She repeated herself, as if she couldn’t believe it: “King Swemmel will talk to our village?”
“Powers above,” Syrivald added around a crust of black bread. Leuba, a toddler chewing on another crust, was too little to care whether Swemmel spoke to Zossen or not.
“I think he’s going to be talking to the whole kingdom,” Garivald said, “or to as many places as have crystals, anyhow.”
“Will we go see him?” Syrivald asked.
“Aye, we will,” his father answered. “I want to find out what the truth is about this miserable war we’ve got ourselves into with Algarve.” After he’d spoken, he paused to wonder how much of the truth King Swemmel was likely to tell.
Annore said, “If we’re going to go, we’d better go now, so we can get up close to the crystal.” Suiting action to word, she scooped up Leuba and carried the toddler out of the house. Garivald and Syrivald followed.
They weren’t the only family with the same idea. The square got as crowded as Garivald ever remembered seeing it, and then a little more crowded than that. Not everyone in Zossen had heard Waddo’s announcement, but no one could miss friends and neighbors and relatives heading for the square. People jockeyed for position, stepped on one another’s toes, and loosed a few judicious elbows. Garivald caught one, but he gave it back with interest.
“I don’t know what we’re squabbling about,” somebody said. “Waddo’s not even here with the crystal yet.” That comment produced a brief, embarrassed pause in the pushing and shoving, but they soon resumed.
“Here he comes!” Three people said it at once. Everybody surged toward Waddo, who carried the crystal on a cushion whose cover his wife had embroidered! “Make way!” That was three different people.
Waddo hadn’t had such an eager, enthusiastic reception since . . . Thinking back on it, Garivald couldn’t remember the firstman ever getting such a reception. But, of course, it wasn’t really for him; it was for the crystal he bore.
“Don’t drop it!” someone told him.
“Set it on a stool,” someone else said. “That way, more of us will have a chance to see.”
Waddo took that suggestion, though he ignored the other one. “It won’t be more than a few minutes before his Majesty speaks to us,” he said. “He will set our minds at rest about the many things that trouble us.”
Garivald doubted whether Swemmel would do any such thing. But he shouldered his way through the crowd till he stood in the second row and could peer at the crystal over the shoulders of the people in front of him. Inactive at the moment, the crystal might as well have been an ordinary ball of glass.
Then, abruptly, it... changed. Garivald had heard stories of crystals in use, of course, but he’d never seen one work till now. First, light suffused it. Then, as the brief glow faded, he saw King Swemmel’s long, pale, narrow face looking at him. But the other villagers’ exclamations, they all saw the king looking at them, too, even though they surrounded the crystal. After the magic that made the crystal work, Garivald supposed the one that let it be viewed from any direction was a small thing by comparison. It impressed him just the same.
Swemmel stared out as if he really could see the peasants gaping at him from one end of the kingdom to the other. After Garivald’s first astonishment and almost involuntary awe faded, he saw how haggard the king looked. Beside him, Annore murmured, “I don’t think he’s slept for days.”
“Probably not since the war started,” Garivald agreed. Then he fell silent, for King Swemmel had begun to speak.
“Brothers and sisters, peasants and townsmen, soldiers and sailors--I am speaking to you, my friends,” Swemmel said, and Garivald was astonished yet again: he had never imagined that the king would address his subjects in such terms. Swemmel went on, now with the first-person plural instead of that astonishing, riveting first-person singular: “We are invaded. The vile hosts of King Mezentio have plunged their dagger deep into us, and Algarve’s dogs, Yanina and Zuwayza, course behind their master. The enemy has stolen much of that part of Forthweg that we reclaimed for our kingdom summer before last. Our own long-held territory farther south also groans under the foe’s heels.”
Swemmel took a very visible breath. “But we must also tell you that only on our territory have the Algarvians, for the first time, met with serious resistance. If a part of that territory has nevertheless been occupied, let that serve as nothing more than a goad to our recovering it. The Algarvians, may the powers below eat them, caught Unkerlant by surprise. Let all Unkerlanters now take the accursed redheads by surprise as well.”
Garivald raised an eyebrow at that. He thought King Swemmel had been getting ready for a war with Algarve. But
