A. Hartley - Will Power

Just as we were ascending the stairs, a distant trumpet call echoed through the air. Everyone paused and it was answered by another, closer this time.

“It seems,” said Sorrail, “that our horsemen have returned, and in triumph.”

His tone was low, amused rather than exuberant, as if he’d just heard that a friend had won a few coins at dice. The ripple through the entourage matched his own contented swagger. I shot Renthrette a bewildered glance. Her eyes were narrowed, confused, even surprised, but further speculation was abandoned as the drumming of horse hooves swelled to a deafening pitch. The courtyard before the palace filled with fifty or sixty blond riders, caped with white, fluttering cloaks and armed with silver-tipped lances. As another smattering of polite applause broke out from the assembly of the steps, I saw one of the riders who was not uniformed as the others. His helm was full and great horns grew menacingly from each side. He bore a heavy axe, a round, crimson shield, and sat astride a great white charger. His face was pale, almost white, and his hair, when he removed the great and terrifying helm, was short and brownish. He glanced toward us and his eyes shone green as emeralds.

“Garnet!” I exclaimed. Renthrette was already running toward her brother, who swung himself to earth easily, smiling. There they embraced as the unit’s captain ascended the stairs and bowed to Sorrail. I left them to their reports and hurried after Renthrette.

“Hell’s teeth,” I exclaimed, laughing aloud. “I never thought I’d be this pleased to see you!”

“Likewise,” he grinned over his sister’s shoulder. He extended his strong, thin hand and I clasped it briefly.

“I had heard you were around,” he said, “but we’ve had no news since you set out to rescue Orgos and Mithos.”

“How long have you been here?” asked Renthrette.

“Almost as long as you have, I think. I laid low in the Hide for a couple of days and then took a horse and whatever I could carry and came after you. When I got to the Black Horse I found you had already gone on ahead, but some ambassador chap said he could lead me to you if I served as his escort for a few miles. I’m not sure what happened next. I think I fell asleep in the saddle or something, I don’t know. It doesn’t really make any sense, but when I woke I was in sight of this place and there was no sign of the ambassador. I’ve been here ever since and, after Sorrail brought news of the rest of the party, I’ve been riding with the armies of Phasdreille against goblin encampments this side of the river.”

“Any sign of Lisha?” Renthrette asked.

“None,” said Garnet. “I don’t really know where we are, let alone where she might be. Until Sorrail arrived, I thought I was by myself. Still,” he added with a smile at the horsemen around him, “there are worse places to be. I mean, I missed you all and everything, but this place. . It’s just so, I don’t know, right . It’s like I should have been born here, or something. God, Renthrette, you are going to love it here. You’ll never want to leave.”

This last remark troubled me. Don’t get me wrong: You couldn’t fault the city. It gleamed with nobility and courage and light and truth and, well, fairness in every sense. In other words, it made concrete all that Garnet and Renthrette lived for. Here they were no longer the principled few struggling against a dark, self-interested, and vicious world. Here they were part of the majority and could be vicious on its behalf. Nor, I had to admit, could I really fault Sorrail. He was everything he had first seemed to be, and if Renthrette looked at him as the best thing since cold steel, I could hardly blame her. I had been a little confused by his odd, courtly greeting to us earlier and by the perfectly decked out little band that had been hanging on his exquisitely tailored coattails, but I suppose that was just the way things worked here. No, nothing had really shaken my faith in the place or its people but Garnet’s rapturous enthusiasm for them.

You see, Garnet is about the worst judge of pretty much anything that I have ever come across. He couldn’t tell a pint of stout from a cream sherry, and if he ever swore that someone was a great fellow, said fellow would probably slip something lethal in your pint (or sherry) before the night was out. This isn’t just sour grapes on my part. Garnet and I have not always seen eye to eye, I confess, but he can be very useful to have around. If you need someone hacked to pieces, he’s your man. Tell him that the friendly stranger across the room made a lewd remark about his sister, hand him an axe, then sit back and watch the fun. But analyze something and come to a shrewd conclusion? When camels write poetry.

Garnet is a terrible reader. I don’t mean he couldn’t pick up a menu and spot the salad; in fact, like his sister, he could wade through the most complex legal documents and figure out their details with alarming rigor and clearheadedness. What he couldn’t do was read between the lines. Just like Renthrette, who had told me that the apparition in the forest hadn’t meant anything, Garnet took things at face value. Neither of them looked too closely or asked too many questions, since that took valuable time away from getting their weapons bloody. They would leave this place and its rosy hue uncriticized because it offered such a neat solution to all their ethical problems. Here goodness was built in the stone of the city and the flesh of its people; across the river was evil. Their mission was clear.

Too clear for a charlatan, actor, dramatist, cheat, and liar like me to swallow without at least looking more closely at the label.

But what really burned me up was that they seemed to be right.

The royal palace came alive before dawn. Unfortunately, since we were due to meet the king today, that meant that the banging on the door at half past five in the bloody morning was supposed to be taken seriously. The journey had taken its toll and I had slept like a particularly exhausted log right until Garnet started bludgeoning my door down.

I crawled over, threw the bolt, and admitted him with a sour grunt. He was dressed in burnished armor that, even in this miserably low light, sparkled like a box of mirrors. He wore a tunic of immaculate white linen and a matching cloak. He was cradling his great horned helm in his arm and beaming like he’d just found a bag of gold in an alley. Or at least, that’s what would make me beam like an idiot. I couldn’t imagine, especially with my brain still fogged with sleep, what could make him so happy short of meeting the goblin king (if there was one) in single combat.

“Ready?” he chirped.

“Hardly,” I muttered, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and clambering irritably into a pair of trousers. “Do we have to meet him so bloody early? Couldn’t we, like, have lunch together or something?”

“No.”

“Dinner, then?”

“No,” said Garnet, still cheery and indulgent with that schoolboy exuberance that occasionally takes the place of his homicidal nobility. “That’s not the way of things here. But you’ll see. This is going to be one of the most fantastic days in your life, Will. Just wait till you see the court: the clothes, the sophistication. I could listen to them talk for hours.”

“Who?”

“The courtiers,” he laughed, like he was assuring a four-year-old about how good a piece of chocolate was going to taste. “You’ll be in your element.”

“Right,” I agreed hollowly, suspecting the chocolate was really spinach.