The Great Hall glittered with a hundred candles, its walls damasked and tapestried, its floor gleaming malachite, its lofty ceiling painted with frescoes that Matt wished he had time to study—but the demoiselle was leading him toward a high dais topped by a gilded throne and flanked by two flaring lamps. At the top of the steps sat the king, wrinkled and silver-haired, but with a lively expression on his hawk-nosed face, and eyes that glinted beneath his golden crown. He interrupted the disputants with a polite smile and waved them away. They withdrew to the far side of the chamber, still arguing.
"My lord and ancestor," the maiden said, "this mortal is hight Matthew Mantrell, Lord Wizard of Merovence."
Matt bowed. When he straightened up, he saw a trace of humor in the old king's eyes—but the royal face didn't crack a smile, much less start talking.
This was going to get nowhere. Matt needed some kind of a conversational opener. "I am honored by your hospitality, your Majesty."
"It is gladly given," the majestic face proclaimed, in a voice of a grandeur to match its appearance. "I am intrigued by your presence, Lord Wizard."
"Oh?" Matt smiled, but was very wary inside. "Am I so rare a thing as that, your Majesty?"
"For a mortal to enter into Ys? Aye—yet that is explained by the presence of my great-daughter." He smiled fondly at the maid, who bowed her head in a gesture that managed to combine demureness with sauciness; then he turned back to Matt. "Therefore, 'tis not your presence in Ys that is remarkable in itself, but your presence in Castillo Adamanto, so near to the lair of the sorcerer-king."
"Oh, that?" Matt waved away the problem. "I spoke rashly, and in anger, Majesty—but I thereby bound myself to do all I could to unseat the sorcerer."
"Oathbound, though a wizard?" The king looked askance.
"I have this little problem with my temper," Matt confessed.
"More than a little, I should think." But the king's eye twinkled. "Do you always go about losing control of your words thus? Or is there one who can provoke you more easily than others?"
"All right, all right, so I was talking to the woman I love! Can you blame me for tackling a sorcerer?"
"For love's sake? Surely not, milord." The king chuckled. He exchanged a glance with the maid and said, "Yet I am rude in so questioning a guest. Come, examine me in my turn. Is there naught you would know about Ys?"
"Well, now that you mention it..." Matt glanced around at the courtiers, then back to the king. "The demoiselle does seem to be a little young to be your granddaughter..."
"Nay, my great-daughter—my daughter's daughter's daughter's daughter's...She is removed from me by some thirty generations, Lord Wizard."
Matt nodded. "I kinda thought it would be something like that. Was your daughter..." He broke off, chagrined.
"You think to make me grieve, in speaking of my child." The king shook his head with gentle sympathy. "Fear not, Lord Wizard. The years have flowed into centuries, the centuries into millennia, and the pain grows dim. I will not deny that it cannot be raised, but I am well consoled in my old age. Know, then, that the first demoiselle, my daughter, found a man to follow her."
"With her magic, she found many," Sinelle said with scorn—the quick judgment of the young, and quicker intolerance. "Every man that she desired, she enchanted—and felt only the greater contempt for them, in that they succumbed to her spells."
The old king nodded. "Yet at last, she met a nobleman's son, journeying with a merchant crew, who fell in love with her as soon as he saw her—and she with him, for that he loved her without the aid of her own artifice. With him she wedded, and did breed a babe—yet her true nature was ever there, no matter how well she hid it from him; I doubt not that, even as she carried the child, she planned the vile use which she intended."
"There was a spell of great power, which she could not attempt," said the demoiselle, in a hushed voice, "for it required the sacrifice of a babe, of the sorceress' own body—for know, Wizard, that it is the dedication to such wickedness that is the essence of evil magic, to exclusion of all else."
Matt could believe it; from his own experience of the magic "field," its manipulation was a matter of intent and will, expressed through symbols. He felt a chill at the thought of the kind of results the witch might have intended. "She sounds as if she deserved her reputation, all right. Was there anything that could have saved the baby?"
"Her father," the old king said, "for he learned of the wickedness his wife intended."
"His eyes were open at last to her corruption," Sinelle said with a shiver. "Knowledge that she intended such wickedness made the good man see her for what she was. 'Twas for the child's sake that he fled to my great-father, the king, and bore with him the babe—and for her sake that Ys was drowned."
"For in her wrath," the king said, "my daughter did raise up all manner of evil spirits from the sea, and hurled them 'gainst mine Ys—yet I had been ever steadfast in my devotion to the Sea King Poseidon, had ever done my best to govern well and wisely, and regularly made suitable offerings to his Oceanic Majesty. So while the sea pounded Ys elsewhere, the Sea King came to me, and we struck a bargain."
"Bargain?" Matt stared. "Why would a being who could control the whole sea, and everything in it, need to make a bargain with a mere mortal? Sure, being merciful I can understand, maybe even rewarding you for having been a good king..."
"In truth, I think he did even so—yet did wish to allow me to preserve some poor shreds of my pride." The king smiled. "Yet there was some need of it. For the Sea King hated my daughter's magic and wished all memory of it erased—but most especially all her implements of witchcraft destroyed, and all her books of spells. Some of those were warded 'gainst him, and the sea could not approach them. These, he proposed, I should destroy—for my daughter had not thought to ward them 'gainst mere mortal folk, sin that the door to her chambers was guarded by fierce spells and fell. For all that, she had left it unlocked in her anger, the whiles she went out to the tower's brim to summon her spirits—so I came in, and burned her books, and threw her alembics and crucibles upon the fire. Even as I did, I heard her scream in rage—but she could not turn aside from her work to punish me, for the fell spirits she had raised would have torn her asunder. In revenge, she turned them against my land—but the Sea King, for his part, had promised that my castle would remain inviolate, and he came to mine aid in that hour, defending me and mine from the avalanche of the waves. So as the surf pounded Ys to bits, all others of my people died..." His voice became somber, his darkened gaze drifting away from Matt. Sinelle laid her hand on his; he looked up, focused on her face, forced a smile, and turned back to Matt. "But this castle endured, sheltered by the vasty bubble that lends us breath. By some Sea King's magic, this air is ever renewed, and we who dwell here never die—so long as we do dwell here."
"But if you go out, you die?"
"We may die," Sinelle corrected, "if we go outside of the Sea King's realm; and protection cannot extend to us on land. Then will we age; then can we be slain."
"But if you don't, you're immortal?" Matt's brain swam at the thought—and at the magnitude of the cabin fever that could develop among these self-willed captives! No wonder the ones who stayed were the ones who valued tranquility and the life of the mind.
"In such fashion did my granddaughter grow," the king spoke up again, "dwelling beneath the water, and only knowing of the human realm above through my tales—for none of my courtiers chose to stay, of such few as had been near me when my daughter struck. Nay, as soon as Poseidon had turned against her the waves she had summoned, and she had drowned in her own evilness, my courtiers left me, by ones and twos, and finally in a body. But my granddaughter was my delight, and her father my boon companion—though he died at last, worn out with living. His daughter grew into a comely, good-hearted girl and found a husband among the folk on the shore, and brought him down to dwell with us in love. She birthed three children, who went above the waves to seek spouses, as her descendants have ever done. Yet one of my granddaughters chose to return to my palace here beneath the sea, and her children also followed the call of love to the land. One great-granddaughter brought her husband down here to me—and I have been fortunate, most fortunate, in that there has been at least one of each generation who has seen fit to join me here beneath the sea."