Page 12 of The Summer War
Roric looked up at Argent. He was a head shorter, and they didn’t look alike at all, but a ray of late sun came dappling through the trees onto them, and up in the tower, Celia could see their shadows stretched out stark on the pale flagstones of the courtyard, facing each other with the matching long narrow slope of their father’s nose in both their profiles. “Roric,” Argent said again, his face brightening a little more. “Youcame for Celie, too,” and smiled down at him.
Celia could see Roric’s face working a little with the urge to fall into the old scowling lines. Of course Argent hadn’t ever realized that Roric was jealous of him; Argent hadn’t paid enough attention, too busy trying to fill all his longing with the sword, trying to be fit to be their father’s son and heir. But he’d also never been angry or jealous in return. To him, Roric had always just been his little brother.
And of course that would only annoy Roric more, but Roric’s face wasn’t used to scowling anymore, and Argent looked too distant, pallid as a ghost, and instead ofscowling, Roric just grimaced briefly, and then he said, almost gently, “Yes. I came, too.”
Elithyon slowly stood up from his throne, staring down at them both. Roric turned back to face him, and said, “You promised. No harm to me or any of my kin. Not me, and not my sister—and not my brother,” and the whole court drew a united gasp of horror and understanding, seeing too late the way that Roric had snared Elithyon in a woven net of oaths that couldn’t all be kept.
Elithyon stood motionless at the top of the dais. Celia wondered what would it mean, for the ruler of the summerlings to break an oath? It had never happened in a single one of the summer stories that she’d ever read. There wasn’t a single murmur, a single whisper of wind or birdsong, as if all the endless Summer Lands now hung on his breath, on his next words. She couldn’t help but think that maybe it did, and whichever way he turned, the whole realm might come tumbling down.
And then Elithyon looked down at Argent, and suddenly a light came dawning into his face, almost the same kind of relief that Celia had seen in Argent’s. Elithyon came down from the dais, and Roric half put out an arm towards Argent, backing away a little warily, but Elithyon didn’t advance on them. He stopped, standing before the challenge square, and said in a ringing voice, “Come forth and arm me.”
A low murmuring of something between relief andfear went around the court even as the royal servants came forward. In a grand, stately procession they armed Elithyon in one glorious piece of summer make after another—ashining coat of mail made of gilded steel that folded over his shoulders, a gleaming vest made of narrow plates sewn over green silk, a shoulder girdle with pauldrons of gold enameled with beetle-iridescence, greaves and boots and gauntlets of steel washed with silver and gold, and from his shoulders they hung a cape of green that seemed half silk and half leaves, clasped in gold again. They brought him a round shield of wood bound in gold, and a spear whose shaft was a living branch with curling leaves, and the head shining golden.
When they finished, Elithyon said, “My people, hear my command: I will stand as the last challenger, and should the Knight of the Woven Blade prevail, my honor shall be sealed with my death in battle, in defense of my oath; no other need stand in his way. You will let him go into the tower, and bring his sister forth from her chamber by the door. And then let the singer and his kin go forth from our lands without harm, and fulfill my last promise. I charge you only to remember forever the fool’s mistake your prince once made, and evade it henceforth. Well I should have known that he who bargains with liars and cheats can gain nothing but shame and misery thereby.”
Roric threw a half-surprised look up at Celia, uncertain whether to be glad or not. But her own heart wastumbling down as if she’d taken it in both her hands and dropped it off the tower. The summerlings were all weeping, many of them hiding their faces in their hands, their heads bowed low. Elithyon stepped proudly forward into the ring of challenge and stood facing Argent with his shield lowered and his spear held aside, his guard wide open, inviting in the killing blow. Elithyon’s face was exalted with having found a way out of his own trap, but the rest of Argent’s serenity, already muddled with confusion, was draining away into horror. He didn’t move. Both of them just stood there.
After a long moment, Elithyon frowned and said to him, “Why do you hold your blade? Strike, strike true, and you shall have your sister, in fulfillment of your challenge,” as if he thought Argent needed it explained, and then he even smiled at Argent brilliantly and added, “Indeed it comes to me that my own sister told me, chiding me once for my hasty temper, with what now I see was a gift of prophecy, that I was foolish to indulge it, and one day I would be more glad to die than have vengeance for my deepest grief. So it is, for it seems to me now that all my days would have been shadowed without any hope of end, had I watched you fall in my court as the price of my revenge. Better this by far!”
Argent didn’t say a word. He only gave a strangled cry of anguish and bowed his head; tears were dripping fromhis face, down onto his woven blade, tracing along the threaded bands of gold and silver and steel. Roric was looking from him to Elithyon in rising dismay, realizing that he’d snaredbothof them in his trap.
And above, Celia was caught in her own horror and understanding: it was the curse. Argent had struggled his way through all its terms. He’d ridden a shaihul and slain a dragon, he’d become the greatest knight in all the world, and through all of it, he’d never stopped caring about love more. He’d come to save her, to die saving her, for love; he’d met a hundred summerlings in battle, one by one, and never wavered, and at last his courage and strength and skill had brought him tosomeone stupid enough to love him again—
And now the curse would force Argent tokillhim, forher sake.To fulfill the childish, resentful wish of a little girl’s heart, to be more important to him than anyone else he might ever meet. To stand between him and a summer lord with shining green eyes who would have asked him to stay, to care.
Tears were pouring down Celia’s face. She would so much rather have jumped from the tower herself after all; only that wouldn’t work either, because Argent lovedher,too. He did love her. It would shatter his heart just as much to know that she’d jumped to spare him. How could he ever stay with Elithyon, after that? But if he killed Elithyonnow, then he’d never be able to stay withher,either. He’d be truly loveless then, forever, either way. There wasn’t a way out.
She looked despairing down at her hand, at the ring of cold black steel tight around her finger, locking up the sorcery that she’d wrung out of all this pain in advance. Her own sorrow and rage had only been the first payment, and the rest was now due. And she’d saved it all for nothing, to sit in her belly the way she had to sit in this tower, useless, helpless. She was the one who’d made the curse; she was the one who had to find the way to break it. She’d known that all along. If only she could have done anything at all, she would have known what to do; she was her father’s daughter. If she’d had even a drop of sorcery, she would have—
Celia slowly turned her head and looked the other way out the window, towards the open end of the courtyard, where the shaihul was seated in state underneath a great shaded canopy, with a silver bowl of golden wine to drink. But it wasn’t drinking at all; it was sunk low on itself, its head resting on its forelegs and its enormous eyes wet and full of sorrow, watching the terrible drama playing out. She called out, “Lord Alimathisa!”
Argent had been starting to raise up his sword, without raising up his head. Roric put out his hand to hold Argent’s arm back, and Argent turned, both of them looking up at her. But she was looking at the shaihul, whichlifted its head and blinked at her like an owl. “Lord Alimathisa,” she said, “would you mind coming up here, so if I jump from this tower, I’ll land on your back?”
Roric burst out in a squawking awkward burst of laughter, pure relief, and put his fist over his mouth to press it in. The shaihul had pulled its head back into its neck, swelling out an enormous collar of puffed-up feathers, as if it was a little indignant at the idea—but then it got up on its legs and shook itself out, and sprang in a single leap up to the tower. It landed on the wall outside on all four feet, standing just below the window as if the world could turn sideways for it, and bent its head to look inside. Celia lurched back a little; the shaihul had looked much smaller below. Its head filled the entire window, and it blinked its dinner-plate eyes at her a moment before it turned and offered her its back. The distance was more of a step than a jump, but she didn’t think anyone was going to quibble; she took a small hop off the ledge and sank through a cloud of feathers to land on its back.
Celia hadn’t felt the curse when she’d made it, but she thought she could feel the awful weight of it lifting away from her, left behind in the tower prison as Alimathisa lightly jumped down to the ground, a single bounding leap onto soft enormous paws, and Roric darted forward to help her slide down to the ground.
“There,” she said to Elithyon, sliding down with the help of Roric’s hand; he’d darted forward to meet her.“I’ve left the tower the same way Eislaing did, and none of your oaths are broken, as long as you don’t hurt me or my brothers.”
Elithyon slowly lowered his spear and shield, almost a little puzzled, or maybe deflated; the solution surely wasn’t grand and tragic enough for him. But then he drew a deep breath and said, low, “That I shall not do. But still I cannot let you go—save by breaking the peace between our realms, which you would have died to preserve.” And he looked over at Argent, who stared back at him miserably, and maybe he’d found a way to dig up his tragedy after all.
Celia bit her lip, thinking, but before she could come up with anything, a muffled voice said, “Wait.” Celia turned around. Some low shrubs were clustered together at the base of the tower, right where the ivy went climbing up, and a knight came pushing his way out of the undergrowth, as if he’d been hiding there. He stepped into the courtyard, a hedge knight in an old and rusty suit of armor without a tabard or even a painted sigil to mark his crest: Father.
He took off his helm, and looked around the courtyard, taking all of them in with bright and narrow eyes: his sons, his daughter, and his enemy. Roric had his chin jutting a bit defiantly as Father looked at him. Father didn’t say anything, but after a moment, he gave a little nod, the little nod that meant:Yes, well done.Roric had never gotten it aimed at him before, but he still recognizedit. He swallowed visibly, his hand clenching and unclenching around the neck of his lute.
Every last summer knight in the court had put their hands on the hilts of their blades and was looking around as if they expected an army to suddenly pop out of their own forest at any instant. But Father just came over to Celia and held out his hand; she gave him hers with the coal-black ring, and he turned back with her to Elithyon, who was eyeing him with more than a little wariness himself. “You gave Prosper your sister, a princess of the Summer Lands, and King Morthimer offered you a princess of Prosper in return,” Father said. “But my daughter isn’t one, and never will be; she’s going to be the queen. So take back your ring, and let her go home to be crowned.” He paused and looked at Argent, whose eyes were bright with tears as Father finished softly, “And she’ll give you her brother to seal the peace, instead.”
The last battle of thesummer war wasn’t very long. Father had worked out the king’s plot as soon as Gorthan had come out of the grove alone, claiming that Celia had been snatched by the summerlings. Father had pretended to be overcome with fury and said he was going to prepare an assault on the Summer Lands, but instead he’d sent hismen riding away to every town along the border, to spread the word of how the king and Crown Prince Gorthan had treacherously given away the power of sorcery to their enemies, and that Grand Duke Veris had bravely gone into the Summer Lands in disguise to save his daughter. By the time they came out again, the word had spread through all of Prosper.
The royal court had been very empty of support by the time Father marched up to the palace with an army greatly swelled by an angry mob of common folk and armed with spears and arrows of summer make. Elithyon couldn’t invade again, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t help. They’d held a parley on the drawbridge with Crown Prince Gorthan, who darted a guilty look at Celia and offered, in a stilted way, to marry her after all.
“No, all in all, I think I’d prefer to just have your throne,” Celia said, icily, before Father could even answer. “Your father can keep the title of Grand Duke, and have our northern estates to be your lands, in exchange for the lands of the crown. And if that’s not good enough, I’ll send both of you to the Summer Lands, and see how muchyouenjoy Elithyon’s hospitality. Decide before sunset.”
The king chose to quietly leave for the north that same day, with a few hundred armsmen and his remaining family retainers. In the last golden rays of the summer sunset, Celia watched them all riding away from the walls of the royal palace, and then she went inside to sleep luxuriouslysprawled out all alone across the enormous royal bed that she’d had moved to a suite on the first floor, from whose window she could have jumped to the ground without even spraining an ankle.
They took the rest of the summer to properly rebuild the old royal palace at the Green Bridge. Many willing hands pulled up weeds and cleared the rotted wood, gathered fallen stones and quarried new blocks and baked new bricks, and mixed a great vat of quicklime mortar, and then Celia stood at the foot of the old collapsed winter towers and used sorcery to raise them all back up to their full height in a single day, stones flying like flocks of mixed birds into their places, from great blocks to little dusty chips left scattered.
And in the outer courtyard they pickaxed up the dark-stained flagstones at the foot of the highest tower, and gently took out the two rows of old dead trees, all of them still bowed over with grief, that once had stood there. The summerlings planted new seedlings in their place, and Elithyon walked among them, speaking to them softly, and overnight they grew into something between an autumn hall and a summerling palace, pillared in living wood, and even before they had finished furnishing it, gleambugs were making small stars among the rustling entwined leaves above.
They held the coronation and the wedding on the same day, with a great joyful feasting laid out ready tocelebrate, leaping summerling bonfires of colored flames, ringed by beds of coals over which a vast array of wild game and luscious summer fruits sizzled, filling the air with rich roasting smells of a thousand foods that no one in Prosper could remember tasting. The feast tables were laden with cakes and sparkling wine and towering spun-sugar sculptures of castles and dragons that enraptured all the summerlings.
Celia came to the palace driving in an open cart along the royal road, through a throng of common folk. Father had been wary of an assassination attempt, but she’d insisted. As they drove through, she reached out her hands to as many of them as she could reach, to her people, the people she’d chosen to care about, and as if they knew, smiles and cheers met her as they reached back eagerly, calling out blessings for her reign. More of them were looking on, crammed into every balcony and window of the towers, as Father put the crown on her head inside the inner courtyard, and they made such a lusty din of cheering that even the stuffiest of the aristocrats in their cushioned seats on the ground floor darted looks up and thought it only sensible to put on a show of enthusiasm of their own.
Father had escorted the Dowager Marchioness of Travinia to a seat in the front row, with Roric on her other side, wearing the red fox tabard of their house. “She’s been telling me stories about every single eligible heiress in the realm,” Roric said to Celia in the dancing after,wavering between bewilderment and laughter. “She says she’ll host a party to introduce me to all the ones that aren’t ‘soul-devouring ninnies.’ ”
But first, once she’d been crowned, Celia went to Argent, sitting on the marchioness’s other side. The time they’d taken to rebuild the palace had also been the time they’d taken to let him heal. He finally had some color back in his cheeks, and he was smiling up at her as she held out her hands. He stood with her and they walked together back out of the tower courtyard and into the living hall, and when they came out of it, on the other side of the outer courtyard stood the Summer Palace, as if the courtyards of the two palaces had overlapped. There was somehow room for all the crowding mortal guests, and also for all the summerling court.
Elithyon was waiting for them standing before his own throne with his eyes gleaming like green jewels, in robes of silk, and Celia brought Argent to him and said, “Summer King Elithyon, I bring to you my brother, Sir Argent of the Woven Blade, to be your companion in the Summer Lands, and seal the peace between our people.” She turned and kissed her brother’s cheek, and then laid Argent’s hand in his, and stepped back smiling through tears as they kissed one another with all the trees and vines around them blooming so furiously that the embroidered flowers on their clothes began to lift off the fabric and come alive to join them.
