Дэйв Дункан - Magic Casement

The harder Rap tried, the more amusing the goblin seemed to find him… and the harder he tried.

Then one night, Rap thought he saw his chance. It had been the worst run yet—as they all seemed to be—and he reeled on his feet as he gathered firewood. The goblin allowed him to help with that task now, because his efforts were so obviously inferior.

Suddenly, through the blur of fatigue and pain, Rap sensed movement within his range. He straightened, searched, and decided that it was a small deer. Calling for silence, he sent Fleabag out to circle beyond the doe and then drive it. Puzzled but impassive, Little Chicken squatted down, watching without a word. Rap strung his bow, notched an arrow, and waited, trembling with exhaustion and mental effort, carefully tracking his quarry’s approach. The deer burst through the trees where he knew it would, at easy range. He shot.

He missed.

Without seeming to hurry at all, Little Chicken rose, lifted the bow from Rap’s hand, stooped to pick up an arrow, aimed, shot, and unerringly nailed down their supper just before it vanished into the trees. He handed the bow back with a smile that showed more enamel than any human mouth should contain.

Shrouded in silent misery, Rap watched the skinning and cooking. It had been fatigue making his hands shake, of course. Even as clumsy an archer as he was should not have missed that one. He had tried to look clever and he had made a fool of himself again. Every joint and muscle in his body was shaking. This last leg of the journey seemed to have lasted for days without a break. Had he thought to notice the moon’s position when they started, he could have estimated the time, but he knew only that it had been many, many hours. He was so grossly exhausted that he was not sure he would be able to eat any of the venison anyway. He could barely keep his eyes open, his chest burned, his legs ached—and Little Chicken seemed as fresh as if he had just climbed out of bed. There had to be a limit to the amount of this torture that a man could take, and Rap was certain he had reached it now. Why not just. admit that the contest was hopeless? Who cared? What did it matter?

Then Rap saw that the goblin was studying him from his crouch by the cooking fire, and his big ugly mouth was curled in disdainful amusement again. “Eat now, Flat Nose. Then sleep? Or run more?”

Rap glared back at the smirk.

Something inside him whimpered as he spoke.

“Run more, of course,” he said.

A hiss of rain rushing over glass died away into petty dripping noises. Logs at the far end of the room spat and spluttered sleepily in the great hearth, and somewhere far off a door was tapping. Rain was a sign of spring, Inos thought happily, and she marveled once more that it should come so soon. For long months yet the iron heels of winter would stamp on poor old Krasnegar, but yesterday she had gathered snowdrops. Flowers! Trees had never impressed her much, but flowers did.

It was a drowsy do-nothing afternoon and she was curled into a big chair in the library with a book of wide erudition and archaic, inscrutable handwriting. Near the fire Aunt Kade nodded over a slim romance. Various other ladies and gentleman were also pretending to read—few of them seriously. Inos was serious, but about ready to admit defeat. She could ask to have a scrivener transcribe the key passages for her, of course, but she had an inexplicable certainty that she was not supposed to be troubling her pretty little head over this particular tome. The request would not be refused, she thought, but the results might be a long time in coming, and meanwhile the book itself would be unavailable.

Spring! Summer would arrive in its turn and her ship would be waiting. She sighed and twisted a lock of golden hair and stared at the rain-blurred windows. Krasnegar? To be really honest, she did not long so much for Krasnegar now. She missed her father of course, but who else? There was no one of her rank there, and no one of her age who would understand one word she might say about Kinvale.

Inos turned to gaze for a moment at Aunt Kade’s drooping eyelids, wondering how she had stood it. Forty years or more she had lived in Kinvale, as wife and widow, and then she had thrown it all up and gone back to Krasnegar to mother a suddenly bereaved niece. A mere niece—a niece who had not appreciated her until she had seen what the old dear had given up. To return to stark and barren Krasnegar for a niece, when Kinvale had offered so much?

And she? Of course she must go back. She could not doubt it. She would return in the summer, unwed and unbetrothed, apparently.

Five months since Andor had gone…

Aunt Kade and her Grace—or Disgrace? —the duchess had run out of candidates at last. The long parade of suitors that had begun with the glorious Andor had ended now with the unspeakable Proconsul Yggingi. Andor had been an accident and Yggingi was a disaster. Yggingi had not been invited to Kinvale for Inos' sake, Kade had assured her of that quite vehemently. After all, he was twice her age and already married. Unfortunately Yggingi himself did not seem to appreciate such considerations. He was the worst yet, the bottom of the barrel, and not even the official barrel. Any barrel. There were a few pleasant young men in residence at the moment—men who might be allowed to brighten a maiden’s day, if not share her life—but not one of them dared come near Inos now. Yggingi’s menacing glare had walled her off as his private preserve.

One of the reasons she had fled here, to the library, was to escape the creepy attentions of Proconsul Yggingi. A library was the last place that man was likely to visit.

How beautifully Andor had read poetry to her!

None of the others had ever compared to Andor. Of course she had never expected that a lightning strike of romantic passion would be waiting in the clouds. A princess must expect to settle for rank, character, and a purely conventional physical relationship. All she could hope for there was that the man not be totally disgusting. But even being practical, she had found nothing of a size to match her mesh—except Andor. If she discounted him, there was no second best.

And she must discount him. Five months…

She raised the book again and made another attempt. A Brief History of the Late and Dearly Mourned Beneficient Sorcerer Inisso, His Heirs and Successors, with an Adumbration of Their Acts and Accomplishments. Dull to the risk of lockjaw, but relevant. A strange man Inisso must have been. Why should he have built his tower on the far shores of the Winter Ocean? Stranger still, why should he have divided his heritage? For it seemed that he had bequeathed each of his three sons an equal share of his magical powers, and apparently that was a most odd thing for a sorcerer to do. There were broad hints here, she had discovered, that some of that magic had been passed down in her own family. She would ask Father about that when she returned. She smiled at the thought of her practical, matter-of-fact father secretly performing sorcerous rituals.

She had never even had a chance to visit that forgotten chamber of puissance at the top of the main tower. It was curious that she should have found this tattered and dog-eared tome in the library at Kinvale. Very dog-eared—it had been much read over the centuries… By whom? Of course the Kinvale family was also descended from Inisso. She and the droopy-lipped Angilki were related through Inisso, as well as by countless later cross-linkages. So was the sinister Kalkor of Gark, gruesome man.

Kade had noticed her settling down with the monster volume and had asked what it was. Her first reaction had been approval—Witless Young Maiden Starts Taking Interest—but that had been followed by a strange uncertainty. Inos could not imagine her aunt ever reading such a nightmare of ennui, but knowing Kade, she might very well have a good idea of the gist of it—better than Inos would gain by her studies, likely. What she really needed was someone to discuss it with. But whom?