“You shave now?” Lin asked suddenly.
“Of course.” Rap had shaved the previous night for the fourth time and included his chin for the first time. He would have to get a razor of his own soon. Lin had a faint dark haze on his upper lip. And he still had a very odd look in his eye. “Why?” Lin shrugged and turned away, but after a moment, he said,
“Funny thing, growing up. Isn’t it?”
Yes it was, Rap agreed, and concentrated on the next water barrier. But once they were safely through that, he relaxed and began to enjoy himself, enjoy the feeling that now he was one of the drivers—if the old man would ever trust him again after that mad stunt he had just pulled.
“Yes,” he said. “One moment you’re feeling all manly and the next you find you’re behaving like a kid again. It’s like being two people.” A fellow’s body started making all these odd changes without as much as asking permission . . . what right did his face have to start growing hair without asking him?
Like being two people . . . and you knew only one of those people. Growing up was becoming a stranger to yourself again, just when you thought you’d got to know yourself. And part of growing up was wondering what sort of person you were going to be. How tall? How broad? Trustworthy? A strong man or a weakling? And what were you going to do with that man? Master-of-horse? Man-at-arms?
“Girls!” Lin muttered to himself.
Girls.
Inos.
Now they were rolling along the edge of the shingle, passing the lonely cluster of shore cottages with their racks of fish and nets and a ramshackle corral and a couple of haystacks starting to sprout. There were stacks of driftwood that the old women gathered and heaps of peat moss. Bonfires of kelp were sending up blue smoke. There were girls there and they waved. The men waved back. The long bent grass waved, also.
“We could eat here,” Lin said thoughtfully.
“Later. “
Beyond the shiny blue harbor lay Krasnegar, a towering triangle with a castle as a topknot. Yes, it did look like a piece of cheese. Perhaps Rap was hungry after all, but he’d said later, so later it would have to be. A yellow triangle. Where had the sorcerer found black stone for his castle?
Inos was in that castle.
He thought of horse rides and clam digging and surf fishing; of Inos running over the dunes, long legs, gold hair streaming in the wind, and her shrieks and giggles when he caught her; of Inos scrambling up the cliffs in the sunshine, daring him to come after her; of hawking and archery. He thought of her face, not bony like a jotunn’s or round like an imp’s. Just right. He thought of singsongs and winter firesides with singing and joking and his arm around her as they sought pictures in the embers.
It hurt, but it was for the best. There could never be anything between a princess and a stableboy, nor even a wagon driver. He supposed that it had crept up on them. He really had not noticed it until the previous day. They had been a bunch of kids together, a dozen or more of them. It had only been near the end of the last winter that he and Inos had started to drift together, and together start drifting to the edge of the bunch. And then he had gone off to the mainland when spring came.
She had kissed him good-bye, but even then he had not thought very much about it—not until they were apart. Then he had realized how he missed her smile and the comfortableness of having her near—and realized that she didn’t kiss other men good-bye. And lately he had started to dream about her. But she would go off to Kinvale and find some handsome noble to come back and be king after Holindarn died.
And he would have to find some other girl to kiss.
Trouble was, there weren’t other girls like Inos.
“Can you remember much of your mother, Rap?”
Rap looked in surprise at Lin, who was still a little paler than usual. ”Why?”
“Some of the women say she was a seer.”
Rap frowned, trying to remember if his mother had ever admitted anything like that or done anything like that.
“So?” he said.
“Growing up,” Lin said. “I just wondered . . . You’ve been doing some strange things today, Rap. You’ve never been able to do things like that before, have you?”
“Like what? I didn’t do anything!”
Lin was unconvinced. “Could it be something that comes with growing up, like shaving?”
Rap would not talk about such things with chatterbox Lin.
“Does that cast bother you?”
Lin looked down at his arm. “Yes, some. Why?”
“Because,” Rap said, “if you start hinting that my mother needed to shave, then you’re going to have two of them.”
2
Summer, said the hardworking folk of Krasnegar, was the two weeks they were given to prepare for the other fifty. There was no small truth in that.
True, summer usually lasted longer than two weeks, but it came late and left soon, and it was marred by endless toil. Without the profit of their summer labors, the people would not survive the merciless winter that was sure to follow. A few hardy crops were sown and most years those could be harvested before the first snows, to augment the grain that must be imported by ship. The other years were destined to bring famine and sickness before summer came again. Peat must be cut and dried and carried to the town in load after load, to blunt the deadly teeth of frost during the long nights. Hay, also, standing high upon the wagons, crossed the causeway at every tide so that the king’s horses could eat until spring came again and the cattle might give milk for the children the next year. Fish must be caught and smoked, livestock slaughtered and their beef salted; seal meat or whale meat laid by, also, if the boats were blessed with fortune. Vegetables and berries, rushes and driftwood and furs . . . the scanty fruits of the hard land were carefully gathered and jealously hoarded away.
Here and there in the bare hills stood forlorn hamlets and clumps of cottages, where life was even harder than it was in the town. But for most of the year there was nothing for men to do on the land except survive, and survival was easier in the city—or death less lonely—and so the cottagers also huddled in with the townsfolk during the long winters, like badgers in their earth. When the snows streamed off the hills in spring, they emerged once more to their toil, and voices were heard again under the sky.
Without careful management their efforts would never have sufficed, and the leadership came from the king, or more directly from his factor, a tall and rawboned jotunn named Foronod, who was everywhere at all times and reputedly wore out three horses a day. His water-blue eyes saw everything, and he commanded everyone in sharp, laconic phrases like small knives, never wasting a word or a moment, never sparing a soul, least of all himself. In high summer he seemed to sleep even less than the sun. His gangling figure could appear at any time anywhere in the kingdom, long legs hanging limp at the sides of his pony, silver hair flashing a warning before him as he came into view. His memory was as capacious as the palace storerooms. He knew to the inch how much hay had been gathered, how much peat; he knew the state of the herds and the times of the tides and he could call down the wrath of the Gods or the Powers on anyone caught slacking or sleeping except for reasons of total exhaustion. He knew the strengths and abilities and weaknesses of every man and woman, girl and boy in his whole great workforce.
Foronod noted that a wagon had been repaired and returned. He doubtless noted as well that a certain stableboy had been promoted to driver, and that fact, also, would have been stored away until it might be needed. But the factor had many drivers and that boy had talents that others did not.
By nightfall, Rap was back with the herds.
3
“Turn around, my dear,” Aunt Kade said. “Charming! Yes, very nice! Definitely charming.”
Inos did not feel charming, she felt wretched. There was a nasty hard feeling at the back of her throat and a dull coldness all over her. Her arms and legs were made of stone. Last night she had slept in her own bed for the last time. An hour ago she had eaten her last meal in the palace—not that she had been able to eat anything. Every time she did anything at all now it was for the last time.