Suddenly something heavy knocked him to the ground and a burning pain blossomed in his right cheek, just below his eye. The invisible attacker vanished as quickly as it had come and Tobin blundered out from behind the rack, sobbing with fear and pain.
“What is it, pet?” Nari cried, gathering him into her arms.
Too shaken to answer, he pressed his throbbing cheek against her shoulder as she carried him into the hall.
“Someone strike a light!” she ordered.
“Not on Mourning Night …” the housemaid, Sarilla, said, hovering at her side.
“Then fetch the reserve coals and blow up enough flame to see by. The child’s hurt!”
Tobin curled tightly against her, eyes shut tight. The pain was subsiding to a dull ache, but the shock of the attack still made him tremble. He heard Sarilla return, then the creak of the firepot lid.
“There now, pet, let Nari see.”
Tobin lifted his head and let her turn his cheek toward the dim glow. Mynir and the others stood in a circle around them, looking very worried.
“By the Light, he’s bitten!” the old steward exclaimed. “Go fetch a basin and a clean cloth, girl.” Sarilla hurried off.
Tobin raised a hand to his cheek and felt sticky wetness there.
Nari took the cloth Sarilla fetched and wiped his fingers and cheek. It came away streaked with blood.
“Could it have been one of the hounds, Tobin? Perhaps one was sleeping in the hayrack,” Mynir said anxiously. Dogs couldn’t abide Tobin; they growled and slunk away from him. There were only a few old ones left at the keep now, and Nari wouldn’t let them in the house.
“That’s no dog bite,” Sarilla whispered. “Look, you can see—”
“It was the demon!” Tobin cried. There had been moonlight enough to see that nothing with a proper solid body had been behind that rack with him. “It knocked me down and bit me!”
“Never mind that,” Nari said soothingly, turning the rag to a clean side and sponging away his tears. “Never you mind. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Come to bed now, and Nari will keep that old demon away.”
Tobin could hear the others still whispering to each other as she led him toward the stairs.
“It’s true, what they say!” Sarilla was whimpering. “Who else does it attack like that? Born cursed!”
“That’s enough, girl,” Mynir hissed back. “There’s a cold, lonesome road outside for those who can’t keep their mouths shut.”
Tobin shivered. So, even here, people whispered.
He slept deeply with Nari close beside him. He woke alone, but well tucked in and could tell by the slant of the sun through the shutters that it was midmorning.
Disappointment swept away all the terror of the night before. At the dawn of Sakor’s Day he and Mynir always woke the household to the new year, beating on the shield gong by the shrine. The steward must have done it without him this year and he hadn’t even heard.
He padded barefoot across the cold floor to the small bronze mirror above his washbasin and inspected his cheek. Yes, there it was; a double line of red tooth marks, curved like the outline of an eye. Tobin bit his forearm just hard enough to leave an impression in the skin and saw that the two marks looked very much the same. Tobin looked back at the mirror, staring into his own blue eyes and wondering what sort of invisible body the demon had. Until now it had only been a dark blur he sometimes saw from the corner of his eye. Now he imagined it as one of the goblins in Nari’s bedtime tales—the ones she said looked like a boy burned all over in a fire. A goblin with teeth like his. Was that what had been lurking at the edges of his world all this time?
Tobin glanced nervously around the room and made the warding sign three times over before he felt brave enough to get dressed.
He was sitting on the bed tying the leather lacings over his trouser legs when he heard the door latch lift. He glanced up, expecting Nari.
Instead, his mother stood framed in the doorway with the doll. “I heard Mynir and Cook talking about what happened last night,” she said softly. “You slept late this Sakor’s Day.”
This was the first time in more than year that they’d been alone together. Since that day in the tower.
He couldn’t move. He just sat staring, with the leather lacing biting into his fingers as she walked to him and reached to touch his cheek.
Her hair was combed and plaited today. Her dress was clean and she smelled faintly of flowers. Her fingers were cool and gentle as she smoothed his hair back and examined the swollen flesh around the bite. There were no shadows in her face today that Tobin could see. She just looked sad. Laying the doll aside on the bed, she cradled his face in both hands and kissed him on the brow.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. Then she pushed his left sleeve back and kissed the wisdom mark on his forearm. “We’re living in an ill-starred dream, you and I. I must do better by you, little love. What else do we have but each other?”
“Sarilla says I’m cursed,” Tobin mumbled, undone by such tenderness.
His mother’s eyes narrowed dangerously, but her touch remained gentle. “Sarilla is an ignorant peasant. You mustn’t ever listen to such talk.”
She took up the doll again, then reached for Tobin’s hand. Smiling, she said, “Come, my dears, let’s see what Cook has for our breakfast.”
Chapter 8
Since that strange Sakor’s Day morning, his mother ceased to be a ghost in her own household.
Her first acts were to dismiss Sarilla and then dispatch Mynir to the town to find a suitable replacement. He returned the following day with a quiet, good-natured widow named Tyra who became her serving maid.
Sarilla’s dismissal frightened Tobin. He hadn’t cared much for the girl, but she’d been a part of the household for as long as he could remember. His mother’s dislike of Nari was no secret, and he was terrified that she might send the nurse away, too. But Nari stayed and cared for him as she always had, without any interference.
His mother came downstairs nearly every morning now, properly dressed, with her shining black hair braided or combed in a smooth veil over her shoulders. She even wore some scent that smelled like spring flowers in the meadow. She still spent much of the day sewing dolls by the fire in her bedchamber, but she took time now to look over the accounts with Mynir and came out to the kitchen yard with Cook to meet the farmers and peddlers who called. Tobin came along, too, and was surprised to hear of famine and disease striking in nearby towns. Before now, those were things that always happened far away.
Still, as bright as she was during the day, as soon as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen the light seemed to go out of her, too, and she’d retreat upstairs to the forbidden third floor. This saddened Tobin at first, but he was never tempted to follow. The next morning she would reappear, smiling again.
The demon seemed to come and go with the daylight, too, but it was most active in the dark.
The tooth marks it had left on Tobin’s cheek soon healed and faded, but his terror of it did not. Lying in bed beside Nari each night, Tobin could not rid himself of the image of a wizened black form lurking in the shadows, reaching out with taloned fingers to pinch and pull, its sharp teeth bared to bite again. He kept the covers pulled up to his eyes and learned to drink nothing after supper, so that he wouldn’t have to get up in the dark to use the chamber pot.
The fragile peace with his mother held, and a few weeks later Tobin walked into his toy room to find his mother waiting for him at a new table.
“For our lessons,” his mother explained, waving him to the other chair.
Tobin’s heart sank as he saw the parchments and writing materials. “Father tried to teach me,” he said. “I couldn’t learn.”
A small frown creased her forehead at the mention of his father, but it quickly passed. Dipping a quill into the inkpot, she held it out to him. “Let’s try again, shall we? Perhaps I’ll be a better teacher.”
Still dubious, Tobin took
it and tried to write his name, the only word he knew. She watched him struggle for a few moments, then gently took back the quill.
Tobin sat very still, wondering if there would be an outburst of some sort. Instead, she rose and went to the windowsill, where a row of his little wax and wooden carvings stood in a row. Picking up a fox, she looked back at him. “You made these, didn’t you?”
Tobin nodded.
She examined each of the others: the hawk, the bear, the eagle, a running horse, and the attempt he’d made at modeling Tharin holding a wood-splinter sword.
“Those aren’t my best ones,” he told her shyly. “I give them away.”
“To who?”
He shrugged. “Everyone.” The servants and soldiers had always praised his work and even asked for particular animals. Manies had wanted an otter and Laris a bear. Koni liked birds; in return for an eagle he’d given Tobin one of his sharp little knives and found him soft bits of wood that were easy to shape.
As much as Tobin loved pleasing them all, he always saved his best carvings for his father and Tharin. It had never occurred to him to give one to his mother. He wondered if her feelings were hurt.
“Would you like to have that one?” he asked, pointing to the fox she still held.
She bowed slightly, smiling. “Why, thank you, my lord.”
Returning to her chair, she placed it on the table between them and handed him the quill. “Can you draw this for me?”
Tobin had never thought to draw anything when it was so easy to model them. He looked down at the blank parchment, flicking the feathered end of the quill against his chin. Pulling the shape of something from soft wax was easy; to make the same shape real this way was something else again. He imagined a vixen he’d seen in the meadow one morning and tried to draw a line that would capture the shape of her muzzle and the alert forward set of her ears as she’d hunted mice in the grass. He could see her as clearly as ever in his mind, but try as he might he couldn’t make the pen behave. The crabbed scrawl it drew looked nothing like the fox. Throwing the quill down, he stared down at his ink-stained fingers, defeated again.
“Never mind, love,” his mother told him. “Your carvings are as good as any drawing. I was just curious. But let’s see if we can make your letters easier for you.”
Turning the sheet over, she wrote for a moment, then sanded the page and turned it around for Tobin to see. There, across the top, were three As, written very large. She dipped the pen and gave it to him, then rose to stand behind him. Covering his hand with hers, she guided it to trace the letters she’d drawn, showing him the proper strokes. They went over them several times, and when he tried it alone he found that his own scrawls had begun to resemble the letter he was attempting.
“Look, Mama, I did it!” he exclaimed.
“It’s as I thought,” she murmured as she drew out more practice letters for him. “I was just the same when I was your age.”
Tobin watched her as she worked, trying to imagine her as a young girl in braids who couldn’t write.
“I made little sculptures, too, though not nearly as nice as yours,” she went on, still writing. “Then my nurse taught me doll making. You’ve seen my dolls.”
Thinking of them made Tobin uncomfortable, but he didn’t want to seem rude by not answering. “They’re very pretty,” he said. His gaze drifted to her doll, slumped in an ungainly heap on the chest beside them. She looked up and caught him staring at it. It was too late. She knew what he was looking at, maybe even what he was thinking.
Her face softened in a fond smile as she took the ugly doll onto her lap and arranged its misshapen limbs. “This is the best I ever made.”
“But—Well, how come it doesn’t have a face?”
“Silly child, of course he has a face!” She laughed, brushing her fingers across the blank oval of cloth. “The prettiest little face I’ve ever seen!”
For an instant her eyes were mad and wild again, as they had been in the tower. Tobin flinched as she leaned forward, but she simply dipped the pen again and went on writing.
“I could shape anything with my hands, but I couldn’t write or read. My father—your grandfather, the Fifth Consort Tanaris—showed me how to teach my hand the shapes, just as I’m showing you now.”
“I have a grandfather? Will I meet him someday?”
“No, my dear, your grandmama poisoned him years ago,” his mother said, busily writing. After a moment she turned the sheet to him. “Here now, a fresh row for you to trace.”
They spent the rest of the morning over the parchments. Once he was comfortable with tracing, she had him say the sounds each letter represented as he copied them. Over and over he traced and repeated, until by sheer rote he began to understand. By the time Nari brought the midday meal up to them on a tray, he’d forgotten all about his grandfather’s curious fate.
From that day on, they spent part of each morning there as she worked with surprising patience to teach him the letters that had eluded him before. And, little by little, he began to learn.
Duke Rhius stayed away the rest of the winter, fighting in Mycena beside the king. His letters were filled with descriptions of battles, written as lessons for Tobin. Sometimes he sent gifts with the letters, trophies from the battlefield: an enemy dagger with a serpent carved around the hilt, a silver ring, a sack of gaming stones, a tiny frog carved from amber. One messenger brought Tobin a dented helmet with a crest of purple horsehair.
Tobin lined the smaller treasures up on a shelf in the toy room, wondering what sort of men had owned them. He placed the helmet on the back of a cloak-draped chair and fought duels against it with his wooden sword. Sometimes he imagined himself fighting beside his father and the king. Other times, the chair soldier became his squire and together they led armies of their own.
Such games left him lonesome for his father, but he knew that one day he would fight beside him, just as his father had promised.
Through the last grey weeks of winter Tobin truly began to enjoy his mother’s company. At first they met in the hall after his morning ride with Mynir. Once or twice she even went with them and he was amazed at how well she sat her horse, riding astride with her long hair streaming free behind her like a black silk banner.
For all her improvement with him, however, her attitude toward the others of the household did not change. She spoke seldom to Mynir and almost never to Nari. The new woman, Tyra, saw to her needs and was kind to Tobin, too, until the demon pushed her down the stairs and she left without even saying good-bye. After that, they made do without a maid.
Most disappointing of all, however, was her continuing coldness toward his father. She never spoke of him, spurned any gifts he sent, and left the hall when Mynir read his letters by the hearth each night to Tobin. No one could tell him why she seemed to hate him so, and he didn’t dare ask his mother directly. All the same, Tobin began to hope. When his father came home and saw how improved she was, perhaps things might ease between them. She’d come to love him, after all. Lying in bed at night, he imagined the three of them riding the mountain trails together, all of them smiling.
Chapter 9
Tobin and his mother were at his lessons one cold morning at the end of Klesin when they heard a rider approaching the keep at a gallop.
Tobin ran to the window, hoping to see his father on his way home at last. His mother followed and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t know that horse,” Tobin said, shading his eyes. The rider was too muffled against the cold to recognize at a distance. “May I go see who it is?”
“I suppose so. Why don’t you see if Cook has anything nice for us in the larder, too? I could do with an apple. Hurry back now. We’re not done for today.”
“I will!” Tobin called, dashing off.
There was no one in the hall, so he went through to the kitchen and saw with delight that it was Tharin being greeted by Nari and the others. His beard had grown long over the winter. His boots were fil
thy with mud and snow, and he had a bandage wrapped around one wrist.
“Is the war over? Is Father coming home?” Tobin cried, throwing himself into the man’s arms.
Tharin lifted him up, nose to nose. “Yes to both, little prince, and he’s bringing some guests with him. They’re just behind me.” He set Tobin back on his feet. He was trying to smile, but Tobin read something else in the lines around the man’s eyes as he glanced at Nari and the steward. “They’ll be here soon. You run along and play now, Tobin. Cook doesn’t need you underfoot. There’s much to do.”
“But—”
“That’s enough,” Nari said sharply. “Tharin will take you out for a ride later. Off with you now!”
Tobin wasn’t used to being dismissed like this. Feeling sulky, he dawdled back toward the hall. Tharin hadn’t even said who Father was bringing. Tobin hoped it was Lord Nyanis or Duke Archis. He liked them the best of all his father’s liegemen.
He was halfway across the hall when he remembered that his mother had asked for an apple. They couldn’t very well scold him for coming back for that.
The kitchen door was open and as he approached, he heard Nari say, “What is the king doing coming here, after all these years?”
“For the hunting, or so he claims,” Tharin replied. “We were on our way home the other day, nearly in sight of Ero, when Rhius happened to mention the fine stag hunting we have here. The king took it into his head for an invitation. He’s struck with these strange whims more often now—”
The king! Tobin forgot about apples as he scurried back upstairs, thinking instead of the little wooden figure in the box—The Present King, Your Uncle. Tobin wondered excitedly if he’d be wearing his golden crown, and if he’d let Tobin hold Ghërilain’s sword.