Then the King sought out all the wise men of his land and asked them if they could discover anything about the enchantment—if enchantment it be, and how could it not?—that his daughters went under, and how it might be broken. And the wise men looked into their magic mirrors and their odd-colored smokes, and drank strange ill-smelling brews and looked at the backs of their own eyelids; and called up their familiars, and even wrestled with dark spells that were nearly too much for their strength, and spoke to creatures better left alone, who hissed and babbled and shrieked. And they spoke to their King again, shaking their heads. Little enough they had to tell him: that spell it was there was no doubt; and that it was one too strong for them to destroy in the usual ways, with powders and weird words, was also, sadly, beyond doubt; and several of them shivered and rubbed their hands together as they said this.
The King looked at them for a long moment in silence, and then asked in a voice so low that if they had not been wise men they might not have heard it at all: “Is there, then, no hope?”
One who had not spoken before stepped forward; his hair was grey, and his long robe a smoke-draggled green. He looked at the King for a time, almost as if he had forgotten the language he must use, and then he said: “I can offer you this much. If someone, someone not of the Princesses’ blood kin, can discover where they dance all night, and bring the tale back to this earth, tell it under this sun—for you may be sure that this dark place knows neither—with some token of that land, then the enchantment shall be broken. For I deem that its strength depends upon its remaining hidden.”
The King whispered: “Not of their blood kin?”
The wise man looked upon him with what, had he been anyone but the King, might have been pity. “Sire,” he said gently, “one of the Princesses’ blood would only fall under the same sorcery that enthralls them. They are still your daughters, even as they move through the web that has been woven around them. What that sorcery might do to another—we cannot tell. But if he lived, he would not be free.”
The King nodded his head slowly and turned away to begin the journey back to his haunted castle. And when he returned he gave more orders: that any man who discovered where the Princesses danced their shoes to pieces each night should have his choice of them for a wife, and reign as king after his wife’s father died. Any man who wished to try was welcome: king’s son or cobbler, curate or knight or ploughman. And each of them, whatever his rank, should have an equal chance; and that chance was to spend three nights on a cot set up in the Princesses’ locked chamber; three nights, no more nor any less.
A king’s son came first; he was the son of a king from just over the border that the soldier’s regiment had fought for; but, for all that, he was graciously welcomed, and fed the same dishes that were set before the King and his daughters; and there was music to entertain them all as they sat silently at their meal, and later there were jugglers and acrobats, but no dancers; and the music was stately or brisk, but it was never dancing music, and the King and the Princesses and their guest sat quietly at the high table.
When the time came to retire, the King clasped a rich red robe around the shoulders of the son of his old enemy with his own hands, and wished him well, kindly and honestly; and showed him where he would spend his three nights. A bed had been set up at the end of the Long Gallery, behind a screen; and besides a bed and a blanket and the robe around his shoulders he was given a lamp, for it was dark at the end of the Gallery. And the King embraced him and left him; and there was perfect silence in the long room as thirteen pairs of ears listened to the heavy door swing shut and the King’s key turn in the lock.
But somehow the king’s son fell asleep that night; and in the morning the Princesses’ shoes were worn through. And so went the second night; and even the third. On that last night the king’s son wished so much to stay awake and see how the Princesses did that he never lay down at all. But in the morning he was discovered to have fallen asleep nonetheless, still on his feet, leaning heavily against the rough stone wall, so that his cheek was marked by the stone, and so harshly that the bruise did not fade for days after.
The prince went away, pale behind the red stain on his face, and he was not seen again.
Here the ostler paused in his story, and stared at the soldier, who was listening with an attention he had not felt since his first years in the Army. “You’ll hear that our King cuts off the heads of them who fail to guess the Princesses’ riddle. But it’s not so. They fade away sometimes so quickly it’s as if they have been murdered; but it’s not our King puts his hand to it, nor do I believe another story that has it that the Princesses poison them to keep their secret. All that is nonsense. The way of it is just that they have to meet our King’s eyes when they tell him that they’ve failed; and the look he gives them back has all a father’s sorrow in it, and all a king’s pride—and all our King’s goodness, and it takes the heart right out of them that have to see it. And so they leave, but there’s no heart left in them for anything.” The ostler shrugged; and the soldier smiled, and then stood up and sighed and stretched, for the story had been a long one—and then thoughtfully collected his and his friend’s tankards and disappeared for a moment into the taproom. When he returned with two brimming mugs, the ostler was examining a headstall with disfavor: the new stable boy had cleaned it, and done a poor job. He would be spoken to tomorrow, and if that didn’t work, on the next day, kicked. But he dropped the reins happily to take up his beer; and as he looked at his new friend over the brim there was a new flicker behind his eyes.
“And what are you thinking?” he said at last.
“You already know or you would not ask,” replied the soldier. “I’m thinking that I would like to see the city of our King, the King in whose Army I labored so long and for so little. And I’m thinking that I would like to find out the secret of the shoes that are danced to pieces every night, and so win a Princess to wife and a kingdom after.” He smiled at the ostler, hoping to win an answering smile. “It is perhaps my only chance to try to see the ways of the Army hierarchy set to rights.”
The ostler slowly shook his head without smiling, but he said no word to dissuade him. “Good luck to you then, my wild and wandering friend. But if your luck should not be good, then come back here, and we’ll try to save you with good horses and good beer. They can if anything can.”
“I have little enough heart left in me now,” said the soldier lightly. “The King is welcome to the rest, for I’ll not miss it.”
And on the next morning the soldier set out.
PART ONE
HE WENT still downhill, but more purposefully; and the bundle across his shoulders was a little stouter; thanks to the ostler. He cut himself a green walking-stick by the bank of the brook his path led him beside; and the sap ran over his hand, and the sweet sharp smell of it raised his spirits. He whistled as he walked, Army songs, songs about death and glory.
The sun was high in the sky and the place of his waking miles behind him when the soldier began to look around him for somewhere to sit and eat his lunch; he hoped for a stream of clear mountain water; if luck was with him he would find a wide-branching tree at its edge to sit beneath, for the sun grew hot, and shade would be welcome. The soldier’s boots began to scuff up the dust of the lowlands as the hard rocky earth of the mountains was left behind him. He had passed through several villages on his long morning’s walk, for the villages sat close together at the mountains’ green feet. But as he looked around now for his stream and his tree, he saw grazing land, with cows and sheep and horses on it, and fields of grain; and far off to his left he could see the hard shining of the river that led to the capital that was also his path’s end. But there were few houses. He looked ahead, and saw a small grove of trees, and quickened his step, anticipating at least their leafy shadow, and perhaps a pool of water.
As he approached he heard an odd creaking noise that began, and stopped, and began again; but the trees hid from his sight anything tha
t his eyes might discover to explain it. When his way led by them at last, he saw a small hut nestled within the grove, and before it and near his path stood a well. An old woman stood at the well, winding up the rope with a handle that creaked; and she paused often and wearily, and as the soldier watched, she, unknowing, stared into the depths of the well and sighed.
“May I help you?” said the soldier, and strode forward; and he seized the handle from the brown wrinkled hand that gladly gave it up to him, and wound the handle till the bucket tipped past the stone lip of the well; and he pulled it out, brimming, and set it on the ground.
“I thank you, good sir,” said the old woman. “And I beg you then, have the first draught; for I should be waiting a long time yet for my drink if I had to wait upon my own drawing of it. I believe the bucket grows heavier each day, even faster than the strength drains away from my old hand.”
The soldier pulled the knapsack from his shoulder, and from it took a battered tin cup: one of the scant relics of his Army days. He picked up the old woman’s brown pottery cup from the edge of the well and dipped them both together; and as he handed her dripping cup to her he held his own; and they drank together.
The woman smiled. “Such courtesy demands better recompense than a poor old woman can offer,” she said. “Rest yourself in the shade of these trees a little while, at least, and tell me where so gallant a gentleman may be bound.” She looked straight at him as she spoke, and when he smiled at her words she must have noticed the strength and sweetness in his smile, for all the weariness of the face that held it; and certain it is that, as he smiled, he noticed the strange eyes of the woman who stared at him so straightforwardly. Her eyes were a blue that was almost lavender, and they held a calm that seemed to bear more of the innocence of youth than the gravity of age. And the lashes were long, as long as a fawn’s, and dark.
“Indeed, I will be most grateful for a chance to sit out of the sun’s light.” And they sat together on a rough wooden bench under a tree near the tiny cottage; and the soldier told the old woman of his journey, and, thinking of her strange eyes—for he spoke with his eyes on the ground between his knees—he also told her of its purpose, for the thought came to him that behind those eyes there might be some wisdom to help him on his way. In the pause that followed his telling, he offered her some of his bread and cheese, and they ate silently.
At last, and trying not to be disappointed by her silence, the soldier said that he would go on; for he could walk many more miles that day before he would need another meal, and sleep to follow. This much his soldier’s training had done for him. And he stood up, and picked up his knapsack to tie it to its place on his back again.
“Wait a moment,” said the old woman; and he waited, gladly. She walked—swiftly, for a woman so old and weak that she had trouble drawing up her bucket from the well—the few steps to her cottage, and disappeared within. She was gone long enough that the soldier began to feel foolish for his sudden hope that she was a wise woman after all and would assist him. “Probably she is gone to find for me some keepsake trinket, a clay dog, a luck charm made of birds’ feathers, that she has not seen in years and has forgotten where it lies,” he said to himself. “But perhaps she will give me bread and cheese for what she has eaten of mine; and that will be welcome; for cities, I believe, are not often friendly to a poor wanderer.”
But it was none of these things she held in her hands when she returned to him. It was, instead, a cape; she carried it spilled over her arms, and shook it out for him when she stood beside him again by the bench and the tree. The cape was long enough to sweep the ground even when she held it arm’s-length over her head; and a deep hood fell from its collar. It was black with a blackness that denied sunlight; it looked like a hole in the earth’s own substance, as if, had one the alien eyes for it, one could see into the far reaches of some other awful world within it. And it moved to its own shaken air, as if it breathed like an animal.
The soldier looked at it with awe, for it was an uncanny thing. The old woman said: “Take this as my gift to you, and consider your time spent telling me your story time spent well, for I can thus give you a gift to serve your purpose. This cloak is woven of the shadows that hide the hare from the fox, the mouse from the hawk, and the lovers from those who would forbid their love. Wear it and you are invisible: for the cloak is close-woven, finer than loose shadows, and no rents will betray you. See—” and the old woman whirled it around her own bowed shoulders, shaking the hood down over her bright eyes—and then the soldier saw nothing where she stood, or had stood, but the dappled, moving leaf-shade over the grass and wildflowers and the rough wooden bench. He blinked and felt suddenly cold, and then as suddenly hot: hot with the hope that blazed up in him and need not, this time, be quelled.
A whirling of air become shadow, become untouched entire blackness, and the old woman stood before him again, holding the cloak in her hands, and it poured over her feet. “—or not see,” she said, and smiled. “Take it.” She held it out to him. It was as weightless as the shadows it was made of, soft as night; he wound it gently round his hands, and it turned itself to a wisp like a lady’s scarf; and gently he tucked it under a shoulder strap of his knapsack. It whispered to itself there, and one silken corner waved against his cheek.
“I have words to send with you too,” said the old woman. “First: speak not of me, nor of this cloak,” and she looked at him shrewdly. “But you may guess that for yourself. You may guess this too: drink nothing the Princesses may offer you when you retire to your cot in the dark corner of the Long Gallery. It is a wonder and an amazement to me that the men before you have not thought of this simple trick; but it is said otherwise—and I, I have my ways of hearing the truth.”
“Perhaps it is the youth of those men,” said the soldier gravely; “for I have heard that all those who have sought this riddle and the prize have been young and fair to look upon. I have little of either youth or beauty to spend, and must make it up in caution.”
The old woman laughed oddly, and looked at him still more oddly, the leaf-shadow moving in her eyes like silver fish in a lake. “Perhaps it is as you say. Or perhaps it is something that stands with the Princess as she offers the drink; something that is loosened in that Long Gallery once the key in the door has turned and this world, our world, is locked away for the night’s length.” There was something in her face like pain or sorrow.
“For this too I wish to say to you: the Princesses you must beware, for the spell they lie under is deep, and spell it truly is, but neither of their making nor their fault, and very glad they would be to be free of it, though they may stir no hand to help themselves.” The old woman paused so long that the soldier thought she might not speak again, and he listened instead to the shadowy whispering at his ear, and let his eyes wander to the path that would take him to the city, and to his chosen adventure and his fate.
“The story is this, as I believe it,” said the old woman; “and as I have told you, I have ways of hearing the truth.
“The Queen had the blood of witches in her,” she went on slowly, “and while the taint is ancient and feeble, still it was there; while the King is mortal clear through, or if there is any other dilution, it is so old that even the witches themselves have forgotten, and so can do nothing.
“The Queen was a good woman, and she was mortal and human, and bore mortal daughters. The drop of witch blood was like a chink in the armor of a knight rather than a poison at the heart. The knight may be valiant in arms and honor as was the Queen in honor and love; but the spear of an enemy will find the chink at last.
“There is a sort of charm in witch blood for those who bear it; a charm to make the spears that may fly go awry. But the charm weakens faster than the blood taint itself if the bearer chooses mortal ways and never leaves them.
“In the Queen there was something yet left in that charm. In her daughters—nay. And so when the Queen died, a witch seized her chance: that her twelve demon sons,
who bear a taint of mortal blood as faint as the witch blood of the Queen’s twelve daughters, those sons shall be tied to those daughters closely and more closely, till by their grasp they shall be drawn from the deeps where they properly live to the sweet earth’s surface; and there they shall marry the twelve Princesses, and beget upon them children in whom the dark blood shall run hot and strong for many generations, and who shall wreak much woe upon simple men.
“Eleven years will it take for the witch’s dark chain to be forged from Princes to Princesses, till the Princesses return one morning with the witch’s sons at their sides; eleven years’ dancing underground. And nine and a half years already have run of this course.”
The soldier grew pale beneath his sun-brown skin as he heard the old woman’s words. “Do any but you know of this? You—and now I?”
The old woman shrugged, but it was half a shiver, the soldier thought, and wondered; for a wise woman usually fears not what she knows. “The Princesses know, but they cannot tell. The King knows not, for the knowledge would break him to no purpose, for the quest and the venture are not his. For the rest, I myself know not; those fools the King consulted when the trouble first began may know a little; but they knew at least not to tell the King anything he could not bear. And you are the only one I have told.” The old woman again lifted her long-lashed eyes to the soldier, and the silver fish in her lakewater eyes had turned gold with the intensity of her telling.
“And the Princesses can do nothing,” repeated the soldier, “nothing but watch the sands of their own time running out.” The soldier thought of battles, and how it was the waiting that made men mad, and that to risk life and limb crossing bloody swords on the battlefield was joyful beside it.
“The eldest, it is said,” the old woman said even more slowly, “has more of wit than her sisters; and yet even she cannot put out a hand to save herself one night’s journey underground, nor even fail to give the man who would free her the drugged wine when he retires to his cot in the dark corner of the Gallery.” The old woman turned her eyes to the path the soldier would follow, that would lead him to the city, and the King’s pale castle, and the twelve dancing Princesses.