Yes. He blew the bug off his arm. They ever try touching you?
Kings can do no wrong, they keep telling me. Helbah says not when we don't let them.
They think about it, though, don't they?
Yes.
You tell Helbah?
I have to. It's my job. He considered that, not liking it.
Doesn't seem right. We've thought to each other since we were children. Almost since we first met.
Yes, but Helbah doesn't do anything to them. She says all boys daydream. Kings have to be watched because kings can get away with more.
Not with Helbah they can't, he thought, remembering his ways.
Or with me watching them.
Glow, now that Glint and Merlain have each other and you and I have each other, I have to ask you something.
About Zady?
Yes.
She's evil, Charles. Can't you remember when you were little? You and Merlain?
A little. She controlled us, all right. It was fun stealing and it was fun doing naughty things. Golly, but it was fun! She never let us feel guilt.
That's what she would do to the kings.
She did when they were younger. They as much as my sister and I. Why didn't she now?
I don't know, Charles. I'm as puzzled as Helbah.
Could it be that she's changed? After all, I did cut her head off. I deflated her old body with my father's sword and dipped you into her blood and disenchanted you.
You broke the spell, Charles. But no, my love, I don't think she can have changed. Witches' natures don't change.
You feel that too, then. What about my father? He acted strange.
There was something, Glow mused. I would like to have read his mind.
Me too. But it wouldn't have been proper.
In this case? Even for a son?
I've wondered too. He could be under a spell. Wouldn't Helbah know about it?
It depends on the spell, but don't spells show? Besides, if Zady got to Kelvin—
She could, he realized, wearing an invisibility cloak.
Why would she want to, Charles?
She used to do things just to be malignant. She would have killed my sister if Father hadn't stopped her.
Her thoughts flickered through scenes of incredible cruelty. All of us, I think.
Probably, though you she might have kept a sword.
That wasn't living, Charles, that was suspension.
She tormented Father first, he remembered with agony. Told him she could make Merlain like herself. She offered to save her life and do that.
But your father refused. He knew her nature then.
Yes, and he didn't know he could save Merlain until his spanner boots and the magic gauntlets acted. They saved her, I guess, as much as he.
But he's the hero. He's the one in the prophecy. Mouvar's prophecy.
Yes, and he's never liked it. He never wanted it.
Yet he's the hero. Charles, could it be—
That it's he who's changed? That she changed him or is changing him?
Could it, Charles?
I'm afraid it could, love, he thought, and dug his fingernails painfully hard into the bark of the unprotesting tree.
CHAPTER 8
Gather by the River
Zady watched the image again. "I have just begun to torment you, you miserable excuse for a hero," she said. "The seed is growing, and it has many ways to manifest. I shall savor them all, and so shall you, my innocent lout. But you will not enjoy it the way I do."
Kelvin was surprised that his own feet had brought him here. It was almost as though he were wearing the spanner boots again. Somehow he had walked to this beautiful bend in the river concealed by fruiting bushes and flowering trees. He was breathing the good sweet river air, redolent of mud and grass and sand. It had rained and the puddles were reflecting blue sky and treetops and...
A face. A beautiful woman's face framed by long red hair that made a perfect setting for eyes so green and bright and all-compelling. He wanted to reach out for that woman, and clasp her and hold her to him. She was there in the mud puddle and then she was there in his arms and there was everything and nothing at all that he could do about it. Such an experience as he was about to enjoy was going to cost him everything he owned and all he had accomplished, but none of that mattered. He stretched his lips to her pulsing red lips, they touched, and he tasted—
Fish! Dry, smelly fish!
He choked, sitting up in bed.
A young girl, almost as beautiful as the one he had been dreaming of, stood at the side of his bed. It was really his bed, in his bedroom, in his cottage. Sunlight streamed through the window onto the impish face of his niece. He remembered how he had seen her legs bare, clothed only in mud and not much of that, and her greenbriar shirt plastered to her body, so that it might as well have been transparent. How suddenly he had seen her change from boyish to womanish, in his awareness!
"Good morning, Uncle. Aunt Heln said I should come in and wake you. She said you were going to sleep away the day. That's right, isn't it?"
Kelvin rubbed his mouth, shuddering. "What's that behind your back, Kathy?"
"Behind my back? Why, nothing, Uncle. Nothing except my pretty little behind. You know what St. Helens says—behind every pretty girl there's a pretty—"
"Young lady, don't you lie to me!" He spoke harshly to cover up his guilty thoughts about that very part of her anatomy. She was his young niece, after all! "Don't get impudent, either!"
"Oh, Uncle, you're such a grouch!" Kathy Jon reached down beside the bed and lifted up a large, ugly, stiff trass with opened mouth. The fishodermist had mounted it to look as alive as possible.
"That's very nice, Kathy, but what are you doing here?" Try as he might, Kelvin couldn't even remember last evening. After the announcement ceremony at the twin palaces they had gone to the wine house to celebrate, and—
"You said to show you when it was ready. As soon as it was ready, remember?"
"Of course I remember," he lied. Somehow he hadn't used to be able to lie at all. Much had changed for him in recent years. Age and wisdom come to all mortals—especially age.
"Well, Uncle Kelvin," Kathy said, putting her shapely bottom into the nearest chair, "you said bring it over and we'll take it around together. Remember?"
Oddly, he did, and yet it had been as though the little impromptu celebration was elsewhere. They had been celebrating the fish and his daughter's and son's marriages, and—
He sat up in bed, startled by where his whirly head had taken him. He should never drink wine, especially as much wine as he had evidently taken! Everything was so mixed-up he hardly recalled anything in the order in which it had happened.
"Kathy," he said, motioning, "out! I'll get dressed and meet you and Heln for breakfast. Take the fish with you."
Kathy impolitely stuck her tongue out, rose, and exited, fish under arm.
He stared after her. Had she wiggled her pert bottom provocatively as she went out, or had he imagined it? If she had, what was she doing, trying to vamp her uncle? If she hadn't, why had he seemed to see it? Neither notion was acceptable. It must have been a trick of the light.
Kelvin tried to get his thoughts in order as he dressed. He still wasn't used to the nearly new body Helbah had in effect made for him. All that running around the track had been so difficult! He couldn't believe the young firmness, and with it, to his surprise, an increased overloading of a younger man's maturing desires. Last night he had wanted a woman, and it hadn't been Heln. Unbelievingly he recalled the circumstances...
St. Helens, looking so much older than he should have, potbellied, wheezing as he reached across his reserved table. Truly he needed to reduce. Less food, less wine, more hugging from that attractive bar wench. Imagine her interested in this fat old phony, even wanting to marry him! But almost everyone felt that his father-in-law had charm; somehow he, Kelvin, and sometimes he thought Heln, were the exceptions. If the man had staye
d with her mother and been a proper father to her, then very possibly the both of them would have felt differently.
"Kelvin!"
He turned at the sharp reprimand, seeing Heln in her housewifely shape and knowing that she had seen him staring at the younger woman, unavoidably comparing her firm arms and legs and quite oversized bosom to his wife's. Being his wife, she knew how he thought. Getting his hero's shape in a manner of days had been great for him, but had done nothing at all for her figure. Years of preparing fattening meals to please her husband and then trying to eat a proportion away from him had taken their toll. Maybe she should have joined him in those three hellish days of exercise.
"Uh, dear, I was just, uh, listening to your father." Oops, a lie, first thing. Heln knew as well as he that he never willingly listened to her father.
"I can see that," she said coldly, demanding with her tone that he look at her. Jealous she had never been, but then he had never given her an excuse. All women had the potential to be jealous, he had heard.
He gave Heln his full husbandly attention, clouded just a bit by the wine he had been drinking. "Sit down, dear. I'm certain you'll find this interesting."
"I'm certain," Heln said. She pulled up a chair, her eyes daring Kelvin to stare into that abundant cleavage across the table from them. Kelvin focused on an irregular stain on the tablecloth and set his face in the I'm-really-interested expression. It was a pose he suspected all married men had to learn eventually to insure their own lives and marriages.
True to form, St. Helens talked on while Nellie appeared to give him all her attention. When she shifted her position her blouse gaped wider and wider, and inevitably Kelvin's attention wandered.
"Kelvin," Heln said icily, "I think I'd like a glass of wine."
"Huh? What? Oh, yes." He wrenched his eyes away from enchanting depths. "I was just about to suggest that."
"Oh, I'll get it, Mrs. Hackleberry!" Nellie smiled, stood up, and picked up her tray. "It's what I get paid for."
"And for making things pretty," Kelvin said. Damn, he hadn't intended to say anything like that! It had just slipped out, as thoughts had been doing lately.
"Oh? I had thought perhaps she got paid for something else," Heln said. This time the word "icy" would not suffice to describe the chill.
"It's her big tits," St. Helens said affectionately. "The customers like looking at them."
Nellie smiled wider, lifted the tray higher, and pretended she was going to crown a saint. St. Helens crouched back in pretended alarm, convincing some watchers that she meant it.
"I'll be right back," Nellie said, and left their table.
"She's really very nice," Kelvin said to St. Helens. "When's the announcement?"
"When I can't get out of it," St. Helens said as he had said before. "Not that I want to, of course."
"Then why hesitate?"
"Same reason I should have hesitated more often when I was younger. Marrying is committing."
"More than adventure?" Kelvin was really astonished at the way his words were forming. They seemed to just well up. Almost as though his tongue had a will of its own.
"At least as much as going to war."
"You'd hesitate over that now? You used to be all for it."
"I used to be for glory. I was dumb."
Well, for once St. Helens had said something smart! After all the years he had spent urging Kelvin to fulfill his prophecy! Or was it that his father-in-law was just tired?
"You feel the prophecy will have to be fulfilled?" Kelvin found himself asking. It was a strange thing to be asking under any circumstances, especially of St. Helens.
St. Helens nodded. "I expect. Only I don't feel as certain. I'm not as anxious as I used to be. Things are good now. The last war almost brought disaster."
"Maybe," Kelvin's tongue suggested, "the prophecy will reverse itself."
"You mean like when Kelvinia surrendered to Helbah and the twins, when the Confederation surrendered to the orcs?"
"Sort of. The prophecy says what's to be accomplished, not how it's to be accomplished."
"If you believe in prophecy," Heln said. "Kelvin, you don't."
"I used to say I didn't. I was younger then."
"Who's the enemy—Rotternik or Throod? Be sort of hard to fight a war without mercenaries, wouldn't it?" St. Helens was definitely interested in his suggestion.
"I think—maybe this is wrong, but it does make a bit of sense—it's not the remaining kingdoms so much as something else. Zady, the witch who opposed us, wanted to govern all the kingdoms. Suppose she comes back the way Helbah insists she will. But suppose she's changed so that ruling will be enough for her?"
"You mean you think she's reformed?" Heln asked with wonder. "How can you suggest that, Kelvin? She tried to destroy our daughter, and you, and in fact all of us!"
"I admit it would be a great change. But so much has worked out so differently than we expected."
"Nothing quite that different," St. Helens said.
His father-in-law finished speaking. Nellie brought the wine and placed it before them. As she leaned over, pouring from the bottle, Kelvin had to admit to himself once again that the girl really did have nice jugs. Finding Heln's eyes were glaring at him, he hastily gulped the fermented graplum—or was it plumape? He never could remember!—and found it refreshing. The rest of the conversation drifted or floated by, and the next he knew he was in bed at home and Kathy, his niece, was waking him. There had been that dream, and that fish under his nose, and now he was nearly dressed.
He finished pulling on his bullhide boots, wondering half seriously if he should get out the spanner ones. The spanner boots fit perfectly, and like the gauntlets never seemed to sustain wear, but he felt uncomfortable wearing them. With his spanner boots, courtesy of Mouvar, he might go places he hadn't intended. Thus he might step out in the midst of a casual walk and find himself at a spot he had been thinking about. It was like that dream of finding himself back at the river, only in the dream he hadn't been wearing the spanners or any of his Mouvar gifts.
"Kelvin!" Heln calling to him from the kitchen brought him all the way back. He could smell the aroma of coftea and wafflecakes, though he hadn't expected any. Just what had happened last night at their gathering? Why did he remember lusting after Nellie and that one pointless conversation? Why remember what he himself had said as though it were some sort of revelation?
He stood up from the chair, admired his younger, handsomer self in the mirror, and strode out. Heln, disheveled hair hanging uncombed, worn housedress askew, eyes puffed almost as though from crying, was far from appetizing. He gulped, having hardly ever thought such a thing in their entire married life.
"Well, sit down," she snapped.
He pulled out a chair and put his seat in it. He really felt strange, as though now intoxicated. The wafflecakes were burned, and the coftea was of a darker and more bilious shade of green. Again he had to wonder: just what had happened last night?
"Eat!" she ordered. Definitely he had transgressed in some fashion and she was letting him know it.
"Where's Kathy?"
"Kathy? How should I know? What are you talking about?"
He opened his mouth to say that Kathy was here, then thought about it. His tongue had been getting him into scrapes lately and he was still confused as to what had happened. He thought that she had been there with him, but possibly it was a dream.
"Are you going to eat that or not?" she demanded.
I'll try, he thought. He lifted a forkful of dry wafflecake, then remembered that he normally drenched that with melted butgen and mappmel syrup. He tried. It still wasn't appetizing. Neither, he thought before he could stop himself, was his wife.
"Well, are you just going to look at that all day?"
The wafflecake tasted like ashes drenched with rancid grease and then dipped into a sickeningly sweet syrup. He retched. He tasted the coftea: bile and dirt mixed. He retched some more.
"I'm not sur
prised!" Heln said. "A man your age acting like that! And in public!"
Kelvin decided to grasp the animal by the horn. "Just what did I do last night?"
"You don't remember?"
"Only that we were at the tavern, with your father."
"And his bovine girlfriend. You forgot that?"
Kelvin strained his recollection, but nothing came. He shook his head.
"You don't remember what you did that made even that hussy blush?"
He pushed back the plate, determined not to eat. He must have made a fool of himself, but he honestly couldn't remember. Now he didn't want to. Strange, he'd never been one to overimbibe.
"Where are you going?" Heln asked.
"To change my boots," he said. "Then I'm going for a walk. Alone."
He strode into the bedroom and went right to the closet. He opened the door, pushed back some clothes, and found them waiting. To all appearances they were as fresh and new as the day he had first acquired them. Dragon-leather boots to match the gauntlets on the shelf. To match, not only in appearance, but also in kind.
He pulled off the bullhide boots and pulled on the dragon. They felt much better than other footwear he had worn. It was a delight just to feel his toes in them.
He left the bedroom, ignored Heln's hurt look, and walked outside. Deliberately he thought of the riverbank, held the thought, and stepped.
He was there. The trees and the bushes and the river and leaping fish. As in the dream, or as on the day before.
He breathed the air with its flower and fruit and grass smells, looked at his reflection—now not quite so old, now not so fat—and wondered why he should be here. But then why be elsewhere? This was the place to be—the place to live and be alive.
In the water his reflection rippled. It was he, a middle-aged, well-conditioned man who by some stretch of the imagination could be seen as a hero. He had never wanted to be a hero. His sister Jon had wanted to be—energetic, young Jon. So long ago that had been. They had been so young.
His reflection came clearer. He seemed even younger—almost the age when he had found Heln. No lines in his face. No gray in his hair. So young a man, so inexperienced.