“You did this,” Moon breathed; and louder, “You gave him to the King of Stones with your own hand.”
“I had to,” he whispered. “He made a beggar of me. My son was the forfeit.”
“You locked him under the earth. And let my teacher go to her … to her death to pay your forfeit.”
“It was his life or mine!”
“Does your lady wife know what you did?”
“His lady wife helped him to do it,” said the queen, stepping forward from the shadows of the hall. She stood tall and her face was quiet, as if she welcomed the noose. “Because he was her love and the other, only her son. Because she feared to lose a queen’s power. Because she was a fool, and weak. Then she kept the secret, because her heart was black and broken, and she thought no worse could be done than had been done already.”
Moon turned to the king. “Tell me,” she commanded.
“I was hunting alone,” said the king in a trembling voice. “I roused a boar. I … had a young man’s pride and an old man’s arm, and the boar was too much for me. I lay bleeding and in pain, and the sight nearly gone from my eyes, when I heard footsteps. I called out for help.
“‘You are dying,’ he told me, and I denied it, weeping. ‘I don’t want to die,’ I said, over and over. I promised him anything, if he would save my life.” The king’s voice failed, and stopped.
“Where?” said Moon. “Where did this happen?”
“In the wood under Elder Scarp. Near the waterfall that feeds the stream called the Laughing Girl.”
“Point me the way,” she ordered.
The sky was hazed white, and the air was hot and still. Moon dashed sweat from her forehead as she walked. She could have demanded a horse, but she had walked the rest of the journey, and this seemed such a little way compared to that. She hoped it would be cooler under the trees.
It wasn’t; and the gnats were worse around her face, and the biting flies. Moon swung at them steadily as she clambered over the stones. It seemed a long time before she heard the waterfall, then saw it. She cast about for the clearing, and wondered, were there many? Or only one, and it so small that she could walk past it and never know? The falling water thrummed steadily, like a drum, like a heartbeat.
In a shaft of sun, she saw a bit of creamy white—a flower head, round and flat as a platter, dwarfed with early blooming. She looked up and found that she stood on the edge of a clearing, and was not alone.
He wore armor, dull gray plates worked with fantastic embossing, trimmed in glossy black. He had a gray cloak fastened over that, thrown back off his shoulders, but with the hood up and pulled well forward. Moon could see nothing of his face.
“In the common way of things,” he said, in a quiet, carrying voice, “I seek out those I wish to see. I am not used to uninvited guests.”
The armor was made of slate and obsidian, because he was the King of Stones.
She couldn’t speak. She could command the king of Hark End, but this was a king whose rule did not light on him by an accident of blood or by the acclaim of any mortal thing. This was an embodied power, a still force of awe and terror.
“I’ve come for a man and his soul,” she whispered. “They were wrongly taken.”
“I take nothing wrongly. Are you sure?”
She felt heat in her face, then cold at the thought of what she’d said: that she’d accused him. “No,” she admitted, the word cracking with her fear. “But that they were wrongly given, I know. He was not theirs to give.”
“You speak of the prince of Hark End. They were his parents. Would you let anyone say you could not give away what you had made?”
Moon’s lips parted on a word; then she stared in horror. Her mind churned over the logic, followed his question back to its root.
He spoke her thoughts aloud. “You have attended at the death of a child, stilled in the womb to save the mother’s life. How is this different?”
“It is different!” she cried. “He was a grown man, and what he was was shaped by what he did, what he chose.”
“He had his mother’s laugh, his grandfather’s nose. His father taught him to ride. What part of him was not made by someone else? Tell me, and we will see if I should give that part back.”
Moon clutched her fingers over her lips, as if by that she could force herself to think it all through before she spoke. “His father taught him to ride,” she repeated. “If the horse refuses to cross a ford, what makes the father use his spurs, and the son dismount and lead it? He has his mother’s laugh—but what makes her laugh at one thing, and him at another?”
“What, indeed?” asked the King of Stones. “Well, for argument’s sake I’ll say his mind is in doubt, and his heart. What of his body?”
“Bodies grow with eating and exercise,” Moon replied. This was ground she felt sure of. “Do you think the king and the queen did those for him?”
The King of Stones threw back his cowled head and laughed, a cold ringing sound. It restored Moon to sensible terror. She stepped back, and found herself against a tree trunk.
“And his soul?” said the King of Stones at last.
“That didn’t belong to his mother and father,” Moon said, barely audible even to her own ears. “If it belonged to anyone but himself, I think you did not win it from Her.”
Silence lay for long moments in the clearing. Then he said, “I am well tutored. Yet there was a bargain made, and a work done, and both sides knew what they pledged and what it meant. Under law, the contract was kept.”
“That’s not true. Out of fear the king promised you anything, but he never meant the life of his son!”
“Then he could have refused me that, and died. He said ‘Anything,’ and meant it, unto the life of his son, his wife, and all his kingdom.”
He had fought her to a standstill with words. But, words used up and useless, she still felt a core of anger in her for what had been done, outrage against a thing she knew, beyond words, was wrong.
So she said aloud, “It’s wrong. It was a contract that was wrong to make, let alone to keep. I know it.”
“What is it,” said the King of Stones, “that says so?”
“My judgment says so. My head.” Moon swallowed. “My heart.”
“Ah. What do I know of your judgment? Is it good?”
She scrubbed her fingers over her face. He had spoken lightly, but Moon knew the question wasn’t light at all. She had to speak the truth; she had to decide what the truth was. “It’s not perfect,” she answered reluctantly. “But yes, I think it’s as good as most people’s.”
“Do you trust it enough to allow it to be tested?”
Moon lifted her head and stared at him in alarm. “What?”
“I will test your judgment. If I find it good, I will let you free the prince of Hark End. If not, I will keep him, and you will take your anger, your outrage, and the knowledge of your failure home to nurture like children all the rest of your life.”
“Is that prophecy?” Moon asked hoarsely.
“You may prove it so, if you like. Will you take my test?”
She drew a great, trembling breath. “Yes.”
“Come closer, then.” With that, he pushed back his hood.
There was no stone helm beneath, or monster head. There was a white-skinned man’s face, all bone and sinew and no softness, and long black hair rucked from the hood. The sockets of his eyes were shadowed black, though the light that fell in the clearing should have lit all of his face. Moon looked at him and was more frightened than she would have been by any deformity, for she knew then that none of this—armor, face, eyes—had anything to do with his true shape.
“Before we begin,” he said in that soft, cool voice. “There is yet a life you have not asked me for, one I thought you’d beg of me first of all.”