Will Power

Cleaning me up was easier said than done. My lip was split, I had a long jagged cut over my right eye, and my left was no more than a thin, dark line across a plum-colored distention. I was fairly sure I had a cracked rib or two (they had kicked me repeatedly and struck me across the back and shoulders with thin but heavy clubs apparently designed for the purpose) and my entire body felt like one great bruise. Every touch of the guards’ sponge set me moaning and squirming like a dying eel, slow and agonized but too resigned to the pain to really fight it. Only when I caught the distinctive rose-petal scent and my mind flooded with images of the factories in the forest and what they did to make their soap and cosmetics did I recoil and insist on them leaving me alone. They went sheepishly, like bullies who had tried to make it up to their victim, failed, and now fear he will report all to his mother.

I crawled toward a couch, dragged myself painfully onto it, and lay there, throbbing. The door opened behind me. Turning toward it proved too painful, so I lay there and waited till my visitor came to me. For a split second I considered the possibility that it was an assassin or that Sorrail had changed his mind and sent some lackey to finish me off, but I did not move. Oddly, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I genuinely did not care. I waited, my good eye closed until I sensed a presence near me. Then I looked.

It was Renthrette. She stood there looking down on me, her face expressionless. By this I don’t mean impassive: She was clearly thinking, even feeling, a great deal as she looked at me, but exactly what was going on in her head was impossible to discern. I wondered if my assassin had indeed come-it would be ironic if all those poems about a distant beauty who kills her suitor with disdain turned out to be literally true. The idea made me smile, slightly, and the muscles of my face cried out with pain. “Hello, Renthrette,” I whispered, my eyes closed.

“What are you doing here, Will?” she replied. The last time I saw her, this would have been a rhetorical question which meant “get out of here before I use your intestines to string a lute,” but now her tone was not so much hostile as cautiously inquiring.

I opened my eyes. “I ran into the goblins in the forest and ran back here. . ”

“I heard that version,” she said, quickly. “What is really going on?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just what I said.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No one is asking you to,” I answered, closing my eyes again.

She paused, turned, and, by the sound of her heels on the stone, I judged that she was leaving. The door closed firmly. Then she came back and knelt beside me.

“I don’t believe it,” she repeated. “This has all the marks of a Hawthorne scam and I will not be taken in by it. Why are you here? What is going on? What do you know?”

I was going to ignore her questions, but the last one sounded odd. I looked at her and saw something similarly odd in her face. There was an anxiety there which had been in her voice when she first came in: an anxiety which had replaced the hatred with which she had been brimming when last we met. I hauled myself onto my elbows painfully and looked at her. “What do I know?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

She hesitated, shot a hasty look at the door, and lowered her face toward mine as if she was going to kiss me. When she spoke, her voice was almost inaudible, and halting, as if she was finding each word, each thought, as she spoke. “I feel that something is not right here. And you feel it, too-no, you know it. Since you left, Garnet and I have been, well, ignored, it seems. Everyone-I mean everyone-seems to have forgotten us. Garnet is happy. He rides against the goblins every day. I am a court lady and I do what they do, though not as well as they do it. Sorrail. . I have barely seen Sorrail since you left, and when we meet at court he treats me exactly as everyone else. But it’s more than that. I think. . there is something more, something much bigger.

“The people here don’t seem real. Different people have told me the same stories, exactly the same, word for word, and no one reacts. I have heard two different people in a group recite the same pieces of poetry and no one comments. It isn’t just politeness; it’s as if they don’t remember. They are like empty shells, going through the same actions day after day. The only thing they show any real passion for is their war against the goblins. I know the goblins are terrible, but their passion. . it doesn’t make sense to me. And when you ask about it, you get the same stories repeated verbatim. Like what they have done to you now: I don’t understand it. For a while, before you left, I thought I did. But that was when I was more like them-when I was becoming one of them.”

She paused, glanced over her shoulder again, and then breathed, “I also feel watched. Kind of like when we were in Harvest. I do not know by who, but there is someone or something here in the city trying to reach me: a mind stretching out to mine. I feel very sure that I do not want it to find me. I. . I fear it may have already found Garnet.”

Not just a pretty face, Renthrette. Still, I wasn’t sure, but then she paused and spoke again.

“Back in the mountains,” she said, “the night this all began, you told a story about a girl whose family was attacked by Empire soldiers. Remember?”

I winced at the recollection and nodded fractionally.

“I think you owe me another story,” she said.

I told her everything. It might not have been wise, and I had been advised against it, but I trusted her-or, at least, I trusted my gut feeling that she wasn’t that good an actress. Anyhow, I found it hard to believe that she had been selected to wheedle the truth out of me, given the terms on which we had parted. No, the very fact that there had been no love lost between us made me take her revelations seriously. There was also a part of me which suspected that an agent of the “fair folk” would not be able to articulate the oddities of their city quite so baldly; they certainly didn’t seem too self-aware when cheerfully recounting by heart the history of some notched goblin- crushing weapon. And if they could identify the inconsistencies in their own tales, I doubted they’d announce them to Renthrette, even as part of some larger ruse.

I have to say that most of these carefully thought out justifications of my actions came to me after I had already confessed all to Renthrette, but I like to think that I had already recognized them intuitively. In fact, it probably had more to do with Renthrette’s earnest face, bent so close to mine that I could feel the breath from her lips on my skin, but why split hairs? In any event, I told her: quickly, in a whisper, and with one eye on the door, but I told her everything.

If it had not done so already, her allegiance switched in a heartbeat. “And they are all alive!” she gasped, joy breaking out all over her. “Lisha and Orgos and Mithos?”

“Yes. But be quiet! Part of the story I told Sorrail is true. There is a large Stehnite force mustering in the forest, but they know they can’t assault the city. They built Phasdreille, after all, and they know that storming the main gate will get them nowhere. The breach in the walls is largely blocked, but it is still their best chance of getting in. Sorrail and the rest of them know this, of course, and will have it heavily defended. The only chance for the Stehnites is to significantly reduce or distract that guard. That, I’m afraid, is the task dumped on me, and because I didn’t want it in the first place, I expect you to help. I know that makes no sense, but people in pain are permitted to abandon logic. If I’m in, you’re in.”

“We can’t do it alone.”

“We won’t have to, supposedly,” I said ruefully. Part of me had hoped she would denounce the plan as foolhardy, in which case I could have abandoned it and still say I’d tried. I should have known better.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked, a flicker of animation coming into her eyes.

I looked at her, sighing pointedly. She misread the gesture as being a symptom of my discomfort, and began pushing pillows under my painfully bruised back. I began talking, hoping to stop her ministrations before she did real damage. “Orgos and a company of Stehnites-the people you call goblins-are making their way to a secret entrance into the city. It is narrow and can only be opened from the inside, but it seems that the ‘fair folk,’ or whatever we’re supposed to call them now-the Arak Drul, I suppose-are unaware of it. We have to let them in. If the king and his ‘fair’ friends do know of the entrance, we will find out very quickly, I would think, but Orgos assures me that all will be well. So that’s that settled.”

“Where is this entrance?”

“There is an abandoned Stehnite necropolis beneath the city-”