village, he dismissed most of the pack and sent them home. He kept his favorite, his particular pet, a stunted fellow he called Ivan. This was no Wise Beast out of The Tradition, but he was a faithful old fellow, and good company, and quick to warn him if someone was approaching so he could put on his Fool face.

  The two of them ambled down a path they both knew well, to a spot deep in the forest that long ago had earned itself the designation of the “Heart of Led Belarus.” As Sasha understood these things, it was not so much the physical center of the Kingdom, and it certainly wasn’t the cartographic center, but something about the place ensured that anything done there would have resonance with the whole of the country.

  And now that he had been insulted, derided, and thrown out of the Palace, Sasha took his brimming Luck into the Heart of his land to be spilled out over it all.

  The path wandered, twisted, and turned like a snake trying to tie itself into five different kinds of knots. The trees here were old, old, old, very tall, broad of trunk and spreading of branch. Sunlight penetrated only here and there, piercing the gloom with shafts of slanting light; his feet made no sound on a path layered years-deep in evergreen needles. In fact, the only sounds were the trickling of water from one of the many little streams that cut through here, and the calls of birds high up in the trees,

  He understood those calls perfectly, of course. Nesting season was over, babies fledged, so mostly the calls were all “I’m here! I’m here!” Not even “Get out of my space! Interlopers beware!” nor “Where are you, gorgeous creature, whoever you are?”

  But there was one, far off in the distance, a heartfelt outpouring of “I’m happy!”

  Oh, how he envied that bird.

  Occasionally the dog would dart off after something scuttling in the underbrush, but he always returned without having caught anything. This was not a good place for a dog of his sort to hunt. Wolfhounds needed space and plenty of it; they were coursing dogs, and needed room to run. There was nothing like that here.

  Still, it didn’t keep Ivan from trying.

  This was, in its way, a very sacred place. The air was thick with the scent of cedar and age, the woods weighed down with years.

  Then, in the distance, a shaft of golden light as broad as a courtyard and bright enough, in the gloom beneath the branches, to dazzle the eye lanced down through the trees, illuminating a very special place indeed.

  He hurried his steps, beginning to feel the press of magic around him. He couldn’t see, taste, or smell it, as a real magician might, but he got the sense of it closing in on him. He needed to discharge it before it found some other outlet. The last thing he needed right now was for The Tradition to decide to “reward” his persecution in its own way. He could just imagine what sort of “way” that would be. With his luck, his brother’s intended bride would come wandering in here to pick berries, discover him, and fall in love.

  And if that happened, he thought with ironic amusement, Father would have every reason to be quite angry. And rightfully so. After all, it was also his job to know The Tradition well enough to keep things like that from happening.

  He stepped out of darkness and into the light. The sun poured down on him like warm honey as he stood beside the spring-fed pool of clear water that was the Heart of Led Belarus.

  This pool of water never froze over, not even in the depth of winter. It was as pure and sweet as water could be, which was hardly a surprise since unicorns drank at it twice a day. And in general—

  “Oh! It is the prince!” The voice was not familiar, but it didn’t need to be. He knew what it was, if not who.

  The words carried an overtone of whinnying, and Sasha braced himself. In a moment, he was overwhelmed by five doe-eyed, adoring female unicorns.

  “Prince Sasha, would you comb my mane?”

  “Prince Sasha, I have this dreadful itch behind my ears.”

  “Oh, Prince, could you please—”

  They pressed in around him, nostrils quivering, horns glowing with magic, all trying to touch him at once.

  Predictably, getting in the way of what he actually needed to do.

  “Ladies, please!” he said, after a moment of being softly jostled and inundated with pleading. “I need to let some magic free! If I don’t, something might happen that you wouldn’t like!”

  They giggled, but backed up. Trotting around to the opposite side of the pool, they lined up, watching him expectantly. He didn’t know what male unicorns were like, but the female ones seemed to have the same intelligence and good sense as any empty-headed young human in the presence of his or her first love. Which was to say, none at all. In fact, he’d seen toddlers with more sense than the unicorns.

  And it made him wonder, how on earth did they reproduce if they were besotted with humans and not their own kind?

  Maybe they didn’t. Maybe new unicorns were spontaneously generated out of something. Nectar and dandelion floss. Honey and milkweed seeds. Spiderwebs and leftover magic. Or maybe the forest spirits created them; some of them were quite mischievous enough to do so.

  Now that he was free of attention, he pulled his flute out of the front of his tunic, made sure that it hadn’t been damaged in his falls, and put it to his lips. Music was how he called on the magic that The Tradition packed around him, And while he couldn’t say that he controlled it, he certainly guided it.

  He sensed the magic flowing from the first note. Using him as a conduit, and the music as direction, it poured out over this place that was somehow integral to all of his Kingdom.

  Bring us Luck, he urged the magic. Give us the reddest cherries, the juiciest apples, the sweetest berries. Make all the nuts sound and savory. Let the cattle and sheep, the goats and the horses, the donkeys and swine and fowl of all sorts bring forth their young in ease and health and abundance. Let the land flow with milk and
honey. Let all things flourish…yes, even unicorns….

  He almost heard the magic reply in agreement. It was as if there were something just on the edge of hearing that said, But of course! The Fool is the Luck of the Land!

  And the magic stopped looming over him like a wave about to break, and flowed off to make all things in Led Belarus as bucolic as an illumination in a manuscript.

  Meanwhile the unicorns sighed and gazed at him with undisguised longing, their eyes growing moist and soulful as he played. He suppressed a chuckle; it didn’t do to laugh when you were playing a flute. It would have been nice if he could have turned their passions toward a more appropriate species, but he knew better than to charge the magic with that task. He was no mage, and anything subtle would almost certainly backfire on him.

  Now there was one more thing he had to do. With the last of the magic waiting to be released, the tone of his song grew dark. The unicorns shivered, and even the golden sunlight dimmed a little.

  In his way, he was not only the Luck of the Land, he was its protector.

  Demons, and monsters, and night-walking vampires, all things that would harm my land and my people, hear now my music and flee from this Kingdom—

  Again, the simplest of commands, and one with no ambiguity. Whatever was evil was ordered to run to the other side of the borders. When he was not riding about the Kingdom to apply the Luck and the magic to specific problems, he did this as often as twice a week, never going more than a month before having to come to this pool to discharge built-up magic. He’d been doing this roughly since he was twelve. No one had taught him, it had just all felt right. He really wished with all his heart he could have had some more guidance on this but the truth was, magicians never came here since he’d begun discharging the built-up power on his own.

  Sometimes he wondered if maybe he was driving all magicians away, not just the ones with bad intentions.

  Ah well, that was unlikely, since this actually didn’t drive all evil things away, just the weakest, the easiest to influence. For others…well, others needed to be dealt with directly.

  He sensed the last of the power go; it was like being clutched in a fist and suddenly sensing the fist relax.

  He ended the tune, and the unicorns sighed in unison.

  Then surged back around him. “Prince Sasha, Prince Sasha, would you—” Nudging and cajoling, they begged for his attention. And soft-hearted as he was, he just couldn’t tell them no.

  Well, he wouldn’t be leaving here any time soon. With a rueful sigh, he pushed one of them aside and made his way to a tiny hut built just outside that circle of golden light, a hut so artfully hidden that even he, who had built it, had a hard time spotting it.

  He went inside and came out with a pair of currying brushes and a comb, and as soon as they saw these implements, the unicorns gasped with happiness. Whether they were familiar to this spot or strangers, they all seemed to understand, by some kind of arcane migration of thought, what lengths he would go to in order to make them happy.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon brushing and combing them, carefully saving out the mane and tail hairs. Unicorn hair wasn’t quite as valuable as dragon’s blood, but it was potent, and there was a demand for it.

  The unicorns themselves were in ecstasy.

  “Stay with us!” they pleaded, when he was done. “We scarcely see you anymore,” added the one that seemed to be the leader this time. “You used to be here much more often than you are now.”

  He didn’t bother telling her that he was here in their glade far more in the past several months than they thought. Unicorns weren’t good at counting. Or at telling time, either. And their memories weren’t very reliable, sadly enough. Now that he came to think of it, they were rather like dogs—good-natured, overly affectionate, not very bright dogs. The ones whose conversation mostly consisted of “Hey! Hey! Hey!”

  “I’ll stay, but only if one of you go fetch my provisions,” he said. Why not? He didn’t have anywhere he needed to be this evening. Whenever he was thrown out of the house, a basket of food and other needed things would have been left at the head of the path by one of his brothers. This was good, sound sense. If someone were to see him, they would never think to question what one of the Princes were doing with extra food. A Prince could do what he pleased, when he pleased, and had to answer to no one. A servant, on the other hand, might well be stopped and questioned.

  “I’ll go,” said the smallest of the five, and, rearing slightly and pivoting on her hind feet, she shot off like a silver arrow through the shadows under the trees.

  She was back in short order with the basket dangling from her horn.

  He took it from her with thanks, and lifted the napkin to see what his brothers thought was appropriate to keep him from starving.

  Bread, soft cheese to spread on it, dill and onions, and smoked sturgeon. A bone for the dog and honey cake for the unicorns. No, his brothers hadn’t packed this. This could only have come from his mother.

  He smiled, and felt warmth spreading over him. He gave the dog the bone, and set the rest inside the hut.

  “All right, ladies,” he said, getting out his flute again. “You have me for the night. What would you like to hear?”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Well, my Cunning Little Vixen,” said the Sea King, as an errant current sent a little clown fish to thread through his hair, thinking it was an anemone. It realized its mistake a moment later, and darted off to swim down to the garden again. “I have a real challenge for you. I know that something is amiss, but I do not know what it is.”

  Katya ran her hand along the polished edge of the pink coral parapet on which she sat. This was just about the only thing that she missed badly when she went onto the Drylands. Here in the Sea Kingdoms, she was essentially “flighted,” since everyone swam in three dimensions. Once on dry land, she was restricted to her own two feet. She was not alone in this. The King hated that so much that he could scarcely bring himself to poke his head above the surface.

  The two of them rested atop one of the many towers of the Palace, which, besides having a view as far as the obscuring nature of the water would allow, meant that no one could possibly eavesdrop on them. This was a wise precaution considering what it was that Katya actually did for her father.

  It was not always easy being the youngest of fourteen children, but there were great advantages to the position if you were of an observant nature, and Katya was. You watched how people with bonds of affection acted toward one another. You saw how other people would try to use or intrude on those bonds. When your family was important, you saw every possible manner of exploiter turn up and attempt to use them.

  You watched your siblings fall for some gambits, make mistakes, have to repair them. You saw your parents forced to fix the ones that your siblings themselves could not save.

  You were a child, considered insignificant, safe to ignore by those outside the family. And by the time you were old enough to be significant, to be used yourself, you knew all of the tricks.

  The Sea King’s brood was enormous, even by Drylander standards. Seven sons and seven daughters, one for every year, until both the King and Queen had decided that any more would stress the capacity of the Palace itself, not to mention the ingenuity of their father in finding places for them. Eventually, for the major positions, he had decided to mirror his offspring; similar duties, different titles. And being a creature of the Fey, of the Sea, and not nearly as bound in these things by The Tradition as mortals, he elected to mirror the boys against the girls. Each of the daughters was being trained, groomed, and nurtured toward the same sorts of lives as the sons. Take Raisa, the eldest. Like Mischa, she was a warrior. Unlike Mischa, she was not apt at tactical thinking, but her combat skills were exquisite. Fighting in the Sea was not nearly so driven by power and bulk as it was by finesse and quickness. So she was training as the King’s Champion, a Traditional role with a lot of the same Traditional magic behind it as a Godmother�
��s Champion, and she in turn handled the combat training of exceptional individual fighters.

  Tasha was training as a Sorceress, Tanya as her father’s Seneschal, and Galya as his…distraction. Among the brothers, middle son Yerik was the male counterpart to Tasha; Vitenka hard at work already as the Steward—at the moment, sisters Svetlana and Inna were not sure what they wanted to do, but given their bent for diplomacy, Katya foresaw both of them happily making alliance marriages, so that they could go exert their influence in another of the Sea Kingdoms. Which was also what Leonide might do. The highly amusing analog to Galya was the other sort of distraction, the irritating kind—seventh son Fabi had virtually leaped into his Traditional role of the Wise Fool. Fortunately for Fabi, the Tradition of the Wise Fool was not so strong nor demanding in the tales beneath the waves as it was on Dry Land. It allowed him the luxury of being the artistic sort of Fool, the dreamy kind, whose wit was admired as well as just barbed enough to serve as a correction. Fabi was a poet, and a good one. He was, Katya thought, entirely in love with words. In a way, she pitied the girls who yearned after him; they could never, ever compete with poetry to claim his heart.

  There was no analogous position to Wise Fool for a seventh daughter, for which Katya was very grateful. Like the rest of her siblings who were not “destined” for a particular life, she had been able to choose, with her father’s guidance, what it was that she wanted to do.

  It had not been the most obvious choice and, in fact, had she not been blessed with a very particular sort of magical ability, it probably would not have been possible.

  “Your magic is still as strong as ever?” the King asked his daughter. “You still have no difficulty?”

  “Stronger and easier to wield, Father,” she said with confidence. There were, of course, always doubts when one first came into a magic. It could leave, or change, or fade instead of strengthening. But once one passed the magically significant milestone of the twenty-first birthday, as Katya finally had, it was generally stabilized for good and all.