Then Orem remembered what Weasel had started to say before the Queen had closed her mouth: “Why am I here?” Orem had asked, and Weasel had answered, “The Queen uses great magic. She must pay a price for it.”

  The price of magic. It was well known what the price of magic was—blood. The blood of an eel for the fishers spells; the blood of the ox for the farmer, drawn from the healthy, living beast. The housewife shed a chicken’s blood. The archer drew from an eagle or a hawk that afterward flew again. The Wizard Galloway had drawn the blood of rabbits, the blood of boars, and for the most powerful of his small magics he had drawn from the hart, and even from the living bear. But the Queen worked great magic. The Queen drew power, and therefore blood, from something greater than an ox or a bear or even a hart, even the sweet hart that had come to him and loved him in a dream. Orem reached up to the welt of the new, unearned scar at his neck. Galloway had seen blood flow from his throat, though no wound had ever been there in all Orem’s life. He had a terrible vision of the farmer pressing his own throat into the sharp blade of the plow, and the woman, his wife, pressing from Behind, driving him on. I have a wife now, Orem thought. I had no wife, when I dreamed the dream, but now I am married, now I have a scar on my neck.

  Why am I here? What do I have to do with the Queen’s great magic?

  “Don’t you learn, boy!” demanded Craven. “We’ve walked half a damnable mile in these corridors, and you haven’t even watched to learn the way!”

  Orem mumbled his apologies, but could not pay much attention to Craven’s wheezing rebuke. He could only think of his own blood flowing from his throat. I am the price of the Queen’s magic. I must . . . I must escape.

  He remembered Glasin Grocer, who had been spared from death in the Hound’s jaws only because he was clean, a God’s man.

  “I’m no God’s man,” Orem said aloud.

  “Damn good thing for you, in this place,” Craven answered. “Now the matter of eating. Not with fingers. You must learn to lift a knife and spoon to your mouth.”

  With a great effort, Orem forced himself to pay attention. “Won’t I cut myself if I put the knife in my mouth?”

  “Not if you’re careful.” And the lesson began in earnest. Orem cut himself once anyway, and the blood tasted strangely sweet on his tongue.

  The party began well enough. Though Orem’s head was still a muddle of bows, kisses, knives, spoons, steps left and steps right, he managed to get through the introductions well enough, partly because he was a bright young man in spite of the Queen’s abuse, and partly because, being king, whatever he did was right as long as it wasn’t too obvious. He even managed to keep his dignity when the Queen herself suddenly appeared to make a short speech in which she made it humiliatingly clear that her Little King was an object of ridicule. “Obey him,” she said as she left, followed by the cheers of a crowd that knew enough to cheer without cue.

  The crowd. Orem recognized them all. Not individually, of course, for he had seen little enough of the wealthy in Hart’s Hope. But collectively, they were the haughty ones borne in litters or seated in carriages, their homes the towering mansions along King’s Road, their servants almost as unbearably arrogant as their masters as they ran their errands through the town. There were even a few faces that Orem knew personally. He had taken an aphrodisiac to the home of that one, the tall, effeminate lord, the one introduced to him as Count of Burmouth, though everyone knew Palicrovol held Burmouth—as he held all of Burland more than a day’s ride from Hart’s Hope. And Orem remembered dousing a spell one magician had tried for the fat but vain wife of the Gamesmaster of Arena—what had the spell been? Orem could not remember. He touched hands, kissed ladies and gentlemen of rank, accepted gifts graciously. But the eyes that met his were not friendly. They were calculating, sizing, measuring. He knew too well what they saw. A child, really, though not an ugly one, certainly, and obviously well past puberty since the Queen’s belly was full. But his face held no force. He was unaccustomed to power, and when the Queen left, there was no hope of his holding things in control.

  Of all the things Orem had wondered about the rich, he did not wonder how they amused themselves. He thought he knew. Fun was fun, and it had never occurred to him that the wealthy might not be content to drink good ale and pull sticks and throw darts and wrestle. They might wear gold and velvet, but they were still human beings, weren’t they?

  But at the party for the Little King, that was not the way it went. At first it was mere conversation, and the clumsiest speaker among them was adroit compared to Orem. “Your Majesty,” asked a near woman, “how shall we address you privately?”

  Weasel, her face so ugly that only her voice could show additional irritation, answered for him. “You address him privately as you address him publicly.”

  A soft-spoken lord with the eyes of a man to whom vice was a familiar friend intervened. “But surely Little King answers for himself, and not through the voice of the Lady Housekeeper.”

  Orem shook his head. “I don’t know how it should be done. The Queen said my name should be Little King, and that’s good enough for me.”

  A mistake—he saw it at once in Craven’s scowl. But the assembled dignitaries laughed and cheered. “A common sort of Little King,” cried the Count of Burmouth, “who does not elevate himself above the rest of us. A cheer.” There was a cheer, and then another, and prayers for his happiness, which for some reason that escaped Orem completely seemed hilarious to the other guests.

  Drunkenness did not lead to stick-pulling. More like dog-baiting, with Orem the dog, though he did not see it at first.

  “Will Little King judge a dilemma for me?” asked one woman, and when he consented, trying to please them, she laid before him a shocking story of her husband’s repeated infidelities with barnyard animals, to the delight of the listeners.

  “So tell me, Little King, command me—should I take him back into my bed or cut off a good six inches when next he comes at me!”

  Orem did not believe her story—he doubted that the giggling man beside her would come near a sow, let alone lie with the beast. “I don’t know, lady,” he said. At that the husband leaped to his feet.

  “I implore you, Little King! Don’t make me give up my liaison with Balak! The cows I can part with, and the chickens give little satisfaction. But the sow is my heart, my life, my love!”

  Was the story true, then? Orem could not believe a man would willingly tell such a tale on himself, even if it were true. Especially if it were true, in God’s name! “You make me sick,” Orem said angrily, and the crowd cheered.

  “To righteous indignation!” cried a man, and there was a toast all around. They smiled at him, winked at him; he fancied them friends for a moment and drank the toast.

  “But you must decide! What should I do?” the lady demanded.

  The husband interrupted. “She uses too much paint. She’s greasy and keeps sliding out of bed!”

  “Decide!” came the chant, well-mixed with laughter.

  Orem looked at Weasel’s inscrutably ugly face and could read nothing there. But she had said before that he should command. Keep them laughing, and the Queen will laugh, too, she had said. Very well. “I command you to stay together. I think you’re well-suited,” he said.

  It must have been the right thing to say. There were cheers, and the woman wept and said, “I must take you back!” She embraced her husband, and they toppled and fell clumsily against their small table, winding up in the middle of the floor.

  “About time!” cried the man, and he lifted her dress and had her on the spot. Orem was horrified—such things would be cause for a public whipping in Banningside. “Stop!” he cried. The startled man withdrew from his wife.

  “But I am unsatisfied,” he said, sounding miffed.

  “Stop anyway,” Orem said, “and cover yourself.” Was it for this that he left Halfpriest Dobbick back in Banningside? Here again, however, his attempt to restore order only led to more problems. The lord only covered himself with a tablecloth and pranced around making lewd jokes.

  Was it Orem himself who suggested wrestling? He could not remember afterward, but he wrestled two old men to submission before a younger man beat him. In the comers of the room, where the lamps were dim, he was aware that worse things were happening. A virgin only yesterday, he was not prepared to see people behave with the indiscriminate self-gratification of animals. He withdrew to his table and drank more wine, watching but unable to stop the commotion. Two wrestlers demanded that he command them to do something more difficult. They ended up wrestling with their arms tied to the others legs; then another quarrel began, and finally in despair Orem cried to one pair of fighters, “Kill each other, for all I care.”

  For Orem, the party ended then, for one, laughing brightly, seized something from a table, and a moment later the other lay screaming with a table knife in his throat. The stewards carried out the man who was ruining things with his indecorous agony, and the party went on. But it did so without Orem. He ran from the party, to much applause, and vomited in a corridor.

  A steward cleaned it up almost before he had finished, while another held a layer of water for him to clean himself. Orem washed, and then let them lead him, weeping, to his room. It was the mirrored room where he had loved the Queen the night before. All excitement was gone now. This was a black place, where people were not people anymore.

  The door opened, and he looked up from where he lay crying on the bed, half hoping to see the Queen. No, not Beauty. Rather her opposite, Weasel Sootmouth, who looked angry.

  “I don’t want a lecture. I made myself an ass. Did the man die?”

  Weasel didn’t answer. Instead she came to him and knelt by the bed. She reached out and touched his cheek, where he wept.

  “Yes, its a tear,” Orem said bitterly. “And more where that came from. Can I command them to take me back to Banningside?”

  Weasel shook her head. “You’d be killed if you tried to leave the palace grounds. Her gift of power does not give you wings.”

  “In God’s name, are there no good and normal people here?” he cried, and she embraced him, comforted him as he wept against her neck. He did not remember falling asleep. He woke up in darkness, needing to piss, and found that he had been undressed and covered in the bed. Had Weasel done it herself? Doubtless not—the stewards were too efficient for her to need to do body service for him. Where was a pisspot? He didn’t know where to look in this room, and the other pisspots were in rooms he didn’t know how to reach. There was no pisspot under the bed, no pisspot standing in the comer; he wasn’t sure the room had corners. At last he went to the open window and voided himself into the flower garden below. Someone cursed, but Orem did not stop. He thought he would piss forever, but at last the flow ended and he went back inside the room, feeling much relieved, as if he had pushed the night’s experience out of him and was clean again.

  He could not sleep immediately, though. Outside he was vaguely aware of conversation. “Someone pissed on me from that window, by the Queen’s own name!”

  “Hush, fool, that’s the Little King’s room.” And then silence. But Orem did not listen. Instead he closed his eyes and let his attention wander far away. What was he hunting for? He had never strayed outside Hart’s Hope walls; there had been no need to, for it was in Hart’s Hope that the wizards worked. But now he let himself fly, coasting through the thin mists of the Queen’s magic, where her Searching Eye touched delicately every living thing.

  Where was he? The landscape was not so simple when Orem searched this way. It was not rivers and roads he followed, but villages and farms, the small cold spells rising as a housewife thrust out a gom or placated one too powerful to control. Here and there a place, a small place where the Queen’s sight was weaker—but not gone. Priestly places, where they thought they were invisible to her. They were wrong, Orem knew now.

  He wandered thus for a long time; hours, he thought, though it could have been only moments. Nowhere did the Queen’s power slacken for long. But at last there was a place where her power increased, palpably strengthened, and Orem realized, suddenly, that he had come to Banningside. He felt it more than saw it; reasoned it out at last. The Queen’s vision was keener here because the King—the real King—was still in the town.

  King Palicrovol was asleep. Around him a few wizards did not sleep. They were awake, and Orem felt their spells as strong lights burning like ice. They were guarding the King, but to no avail, though they could not have known it. Orem saw—as none of them could see—the Queen’s magic was not held back by such slight fences.

  In his tiredness, Orem could not resist striking back against the world in some small way. They might laugh at him at the party, and the Queen might think him a nothing, which could be used and then made to dance like a fool for her amusement. But he had a power, and it was stronger in its small, negative way than any of theirs.

  One by one he tasted their fires and put them out. He sensed the thin, futile rage; he knew that they thought the Queen was striking at them. Let them think what they would. For now he turned to the Queen’s own magic, the mist itself. He swallowed its strong, sickly flavor. It gathered and increased around him, but still he swallowed it, and then it was gone; he himself was panting, sweating on his bed, but the Queen’s sight was gone from Palicrovol, perhaps for the first time in years, and any spells she might have put on him were gone. Would she notice? Orem almost hoped so. He knew this: once he had cut a hole in her power, she would have to discover it and remake all the spells that he had taken. Her mist of magic was not like a real fog; it was not carried on the wind. It went only where she put it.

  For a long time he stayed there, reaching farther and farther from Palicrovol, tasting, drinking down all the Queen had put there, finding that its unpleasant taste grew tolerable and finally, finally invigorating. Yet, when at last he quit, none of it had stayed with him. It was as Galloway had told him: What he swallowed up was gone forever. It only touched him slightly on the way into him. He could never draw it back again.

  He withdrew his attention, opened his eyes. He was alone in the darkness and very tired. The palace was silent, and almost he went to sleep. But before he had dozed off completely, he heard a faint sound, a distant sound in the palace. It was a cry of rage, he thought. And then, as sleep finally did come, he was vaguely aware of servants moving very, very quickly on their near-silent feet, on a hundred errands.

  In the morning he did not see the Queen. He asked Weasel, who met him at breakfast.

  “You won’t see the Queen today.”

  “Why not?” asked Orem.

  “She’s very busy.” And that was that. Except that once he caught a glimpse of Urubugala, who was waiting outside a door. The little black fool winked a white eye at him and made a grimace and a sign with his hand. It could have meant anything, really. Except that Orem recognized it. It took him a few moments of remembering to realize what it reminded him of. Urubugala had pointed at him with his eyes bugging out, in exactly the same way that King Palicrovol had pointed at him from the street in Banningside. “Mine, mine, mine,” cried the fool, cackling with laughter. And he winked again.

  Orem turned and ran from him, though in a few moments he stopped and wondered why he had been so afraid. The man was just a fool, the sign just coincidence.

  But he knew it was not true. Urubugala, at least, knew who and what Orem was and knew also that it was King Palicrovol who, however accidentally, had sent the Little King to Harts Hope so many months before. Urubugala knew; but the Queen did not know. The fool was disloyal, then. Well, he had good reason. So, for that matter, did Orem. He had been brought here against his will, and though he hadn’t fought his marriage with the Queen, no one had so much as asked him if he would like to wed her; now he knew, or at least suspected, that he was here, not for himself, but for the blood in his veins, for the power that it might give to the Queen in her great magics.

  He did not know how he would keep her from taking his life, but he would do it if he could. One thing he did know, however, was that until the last breath was drawn in red fire from his body, he would work against her, secretly, in the darkness, by undoing all of her work. All of it, if he could. Was Palicrovol her enemy? Then Palicrovol was Orem’s friend, as was everyone who hated her or feared her.

  Such as Urubugala. And wasn’t it Urubugala who had told him, when they first met, “The Queen sees everything except that which she sees not.” The Queen could look at the whole world; but she could not see that she could not see Orem. With her eyes she could see him, but not with the perpetual vision that floated like mist in the back of her remarkable mind.

  In the late afternoon, Orem walked in the palace garden because it was green and beautiful and reminded him of the forests of the high Banning Valley, where he had walked all his life until a few months ago. Nearest the palace, the gardens were well clipped and tended, with gravel paths and even a few corduroy carriage roads for lazier guests. But it was not far at all to where the paths faded into many thin trails and the underbrush grew thick and untended and rude squirrels fled the sight of man. Orem walked westward until he came to the palace park wall. High above him a few soldiers lounged, looking nowhere in particular—certainly not at him. The wall was not climbable: the stones were set so close, without mortar, that Orem doubted a knife blade could fit between them, and three times up the walls height the wall stepped out nearly a yard. There was no escape here.

  Still, lost in his own thoughts and facing, in small bits, the fear of certain death that was growing in him, he walked north along the wall until it curved in sharply, and a tower was set into it. He did not know until later that this was Corner Castle, with its Lesser Donjon. But without having to ask anyone, he knew what the place was for. He could hear it only faintly. It could have been a distant cry, even a sound from the city beyond the wall; could have been, but was not Orem pressed his ear against the stone of the tower and the sound became clear. It was the scream of a man in agony; it was the scream of the worst terror a man can know. Not the fear of death, but the fear that death will delay its coming.