Page 6 of The Summer War
Just barely reasonable, and nothing in the letter was alie,but Celia was certain that it also wasn’t the real reason. The king had wanted her at twelve, and the prince couldn’t possibly have gotten an heir on her then without shocking the country and risking her life, so that wasn’t what he really wanted. It was only the excuse that the king was using now to make Father hand her over to him as quickly as possible. And he wanted thattoomuch; making it an ultimatum was a risk, because there were also plenty of people who would agree withFather,if he dug in his heels and refused to hand over his daughter so young, and then the king would have to decide between giving in and looking weak, or declaring Father a traitor and picking a fight with him, which would have made him look unreasonable enough to let Celia just take the throne with sorcery after all, with most people, especially the common folk, ready to take their part.
Father did finally recognize that something was wrong, but he’d spent too much time with his brain shut up inside a dark room, and he couldn’t take it out and use it again right away. He said finally, “I’ll muster a thousand men for our escort, and raise another seven thousand, in case it comes to war,” but that was just flailing. He didn’t really know what to do. He’d still know what to do if it did cometo fighting, but Celia didn’t believe it would. The king wouldn’t count on winning a war against Father—no one would have—so it couldn’t be fighting.
“I’m coming too,” Roric said, as they left his study together.
“You can’t,” Celia said. “If they killed Fatherandyou, they could do anything they wanted with me, and there wouldn’t even be anyone to object. I can’t just slaughter the entire army of Prosper.”
“If they kill Father, they can do anything they want with you anyway,” Roric said, which was probably true. “Anyway, I won’t let anyoneknowI’m coming. I’ll dress like a song-spinner and go to the Green Bridge as if I’m thinking of going into the Summer Lands for the season. No one in the royal court knows anything about me. They might not even know I exist.”
Roric left the castle that same day, with her mother’s lute and a red cap on his head. While the more elaborate preparations for her own journey were made, Celia grimly finished the last part of the embroidery, a little bit quicker than she’d meant to, so the two figures being married under the trees had to be left a bit indistinct, and she sewed it onto a beautiful silk gown of green and yellow, the colors of summer, for her wedding day.
Castle Todholme was a long way from the border: Father hadn’t wanted to be in range of a surprise attack. It took two weeks to make the journey to the Green Bridge.She sat tensely next to Father in the coach the whole way, and it wasn’t reassuring to feel him just as taut beside her. On the last night of the journey, he ordered his men to stop and make camp a little early, at the crest of a hill overlooking the Evergreen Valley. He and Celia got out of the coach; she followed him to the ridge and they looked down together into the wide green half valley below, with the snaking line of the Meanwhile River running along the border of the Summer Lands, still shrouded in thick mist: it wasn’t yet the first day of summer. The Green Bridge wasn’t really there yet, but you could glimpse it like a shadow, on the verge of emerging from the mist.
Taverns and market stalls were clustered on either side of the royal road running from the Green Bridge. Celia had heard many of their song-spinner guests talk with enthusiasm about the reopening of the Summer Market, and all the lovely enchanted summer work they’d seen. But there were many more half-crumbled stalls still abandoned than there were repaired, and all of them looked deserted at the moment, as if the mortal tradesmen were hanging back and would only turn up after the summerlings arrived.
The challenge grounds were just a large rectangle mowed into the ground near the river, with pavilions set up around it and one block of tall wooden stands. It wasn’t especially impressive. Their training yard at Castle Todholme was almost as big. The old royal palace stood on theother side of the road, upon the tallest rise along the bank of the river, but it was more than half a ruin, of pale soft limestone streaked with dirt. For a hundred years of war, no one had lived there, and no one seemed to have done much work to rebuild it since. Prince Gorthan wasn’t even staying inside. The royal flag with its crown was flying from a large pavilion outside the walls, surrounded by a large company of royal armsmen, who looked more like a military camp than an embassy, with many sentries on high alert.
Father stood silently frowning down into the valley while the leading edge of nightfall gradually crept in from the east. “What is it?” Celia said, looking at him.
“Thisis what’s wrong,” he said after a moment, like rusty gears turning. “It’s the peace that’s a lie.”
And as soon as he said it, Celia could see the lie of it herself. The legends all said that the town of Green Bridge was almost part of the Summer Lands, truly halfway between. The trees never lost their leaves, and summerlings would often pole out of the river mists on an unseasonably warm day, even if the bridge wasn’t open, and attend feasts in the royal palace. That was why Princess Eislaing had been able to marry Sherdan, and come to live with him here.
But the town below was just a perfectly ordinary mortal place. Some of the market stalls were nicely fixed up, others half built. There were untidy piles in places andugly ruins left uncovered, weedy plants and irregular patches of tall grass growing. Those makeshift grounds weren’t a place for the flower of summer knights to do battle. The palace ruins were picturesque but not achingly beautiful, and the towers were surrounded by the rotting heaps of the long-collapsed autumn halls, which no one had cleaned up. The summerlings hadn’t really come back. They were just pretending.
“But—the summer war ended before I was born,” she said. “It’s been almost twenty years.”
“What’s twenty years to a summerling?” Father said. “They don’t change. Time is a river; it carries us along. But they’re only on the banks, watching it go by. They canbechanged, if we throw a rock and hit them, but they don’t change on their own.” He shook his head. “If the king had let me kill Elithyon, that might have ended the war. Some other summer lord would have become king, and likely he’d have forgotten that any Elithyon and Eislaing even existed. No summer king really remembers that there was ever a king before him. But Elithyon would never give up vengeance for his sister. To him, we’re still the same people who murdered her the day before yesterday. When he agreed to peace, he lied.”
“But what aboutourking?” Celia said uneasily. “What’shelying about?”
Father was silent a long moment, and then he gave an impatient shrug. “Unless Morthimer is a complete fool, hewants you to bear Gorthan an heir. That’s even more true if he knows the peace is false. And then—” He seesawed his hand. “He’ll see how biddable you are. If you’re difficult, or too much under my thumb, you could die in childbirth, or of some sickness.”
And that all made perfect sense, only Celia felt too much that she was working on a puzzle with some pieces shoved into the wrong places, not quite fitting, and the picture not coming clear. But there still wasn’t a better choice than going forward. If the summerlings were just waiting to attack again, starting a civil war in Prosper would be a terrible idea, especially on the first day of summer.
They rode down early the next morning, and even as they came, the mist was rolling back from a shining bridge of living wood, vines full of leaves and opening into flowers. Celia couldn’t help but put her head out of the carriage window to watch it stretching out for the bank. Even though nothing about the town had changed, Celia was glad she’d seen it from a distance, the day before, to recognize the lie: all the disrepair she’d seen was hard to notice with the warm fragrant summer breeze coming down the road, and flowers blooming on either side.
Father encamped their men in a solid block just north of the tourney grounds, near a stand of trees he’d marked out the evening before, which he knew were real; he put a small company of two dozen men hidden there, with threefast horses apiece, and had them lay a ring of salt around their camp. “If something goes wrong, we’ll go straight there, and run for the mountains,” he said. But Celia was sure that nothing was going to go wrong with that much warning. “Don’t use sorcery until you have to,” he added. “It’s a blunt instrument. If you have to use it against them at all, likely the only sensible thing you can do is kill them.” It was a warning she didn’t need, and which wasn’t comforting when sorcery was the only power she had to defend herself.
A royal messenger arrived while they were still putting up tents, and told Father that the wedding would be held that very evening before the opening feast began. He pointed out a small beautiful grove that Celia hadn’t noticed before, on the riverbank near the palace: a stand of golden-barked trees hung with swaths of green silk and white flowering vines. There was an enormous white pavilion up on the other side of it, full of feasting tables, with servants already bustling around them to lay down the trenchers and dress them with flowers. “Prince Gorthan sends his greetings and best wishes, Your Grace, and thanks you for the honor of entrusting him with your daughter. He will come to you at sunset, to escort her ladyship to the wedding grove, where she and the prince will pledge their troth,” the messenger said.
He wasn’t lying, and more than that, he seemed sincerely excited, and eyed her with the avid curiosity of aman who thought he was looking at his future queen. At leasthethought the wedding was going to happen. After he left, with many bows and smiles in her direction, she said to Father, “Maybe it’syouthey’re going to murder,” which would have made some sense, if the king didn’t realize that the summerlings were going to break the peace. Once she was married to Gorthan, he could get rid of Father, and have a young sorceress completely in his power.
Father put on his armor, and kept all his men on high alert, but no one attacked them. As the sun was going down, a company detached itself from the royal camp and came towards their own, but it was only an honor guard of two dozen knights in full plate, with cloaks of royal blue, and in their midst a tall man, not quite young anymore, with a serious face and a trimmed brown beard, in beautifully engraved steel armor and a cloak of purple, who was soon bowing over her hand: Gorthan.
“Your Highness,” she said, making her curtsy, and then lifted her eyes and looked him anxiously in the face.
He looked down at her soberly, without any false pretense at enthusiasm, and said, “I’m glad to meet you, my lady. Let us go to the wedding-grove,” and held his hand out for hers. She looked at Father; he just gave a small jerk of his chin:go on.She put her hand into Gorthan’s. It was hard in a familiar way, like Father’s and like Argent’s: a swordsman’s hand, with calluses from drill. Theroyal guard closed ranks around them, and her own honor guard of ten men fell in at their heels, Father and his own guard behind them, and they walked together towards the beautiful grove, trailing a small army of soldiers and mutual distrust behind them.
Celia was still uneasy, but she couldn’t help but think how silly it was to be married this way. She looked over at Gorthan, and when he looked back at her she said, trying to share the joke, “We should have brought a drummer, to keep the time,” and he darted a look back at the marching pack of men and gave a small involuntary snort of laughter. For a moment his face had good humor in it, a sparkle. He quenched it back to seriousness a moment later, but she felt a little burst of hope. Surely someone who could laugh at himself a little bit couldn’t be so terrible to be married to.
They came to the grove, and a pale and nervous priest was waiting by the front of it. He said to her anxiously, “My lady, I ask you to aver that you come here with your family’s consent and of your own free will to be married to the prince, as your king has commanded, and go hence with him to his home,” darting a look at Gorthan, as if he wasn’t sure what he’d do if she said no.
“I do aver it,” Celia said, and Gorthan heaved a deep breath and led her past the priest and into the grove. They had to lift aside a curtain of the flowering vines to go inside, and a delicate wafting of perfume came off them thattugged up a fragment of memory of something she’d never known, just barely familiar in some strange way and already slipping away. She tried to catch it, and for a moment in her mind’s eye she had a bright and vivid glimpse of her sitting room back in Castle Todholme, with a woman she didn’t know sitting inside it, working on a band of embroidery, and Celia caught the faint scent of her skin.
Her eyes were prickling with tears, a sensation beautiful and painful at the same time. Then Gorthan’s hand was drawing her forward through the trees, and another curtain of flowering vines brought another scrap of memory: sitting crying with her knee bloodied in the garden and her nurse fluttering anxious, and then Argent bending down to her, smiling, picking her up. He was saying something to her, but the words were lost, and didn’t matter; her head was nestling down on his shoulder, and his arms were strong around her, safe.
She had to put her hand out to stop a vine coming into her face, and suddenly she was swallowing laughter instead: sitting in the tower herself with Roric, telling him another one of the silly account-stories she made up for him, each one a ridiculous summer battle, only this one was all the best parts out of all the stories, somehow woven up together into the funniest story she’d never told, and Roric had stopped doing any of the actual figuring forlaughter, and she was giggling with him even as she went on telling it.
