“Well, then, obviously you’re guilty. Take off your mask so we can see the face you’ve earned yourself before we sentence you.”

  And Orem reached up and removed his mask.

  One of the judges gasped.

  The one who chuckled had no laughter in his voice now. “The Queen’s dream, and brought to us masked. Who would have thought.”

  “Boy,” said another. “You have a wound in your throat. How did you earn that scar?”

  Wound? Orem reached up and touched his throat. There was a low welt there, that ran all the way around his neck, except for a few inches at his spine. The only explanation for such a scar was his dream. “I’m a farmer,” he said. “I was cut on a plow.”

  And the judges looked startled. One made as if to stand, while the one who chuckled nodded and his hands trembled.

  “Sentence, sentence,” said the third, who alone remained calm. “We have no power to sentence you. The Queen saw you in a dream last night, boy.”

  “Guards,” called a judge. “Guards!”

  And they gave orders, and Orem was led from the room. Before he reached the door, he asked, “My lords! What was the Queen’s dream?” But they did not speak to him, and he was gone with the guards.

  They took him out onto the stone-paved square. The palace walls, delicately mosaicked all along their length, opened in broad, well-guarded gates before him. He could see the palace, a gleaming building of polished ivory, it seemed, with so many wings and piles added that it was impossible to find the original structure. It looked like a place of majesty all the same. It was the Queen’s hive. He wondered what the bees found when they went home.

  At first he did not understand what was being done to him. He was too afraid, certain the Queen had seen him too well last night, certain that she would destroy the Sink who alone could extinguish a part of her Searching Eye and leave her partly blind. And there was the sheer newness of the place. They took him through rooms larger than the town of Banningside, whose ceilings looked as distant as the sky. All the walls were layered seven times in tapestries and metalwork and stone. There was no marble that was not living with the figures of men and animals engaged variously in killing and in coitus. There was no iron that was not silvered, no silver that was not inlaid with gold. The furniture was made of heavy woods, yet all was delicately carved so that there were thousands of tiny windows in the wood and it looked as if the weight of it was borne by dark and insubstantial lace. And through it all no one spoke to him, so that he realized what was happening to him only gradually.

  After all, in the villages and farms it was done only symbolically, for they were poor. It was the Dance of Descent, of course, the last thing Orem expected. And it was done for real. He was carried to the palace door in a carriage with twelve wheels, drawn by eleven horses. He was surrounded by ten armored men, their shields marked with nine black stones. His hair was cut in eight passes of the shears, and seven naked women with blood on their thighs immersed him six times in hot water and five times in cold, so that he was washed in menstrual blood each time thinner than before. It was then that he understood, and began to anticipate the steps.

  He himself had been one of the Four Virgin Boys at three of his brothers’ Dances of Descent. On the farm the Three Oils had been pig fat, sheep fat, and chicken fat, and they had jostled and joked as they anointed him and scraped. There was no joking now. The four young boys who knelt around him as he lay naked on the stone floor were sober and worked strenuously. The oils did not reek of animals; they were delicate yet strong of scent, and the boys rubbed them firmly into his skin, each oil in turn, scraping his body between each oil. They did not even speak to ask him to turn himself over; instead, their thin childish arms reached out and their small hands gripped him firmly, and he was turned abruptly without any volition of his own, and yet without any discomfort, either. The odor of the oils went into his head, and he felt a slight aching between his eyes. Yet it was a delicious pain, and the scraping of his body was a pleasure he was not prepared for. It left him weak and relaxed and trembling, and he reached gratefully for the Two Cups when they were brought to him.

  No rough clay cups here. The Cup of the Left Hand was a crystal bowl set in a lacy gold cradle that rested on the top of a thin spiral stem. The liquid in it was green and seemed to be alive with light, yet a smooth light that did not flicker with the dancing of the lamps on the walls. As he reached for the cup with his left hand, Orem was suddenly filled with fear. This was the stuff of poems, but he had not been ready, had not been warned. I am like Glasin the Grocer, chosen by chance for adventures that only the Sweet Sisters could have predicted. I am not ready, he cried out inside himself; but still his hand reached out, and though his hand trembled, he spilled no drop of the green. In the villages it had been a tea of mints; here it was a wine, and when it touched his tongue the flavor went through him like ice, bringing winter to every part of his body, so that he felt it sharply in his fingers, and his buttocks clenched involuntarily. Still he drank it all, though when he was through, his body shook violently and his teeth chattered. Steam rose from the empty crystal cup.

  The Cup of the Right Hand was made of stone, plain unpolished stone with no figuring or sculpture on it except that it was cut to make the proper bent curve required even on the farm. The soul of the woman he had drunk, and now he reached down with his right hand to pick up the soul of the man. The stone was not as heavy as he had expected, and he nearly spilled it, but the thick white fluid was heavy and slow as mud and did not slosh easily over the edge.

  This time when he sipped, the drink was hot and did not penetrate as quickly as the cold. On the farm it had been milk, and perhaps it was milk here, too; but it was sweet, painfully sweet and hot enough to burn his tongue. Yet he drank the thick stuff down and set the cup aside slowly, relishing the heat as it fought the cold within him and won. He knew that his skin was flushing, that his face was red. He gasped his breaths, and knelt on all fours, his head hanging down nearly to the floor as his body absorbed the heat of the soul of man.

  Then the servants bore away the Two Cups, and others led him to a golden chair covered with a thick velvet cloth, where he sat waiting for the One Red Ring. Not made of painted wood, the ring they brought; it was carved whole from a ruby, a thing whose value was so beyond Orem’s understanding that it was not until years later that he realized that the price of that ring would have bought a thousand farms like his father’s farm, and had enough left over to buy ten thousand slaves to work them.

  Which finger? How did his brothers ever decide? All the future would hinge on this one choice.

  He raised his left hand, the hand of passion, without much thinking of the meaning of it, only because that was the hand that wanted to rise. The servant picked up the ring between his forefinger and thumb, and waited for Orem to choose. And he chose the one finger no man would ever choose; he chose the last finger, the small finger, the finger of weakness and surrender. He flushed with shame at his choice, but knew that he could make no other. Why? he asked himself.

  But he did not know the why of anything today. It was too quick, too strange, too inexorable. He had thought to earn a poem. Instead, he had just completed the Dance of Descent, and somewhere nearby was the woman he was to marry. Marry, at fifteen years of age—or no, sixteen now, he had passed his birthday in the months at Galloway’s house. Marry; and with all that had passed in the Dance of Descent, Orem had little doubt who his wife would be. Though it was a thought so outrageous that he would never have dared to name her name aloud.

  To his surprise, he was not asked to arise from the chair. Instead, with the ruby ring on his small leftmost finger, he sat in the chair as porters passed rods through rings on its side and lifted him up, bore him from the room. There was no door at that end, but the wall itself parted in a great crack from floor to ceiling, and then slid aside, and he was carried into the presence of the queen.

  Behind him the doors slid shut again, and the only light in the room was the moonlight that came through great windows and was reflected off a thousand small mirrors on the walls. In the mottled silver light, he saw her standing alone and naked in the middle of the floor, her bare feet white and smooth as the cold marble they seemed carved from. Her hair was long and full and reached below her waist; the hair of her head was the only hair on her body, and she could have been a child except for the small, perfect breasts that, in their slow and tiny rise and fall, were the only proof that she was alive.

  Her face he recognized. It was the perfect, pleading, loving, inevitable face of the woman in his dream. She was the virgin, begging for his gentlest love. She was Queen Beauty, and she was now his wife.

  He stood from his chair, keenly aware of his own thin, unproportioned body, tanned and weathered from the waist; yet he had scant thought for shame at what little he had to offer the only perfect woman in the world. For she had raised her hand, and it was her right hand, and the golden ring she wore was on the impossible finger, the finger he could not have hoped for; the small finger of her right hand, her rightmost finger, and as he walked to her, his hand upraised, the rings on their fingers rested the same distance from the fingertip.

  If he had chosen to surrender all his passion, she had chosen to surrender all her will.

  “Are you a virgin?” she whispered, her voice soft and urgent.

  He nodded. It was not enough.

  Impatiently she asked again, “My boy, my husband, my Little King, has your seed ever spilled inside another woman’s womb?”

  And Orem spoke, though where he found his voice he wasn’t sure. “Never,” he said, and she leaned forward and kissed him. It was a cold kiss, yet it lingered and Orem did not want it ever to end. As she kissed him, her breasts leaned in to touch his chest, and then they met hip to hip, and her left hand was behind his back and she clung to him. The kiss ended.

  “I will never love you,” she whispered. “You will never have my heart.” But the tones of her voice rang with love, and Orem trembled at the power she had without using any magic at all.

  Should he answer? He could not. For he had worn the ring on the hand of passion, and that was a vow to love forever and completely. Yet in his heart he knew, without knowing why, that he would never love her, either. His heart was surrendered, but not to her; her will was surrendered, but not to him.

  “We will have a child,” she said softly, leading him to the place where the floor gave way to a vast sea of a bed.

  “It will be a boy,” she said, as they knelt together and her hands softly touched him.

  “I will give him all of myself,” she said, “and that is why there will be none of me for you.”

  And they lay together all the night, and the child was conceived, and Orem never knew the Queen’s body again. It did not matter. The nights passion was so strong that he dared not think of it thereafter, for when he did his body aroused and lost control and violently spent itself, all in a few moments, from just the memory of it.

  Yet Orem knew as no other man could know that none of it was magic. She had worked no spell on him that night. It was merely what and who she was that had so much power over him, and at last he began to understand why King Palicrovol could not forget his obsession with returning to Hart’s Hope. He was not coming back to kill the Queen and regain his place in the Kingdom of Burland. He was coming back to regain his place in her bed.

  In the morning, sunlight danced from a thousand mirrors. Orem awoke with his body stiff from the unaccustomed softness of the bed. It took him a while to sort out his dreams from reality. For the first time in his life, it was the reality that was less probable and more desirable. The Queen herself had lain with him last night. From a strange dream of a hart in Galloway’s cramped attic room to the most powerful and beautiful woman in the world taking his virginity in a sparkling mirrored room in the palace, all in a single day. Here was a poem if there had ever been a poem.

  And a place, too. For she had not just lain with him, he remembered. They had done the Dance of Descent, the most sacred binding between man and woman—a greater tie than existed between King Palicrovol and the Queen. I am husband of the Queen, Orem thought, and it was so incredibly perfect that he laughed aloud, laughed until the bed bounced and the sunlight seemed to go crazy in the mirrors.

  They must have heard his laughter. The quiet servants came in, making almost no sound. At first Orem was surprised and tried to cover himself. But he couldn’t find an end of a blanket before he noticed that they were not looking at him. They went about their business without even seeing him. He could have voided his bladder on the bedsheets, and there would have been no comment, he was sure; though he was just as sure that the mess would have been cleaned up the instant he was through.

  They dressed him—in clothing cut to fit perfectly, something Orem had never experienced before in his life. It was heavy clothing, but not overwarm; the brocades were layered, and gold and jewels gleamed here and there. Orem took no thought for his family, who could have lived for a year on the cost of such a gown. His delight was complete because it was so innocent. He knew he had not earned his good fortune, and so he did not worry about fighting to keep it. He simply enjoyed it, and there were plenty of mirrors to give him the pleasure of seeing his shoulders suddenly enhanced to look broad and strong, his thin thighs masked so no one could know that an unpowerful boy hid behind the costume of a mighty man.

  “I look like a king,” Orem said softly to the mirror. The servants, who had unobtrusively fastened all the hidden fasteners, said nothing. But there was a pretty young girl reaching out her hand to him. Her right; he was not sure what she wanted but reached out his left hand to see if she wanted to lead him somewhere. She did. When their hands met, she gravely curtsied, then took his fingers lightly and led him slowly out of the room, then more briskly down corridors, up stairs, through chambers. Every room was perfect, with doors placed symmetrically, though some were obviously false doors going nowhere; if one room was wood instead of marble, it was a rare and deep-polished wood; if furniture here was light instead of heavy, it was intricately carved so that its value was all the greater; and wherever Orem went, he was surprised again by the great pains that had been taken to make beautiful even corners where surely no one important ever went.

  But no; this was not designed to impress important visitors, he realized. This was designed to please only one person, and she might go anywhere.

  The Queen was waiting for him in what he later learned was Moon Chamber; great discs of silver were set into the walls, and a huge glass table, also a perfect circle, filled the center of the room. It was the Queen’s second court, her private court. The servant girl led Orem to the space between the table and the two white thrones that dominated the head of the room. Orem was conscious, as the girl withdrew, that there were others in the room; he could not see them, for he could only look at the Queen, who arose to greet him.

  She stepped forward from her throne and reached out her hand. Orem took it, and he noticed that, unlike the servant girl, whose hand had been under his to lead him, the Queen’s hand was over his, as if to be led. Orem would have bowed to her, but he hesitated, unsure of protocol. So it was that the Queen bowed, and Orem heard someone else in the room gasp.

  “Beauty has taken a husband,” a high-pitched voice intoned with an edge of madness, “to last her all his life. Has she taken him to his bed with poison in his head?”

  The Queen lifted her head from the bow and faced the others in the room; she turned Orem in the process. Before her, in the middle of the glass table, sat a black man, a small man, nearly naked, with a headdress of cow’s horns on his head and an immense false phallus hanging from his belt. It was he who had recited the rhyme. “What a pretty little king, with a pretty little thing,” said the black man, “but will the bee still sing when he finds he has no sting?”

  “Shut up,” said the Queen beautifully, and the black man turned a somersault and landed, laughing, at Beauty’s feet.

  “Ah, beat me, beat me, Beauty!” cried the black man, and then he wept piteously. In a moment he started tasting the tears, then retreated to a comer of the room, dabbing at his eyes with the stuffed phallus that dangled longer than his legs.

  “As you see,” said the Queen, “I have taken a husband. He is a common criminal from the filthiest part of the city, and he is as attractive to me as a leprous hog, but he was given to me in a dream from the Sweet Sisters, and it amused me to follow their advice.”

  Orem could not sort out the difference between her sweet, musical voice and the acid words she was saying. He smiled stupidly, vaguely aware that he was being abused, but unable to react negatively to the song Queen Beauty sang.

  “As you see, he is also quite stupid. He once had a name, but in this court he will be called Little King. And for all that he has the sexual prowess of a dung beetle, we conceived a child last night.”

  Orem was startled that she could know, for sure, already. Didn’t she have to wait awhile? He vaguely remembered something his brothers had said about being sure only when the moon didn’t rise for the woman, or something. He looked at her, and she glanced back at him. “You don’t imagine such things are left to chance, do you?” She turned back to the others. “You will speak of my child to the others. Spread it as a rumor through all the world. Dear Palicrovol will know what it means, even if you do not, and he will come again to knock at my gates. I miss the man. I want to see him weep again.”

  There were three in the room. The black fool, who was gnawing on his false phallus under the table; a wizened, withered old man in extraordinarily large breastplate and helmet, like a mockery of a great soldier; and a deformed woman, whose face was pocked and lumped with scars of old sores. Why would the Queen introduce him first to such a bizarre trio? Yet there was an odd note of respect in her voice when she spoke to them, and they were all grave and self-possessed as they answered her.