moment into the fire. “Such a thing has never happened to my certain knowledge to any I know,” he said at last, very quietly, “only to those of the old tales.”
“And are there not Weavers as well in the old tales?”
Roric did not answer but cocked his head as though listening to the high voices of the bats outside. “He never did tell me what he wanted,” he said after a minute, “but if he wants me it’s because I was nearly an outcast when he spoke to me. Does that mean- Does that mean the Wanderers have reasons of their own for hiding from me who I am?”
“You are Roric No-man’s son,” said the Weaver loudly.
“Yes, and that’s who they said they might need. But why would the lords of voima want a mortal to help them?”
The Weaver examined the web of string again, picking at a few threads until the knots were even more tangled. The silence stretched so long that Roric had decided he would have no answer to his question when the other suddenly spoke. “Even the Wanderers may not have full control over their own fate.”
“Listen. I haven’t tried this since I was twelve.” Roric tugged in sudden resolution at his ring, the one Hadros had given him when he became a man and received his sword, when they had first sworn their oaths to each other. “If I give you this, will you give me a straight answer? Will you tell me my father’s true name?”
The Weaver made little rasping noises that could have been a cough, could even have been a laugh. “That is not an answer I give for a ring-or for the silver-decorated halter you tried to give me years ago. This is an answer that gives a man his identity and takes it away in the same instant. The price of your question is knowledge that will destroy you.”
“I must say I don’t understand you any better than I did when I was twelve.” Roric rose abruptly. “I’ve wasted a good knife,” he said with a shrug. “The Wanderer- if he was a Wanderer, and if he appears again-can tell me himself what he wants. In the meantime, I know who I am, and I have no intention of waiting for my fate to reach me. I am King Hadros’s sworn man and bitter enemy, and I am the man Karin loves.”
As he left the cave, there came a metallic clatter almost at his foot. He paused and glanced down. It was his knife.
He stood motionless for a second, then picked it up and returned it slowly to his sheath, looking back toward the cliff. A fitting conclusion to the last day’s events, he thought with a mirthless smile. Even in the oldest tales, no Weaver had ever refused payment. It was now full night, and there was not even a glint of firelight from the cave.
2
Karin had never told anyone, not even Roric, about the faeys.
She slipped out of the hall very early in the morning, an hour before the maids would rise to stir up the fires for morning porridge. The room was still completely dark. Hadros and his sons snored peacefully in the other cupboard beds as she went on slow silent footsteps across the hall, finding her way by feel to the great door. She always kept the bolts oiled, and they slid back effortlessly. The hinges gave the faintest creak as she swung the door open, but the note of the snores did not change.
Roric, she knew, would also be asleep, up in the men’s loft with the king’s warriors and housecarls. She hesitated for a moment as she pushed the door soundlessly shut behind her, with a disquieting image of him quietly knifed. But even Gizor would not dare an attack among so many men.
She pulled her cloak around her against the pre-dawn cold and hurried across the courtyard to the apple tree that spread its trellised limbs against the outer wall. They would assume she was in one of the other buildings in the castle when they woke to find her gone from the hall. She had been climbing this apple tree since she was small, and it would still-just-hold her.
She scrambled upward quickly, pausing at the top of the tree to free her cloak from a twig on which it caught. The last ten feet she went by toes and fingers, but the sandstone was soft enough that she had been able to chip away holes over the years. Then she went lightly along the top of the wall toward the back of the castle, where an oak branch stretched near. Since Hadros had won the war with her father, he had neglected such things. She seized it, scrambled, and worked her way down the tree until she was low enough to jump.
The faeys would want to know she was going to become queen.
The long grass brushed dew against the skirt she had hitched up while she climbed, and roots caught at her feet. She never liked to come out while it was still fully night, for fear of meeting the troll, but if she waited for sunrise the faeys would be gone. She hurried in the opposite direction from the cliff, darting between trees whose shapes became clearer and clearer as the sky lightened above her.
But she was in time. As she came over the last rise, she could see their lights still burning with a cold green glow. Many of the faeys had already gone into the hill, but others lingered in the dell. She paused above them, pushing back the hair she had not taken time to braid, and whistled three times.
They ran around in panic for a few seconds as they always did, as though they never could remember they had taught her that whistle themselves. But then they spotted her and poured up the hillside to meet her.
They came up to her knees. They leaped and frolicked like puppies, crying, “Karin! Karin!” in shrill voices, snatching at her skirts and all trying to get closer to her than the others.
Even miserable she had to laugh. “Yes, yes, I’m coming to visit you! I have news you’ll like to hear. Yes, I’ll tell you when we’re all inside.”
For ten years, the faeys had been the only ones with whom she could be not a princess, not a hostage, not even a woman, but only herself, Karin.
They poured back down the slope into the dell and gathered up the lights. She went on her knees to crawl into the hillside behind them. The stone swung shut, closing them in.
In all the years she had been coming here, she had never liked this disorienting moment when natural light was abruptly gone, leaving them all illuminated only by the faint green light that put weird shadows across their features. She took a deep breath and shut her eyes, then carefully opened them again.
It always became better in a few minutes. The faeys brought out wild strawberries and honeydew from the bees and ate happily, apparently not noticing that she was not eating hers.
“Yes,” said Karin. “I told you I have something to tell you. I’m going to become a queen.”
“A queen! A queen!” the faeys cried in delight. “And will that pleasant young man you told us about become your king?”
“I don’t see how he can. But I love him, and I don’t want to marry anyone else.”
The faeys gave her more strawberries as though that would solve her problems and finally noticed she was not eating. She ate a few to make them happy.
“And that’s not all,” she continued. “I shall have to leave here, go back to the kingdom where I lived when I was little.”
This caused consternation. “But how could you go away? That would mean you’d leave us! Don’t leave us, Karin! Maybe we could come with you!”
She looked at them between exasperation and affection. She had stumbled across the faeys when wandering at twilight the first summer she had come to Hadros’s kingdom, within a week of when her younger brother had died. She had not then been much taller than they were, and the faeys had since told her she was the first mortal they had successfully tamed.
“If you came with me,” she said, “you’d have to leave your dell. The trip is too long for a single night, and much of it is by ship.”
They had not thought of this. They conferred urgently among themselves for a moment, then announced, “Then you’ll have to give up being queen! That way you can stay here and still marry that nice young man.”
They gave her arm and hair reassuring pats, happy to have solved her problem so easily. Karin shook her head. She had come hoping the faeys might have some ancient wisdom to offer, but years of visiting them should have made her know better.
“The king here would like me to stay, I think,” she said.
“There! What did we tell you? You know you wouldn’t want to move away from us!”
