Will Power

after Sorrail brought news of the rest of the party, I’ve been riding with the armies of Phasdreille against goblin encampments this side of the river.”

“Any sign of Lisha?” Renthrette asked.

“None,” said Garnet. “I don’t really know where we are, let alone where she might be. Until Sorrail arrived, I thought I was by myself. Still,” he added with a smile at the horsemen around him, “there are worse places to be. I mean, I missed you all and everything, but this place. . It’s just so, I don’t know, right. It’s like I should have been born here, or something. God, Renthrette, you are going to love it here. You’ll never want to leave.”

This last remark troubled me. Don’t get me wrong: You couldn’t fault the city. It gleamed with nobility and courage and light and truth and, well, fairness in every sense. In other words, it made concrete all that Garnet and Renthrette lived for. Here they were no longer the principled few struggling against a dark, self-interested, and vicious world. Here they were part of the majority and could be vicious on its behalf. Nor, I had to admit, could I really fault Sorrail. He was everything he had first seemed to be, and if Renthrette looked at him as the best thing since cold steel, I could hardly blame her. I had been a little confused by his odd, courtly greeting to us earlier and by the perfectly decked out little band that had been hanging on his exquisitely tailored coattails, but I suppose that was just the way things worked here. No, nothing had really shaken my faith in the place or its people but Garnet’s rapturous enthusiasm for them.

You see, Garnet is about the worst judge of pretty much anything that I have ever come across. He couldn’t tell a pint of stout from a cream sherry, and if he ever swore that someone was a great fellow, said fellow would probably slip something lethal in your pint (or sherry) before the night was out. This isn’t just sour grapes on my part. Garnet and I have not always seen eye to eye, I confess, but he can be very useful to have around. If you need someone hacked to pieces, he’s your man. Tell him that the friendly stranger across the room made a lewd remark about his sister, hand him an axe, then sit back and watch the fun. But analyze something and come to a shrewd conclusion? When camels write poetry.

Garnet is a terrible reader. I don’t mean he couldn’t pick up a menu and spot the salad; in fact, like his sister, he could wade through the most complex legal documents and figure out their details with alarming rigor and clearheadedness. What he couldn’t do was read between the lines. Just like Renthrette, who had told me that the apparition in the forest hadn’t meant anything, Garnet took things at face value. Neither of them looked too closely or asked too many questions, since that took valuable time away from getting their weapons bloody. They would leave this place and its rosy hue uncriticized because it offered such a neat solution to all their ethical problems. Here goodness was built in the stone of the city and the flesh of its people; across the river was evil. Their mission was clear.

Too clear for a charlatan, actor, dramatist, cheat, and liar like me to swallow without at least looking more closely at the label.

But what really burned me up was that they seemed to be right.

The royal palace came alive before dawn. Unfortunately, since we were due to meet the king today, that meant that the banging on the door at half past five in the bloody morning was supposed to be taken seriously. The journey had taken its toll and I had slept like a particularly exhausted log right until Garnet started bludgeoning my door down.

I crawled over, threw the bolt, and admitted him with a sour grunt. He was dressed in burnished armor that, even in this miserably low light, sparkled like a box of mirrors. He wore a tunic of immaculate white linen and a matching cloak. He was cradling his great horned helm in his arm and beaming like he’d just found a bag of gold in an alley. Or at least, that’s what would make me beam like an idiot. I couldn’t imagine, especially with my brain still fogged with sleep, what could make him so happy short of meeting the goblin king (if there was one) in single combat.

“Ready?” he chirped.

“Hardly,” I muttered, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and clambering irritably into a pair of trousers. “Do we have to meet him so bloody early? Couldn’t we, like, have lunch together or something?”

“No.”

“Dinner, then?”

“No,” said Garnet, still cheery and indulgent with that schoolboy exuberance that occasionally takes the place of his homicidal nobility. “That’s not the way of things here. But you’ll see. This is going to be one of the most fantastic days in your life, Will. Just wait till you see the court: the clothes, the sophistication. I could listen to them talk for hours.”

“Who?”

“The courtiers,” he laughed, like he was assuring a four-year-old about how good a piece of chocolate was going to taste. “You’ll be in your element.”

“Right,” I agreed hollowly, suspecting the chocolate was really spinach.

“Come on, Will. Are you going to put a shirt on?”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, parodying his childlike excitement. “That would be a wheeze.”

I dressed, irritably.

“You’re wearing that?” said Garnet, with a sour look.

“Evidently,” I said, checking to be sure. “Why?”

“Don’t you have anything. . you know, classier?”

“I thought we were adventurers,” I said. “These are adventurers’ clothes. Shirt and britches. Leather belt. Some bits of ring mail here and there to denote manly purpose. I thought you’d approve.”

“Weren’t you wearing them yesterday?”

“I was indeed,” I agreed. “We adventurers are hardy folk. But the britches are fairly clean and the shirt is not actually unpleasant. Yet. Maybe when the day heats up a little. .”

“Can’t you wash them?” said Garnet, like someone’s grandmother.

“Not now, and I didn’t have time last night. If I’d known you cared so much I wouldn’t have bothered sleeping at all, then I could have spent the night running something up in pink satin and lace.”

“Well, at least wash yourself. Here.”

He tossed me a piece of soap shaped like a seashell. I sniffed at it suspiciously. It smelled of rose petals, only stronger and powerfully sweet.

“It’s wonderful,” Garnet said. “All produced locally, I hear. There’s quite a lot of soap around. They are a very clean people. They bathe daily. It’s a sign of spiritual purity. But it’s not just about being clean; it’s also about elegance. Look how intricately that has been molded,” he said, nodding at the shell-shaped soap, “and smell the fragrance!”

“Yes,” I scowled. “Very nice. And the next time I want to go round stinking like an expensive whore I’ll put it straight to use.”

“Just get a move on,” he snapped. “And brush your hair.”

And so we left, him in front, striding off and making pleasant little bows every time someone passed, me straggling after him, doing up buttons and cursing quietly to myself.

We entered a large room, flagged with black and white marble like a chessboard and arranged with padded chairs and benches. There were torches and lanterns everywhere and it was like daylight inside, except for the wreath of smoke that hung about the ceiling. It was packed with men and women in silks and satins and jewels, many seated or reclining elegantly on pieces of furniture that looked like chairs with pretensions to couch-hood. Others were poised artistically against columns or leaning with studied nonchalance on mantelpieces. And all were engaged in hushed conversation. Occasionally there would be a ripple of laughter or a soft pattering of polite applause from restrained, gloved hands. Somewhere a wistfully plucked harp was accompanying a woman singing in a high, lilting tone about a lovelorn shepherdess.

“What the hell is this?” I breathed to Garnet.