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Oh, don’t be so shocked. Morality makes way for Kings, and the dirt-virtue of cattle farmers is of no interest to me.
There was a shuffling and rustling behind the door. Finally I was finished with her nonsense, her childish tantrums, her hiding like a crab in its scarlet shell. I put my shoulder to the hinges—I was never a weak man, and the bronze bent after only two blows. They bent, creaked, and gave, and my mother was sitting on a bed in the middle of a room filthy with dust, sheets tangled around her, her violet-black dress torn and too small, her red hair matted and tangled, spilling onto the sagging mattress.
On her lap was the hole.
The edges of it crackled and warped in a way I had never seen, a strange silver light that actually rimmed the outli
ne of a long-haired girl, slumped into my mother’s lap. There was nothing there, as though the girl had been ripped out of the air and left but a suggestion of what she might have looked like, what her posture might have been. All I had seen of the hole until that morning was its absence; this thing had weight and heft, weight and heft and light. There was nothing there, but the nothing glinted dully while my mother stroked its shape.
“I made it,” she said, and her voice creaked and groaned, a stuck door pried open. “When he took her, I made it. It was the last magic I ever did.”
“Magic,” I snorted.
“I set it to walk the house as she would have done, to eat and sleep and laugh as she would have done. But as she might have done, it kept coming here, and only came down the staircase to see you grow, and watch you play and frown and sleep.”
“It’s nothing, Mother. It’s less than air.”
She shrugged miserably. “It’s not her, I know that, I’m not mad, but when I sleep, it puts its airy arms around me, and I can almost smell her skin. I miss her. I just miss her. But after you killed your father, I let it stay here.”
I shrugged. “I wanted to be Baron. I won’t apologize for it. Father had let this house go to ruin, and you with it. You only married him for the sake of a gold belt, anyway.”
She glared at me through her ruined curls. “You’ll believe what you want to believe, Ismail. Belts, collars—they only give you a reason to take the woman you wanted all along, without giving her space to speak.”
I looked at the damp-warped floor. Not out of shame, mind you, but because I thought that was what a good son in this situation might do. “The belt fits no one else.”
My mother rested her hand on the hip of the hole, and her face seemed to sag, as if some final thing slid out of it, leaving nothing but a dry shell, a sea snail rolling in the sand. “If you cannot think of a reason not to come breaking down my door proposing a thing which not even a King would dare—”
“Would it be better if I was King, Mother?” I exploded, pushing through the hole onto the bed and grabbing her violet-wrapped shoulders—she was so thin! “If I were King, would you curtsey and put on your ermine and dance at our wedding? You know the family law. Better wedded to me than to this disgusting display of magic tricks, cloistered with it day in and day out! I won’t apologize for my father and I won’t apologize for you. Nothing is gotten in this world except by force—a lifetime in this dead place, where nothing ever happens because the only people who live here are dead, has taught me that!”
She started laughing, hysterical, unhinged as the door to her room. “Yes, yes, if you were King it would be licit; Kings do whatever they please, Kings and their Wizards—no laws for them! They take and take and what does it matter? No one asks the taken; they just forget, they just forget, they disappear and everyone forgets.” She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly canny as a fox in sight of a mouse. “I’ll play this game if you want to play it, Ismail mine, but you have to perform a deed of honor. That’s what young men do when they’re courting, if I remember.”
I let her go gently. Was that all? Bring her roses or a dragon scale from furthest isles and she’d put up no fight? “What would you have me do? Let us get this over with as quickly as possible.”
“Bring me the head and the collar, and whatever other pieces you want to keep, of the Wizard who took your sister.”
Well, killing is easy work. I rose from the bed, and the hole coalesced again where I had been. I bowed to her in as courtly a manner as I have ever managed.
“Lady Iolanthe, I am at your service.”
I did not particularly want to marry my mother, you understand. If another girl had fit the belt I would have had her just as easily. But protocol must be observed when one is of a certain station, and it wouldn’t be so awful, after all, for her to stand at ceremonies and dance at balls. It’s not as if she had ever shared a bed with her last husband, beyond what was necessary for inheritance. I was not happy to go off and kill a Wizard who had done no harm to me, besides being part of an unsavory profession, just so I could make Iolanthe a Baroness twice over, but then, what is happiness? I’m sure I’ve never met the beast.
It is not that we didn’t know where the Wizard who took my sister from us lived—there was not a farm-haggarded soul in the countryside who did not know where Omir rested his staff and vial. But one does not go demanding one’s daughter back from such a man, especially when he is bound to such a King as we were ruled by in those days.
That King’s Palace was surrounded by deep woods whose trunks were bunched and cracked as old women’s spines. The thing itself was close-bordered by two strange-watered rivers, one black and one white. As I crossed the bridges I looked into the current—the black one reflected my face like the side of a dead volcano, glittering in flat shapes between ripples, showing a reasonably handsome young man who was not a Prince, but might be mistaken for one on a particularly sunny day.
The white river showed nothing, sheer and dull as milk.
Not knowing much about how to assassinate when it is not a simple matter of a bedroom and a knife, I applied for an audience and, predictably, was told to wait. I busied myself as best I could, and enjoyed a new kind of life: sleeping in proper rooms for once, eating at proper tables, dressing in proper clothes.
I walked out to look at the rivers every day.
Finally, I was called into the high-ceilinged audience chamber, heralded as Ismail of Barony Baqarah—how strange it was to hear my name intoned by a bored scribe!—and stood before the King and his favorite slave. The King was at his midday meal, slavering at hay in a golden trough, shoving his face full of grass with both hands.
Monstrous. Unnatural. For men to be ruled by an animal. I suppressed the urge to vomit onto the silver-tiled floor.
Sorrel, the Centaur-King of the Eight Kingdoms, looked up at me, his forelegs buckled and kneeling so that he could eat his fill. His chestnut tail flicked at the air. Hay still stuck to his brown beard. “Oh,” he grunted, “it’s you.” Behind him, the Wizard, in ill-fitting blue-brown robes and a heavy iron collar that weighed on him like a penance, looked from the horseman to me with an uncertain gaze.
“It is him, isn’t it, Omir?” the Centaur said, lifting his huge equine form with some difficulty from the trough and clacking his hooves on the tile, keeping his right side always to me, his left in shadow. His brown pelt flowed into pale skin that seemed to rarely see sun and he wore, as you might expect, nothing. There was no throne—how could there be?—but he rested on a pile of rose-colored cushions on a dais, and I suppose for a horse that is as good as a throne.
