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Leander expected nothing less at this point, but covered his fear with a blank face. “It seemed the best plan.”
“Did it now? And I see you have brought the poor little bird with you. All the masks off, then?” His eyes did not blink, nor shift to Aerie even for a moment. She was nothing to him; she didn’t matter.
“If the derivative of a Prince is set to zero, the kingdom survives,” Leander whispered.
“What nonsense are you spouting, boy? Did that foul Witch find you at last? She was never worth the price of her bedding. A pity the fire could not be extended indefinitely. Executions must always be handled personally; remember that, when you are King, my son.”
“I will not be King. I will kill you here where you lie for what you have done to my mother’s people, for what you have made me do to countless others like her when the men rode out under white flags.”
The King laughed, low and hooting. “Oh, my son, my son. How do you think I became King? I, too, cut out my father’s heart while he slept…”
HIS FACE WAS SO FAT ON THE PILLOW. LIKE A SLAB of meat on a white tablecloth, all spidery red blood vessels and swollen nose. He hadn’t slept in the same bed with my mother for years—but then, no one did. I think I would have actually preferred it if she had had a lover. It would have meant she was human. But she never let anyone between her legs; she spent every night in a shabby old bed in a shabby old tower, and my father slept in the great ebony four-poster bed that was meant for the lord and his lady.
Didn’t you know? My father was never King.
A country Baron at best—some winters, the pigs and cows slept in the great hall to keep them from keeling over in the frost. The stink of it reached the rafters and hung there like a dung-spattered chandelier. My mother was better than that. I was better than that. I used to watch her, her profile against her window, and wonder how she ever married the sack of onions and pig snouts I called a father. I heard from servants that he wasn’t always so useless. Before my mother shut up her mouth with grief, this was a rich place, and the cows slept in the grass where they belonged.
But things were as they lay. She never said anything. She never said a word. My mother had kept silent as a nun since the day my sister was taken from her.
I was an infant when she vanished from us; I never knew that sister. But her absence stalked the house like a hungry dog. The hole where she had been took up space at our dinner table, it sagged and slumped in the musty air, it ate and drank and breathed down all of our necks.
My other sisters were married off before I could manage arithmetic. I grew up alone in that silent house with nothing but the stinking cows and my mute mother and the hole. Even my father didn’t want to spend his days there; he stayed in the fields directing hay-rolling and goat-breeding until it was dark enough to slip back inside without anyone bothering him. But still, the hole answered the bell when he rang, and he had to scurry to bed with his head down to avoid looking it in the eye.
I didn’t think anyone would miss him. He was a fool now, feeble as a sheep after shearing, and I was well into manhood, ready to be Baron, hungry for it, tired of the ramshackle place falling down around us, propped up only by a hole in the air, by empty space. Dirt-farming squalor like my father always has a kind of rude health, and I knew if I wanted a Barony, I would have to take it.
I wasn’t even very quiet going up the stairs to his room. I stomped like anything—in that dead house, who would care if one more dead thing turned belly-up by morning? But the hole was there. I could feel it, tugging at my sleeves with sisterly disapproval. If she had been there, the hole sighed sadly, there would have been no silence, and I wouldn’t need to hear my own father’s screaming just to know I was alive. The hole was sorry for me, and I hated it.
But he didn’t scream. It was as easy as cutting meat for a roast. I didn’t even think when I slid the knife into his ox-huge heart. I just did it, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Killing, I thought, should be harder than this. His eyes flapped open, and he gurgled a little, no more than a calf will when you cave in its skull for the summer banquets. He didn’t scream; I wasn’t alive.
But I was Baron.
Mother watched me coming down the stairs, wiping blood on my trousers. She stared, and her mouth was thin and colorless, but she said nothing. She never did.
The Barony was better for my hand, as I knew it would be. The fields gave grain, the trees gave cider, the pigs slept in the penned muck and grew sweet with fat. The dust was swept from every corner of the great hall, and long white banners were hung from the well-scrubbed rafters. Folk came to the Castle again, and there was music and dancing when the summer broke the spring.
The hole never came back.
Finally, it came time to choose a wife. I didn’t really care, but I was told it was the lordly thing to do, and already I was considering how to move myself into a crown the way some men consider how to move themselves into a larger house by the sea. A King has to have a Queen. A Baron has to have a Baroness. So it was that I consulted the family books, oily and filth-stained as they were, and discovered how my mother managed to marry a sack of onions and pig snouts.
In our backward, beer-addled family, a wife is gotten by contest, not courting. There is a belt of gold and jasper, handed down grandmother to granddaughter, and the next lady of the house must fit the belt, or else she cannot sleep in a tower and ignore her husband for twenty years. Yellow-eyed superstition and idiocy will always outlive the family that perpetrates it.
I took the belt from my mother’s waist. She said nothing. She never did.
But when I sent out my summons for likely young women to come and try the belt to their hips, my mother closed herself up in her tower and would not come out, no matter how many sweet-cheeked maids begged her to unbolt the door. From within, she said nothing.
The whole procedure took weeks. They came waltzing up to my door in every conceivable color and manner of dress: rags and bustles, blond and black, velvet and muslin and plain cotton sashed with rope. I slung the gold and jasper around dozens of waists; I fastened it under dozens of blushing cheeks. It slipped off their hips and cinched them till they could not breathe—no one fit the belt; no licit woman lived in all my countryside.
I did what logic dictated. I went up the long, winding stair to my mother’s tower, fingering the belt in my hand, watching the dim light glitter on its dull gems. Faced with the thick oak door and its bronze fittings, I knocked as politely as a suitor.
“Mother,” I said. “The belt fits no one.”
There was no sound from the room.
“Mother,” I said, “I must marry.”
There was no sound from the room.
“Mother,” I said, “the belt fits you.”
