The Queen of Attolia (9 page)

His wish was for a wife who chose him, he said. He had no heart for an unwilling wife. The goddess Meridite kissed her son on his black brow and went away.

She spent some time looking for a girl both pretty and well mannered and willing to live in a dark hole but found none. She remembered that a pretty face is not the best indicator of a tractable wife and looked among the ugly girls, but not even an ugly girl would marry a man who was pockmarked, who worked in the dark with spirits and monsters. No father would let his daughter go to such a husband, so Meridite turned back to the pretty girls and looked for one with no father to protect her. Now the prettiest of the girls was the daughter of Callia, who was a widow and a priestess of Proas. You know Proas? Yes, that’s right, the god of green and growing things.

One day, as the girl walked the road between the temple of Proas and her home, the goddess Meridite
saw her. Appearing at a bend in the road, Meridite called out to the girl, and the girl turned. Meridite looked her over carefully and could see no flaw that would make her an unsuitable wife. The goddess held out her hands and took the girl’s. “Beautiful child, can you sing?”

“Yes, Goddess,” Hespira answered.

Meridite was a little cross to be identified as an immortal so readily. She pouted. “You know me?” she said.

“Yes, Goddess,” said Hespira.

“Then you know I have a son?”

“Yes, Goddess.” Hespira knew she had any number of sons and waited to hear which one the goddess spoke of. She was patient. It is the gift of all the followers of Proas, and no doubt she had learned it from her mother. She was also clever. If the goddess had looked beyond Hespira’s beauty, she would have seen this, but she didn’t look.

“Horreon. He’s ill, very likely he will die.” Meridite sighed.

“I am sorry,” said Hespira, though Meridite didn’t seem overly concerned. Meridite only thought it would seem unlikely that she was looking for a wife for her son if he was supposed to be on the verge of death.

“He asked me to find someone to sing to him,” said Meridite. “Will you come?”

One does not refuse a goddess. Hespira agreed but
asked if she might send a message to her mother. Meridite consented. She called a dove to bear the message, but once the bird was out of sight, it dropped to the ground dead, and so the message disappeared.

“Come to my temple first,” said Meridite, and offered Hespira food. She declined. The goddess pouted, and Hespira agreed to have something to drink. When the goddess wasn’t looking, she carefully tipped the drink into the basket she carried. Then, quite cheerful, Meridite took Hespira down into the mountain along the twisting black caves in total darkness. Hespira was frightened. She had not reckoned on being so hopelessly lost. She wondered if her mother was looking for her.

Her mother had waited until the end of the day, and as the sun was setting, she had walked the road between the temple and her home, calling her daughter’s name. When there was no answer, she had gone from door to door, asking at each house. The people there could only shake their heads and say that they hadn’t seen the girl.

Meridite, confident that the drink she had given Hespira would leave her ready to fall in love with Horreon when she saw him, gave up any pretense that he was ill. Her son had wanted a willing wife, and lo, Meridite had made one willing. She smiled in the darkness, pleased with her gift to her son.

She brought the girl to the edge of the cave where the forge was and left her. Suddenly alone in the dark, Hespira stopped at the entrance and stood looking into
the space before her. The cave was empty of minions. There were no spirits; the fire was quiet; the chained monster slept curled at Horreon’s feet. Horreon himself sat on the stones at the lip of the forge. The fire was dim, and by its light he was gently tapping a bit of metal he had heated. Each time he tapped the metal, sparks flew up into the air. Glowing with their own light, they danced in front of the forge, swinging in circles and dipping in sequence like the dancers at a festival.

“They are lovely,” said Hespira from the entranceway, and Horreon looked up, startled.

“If you have no light, you have come a long way in the dark,” he said. “Are you a shade?”

“No,” said Hespira. “I am a living maid.” She stepped forward, carefully picking her way across the rough ground of the cave floor.

At the sound of her voice the monster by the forge awoke and slunk toward her, his chain rattling out behind him. He was black and the size of a large dog, with leathery black wings that whispered as they dragged behind him and claws that scrabbled against the stone beneath him. Hespira hesitated. Surely Horreon could have no reputation as an armorer if all of his customers were eaten. Bravely she held one hand forward as she would to a strange dog, and the bat-winged creature lifted its head and a forked tongue licked out once and then twice to brush her skin before the monster turned back to the forge and lay down
again while Horreon looked on.

“You wish armor for your lover or your brother?” he asked.

“No,” said Hespira. “Your mother brought me.”

Horreon scowled suddenly, his brows drawing down, and Hespira’s heart quailed.

“And why did my mother bring you?” Horreon asked.

“She said you had asked for someone to sing to you,” Hespira answered.

Horreon still looked suspicious, but he scowled less.

“Sing, then,” he said gruffly.

Hespira stopped in the middle of the floor. After a moment she opened her mouth and sang the nanny song about the boy who was rude and got not and the boy who was good and got much.

Horreon grunted. “Forgive me my rudeness,” he said.

“I may,” Hespira said.

Horreon looked her over, reevaluating what he saw. “When might you forgive me?” he asked.

“When I have a chair to sit in, and a pillow,” said Hespira, “and light to see with whom I speak.”

Horreon laughed. It was a rumble in his chest that Hespira didn’t at first recognize. Then the armorer stood and bowed and offered her his arm, and together they stepped across the cave to a stair and door that led to a room lit with lamps where there was a single chair.

“No pillow,” Hespira pointed out.

Horreon stuck his head out the door and bellowed in a voice that seemed likely to split the stone walls around them,
“A pillow!”
and a moment later he reached into the hallway and pulled back an embroidered pillow. He closed the door, then saw Hespira’s look of reproach and opened it again to thank whoever or whatever lingered in the hall. Horreon brought the pillow and placed it in the back of the chair, then offered the chair to Hespira. She sat. Horreon sat at her feet, and they smiled at each other.

Callia searched and found no sign of her daughter. Finally she went to the temple of her god and made a sacrifice and begged him to tell her what had become of Hespira. The god sent her into the forest to await an answer. There she saw the trees twisting, their branches dipping and reaching like hands passing a burden until finally the dead dove dropped at her feet. She bent and collected the message from its leg and knew where Hespira had gone. She went to the caves in the Hephestial Mountain and searched through them for Horreon’s forge, but mortals cannot find the forge without a guide, and she had none. She wandered through the darkness bearing a small lamp and calling her daughter. She could hear Hespira singing somewhere in the dark, but the sound of her voice was carried through the caverns and gave her no direction. Her daughter, in the rooms with Horreon, could not hear
her calling. Horreon heard and for a moment was silent. Hespira asked him what was the matter.

“Nothing,” he said. Already he was unable to bear parting with Hespira, right or wrong. Reluctantly he sent the shades to drive her mother away. Terrified, the woman fled. Stumbling out of the caves and falling to the ground in the moonlight, she sobbed for her lost child. She went back to the temple of her god and sacrificed again, begging him to restore her daughter, but he answered that the gods could not bicker over what befell mortals. This was not a helpful response, but not unexpected either. Hespira’s mother pointed out that she was not any mortal; she was his priestess and surely deserved his protection. Proas only reminded her that as his priestess she had gifts that she might use to address the difficulty herself.

Hespira’s mother went away and waited as the long, cold winter passed. Horreon and Hespira were happy together in the dim light under the mountain. Hespira was unaware of time passing, thinking that she spent an evening there in the room by the forge, but Horreon knew. Hiding it from Hespira, he fretted. Already he loved her as he had never loved anything in his life. His father had been a cold man, jealous of his son. His mother granted his wishes from time to time, but otherwise he had rarely seen her. All his life he had known the forge and the colors of hot metal and little else. Now he wanted Hespira and no one and nothing else.

Hespira told him stories of the world, stories of kings and queens in their palaces, plain stories about her neighbors bickering over missing chickens and the disappearing melons from one neighbor’s garden, ordinary things that he soaked up like the sunshine. She sang to him, and he listened, content.

In the springtime Hespira’s mother wrapped her head in a shawl and bent her back under a tray of seedlings and came to Meridite’s temple here in this valley. It was the favorite of Meridite, graceful in its proportions, protected from the wind, with a forecourt surrounded by a garden almost as lovely as the gardens around the temple of Proas. Hespira’s mother came as a supplicant and offered to add her seedlings to the garden. She planted them carefully around the base of the temple, the first of the vines that grow here now. She had nurtured them from fall through the winter and invested them with the gift of growing that she had from Proas. The vines, when they were planted, quickly grew, and the tiny rootlets clung to the temple walls and slipped between the stones to loosen the mortar. When Meridite saw the damage they were doing, she ordered her priests to pull them down. But the priests could not, and the vines grew higher. The facing stones began to fall, and Meridite came to blast the vines herself and realized she could not overcome the gift of Proas.

Irked, she went to Proas and demanded he remove the vines, but Proas declined. They were none of his
doing, the vines on Meridite’s favorite temple. She must find the cause if she wanted a solution. So Meridite sought out the priestess of Proas and commanded her to remove the vines, but the priestess told the goddess the vines would die when her daughter was returned to her.

Meridite was much taken aback. Mortals do not challenge the gods. Only once had a mortal dared and he’d been driven insane for his insolence.

“Your daughter?” Meridite couldn’t guess whom she meant.

“Hespira,” said the mother.

The goddess’s mouth opened in an O of surprise. “That lovely girl,” she said. “She’s very happy, you know,” said Meridite, hoping to placate the woman.

“Then I hope you will be happy with your shattered temple,” said the priestess, and turned her back on the goddess to go back through her doorway.

“Dear, dear,” said Meridite. She loved her son, but she loved her temple more.

“Come out again, you wretched woman,” said the goddess, “and we will go collect her together.” So the goddess and the girl’s mother went to the caves of the Hephestial Mountain.

In a pool of light cast by a lamp, Horreon sat on a footstool listening to Hespira sing. She sang about the rain dropping in the spring and the grass greening, and Horreon bowed his head. “Would you miss the rain?”
he asked in a low voice.

“Yes,” said Hespira.

“And the sun?”

“Yes,” said Hespira.

“Will you leave me to return to the sun and the rain?”

“No,” she answered. “I will stay.”

Horreon took her in his arms. Her head lay on his shoulder, and he cupped it with one large hand the way a mother cradles her child and knew that he could not keep her.

“My mother brought you,” he said.

“I chose to come,” said Hespira.

“Did she bring you here from your home, or did she take you to her temple first?”

“She brought me to her temple first.”

“And did you eat there?”

“No,” said Hespira, smiling into his shoulder that he would think her foolish enough to eat at his mother’s table.

Horreon didn’t ask if she drank anything. He couldn’t bear to ask and hear the answer, and he saw no need of it.

“Come,” he said, and led Hespira through the caverns to the cave that opened onto the mountainside.

There they met the goddess and Hespira’s mother. Hespira’s mother ran to her, taking her daughter in her arms. Horreon looked away. He released Hespira’s
hand, but she clung to his.

“Did you worry?” she asked her mother.

“It is a year you have been gone,” her mother told her.

“It was an evening, no more,” protested Hespira. She turned to look at Horreon, and he looked down in shame.

He said, “This close to the Sacred Mountain, time ebbs and flows. A current can carry you forward a year in an eye blink if you choose.”

“And you chose?” Hespira accused, and Horreon nodded. He’d meant to carry her forward a hundred years, out of the reach of her mother forever, but had changed his mind.

“Didn’t she suit you?” Meridite said. Looking at the girl carefully for the first time, she saw that she was not just pretty, she was clever. “Who wants a clever girl? “Just as well,” said Meridite, “that her mother wants her back.”

“She suited too well, Mother,” said Horreon, and Meridite was startled to see that he was angry and that he was angry at her.

“You were bringing her back,” the goddess said.

“I was letting her go,” said Horreon, and he turned back toward his cave, but Hespira still held him.

“Well, if you like her, keep her,” Meridite snapped. “What’s one temple to me? Just because it is my favorite, don’t think I can’t do without it.”

“I asked for a woman who chose to be my wife,” said Horreon.