Dennis felt his expression tremble. He could face anger, now that he knew what the anger hid; but his father had undermined his composure by treating him for the first time as an adult. “Father, if I don’t go—”
Hale shook his shaggy head. “It doesn’t matter to you. It’s my bargain, and my decision.”
“But—”
“It’s my decision!”
Dennis spun to the door and jerked it open. It took all his remaining strength of will to plunge into the anteroom again before his own tears joined those of his mother.
This time, the cause was more complex than anger and frustration, though; and he half thought he heard his father start to cry also as the thick panel slammed shut.
CHAPTER 10
“I always used to like the night, Chester,” Dennis said as he watched the sea surge and glow. “Remember? We’d lie out here and wonder which star men really came from?”
His back was supported by one of the smooth-contoured crenelations that decorated this roofline. The crystal was slightly chilly—it remained cool even in the direct glare of the summer sun.
The metal of the robot’s case was warm and reassuring as Dennis reached out to his companion.
“Well, I still like it,” the youth admitted aloud. “It’s just that I haven’t been having a good time at nights recently. I—”
He paused and looked at Chester, a dull blur against the vague light retained by the structure of the palace. “I don’t know what to do, Chester. My father’s been a good ruler, a really great one, even if he…”
It was hard for a boy who’s been raised a prince to find that he is both a man—and a fisherman’s son. Though a prince as well, of course.
And Dennis was still a boy, too, unless he was careful about the way he reacted to danger and frustration.
“If you listen to the judgment of your heart,” the robot said with the pompous weight of wisdom in his voice, “you will sleep untroubled.”
As a friend in the darkness, Chester added, “What is it that you would do, Dennis?”
“I’d go out to the sea hag,” Dennis said simply. Stated that way, he could forget all the doubts and terrors that the decision implied. “But I can’t go against Dad.”
“Do not leave a fool to rule the people,” Chester said; but that was the program talking and not the friend Dennis had made over sixteen years together.
Hale was being foolish in this.
“…all will be yours to command…” the sea hag had bargained as Hale stood on the deck of The Partners. Knowing that, Dennis couldn’t be sure how much of the way he obeyed his father was a result of the sea hag’s magic…
Chester would ask what Dennis wanted to do if he couldn’t do the right thing—and even in his princely willingness to be sacrificed, Dennis felt an underlying joy that he didn’t have to hurl himself into that waiting, stinking maw. But if he couldn’t do that—
“Chester, I can’t stay in Emath,” Dennis said in sudden resolution. “My father never told me not to go out into the jungle. I’ll do that tonight. I’ll find—some other place to live.”
He couldn’t live in Emath and watch it be destroyed because of something he hadn’t done, something his father wouldn’t permit him to do. Perhaps if he left, the sea hag would spare the village.
And perhaps one of the jungle’s hidden monsters would gobble Dennis down; and then he could stop worrying about what he ought to do.
“Oh—” Dennis said. Death was something he knew only from books, where it seemed noble and heroic. Being alone was a fear of a much more serious order.
“C-chester, would you go with me if I leave Emath?” he asked.
A tentacle looped his shoulders and tickled the back of his left ear. “I will go with you wherever you wish, Master Dennis,” the robot said softly.
Dennis jumped to his feet, speaking quickly so that emotion wouldn’t choke him. “Right,” he said, “great. I’ll need food—I’ll get some bread and sausages from the cooks.”
He frowned. “That’s the sort of food people take when they go out in the jungle, isn’t it, Chester?”