“They only told me this ‘think of yourself out’ idiocy. Does it give you pleasure for your servants to be insolent or were you testing my obedience? I didn’t kill them for it, nor give them even a gentle slap for their rudeness.”
“But it’s the truth. They just don’t understand that you’re not used to such things. This is… ”
“… not Leire. Yes, I remember.” She spun on her heel, almost causing me to collide with her. “So tell me, O great king, where in the blighted universe are we?”
“Its inhabitants call this world the Bounded.”
“This world - ” She sat down abruptly on a plain wooden bench next to the wall. To her credit she lost none of her color. “You really mean that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I heard a story once of another world… ”
“… and a bridge of enchantment that joined it with our own.”
“I remember some of it. Such a wild tale… sorcery… other worlds… villainous creatures with no souls. I thought the woman must surely be mad.”
“That woman was my mother.” My mother had been astonished that King Evard had kept his daughter in the room as she told him about Gondai and the Bridge and the battle that had killed her brother.
“Your mother… truly? I couldn’t believe my father would even listen to her. I thought it was only because she was related to his sword champion, the Duke of… ” Her voice trailed away, and her gray eyes grew wide, staring at me again. “That’s who you are! Duke Tomas’s son!”
I bowed. “The stupidest boy in the world - at your service.”
Her brow wrinkled. “But the woman who told the story was not Duke Tomas’s wife.”
“There was a mix-up early on. He wasn’t really my father, but my uncle. His sister, Seriana, was - is - my mother.”
She shook her head. Her hair was curling as it dried and a few of the curls fell down on her face. She didn’t seem to notice. “Gerick. That was your name. And you were so unfriendly! You wouldn’t say anything and wouldn’t play anything I wanted. I told you about the cherry tarts to impress you. And later you were stolen by bandits. Everyone believed you were dead.”
“It’s complicated. I didn’t die.”
“So this is the world your mother told of?” She looked around the audience hall with new interest.
“No… or rather, I’m not exactly sure. It’s a long story. Would you like me to show you how to leave the Blue Tower? That’s probably enough strangeness for one day.” Then I could leave her to her own devices.
“Yes. Certainly. It might prove to me that I’m not your prisoner.” She popped up from the bench. “This is so odd. We played together. It seems a thousand years ago right now. This place… these people… You know… I don’t care if it’s complicated to explain where we are. I want to hear it. I’m not stupid. And I’m not some ninny who faints at the least fright. But, yes, show me how to get out of here first.”
Roxanne didn’t stop talking the whole way down the length of the audience hall. Without giving me much time to tell her anything, she peppered me with questions, not always the ones I expected.
“Who is your friend that you care so much for him?”
“His name is Paulo. He was born in the village of Dunfarrie. My mother befriended him there, and four years ago he helped her rescue me from the people who abducted - ”
“A common boy, then.”
“Those words have no meaning with respect to Paulo.”
“All right, all right. I can see not. Are you really as fierce as you say?”
I kept my eyes on the doorway at the end of the hall, wishing we were in the rotunda already so I could push her through the wall and be done with her. “My childhood was very unusual. I’ve done everything I say.”
She thought about that for a moment, her sidelong gaze feeling like fire on my skin. “There are a number of people who would say you are young to be a king, but I think it would be more accurate to say you are very old to be a year, ten months, and five days younger than me.”
The main entrance to the Blue Tower, where Paulo and I had first come through to visit the Guardian, was centered on a sheer curved wall, identifiable as a tower entrance only by the narrow silver band at its edges. I traced my finger over the outline to show her. “A dwelling in this world is called a fastness. They look like towers to us. But dimensions - height and width and depth - are measured differently here, so the interior spaces don’t reflect the exterior shape. And though the interior doorways between rooms look familiar to us, those which pass through the walls do not. The women were exactly right. You have to think of yourself out…”
I explained the passage to her as Vroon had explained it to me, and I described the thoughts I had used successfully. That was not easy, as I didn’t even have to consider them any more. Then I gave her a demonstration. When I popped back in, she was already yelling at me.
“Sorcery! I should have known it! How is it you are capable of such wickedness?” The princess was flushed, whether with anger or fright I couldn’t tell. “And how could you think that I - ”
“It’s not sorcery, though I’m sure to you it appears the same. But you and every person in this land can do it. And no one burns you for it.”
This time, she did turn pale. I thought she was going to run. But she just stared at me until my skin grew hot. “Well then,” she said at last. “Explain it to me.”
It took me a few moments to decide how much to say. I’d done a lot of thinking about the Bounded. Anyone in the Four Realms would call Nithea’s healing practices sorcery, and the same for Zanore’s route-finding, Ob’s weighty words, and the whole business of towers that grew. Yet I’d felt no telltale prickles of enchantment when the healing woman had massaged my shoulder - twisted when the dead maintainer had fallen on me - and I could suddenly raise my hand above my head without passing out from the pain. And I summoned no power to think myself out of the Blue Tower. The “prickles” were a sign of the resistance of the natural world to the use of a sorcerer’s power. So I had concluded that the Guardian had pronounced no magical winding to open the stone circle passage to the garden because no magic was needed. The fundamental nature of the Bounded was magic.
The princess’s fingers tapped impatiently on her folded arms.
“Well, first you have to understand the distinction between natural law and sorcery. Natural law is the set of rules a world works by - which can be different depending on the world. Sorcery is the use of a particular kind of power to stretch or extend or nullify those rules. Going in and out of these towers has no more to do with magical power than does riding in a wheeled cart or sailing on a lake in Leire…”
I tried to explain how things that would be inexplicable in our world and require a sorcerer’s power to accomplish could be a natural part of another one. I felt as if I was making a muddle of it. Roxanne stared at the floor, listening, her frown deepening by the moment.
When I finally gave up and stopped talking, she glanced up. “All right, then. I suppose that makes some kind of perverse sense. Go on.”
I was astonished. I wondered briefly what she might say if I told her I’d melted rocks with lightning from the tip of my finger or had swum in the deeps of the ocean in the form of a fish. I stayed with nature. “So, the way to pass between these spaces we call in and the spaces we call out is to convince yourself which way you’re going. Your mind’s just not used to being in a world with a different set of rules, and it doesn’t believe it when you tell it what to do. If you don’t want to try it, I could - ”
“No. I’m feeling a bit overstuffed with all this strangeness, and I’m tired of this dismal place and these lamps that are forever being turned up and down by creeping servants I never see. I need to walk in the sunlight. Maybe go riding.”