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“No. I’m feeling a bit overstuffed with all this strangeness, and I’m tired of this dismal place and these lamps that are forever being turned up and down by creeping servants I never see. I need to walk in the sunlight. Maybe go riding.”
“Uh… perhaps there are a few more things you should know before we go out…”
Roxa
Once we were outside, she marveled at the green stars and massive lightnings of the Bounded, and called the towers “extraordinary” and “exotic.” This is not to say she was pleasant company. Mostly she complained about her awful robe, and the wind, and the too-large sandals they had given her for shoes, and the black dirt, and all the inadequacies of service in the Blue Tower. But even though I sensed how she was repulsed by many of the deformities in evidence, she never once showed it to those who crowded around us as we walked.
After a short walk, we headed back toward the Blue Tower. As we crossed the commard, a bent old woman with a jaw that bulged out like a bullfrog’s throat dropped to her knees in front of me and kissed the toe of my boots. She wasn’t the first Singlar to have done so that day.
Roxa
“I need to go - ”
“It’s your vile henchmen who brought me here, ‘King’ Gerick, putting a bag over my head and taking me before a horrible man who wore a crown and acted as though he were a king, though he had no kingly ma
“And I would guess you told him who you were and what he could expect from your father if he so much as looked at you.”
Her eyes could have ripped the skin off a rabbit, but her tongue never slowed. “ - and in his most disgustingly impudent ma
“It’s all bound up with a prophecy or an oracle or something like that… ”
I didn’t explain about the Breach or the Lords or why I had come here. I just told her about the Guardian and his corruption, and how I’d come to the Bounded for my own reasons, but gotten caught up in their expectations. As I talked, we started walking again, across the commard and back into the city. It rained a little as we walked, but the air stayed warm and still. Roxa
“Is everyone here a cripple or were they made so by this Guardian?”
“They are as they are,” I said. “You could say this is a world of outcasts, leftovers, ones people in our world would find unacceptable. They weren’t - ”
“And those three monsters came and stole people like these from Leire” - she waved her hand to the growing crowd following us through the dark streets - “frightening everyone to death. Brought them here to live like this, as if this were something better.”
“Vroon and two friends were sent to our world to look for this king. They just thought… Well, they were trying to help, I think. The Bounded is a very new world. They have little experience to - ”
“And then they make a boy their king!”
Having a conversation with Roxa
“I’ve no intention of being their king forever. I just need some information from this Source. The Guardian was in the way.”
“So you’re not going to stay here and sort out the mess you’ve made.”
“As soon as Paulo is well, I’ll find out what I’ve come here to learn. Then I’ve got to go back, get some things straightened out. Make sure some people are… all right… ”
“… and take me back.”
“That, too. But meanwhile, yes, there are some things need doing here, and as I upset the order, I might as well do them. Then they can name someone else to be king if they even need one.”
“So why was I brought here? Do you know what they did to my father? They don’t have any prophecies about driving rightful kings mad or abducting princesses, do they? Whatever my failings, I don’t exactly match what your odd friends were looking for.”
We had come to the commard in front of the Blue Tower again, but here was another mystery laid out right in front of me. “I know what happened to King Evard, and I asked Vroon about it. He swore they had never touched the king. He admitted everything else - taking the other people and taking you.”
I waved toward a set of towers we hadn’t explored yet, and we set out that way. “What did you see on the night your father was attacked?”
Roxa
That scene wasn’t difficult to imagine.
“Papa was sitting on his bed, looking as if someone had hit him on the head, and a man was touching him… arranging him.” Roxa
“Was he the same man you’d seen before? Your mother said you’d seen a threatening man in your apartments.”
Roxa
“When Vroon took you… was the man there, as well?”
“No. I locked myself in Papa’s room, telling everyone I was going to stay there until they believed me. Foolish, I know, but I couldn’t think what else to do. I was so angry and so afraid. Yes, afraid. I’m not a fool; Leiran nobles are not the most forebearing of subjects. If word got out about Papa’s condition, he would have been dead by midnight, and I’d have been married to whichever of the closest contenders lived until dawn. Poor Mama… ”
She inhaled deeply. “Anyway, I fell asleep on Papa’s bed and got waked up by a huge flash of green fire… The dwarf babbled nonsense, and when I told him who I was and threatened to have him flayed, the three horrid creatures dragged me off here like old baggage.” As we rounded a corner and entered the commard once again, she was glaring at me.