Knot Gneiss (37 page)

The tears flowed down Ida’s face. “So would I,” she whispered.

“I am glad to hear it.”

“You are young, yet you exemplify princely qualities of courage, commitment, and nobility that I fear have similarly spoiled me for my own man, once I find him. I doubt he will be better in such respects than you, and I will be aware of the lack.”

“It is ironic,” he said. “We have nothing but the greatest respect for each other, and this is perhaps our tragedy. To mess up each other’s lives by sowing dissatisfaction.”

“Unfortunately true,” Ida agreed.

Their dialogue lapsed, leaving Wenda to ponder. What each had said was true: they were in key respects ideal for each other. It was too bad they were of different generations, destined for other relationships. Each needed to find a companion of his or her own age.

By noon they crested a hill, and there before them, in the next valley, was the Good Magician’s Castle. It was all downhill from here.

They paused for lunch, relaxing, basking in the near completion of the arduous chore. The Knot radiated so violently that already the morning’s shield of fresh reverse wood was curling.

“Something the Maiden Taiwan said,” Hilarion remarked as he sat beside Wenda. “Could I have been searching for ten years?”

“Yew did run afoul of that forget whorl,” Wenda reminded him.

“I did. I thought it was merely a glancing blow, as it were. But now I am almost beginning to remember.”

Ida came up on his other side. “You remember? That suggests that you are older than you seem.”

“I may be,” he agreed. “I do remember that when I set out to find my betrothee, I invoked a spell to freeze my age, as a matter of convenience. I will revert to my current age, whatever that may be, once my Quest is complete.”

“Assuming that the Maiden Taiwan’s memory is accurate,” Jumper said, “you have been at it for at least a decade, and probably longer. There’s no telling how long a span that forget whorl wiped out.”

“True,” Hilarion agreed. “But I think that dose of forgetting is wearing thin. Perhaps the Knot or its sheathing is affecting it, reversing it.”

“Try standing closer to it, if yew can,” Wenda suggested.

Hilarion did. He got up and stood nervously close to the boulder. “It—it
was
longer,” he said. “Twenty years.”

“But that wood make yew forty,” Wenda said.

“Forty-two. I remember now.”

“Forty-two!” Ida said, startled. “I am forty-one.”

He gazed at her with a dawning surmise. “Is it possible?”

“Yew can readily find out,” Wenda said. “Kiss her.”

“I never thought of you in that way,” Hilarion said to Ida. “I thought you were well outside the age my betrothee had to be. Now I feel almost guilty. But yes, I would like to kiss you, Princess Ida.”

But now Ida demurred. “It still seems far-fetched. I would hate to spoil our compatible relationship by proving that there is no match.”

He considered that, and nodded. “I agree. It is not a worthwhile risk. There needs to be some further indication. We need to believe that it could be the case, before risking the refutation of it.”

“Your memory,” Meryl said. “It came back for your age. Surely you knew the name of your betrothee. Can you remember that?”

Hilarion concentrated. “Yes, it is coming back. An odd name. Nirp, I believe. Adissec Nirp.”

“She must be from a far kingdom,” Jumper said.

“I know of no one by that name,” Ida said sadly. Wenda realized that she had just started to entertain the idea that they might be for each other, only to have it dashed by his further memory.

“I have an idea,” Angela said. “Hilarion went close to the Knot to remember. It is made of old reverse wood, with a sheathing of new reverse wood. Could his memory of the name be reversed?”

The others stared at her. Then Wenda smoothed a place in the dirt and printed out the name, backward, letter by letter. P-R-I-N-C-E-S-S I-D-A. “Princess Ida!”

“It
is
you!” Hilarion cried.

“Then perhaps we should …” Ida said, blushing.

“Oh, yes! To verify.” Ever a man of action, he stepped up to her, gently enfolded her, and kissed her.

There was a coruscation of brilliance from the touching of their lips that radiated out to brighten the scene, warming them all. It intersected Ida’s moon, causing it to radiate a burst of colors. The ground glowed, and the nearby trees, and then the sky itself. It caught Wenda, warming her hollow frontside and to a lesser degree her backside. A giant beating heart formed, scintillating in rainbow colors, enclosing them in the center. Pastel hues coursed through it, making a fog of sparkles. The world faded out, leaving only that picture in the center.

There was the swamp where Princess Ida had lived. A stork flew low, carrying a double load. A stray wind buffeted it, and it almost crashed. It fluttered its wings valiantly and managed to recover elevation. But the content of one of the bundles rolled out and splashed into the water. By the time the stork realized what had happened, and turned back, the baby was gone. The stork had to go on with the one bundle it retained. There was after all a delivery to make on a tight schedule.

That baby was Ida, and she had been rescued by a passing nymph from the adjacent Faun & Nymph Retreat. The nymph took her to the retreat, where the others paused in their ongoing celebrations and clustered around admiringly. They had no memory of ever seeing a baby before, but they instantly adored it. They collected milkweed pods and fed the baby, and swaddled it in warm ferns. Baby care came naturally to them.

As the day ended, the fauns and nymphs settled down for sleep, as they normally did. They left the baby in a comfortable nest with plenty of milk, intending to return to her in the morning.

But fauns and nymphs have no memory of the past. Each day is completely new to them. They completely forgot about the baby.

Fortunately the nearest neighbors were benign water dwellers, the otterbees. One spied the isolated bundle, and investigated. Then the friendly creature, knowing the forgetful nature of nymphs, did what it otter, and took her to its den. There the mama otterbee did what she otter, and dried and swaddled the baby in soft dry leaves. The otters took care of her in the following year, teaching her to swim, then to crawl, then to walk. She was human, so they taught her the human language. They took very good care of her.

When she was a year old, a party from a far island came. Their magic had shown them that the ideal bride for their two-year-old son was here. So they set the little boy, Prince Hilarion, down beside Princess Ida and held a ceremony of betrothal.

“She’s a princess?” the otterbees asked, amazed.

“And a Sorceress,” the party’s seer said. “Be sure she comes to consummate the marriage when she is twenty-one.”

“We will,” the otterbees promised.

The visitors put the two children together and had them kiss, sealing the deal, and there was that coruscation that bathed the swamp in lovely light. By the time it cleared, the prince’s family was gone, and Ida was as she had been before, just another baby. Only now she had a glorious future.

Then a stray forget whorl forged through the swamp, wiping out all memories of the occasion. The otterbees still cared for Ida, but they no longer remembered her destiny.

She grew up into a fine and beautiful young woman. When she was of age, the otterbees told her that it was time for her to seek her fortune, for they were sure she had one. They just couldn’t remember what it was. So she set out, and after many adventures discovered that she was the twin sister of Princess Ivy, daughter of the King of Xanth. She posed for one picture as she settled in to her suite in Castle Roogna. That picture looked exactly like the one the fun house had shown, of Hilarion’s betrothee.

Later she acquired her orbiting planet, Ptero, the connection to all the imagination of existence, and was recognized as a Sorceress. The magic of the planet interfered with pictures, and so there was never another made of Ida as she aged. That was why the fun house lacked any recent picture, and had to use the early one.

But she did not remember the betrothal.

Meanwhile in another part of the heart-shaped picture, Prince Hilarion undertook the considerable training required of a prince. He studied weapons and combat, and letters and literature, and logic and diplomacy. He became the very model of a royal scion. Everyone was proud of him.

When the day for his marriage came, there was just one hitch: his betrothee did not show up. What had gone wrong? So he did what he had to do: he set out to find her.

He searched for some time. He had a brush with a forget whorl—perhaps the same one, meandering through the territory—and it wiped out most of his memory of the search, so that he did not realize it was twenty years instead of one year. This meant that he was looking for and kissing twenty-one-year-old maidens, and not having any success.

Until this moment, when enough of his memory returned to identify his betrothee at last.

The kiss was one minute in one frame, and forty years in another. At last it broke, and the two parties separated. Slowly the heart and colors faded, and the other members of the party resumed breathing.

“You are the One,” Hilarion told Ida. He was now showing his true age. He was a handsome man of forty-two. In fact he looked exactly like the fun house picture.

“I had that impression,” she agreed.

Wenda glanced down at herself. The explosion of love light had melted her clothing and imbued her hollow front with a gentle warm glow.

Then Wenda heard a ticking sound behind her. “The Knot!” she exclaimed. “The love was too much! It is about to blow! Get under cover!”

The others threw themselves behind any cover available. Wenda stood facing the Knot, her arms spread wide, to shield the others to the extent possible. The ticking increased in volume.

Then it blew. The Knot exploded into fragments that blasted the ground, the trees, the sky, and the remains of the floating heart. It piled into Wenda’s frontside, hurling her backward. The landscape darkened with the force of the blast.

When it seemed safe, the others emerged from their refuges. Everything was peppered with embedded specks of petrified wood. Wenda herself was … filled, from face to feet. She had caught the brunt of the detonation.

“Maybe we should have kissed with less force,” Hilarion said. But he did not seem particularly regretful. Ida did not comment, but she looked vibrant.

“You are whole again!” Jumper said. “But the detonation must have reversed it, because you seem to be shapely flesh, not packed petrified sawdust.”

Wenda checked her frontside. It seemed to be so. Her shapely bosom had been restored, and her limbs were rounded and whole. Even her hollow head was now solid, with a fully functional face. Jumper was right: she felt like living flesh, rather than shaped sawdust. How could that be?

“But I have lost the Knot,” she said. “How can I deliver it to the Good Magician?”

“We will go with you to explain,” Hilarion said. “It was my fault it happened.”

“And mine,” Ida said. “We should not have kissed so close to the Knot.”

“We all will go,” Jumper said.

That seemed to be all they could do. The party resumed travel toward the Good Magician’s Castle, pulling the empty wagon. Progress was rapid, without that weight.

The scenery had changed. The trees, bushes and rocks seemed somehow enhanced, as if painted with a brighter brush. They also seemed to be making sounds, or at least the colors felt audible. Some were loud, some soft; some strong and bold, others pale and weak. Wenda even heard the footsteps of running colors. Even the ground was strangely colorful, with its own shades of sounds. But there were shadows of normal ground beyond the rocks and trees. There was also a subdued aura of fading menace, yet nothing tangible. They hadn’t been that way before; what had changed?

Yet the effect was one-sided. The opposite sides were normal. Why were the odd sides all facing the travelers, as if orienting malignantly on them?

“The Knot!” Meryl said. “It exploded and sent tiny fragments into everything nearby. But only on the surfaces that were line of sight.”

That was it, of course. Every surface in sight of the Knot when it detonated had been sprayed with petrified reverse-wood powder.

Now that they understood the pattern, it was rather pretty. The near side of everything scintillated with slight malice. Diluted like this, it wasn’t really scary, but merely tangy.

Wenda realized that when she looked at a peppered surface, she saw reversed colors. When she listened to it, she heard those colors. They were not speaking or singing, just sounding off. The reversal had extended into another sense. That was curious.

“I think I understand,” Jumper said, divining her thought. “The Knot exploded and spread its powder right after the kiss.” He did not need to specify which kiss. “So now the two are mixed on all the surfaces they struck: the love from the kiss, and the malice from the Knot. They must cancel each other out. Except for the competitive interface between them, which generates the colors and sounds. So it is harmless and interesting.”

“My frontside is neutral,” Wenda said, relieved. “It was bathed with the light of the kiss, before getting filled by the exploding Knot.”

“It must be,” Jumper agreed. He eyed it with three or four eyes. “Yes. It is harmless and interesting. Prince Charming should notice.”

That reminded her. “I must dress!”

“I have a spare dress,” Ida said, coming to help put it on Wenda. But in a moment she shook her head. “That is the wrong one; I don’t know how it got in the collection.”

Wenda looked at it. The dress was covered with ads for different things.
EAT AT SLURPEES
,
OLD SPELLS TRADED
,
CURSES ENHANCED
. “What is it?” she asked.

“It is an ad-dress. It consists of assorted ads for things, constantly changing. Some young women like the attention it generates. But it’s not right for you.”

“Not right,” Wenda agreed.

Ida got out another dress. That one made Wenda look like a princess. But of course she was one.