Orem could not conceive of the torture that would arouse such a cry from a human throat. The stone he leaned against was cold, and he shivered. The sun was long since hidden behind the west wall, but now he could see that the sunlight touched only the topmost domes of the palace. It was near evening and getting cooler. He left the tower and the man suffering inside. He wondered if he would ever hear such a sound coming from his own throat. Ah, no, he told himself, shivering again. He who can make such a sound is already far beyond hearing.

  He walked back a different way and came suddenly to the Queens Pool. It was the water from the Baths, of course, the pure spring water that flowed in an endless stream as if God himself were pumping, right in the heart of the Castle. The Baths were public and the water good; but most of the water went somewhere else, went in aqueducts to the Temples, to the great houses and embassies lining King’s Road and the even more exclusive Diggings Avenue, went in bronze pipes to Pools Park, where the artists dwelled outside the palace, and went here, to the Queen’s Pool, where few ever bathed and the water was pure as a baby’s tears. Orem stayed back in the trees, just looked at the water rippling in the breeze, transparent, green, and deep because the sun did not shine brightly from the surface.

  Then he saw that someone else had come to bathe. It was a woman, distant across the huge pool, but still easy to recognize—Weasel Sootmouth, and as Orem watched she stepped from her gown and entered the water and began to swim lazily along the surface of the water, lying on her back.

  Why does this woman serve the Queen, Orem wondered. Named Weasel by the Queen, but what was her name before? What magic has the Queen placed upon this woman?

  And so Orem looked, or rather tasted; and was surprised to find that here the Queen had spent at least as much power as she had used to bind poor Palicrovol. But why? Who was this ugly woman, that the Queen feared her as much as her hated enemy, the true King?

  Orem toyed with the idea of breaking all the spells that bound Weasel. But he restrained himself. If it is far beyond the walls of Hart’s Hope that the Queen finds her magic undone, that’s one thing, he decided. But for her to find such things happening here—it would not do. For now, anyway. At least for now.

  It was ungracious of him to watch poor Weasel’s bent and shapeless body, he realized. She would surely be embarrassed that a man knew that her breasts hung like empty feedbags and that her legs and knees were gawky and overboned. He turned away from her in pity. And then remembered that she had also pitied him.

  Of such feelings are friendships made in this sad place, Orem thought as he left the pool. He took a wide curve around the pool and was quiet. But then he could not resist one last temptation. It was not for lust or even curiosity that Orem turned back. He was drawn some other way. But this time he approached the pool from the south end, as silently as he could; and this time he learned something more than the sadness of Weasel’s nudity. For he came up behind the Queen, and she did not see or hear him, because she was also watching the pool, as he had watched. And so both the Little King and Queen Beauty, his wife and owner and executioner, watched as the great stag emerged from the wood, just where Orem had been only a few minutes before, and came to drink from the water’s edge. It was an ancient hart, as could be seen from the tremendous rack of antlers that overbalanced its head. As the stag braced itself to lower its head into the water, it became just as clear that if it once lowered its antlers that far it would never have the strength to raise them up. What a monstrous trick the Sweet Sisters play on such a magnificent animal as this, Orem thought, that if he bends to drink, he may never rise again.

  And then Weasel Sootmouth was beside the hart, and received its antlers into her hands, and held their weight as it drank its fill from the Queen’s pure pool. Drinking done, the stag strained to rise, and Weasel rose with him, lifting the horns high until the weight sat properly upon the great stag’s neck and it moved slowly, gracefully, imperiously back into the forest How old this hart must be, Orem thought, to have earned two dozen points to each antler; and all his life he has dwelled here, in the palace park, surrounded by these ancient walls. Or is this stag so old that he remembers freedom?

  And he thought again: how strange that this most beautiful of animals comes to drink when Weasel bathes here. If the stag needed help today, it needed it yesterday, too; each day, then, Weasel comes, faithfully, the hart’s true friend.

  It was then that Orem first loved Weasel Sootmouth. Not as a man loves a woman, certainly, for he was not yet old enough that he could forget a woman’s ugliness and love the beauty of her soul; few men ever are that old. He loved her as a child loves his good teacher. Perhaps, most of all, he loved her because he had to love someone, and she at least had shown herself capable of being trusted. If she can love this great old stag, Orem thought, perhaps she can love me.

  Just in time Orem slipped back almost silently into the trees; he was just out of sight when the Queen turned and walked back to the palace. Orem could see her face, though she did not turn to look at him. The virginal sweetness was not there. Queen Beauty looked angry and beautiful and tired and beautiful and vengeful and beautiful, and it made Orem afraid.

  It was dark again. Orem had wasted the day. But he did not waste the night. He went back to his mirrored room and shut his eyes and found King Palicrovol again. The Queen’s magic was stronger around him than ever before but, systematically, Orem tasted it all, drowned it all in the deep well within him. And this time he took even more, took it in an even wider circle around the King, so that many miles of land were free of the Queen’s Searching Eye. Oh, you will have to lay many a spell tomorrow, Orem silently said to the Queen. Many a spell before you even find old Palicrovol with his golden eyes. And he went to sleep satisfied, hearing once again with pleasure the servants on their errands, and the Queen’s dim cry of alarm, of fury, and of fear. Orem hoped, at least, that she felt fear. Let her turn cold inside herself, wondering what wizard challenges her, what power that she cannot find opposes her, he thought. She will never imagine it is her Little King.

  Orem dreamed that the Queen came to him in the night and made love to him; he awoke in his moment of ecstasy and wept that it was not true.

  The palace was filled with infinite variety, but variety itself soon becomes monotonous. Today the elephant from the northeast nation of Bushmouth, brought by a great barge towed upriver by five hundred slaves; tomorrow a chariot all of gold and ivory, drawn by fifteen horses with one black diamond eye, perfectly matched, a gift of the Prince of Woodrise. The next day naked boys dancing and virtually flying through the air as they wrestled and tossed; and afterward soft hollow candies filled with wine, each a different vintage, or flavored with a different fruit. Orem’s place in all these things was the same: to appear prominently, to say little, and to be laughed at whether he spoke or not. Oh, all were polite; all bowed to him and, as Queen Beauty had commanded, everyone obeyed. But it was known that in Hart’s Hope, the greatest city in the world, Queen Beauty was pregnant by a farmboy and had made the bumpkin her Little King.

  The diversions were all the same to Orem. For a few moments he was interested, but when the novelty was done the palace itself returned; the servants ran their inscrutable errands, the local nobility and nouveau riche came and went, favorites fell and favorites rose; it made little difference to Orem. As long as no one interfered with his walks in the palace park, his wanderings through the palace, his virtual ransacking of Queen Beauty’s father’s library, then he was content. Once, feeling nostalgic for old Halfpriest Dobbick, Orem hunted for a chapel to offer the five prayers and two songs. But there was no chapel, nor even a clay cup for the offering of earth’s water from earth’s hand. God had no place in the palace, and Orem was disquieted by that. God had surrounded him all his life, and when he took to the river he had been glad enough to leave religion behind. Now he was surrounded by magic, and though it never touched him—or perhaps because it never touched him—he felt oppressed, and more and more believed that a simple prayer could set him free. So he knelt by the pool in the morning and made a cup of earth in his hand, filled it with water from the Queen’s Pool, and said the first three prayers. When he tried to pour the water out, however, it evaporated before it touched the ground. The Queen’s magic could not tolerate such a thing. Orem thought of clearing a place in the magic where he might pray. But he did not want the Queen to notice holes in her spells so close to home. No, safer not to. And it was silly, he decided for him to want to pray at all.

  And yet he still sang the two songs on the way back to the palace, though he could tell that the air swallowed up the words only a few inches from his mouth so that he could hardly hear them.

  His rest from the days’ humiliations and boredom and despair was the nights’ battles. He took a great deal of joy from vexing the Queen.

  She was getting unmistakably gravid, heavier in the belly every day, and though her magic was enough to keep her beautiful throughout, there was still a toll. She became short-tempered and took more naps during the day. She also began to seem visibly weaker. Fainter.

  Each night Orem would go to bed a little earlier and lie awake a little longer. It became easier and easier to find King Palicrovol and undo all the Queens magic around him; easier, too, to spread an ever broader circle around him that was cleared of her magic, cleared of her Searching Eye. And while every day her spells on the King were more heavily protected, more painstakingly placed, Orem also noticed that the Queen was beginning to lose ground—every day there would be places and patches in the mist of her magic where she had not replaced her spells, where her Searching Eye no longer reached. She could not keep pace with him, and he reached far afield each night in the last few minutes before sleep, tearing great holes in her Searching Eye in places where she could not expect it. One night he took Calarnay from her sight; the next Baysend. Cities and towns, forests and farms, he rent her vision and her power and she hadn’t the strength to seam it all.

  Orem did not fool himself into thinking this was a great victory, however. He did not know if he could face her directly and counter spell after spell. All he was sure he could do was this: occupy her in mending a thousand tiny holes; irritate her; weary her; weaken her.

  And another effect, of course. Palicrovol’s wizards knew that something strange was going on, and knew that, in the long run, it could only benefit the true King of Burland. It gave Palicrovol hope.

  “Palicrovol threatens he will tear you limb from limb while you are still alive,” a noblewoman said one day, pretending to be outraged by the gossip. But Orem only smiled. They thought he smiled because he knew the Queen’s magic would protect him. Actually he smiled because he loved to hear of Palicrovol, his enemy, whose place he had usurped: “Where is he now?” Orem asked.

  “He is said to be in Gronskeep for the winter.”

  “Is it winter?” Orem asked.

  “Outside the palace it is,” another woman said. “The Queen’s power cannot stop the turn of seasons outside the palace walls.”

  “And is Palicrovol deep in snow?” Orem asked.

  And the women laughed and denied any knowledge of such things. “Just the tales the servants pick up in the markets, or our husbands at the Arena, that’s all we know.”

  And then the more dangerous rumors, as the bureaucrats from the Taxhouse questioned him whenever he wandered into the official end of the palace. “Is it true that King Palicrovol no longer goes blind because the Queen cannot see through his eyes?”

  “No one tells me such things,” Orem answered them all.

  “But surely you can tell us if its true that Queen Beauty is ill, that a great necromancer is countering all her spells against the King.”

  “I am not kept informed about the Queen’s business. And so far as I know, there’s no such thing as magic in this palace.” And the bureaucrats retreated after his reminder of the official lies that kept the peace between palace and temple. Yet he let slip a few points, now and then. That the Queen was weary. That she napped often. That she was surly and irritable. Let the rats wonder if they had chosen the right ship for sailing, Orem thought. Let them begin to try to make friends in the Kings camp. Any weakness to the Queen is strength to the King. Palicrovol sent me here, wittingly or not; if the Queen means to use my blood to make her magic, I will do as much as I can to strengthen Palicrovol before I die.

  “You’re too somber,” Weasel told him. He was sitting on a bench, studying the floral work inlaid into the floor.

  “Am I?” Orem asked.

  “Whenever I see you, you’re reading books or staring at the floor.”

  “I go to parties,” Orem said. “I’m very busy.”

  Weasel smiled. “I thought boys your age loved to be lazy.”

  Orem said nothing, but unaccountably his thoughts went to the growing belly of the Queen. “I am going to be a father.”

  Weasel looked away from him. “Well, then, I guess it isn’t right to call you a boy, is it? I’m sorry.”

  That was not what Orem meant. “What will be expected of me?”

  Weasel looked back at him, studied his face. “What is expected of you now?”

  “I must act the fool. Will my child laugh at me?”

  Weasel’s face contorted oddly, but she was so ugly that Orem could not tell what emotion she was trying to express.

  “Or will I never see him at all?”

  “That, at least, is up to you.”

  “Is it?”

  Weasel sat beside him on the bench and put her arm around his shoulder. Orem remembered her swimming naked in the Queen’s Pool. He also started to remember the Queen’s touch on that first night, but he fought that memory down, would not think of it, listened instead to Weasel. “Little King, you command everyone in this palace except Urubugala, Craven, and me. If you want to see your child, you can. Who will stop you?”

  “The Queen does not obey me.”

  “Have you commanded her?”

  Orem started to laugh, but could not stay amused. “I’m afraid to,” he said.

  “I don’t advise you try it, but I can promise you that part of the result, at least, will be her obedience. I suggest you word your command carefully.”

  “Is it true?”

  “If the Queen didn’t want you to hear this, she would have stopped me, wouldn’t she?”

  “Perhaps she isn’t listening.”

  Weasel smiled thinly. “The Queen is always listening.”

  “I hear that she doesn’t hear everything. I hear that she’s blind to what goes on with King Palicrovol. I hear that there’s a power in Burland that can undo her magic wherever it likes.” Orem felt his heart pounding. He had never come so close to self-revelation before; why was he doing this now? The Queen could hear, surely—and yet he knew that he was trying to say something to Weasel.

  “Where did you hear that?” Weasel asked, truly alarmed now.

  “It’s common rumor.”

  “It’s—it’s—” and then Weasel stopped, choked on the words, but finally, with her voice bent in some strange way, she said, “It’s a lie.”

  But it was not a lie, and Orem knew whose words Weasel had spoken. He felt guilty that he alone of all the people in the palace was free of the Queen’s intrusions. He alone went every day with his mind unforced, his will unbroken. He wanted to make it up to Weasel somehow. He reached out and touched her face, as he had touched his mother’s face once after his baby sister—was it a sister? yes—had died.

  Weasel shuddered at his touch, and he withdrew his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

  He took her hand in his. “I do, better than you know.”

  She pulled her hand away, and then bent over as if in pain. “It’s the Queen’s blessing on me,” Weasel said, between clenched teeth. “It isn’t enough that I look this way. A man’s touch makes me sick, as well.”

  Orem pulled back from her. “What are you doing here?”

  “The story isn’t mine to tell.”

  “Whose is it, then?”

  Weasel strained to answer, but the words would not come. Apparently the Queen did not want Orem to know who was free to answer him. But it was no secret—the Queen knew all the tales, and this was one Orem meant to have. More than that. This was the time, if there ever was one, to see if the Queen lied or not when she promised to bend her will before his.

  “I will go and speak to my wife,” Orem said, but he felt silly saying the words. Wife and husband they were in name, but their only act of unity had come and gone long ago.

  “Not now,” Weasel said. And then she cried out in pain.

  “Why are you still in pain?” Orem asked.

  “I’m not,” Weasel said, and then cried out again.

  “Then why do you cry in pain?”

  Weasel laughed. “It’s another part of the same—ah!” Silence. A gasp. Then: “The same tale told by the same teller. But don’t go to her now.”

  “I will.”

  “I advise against it.”

  “I will be my own adviser, then.”

  “She’s having the baby!” Weasel said. She was gritting her teeth in pain.

  “Already?” Orem asked stupidly.

  “Already! Fool! The child has been in her womb for a year today. Because the leaves don’t fall, have you forgotten that days still pass? A year in her womb, Little King! Don’t go near her now!”

  But Orem was already going. His child was being born. He had no idea what he meant to do, but he had to do it. He ran to the first door, entered a great hall, crossed it, climbed a stairway, and stopped, panting, at the top, realizing that in all the time he had lived in the palace, he still had no notion of where the Queen’s chambers were. He had never been invited there.