Hart's Hope

"Youth," Orem whispered.

Beauty smiled. Orem understood. Hadn't Gallowglass warned him? He had gone too far; he had told her who he was; he was bound. She could not destroy his gift, but she could turn him in upon himself, where he could do her no more harm.

"Always you," she said to him. "I should have known the Sisters would betray me. Did you join them again? No matter. In another week I'll separate them. And you, Little King, you'll be here to watch my work. You know at last how it's done, I think. Only you were stupid enough to take so long to guess the price."

"Do you want to hear a story, Papa?" asked the child.

He would have killed her with his hands, except the guards had him, and carried him away from the son who was his life, away from the frozen smile of his wife.

24

The Lesser Donjon

How the Little King decided to help with the death of his son.

Torture You were outside the city when they carried him to prison, Palicrovol. Your armies were gathering at Back Gate, where the towers were fewest, as if the towers meant anything. As they brought Orem up the Long Walk to Corner Castle he could see your ba

But you delayed, and gathered your armies, and waited, and waited, while others took the only path, the impossible path, the hopeless path to bring her down before she was unassailable again. You could have stopped her, Palicrovol, but once again it was your son who saved you. Think of that, too, before you slay him for daring to sit upon your throne.

They kept him in the Little Donjon, and the keepers there perfunctorily tortured him, because that was what prisoners were sent there for. He wondered as they pulled his arms from his sockets if this was what had made the man scream; it did not make Orem scream. Was it the suffocation? Needles in the soles of his feet? The binding of the testicles? The broken glass forced into his mouth that cut his tongue and filled his mouth with blood that he dared not swallow—was that what broke the other man? It did not break Orem.

For he did not dwell inside himself now. He dwelt in the body of a year-old child whose mind was five times that age, whose heart was bright, whose life was all rejoicing; Orem lived in Youth, and only watched his own agony from a distance, almost unconcerned. He had once drawn a sword through his own throat, he remembered. But the pain of that had been erased. All the pain was gone, was locked away somewhere and he could not remember where. Only the child's kiss on his lips, only the small arms around his neck. I never knew how a father loved a child until now. How did my father find the strength to ride away from the House of God and leave me? And when the pain was worst, Orem dwelt again with his father, and was four again, and saw the world from his father's shoulders, gripping the golden hair of his father's head as the world bounced up and down.

It was his comfort then, that Avonap had been his father. What if Orem had learned fatherhood from you, Palicrovol? He would have thought then that fathers do not love their sons. He would think that a father is a King, and decrees a man's death because he usurped his place. And then, when he is told that the usurper was his son, the King doubles the reward for his capture, for now he knows his son is guilty of incest as well as treason. How long would Orem have lived in Corner Castle, Palicrovol, if he had learned fatherhood from you? Not long enough to save your life, I think.

Urubugala On the sixth day Urubugala came to the Lesser Donjon. It had all been a mistake, he said. Orem was not supposed to be tortured; the Queen sent her apologies.

"Listen to me," said Urubugala. "Of course she ordered it. But today it stops because tomorrow is the day she means to kill your son."

Orem turned his face away.

"She can't hear us—you saw to that, she has no Searching Eye now. There's a way, only one way that we can stop her, but with your help it can work."

"There's no way," said Orem. "She's bound me. I can't get my power outside myself."

"I know she bound you," Urubugala said. "I taught her how."

"You taught her!"

"She came to me in terror as you savaged her and tore it all from her and she forced me to tell her how to bind you."

"She forced you not at all," Orem said. "I had freed you first, before I ever set myself against her."

Urubugala shrugged. "Then she didn't force me. If I hadn't taught her how to bind you, then she would have had to kill you to save herself. So you owe your life to me."

"I don't want my life," said Orem. "My son is going to die."

"Yes. Tomorrow," said Urubugala, brutally. "Your son has no hope, he never had hope, and Beauty warned you not to love him. We all warned you not to love him, but you did, for Hart knows what reason. How can we undo that? You chose it yourself, Little King. But there's still a way that when Queen Beauty kills your son she'll destroy herself as well. Listen, Little King. You know who I really am; can you doubt that I know what's possible and what is not? The Queen will do the rites that put her power into the child. All that she is she'll take out of herself and put in him. And in the moment that the Passage is complete, she'll cut him and drink the living blood, and through the blood receive back all herself, a hundred thousandfold increased."

In vain Orem cried out and buried himself in the bed, to shut the vision from his mind.

"Little King, if you do the rites along with her, but secretly, so she ca

Orem heard, though he did not want to hear; he thought though he did not want to think. "No," he whispered.

"If Youth is dead, what is the rest of it to me?"

"Doesn't it matter to you that you're the only one in the world with the power to stop her? That the gods themselves are at your mercy? Why do you think they brought you here? Why do you think that you're alive at all?"

Orem rolled over, looked at the dwarf eye to eye, inches away at the edge of the bed. "I don't know why I'm alive," he softly said. "Once I thought I was myself, just myself, free to make what I liked of my life. But now I know from my conception on I've never been myself, but just a tool. As Beauty brought forth a daughter and a son to use for tools, so God and the Hart and the Sisters brought me forth. How are they different? If my son is not to be saved from the Queen, I at least can save myself from the gods."

He looked into Urubugala's eyes, waiting for the argument. But it did not come. The dwarf's eyes filmed over with tears. "You dreamed of freedom, did you?" he whispered. "So have I, for three hundred years. But you're not the only one who'll pay a price for Beauty's end. Beauty's power has sustained the four of us for centuries. Weasel, Craven, Palicrovol himself, and me. When her power goes, what sustains us then?"

Orem had thought that Weasel would simply become Enziquelvinisensee Evelvenin again. As she had been on her wedding night. It had not occurred to him that the intervening years would also be restored.

"And yet," said Urubugala, "we'll gladly pay that price."