Well of Darkness Read online

  The chamberlain’s hand shoved Gareth into the floor.

  “His Royal Highness, Dagnarus, Prince of Vinnengael.”

  Gareth sank to his knees, mindful of his father’s teaching. He had an impression of somebody coming up to take a look at him, as one inspects a pig at market.

  “Leave us,” said a voice, imperious, even then.

  Gareth thought, of course, that the prince meant him. He was only too glad to comply. Leaping to his feet, he was ready to bolt. A hand—his hand, the prince’s hand—grabbed hold of his sleeve, however, and held him fast.

  “I said leave us,” the prince repeated, and Gareth understood that the prince was speaking to the chamberlain.

  “But, Your Highness, you know nothing of this boy—”

  “Are you forcing me to give you an order three times?” the prince asked with an edge to his tone that made Gareth shiver.

  “As Your Highness commands,” said the chamberlain, bowing very low and backing out of the room. Not an easy feat, considering the floor was littered with hobbyhorses and toy ships and chariots and child-size shields and spears.

  He shut the door, and Gareth was alone with his prince.

  Blinking back his tears, he saw him, and, in that moment, he feared him.

  The two boys were equal in height then, though Dagnarus would be taller when he came to manhood. He was large-boned, whereas Gareth was slimmer, and so the prince seemed bigger to the whipping boy. The prince’s auburn hair—the color of the leaves of the sugar maple in the autumn—was thick and heavy and cropped close around his face in the fashion of the time. His skin was pale with a smattering of freckles over his nose, the only flaw to his flawless complexion.

  His eyes were green, flecked with gold, large and brilliant, framed by russet eyelashes that made it seem as if they were gilded with burnished gold. He was dressed in a green doublet and hose that brought out the red of his hair and deepened the green of his eyes. He was well formed, strongly built, with remarkable strength—for a child—in his hands.

  The green eyes went over every inch of the whipping boy, inspecting him much more thoroughly than the guards outside the door. Gareth remembered everything he wasn’t supposed to do, but no one had told him yet what he was to do. Unhappy, uncomfortable, overawed, humiliated, he cowered before this calm, self-possessed, beautiful child and, seeing his inadequacies reflected in those wonderful eyes, wished again that he might die.

  “What is your name, boy?” Dagnarus asked, and though the voice was still imperious, it was not unkind.

  Gareth could not answer for the tears in his throat.

  “Are you mute or deaf, boy?” the prince demanded. He was not impatient or sarcastic, merely requiring information.

  Gareth shook his head and managed to blurt out his name. With what little courage he had left, he lifted his head and peeped at the prince warily.

  Reaching out his hand, Dagnarus touched Gareth’s face, rubbed his cheek. He drew his hand back, looked at his fingers, and looked back at the whipping boy.

  “It doesn’t come off,” the prince said.

  “No, Your—Your Highness,” Gareth stammered. “I was born with it. A curse.”

  Other children of Gareth’s acquaintance had either mocked him or run from him. Dagnarus did neither. He would never run from anything. And he would always look a truth in the face, no matter how ugly.

  “A curse?” Dagnarus repeated.

  The green eyes brightened. The prince drew Gareth over to a pair of chairs, made to child size, which stood beside a child-size table. Several books had been shoved off the table, to make room for a miniature catapult, carved of wood, with which he had been firing peas over a wall made of blocks. Gareth’s gaze went hungrily to the books. Dagnarus’s gaze went proudly to the catapult.

  In that moment, the two were defined.

  Dagnarus sat down. Mindful of his instructions, Gareth remained standing.

  “Tell me of the curse,” Dagnarus ordered. He never made a request, everything was a command.

  Shyly, Gareth began, “Yes, Your Highness. It seems that when my mother was—”

  “Why don’t you sit?” the prince interrupted.

  “I was told not to, Your Highness,” Gareth said, feeling his marred face burn.

  “Who told you? That great idiot?” The prince dismissed the chamberlain with a snort. “Ignore him. I always do. Sit down in that chair.”

  “Yes, Your Highness.” Timidly, Gareth sat down. “It seems that when my mother was—”

  “And you must not call me ‘Your Highness,’ ” said the prince.

  Gareth looked at him helplessly.

  “You must call me Dagnarus,” the prince said. He put his hand on Gareth’s, and added, “You will be my friend.”

  In that moment, Gareth loved him, as he had never before loved anyone or anything.

  “Now.” Dagnarus settled back, folded his arms across his chest. “Tell me of this curse.”

  “It was when my mother was carrying me in her belly,” Gareth said. This story was another one of his earliest recollections, and he knew it by rote. He spoke at first shyly and hesitantly, but, finding an interested listener, he gathered more confidence and was eventually talking quite volubly. “She was in the marketplace, on an errand for the Queen, your mother, and there was a beggar woman sitting on the corner. She asked my mother for a coin for food. My mother had no coins to give; the only money she carried belonged to the Queen. My mother said as much and was walking on when the beggar woman cursed her. I kicked in my mother’s belly very hard and my mother knew then that the beggar woman was a witch and that her curse had struck me.

  “My mother summoned the city guards, and they arrested the witch. She was tied hand and foot and thrown into the river, where she floated a long time, which my mother says proved that she was a witch. The people threw rocks at the witch, and eventually she sank. The midwife said my mother was to drink rose hip tea, to wash off the curse, but it didn’t work. I was born with this on my face.”

  The large purplish blotch surrounded Gareth’s left eye, crawled up onto his forehead and down onto his left cheek. His nondescript brown hair was cut into bangs across his forehead, to hide that portion of the mark, but there was no hiding the mark around his eye or on his cheek.

  He could not recall the number of potions and ointments, salves and creams the servants used at his mother’s behest to try to rid his face of the curse. And although several took off his skin, they had done nothing to remove the mark. One enterprising serving lass had even tried sanding it off. Fortunately, Nanny had heard his shrieks and come to his rescue.

  “Do people make sport of you?” Dagnarus asked, staring at the mark.

  Usually Gareth didn’t like to be stared at, but the prince wasn’t like the rest, he wasn’t mocking or sniggering. Dagnarus was merely curious.

  “Sometimes, Your Highness,” Gareth admitted.

  “They won’t do so anymore,” Dagnarus stated with finality. “I shall order them not to. If anyone does, you must tell me immediately. I will have the person executed.”

  The prince was showing off. Gareth was not completely ignorant of the ways of the court, and even he knew that a nine-year-old prince did not possess life-and-death power over others. But Gareth was touched and pleased, if not with the sentiment, then with the feeling that at least now he mattered to someone.

  “Thank you, Your Highness, but it’s not important, and I wouldn’t want anyone to be beheaded because—”

  “Yes, yes.” Dagnarus waved his hand.

  He had a short attention span and, although he would listen well to something in which he was interested, he would cut off impatiently any conversation that he found boring.

  “I don’t like the name ‘Gareth,’ ” he announced.

  “I am sorry, Your High—”

  The prince lifted his chin, stared.

  “Dag…narus,” Gareth said. He left a pause between the syllables, for he was truly afr
aid that the prince would change his mind and order him to return to the formal appellation.

  Dagnarus smiled. The smile brought out the gold flecks in his green eyes, made the eyes sparkle like topaz and emerald.

  “I will call you Patch,” he said.

  Gareth bowed his head. The moment was solemn as a christening.

  “You understand your duties, Patch? You are to be whipped when they want to punish me.” The prince turned to his toys, caused the arm of the catapult to move up and down by pressing on it with his finger.

  “You know that, don’t you, Patch?” he reiterated. “They told you that?”

  “Yes, Dagnarus,” Gareth replied, a little uncomfortable with his new name.

  “They hit you because no ordinary mortal dares lay hands upon his king. They think that if they beat you, I will feel remorseful, and I won’t disobey them anymore. That’s what they think.”

  He frowned, the green eyes darkened. The gold glints disappeared like jewels sinking beneath the surface of still water. He joggled the catapult, rolled it about on its small wooden wheels.

  “It won’t work,” he said, and his voice was stern. “I tell you that right now, Patch. I will be sorry to see you beaten, of course, but there are things that they want to try to make me do that I will not do.”

  The green eyes, looking at Gareth, were dark and still. “Not if they were to kill you for it, Patch.”

  This statement was different from the former boast. This was spoken in a strange, unchildlike voice, a voice without innocence, a voice that knew the meaning of what he said.

  “You can leave, if you want to, Patch,” Dagnarus added. “You won’t get into trouble over it. I’ll tell the Queen, my mother”—he said this word with a slight curl of his lip—“that I didn’t want you. I don’t need a companion.”

  Gareth looked around the room, and he didn’t see the wonderful toys, or the books, or the guards at the open door, keeping watch to see that the whipping boy didn’t strangle His Highness, or the servants lurking about, waiting to satisfy His Highness’s least desire. Gareth saw the prince’s loneliness, stark and bare as a bone. He saw it as a mirror reflecting his own loneliness. He saw the stag with the arrows, leaping merrily.

  “If they want to whip me, Dagnarus,” Gareth said shyly, “they’re going to have to catch me first.”

  The golden jewels sparkled, the green eyes glittered, and the prince laughed out loud. So boisterous was his laughter that the chamberlain, who had been skulking about in the hall, hoping for a fight to break out that he might be the one to tell Her Majesty that he, the chamberlain, had been against this from the start, thrust his head inside the door.

  “Did we summon you? Get out of here, you old fart!” Dagnarus shouted, and threw a wooden block at him.

  Emboldened, Gareth tossed a block at the chamberlain as well. His aim fell quite short, for his throw was meek and halfhearted. Dagnarus’s block was thrown with much more accuracy and skill and missed the man only because the chamberlain had the good sense to slam shut the door.

  Dagnarus opened one of the books, a large, leather-bound volume with gold leaf on the cover. The pages were vellum, trimmed in gold. Timidly, Gareth admired the book. He gazed in wonder and awe at one of the illustrations within—a knight in fabulous armor battling a dragon out of Nanny’s bedtime tales. He recognized a book written by the magi, who keep a record of great deeds done by heroes of the past and use them as teaching tools.

  “Do you want to read this story?” Gareth asked with wistful longing.

  “No.” Dagnarus scoffed. Closing the book impatiently, he stacked another volume on top of it. “This shall be our fortress.” He positioned the catapult in front of it and prepared to fire. “We are going to play at war.”

  The Lesser Guardian

  The elves have a legend that relates how, at the beginning of time, the flutter of a butterfly’s wings caused the air currents to expand out like ripples in the water, gaining in strength and potency until eventually the whispering flutter built into a tempest that laid waste to a city a thousand miles away. If this legend is true—and the elves reverence the butterfly on its account—then perhaps the sound of the marble flung from the prince’s toy catapult, smashing into tiny soldiers, was magnified in the ears of the Shield of the Divine, so that he heard the boom of war and smelled the blood of thousands.

  He reflected on war as he scattered bread crumbs to the golden-scaled fish, whose thrashings as they fought for the food disturbed the tranquillity of the ornamental pond. The Shield was fond of the tranquillity, but he also took pleasure in watching the fish fight over the bread crumbs, one reason he fed them himself instead of consigning such a mundane task to his servants.

  Fish fed, the Shield held out his hands. A servant bearing a bowl of fresh water and a towel stepped forward. The Shield washed the crumbs from his hands, dried them on the towel, and spoke to another servant. “I will hold audience in the cedar grove this afternoon. Has Silwyth of House Kinnoth arrived?”

  The servant bowed. “Yes, Shield. He awaits your pleasure.”

  “He will take wine with me in the cedar grove,” the Shield decided. “Produce him at the prescribed hour.”

  The servant bowed again and departed, backing out of the august presence. The nobles, three of them this day, who had been given audience by the ornamental pond, glanced at each other. Silwyth of the House Kinnoth—the Shield’s own house—had been nothing more than a small fish in the pond before this. Though he held the rank of Lesser Guardian of the Eastern Forest, a rank and title granted to him by the Divine, and though he was a cousin to the Shield, the Shield had many cousins, and there were many Lesser Guardians. The taking of wine in the cedar grove had just elevated Silwyth’s status from small fish to large.

  The servant, who was one of the house servants, carried the message to a servant who was outside the house and who carried it to Silwyth, who had not yet entered the house but who was waiting in the fourth terrace above the gatehouse. Since Silwyth had been accorded the honor of taking wine with the Shield, and thereby accorded the honor of entering the house, the servant requested that Silwyth accompany him to the ninth terrace above the gatehouse, the terrace closest to the house.

  Silwyth received the news of his audience and of his relocation to the higher terrace in silence, with outward calm, though within him his heart reveled. Elves are taught from an early age to keep their emotions concealed, that they might not disturb or offend or intrude upon the lives of others. This custom makes the elves appear cold and unfeeling to humans, who let their emotions run amuck, doing all sorts of harm. The elves believe that it is wrong to invade the life of another even by the look upon one’s face, thereby to force someone to share in one’s joy or sorrow, elation or despair. Only those closest and most intimate with an elf—the partner of the soul, for example, or one’s honored parents—may choose to take upon themselves the burden of a shared life.

  The reason for such control and discipline is simple—survival. Elven lives span three hundred years or longer. Their cities are few and densely populated. Elves are not adventurous; they rarely roam far from their homes and their ancestral advisors and will do so only if they have an excellent reason. They are the very antithesis of the dwarves, who never stay in one place longer than two days. As little as they understand humans, elves understand dwarves still less.

  The birth rate is high among elves, the death rate low (unless some or all of the seven great houses are at war). Elven families remain together, and thus elven households and elven cities are crowded. An elf lives almost continuously in the sight, sound, and smell of many other elves. Only by maintaining the strictest discipline and control on themselves do the elves manage to survive in such crowded conditions, their sanity intact.

  A human entering an elven household marvels at the tranquillity, the quiet, the peace, and is astounded to hear that there may be thirty elves sharing that single tiny abode, including great-great-grandparent
s, great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, children’s children, to say nothing of the servants, the Honored Ancestor, the aunts and uncles and cousins. By contrast, an elf visiting a human household is overwhelmed by the noise, the stench, the confusion, and is similarly astounded to find that only a few people—parents, a child, and perhaps a servant or two—occupy the dwelling.

  The higher ranking the elf, the larger the dwelling place, though the size of the house is offset by the fact that more of his relatives are probably living there, as well as the Elders of the House and their immediate families and any visiting nobility. Guests are usually accommodated in guesthouses, located near the gatehouse, which is where Silwyth had spent the night of his arrival. His family’s home was north of Lovod, the Shield’s city. Silwyth had traveled a day and a night, changing horses on the road, in order to answer the Shield’s summons.

  Silwyth climbed the innumerable flagstone steps leading from the fourth garden up to the ninth, restraining his eagerness in order to maintain the correct distance between himself and the servant. The gardens were built in terraces along the sloping face of a mountain. Ornamental shrubs and ponds surrounded small tinkling fountains. Orchids and roses and trailing vines covered stone archways. Paths led between carefully carved hedges and into shady grottoes. The gardens, exceedingly beautiful, served several functional purposes as well. They informed the visitor that the man who owned the gardens was prosperous and powerful, since he could afford the labor required to tend them, while their beauty helped the visitor forget that he was climbing a thousand stairs up the side of a mountain in order to reach the main house. If he was fortunate enough to reach the main house. Many visitors to the Shield never moved past the fourth garden, some never saw anything beyond the first. Silwyth was being greatly honored.