Will Power

So much for my sneaking about. So much also for my claims to heroism. Here I was being turfed out like someone’s elderly mother-in-law while others more capable looked to the valiant defense of the library.

“I can help, too,” I began.

“No,” said Aliana firmly. She gave me a quick look and added in a gentler, but still urgent, tone, “You are a guest of the king and I will not have you come into unnecessary danger. Please. Let us handle this.”

“All right,” I shrugged. “But be careful.”

She gave me a long, strange look as if caught completely off guard, then moved rapidly back to where the blaze was raging, without another word or a glance back.

I was ushered down and out. Once in the streets, I ran around the building looking for signs of the conflagration. There was a pall of smoke over the building, but it was hard to see how much of it came from the various chimneys that peeped discreetly from around the dome. I caught a passing guard and told him of the fire and he ran to contact the appropriate authorities. I sat around to watch.

A few minutes later a horse-drawn cart with a great tank on the back drew up and a group of uniformed men with axes and pails alighted and entered the building. After that, nothing.

Time passed and the firefighters emerged, apparently none the worse for their labors. I watched them leave and then returned to the door through which they had come.

Aliana was there. “I thought you’d still be here,” she said.

“I’m glad to see you unharmed,” I replied.

“It was a minor affair,” she said, still not inviting me in, “but it could have been much worse had you not reported the blaze as quickly as you did, though you should not have been here at all.” She looked at me from beneath lowered brows, but the reprimand was almost playful.

“Sorry,” I said. “But at least I was of use.”

“Indeed,” she replied. “Much of what was damaged was old binding material scheduled for disposal anyway, but it could have spread disastrously. We have had a narrow escape.”

“Narrow enough to justify my asking you to join me for dinner?”

“What?” she asked, caught off guard again.

“Dinner with me. As a kind of reward. For me, I mean. There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Like what?”

“The battle for one,” I said. “And the library. So what do you say?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. She seemed confused, as if this had never happened to her before. “I will have to think about it,” she concluded.

“Fair enough,” I said.

She smiled and began to close the door. “Farewell, Mr. Hawthorne. Till next time.”

“Till next time.”

So I hadn’t lost all my charm, I thought to myself wistfully. Progress, of a sort, had been made. It was only a matter of time before she succumbed, and if that didn’t get Renthrette’s goat I was a pickled fish. Which I’m not. This return to erotic possibilities, however distant, suddenly reminded me of how I had heard of the library in the first place.

I fished in my pocket and drew out the letter which Renthrette had brought and read to me. Since I had never actually finished reading the thing, I unfolded it and looked it over. Being unused to love letters, especially courtly love letters, I was unsure of what to make of it, which was probably why I had all but forgotten about it. Of course, part of me was excited that there was someone here, someone pretty sophisticated and elegant, if her diction and perfume were anything to go by, who was apparently interested in me. This very elegance and sophistication constituted, however, a pretty major stumbling block for someone as out of his depth in the king’s palace as I was. I could fake it a bit, from time to time, and I had as quick a brain as most or all of them, but I didn’t have, and didn’t want, the training in insincerity. This courtly verse and delicate verbal sparring bored the pants off me (and if that isn’t the most inappropriate figure of speech ever invented, I don’t know what is), and I wasn’t about to work at getting it right for weeks so that some gorgeous tart in silk and rubies could reward me by presenting me with a scarf for me to wear in my hat, or whatever the hell they did round here in place of sex.

But I could not pass up female attention, however odiously it was versified, so I read the rest of the note. After that stuff about the play and the rather promising references to kisses and heaving breasts, it got down to the serious business of courtly metaphor. My eyes ran over two pages of rare stones, phoenixes, swans (and other-so far as I could tell-unchocolated fowl), sighs like clouds (hers), glances like javelins (mine), and a host of other tedious stock allusions. It was as if my self-proclaimed admirer had been locked in a small room for five years with nothing to eat but the most aristocratic of love poems, something far from unlikely around here. The second to the last paragraph, however, promised more than Renthrette had spotted or chosen to reveal, though I had long since quit trying to read something hopeful into her foiling of my amorous adventures. It ran as follows:

Be but at the gatehouse beyond the bridge as twilight falls and my coach will sweep us into such sweet bliss that angels will pause in their celestial music and sigh that only mortals could partake of such earthly rapture. For as the bluebird spies out her mate as night comes on and twines with him in flight, so will my hand seek yours and joy will bear us into heaven where lovers sing by the light of. .

And so on, and so on. You get the picture. But, you must admit, it wasn’t a bad picture, once you got past all that literary throat-clearing. All that intertwining birds business (what exactly is the fascination with birds in this town, anyway?) may promise no more than hand-holding, but either there was a spark of fire there that could light a real inferno, or I’m no judge of writing. I only wished my eloquent seductress had spent less time on similes and more on concrete arrangements. I mean, twilight is not very specific as a time for a rendezvous goes, and no particular day had been mentioned. Would she patrol the gates in her coach, sighing little love clouds out the window for the rest of the week, or what? Well, there was only one way to find out. As the proverbs say: Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and he who hesitates is likely to wind up spending the night by himself. Call me a hedonist, call me an irresponsible seeker of pleasure, a libertine, and a degenerate. While you do so, I’ll be at the gatehouse waiting for a coach to take me to heaven by the fastest route I know.

A fast route, no doubt, but not one I had traveled in some time. Or that much at all, to be honest. This was a consequence of spending most of my first eighteen years in a dress (on stage, you understand) and the next with a bunch of high-minded adventurers who lived to denigrate my moral character. I needed to get into the right mood, and-if I didn’t want to stifle my would-be lover-a clean shirt.

One problem with my scheduled assignation, of course, was that it meant wandering around the city after dark. The last time I had done that I had almost fallen victim to every assassin in the region. I wasn’t going to put myself in that predicament again. The solution had already occurred to me, though: I would leave early, while it was still light-well in time for my assignation-and come back in the morning. This would mean being so irresistibly charming that my romantic correspondent would keep me closeted with her until daybreak, but surely I could manage that? Given my recent track record, it was a plan almost certainly doomed to failure, but I might be able to use the threat of my certain death if I returned to the city after dark as a way of keeping me enveloped in my beauteous lady’s piteous bosom.

It never really occurred to me that she might not be beauteous. The fancy writing oozed sophistication and style, and all the courtiers I had seen thus far had been real lookers; in fact, I think they pretty much had to be real lookers in order to be courtiers, if you know what I mean. Everyone in the palace was so preoccupied with their appearance that you just couldn’t imagine them daring to pass the time of day with any vile or misshapen old crone, assuming that the city of the fair folk even had the odd misshapen crone. I suppose I should have been outraged by this, but Garnet and Renthrette, who were usually pretty easy to outrage, would slit the throat of anyone who breathed a critical word about the court. If they thought it was all good and moral and wonderfully principled, how bad could it be? However much they played it down, of course, Garnet and Renthrette were attractive people themselves, in a chill and dangerous kind of way, and maybe this unspoken awareness made the exclusion of