The king in the keep was not a happy man. He was not rich enough. He didn’t get enough respect. The world did not recognize him. The nations didn’t come streaming to his door. He was a small king of a second rate, sparsely settled, peaceful, pastoral and utterly insignificant country.
It wasn’t fair.
He established himself in a venerable castle with dungeons and halls and galleries, towers and stables and immodestly sized bed chambers, gates and courtyards and a very good view. He put together a spit-and-polish horse brigade with serious uniforms and snapping pennants. But it did not feel like enough.
He built a beautiful little village at the foot of this stronghold, a mill and a bakery and a smithy, places for weavers and silversmiths, apothecaries and carpenters, tailors and tanners and turners and sawyers, and a collection of sturdy little cottages set around a sweet green park. All of this, he rented to fine craftsmen and dependable folk at very high prices. From these came beautiful goods, the finest of everything. Now he had a center to his kingdom, a place for spring fairs and harvest markets, a place that drew attention and gold from all the countryside around, so that he could collect his rents and pay for his castle and his Special Horse Guard, and his servants, and all his trappings of power.
But it still wasn’t enough.
He married a princess, daughter of the king of the Far West, hoping her connections and her father’s mines would prove a good investment. But she died, leaving him inarguably the richer, but with no children and a reduced opinion of the usefulness of womankind. The truth was, she had been a disappointment from the beginning, for he had learned that owning the west was nothing. It was in the east that glory lay.
Glory, power, magic, mystery, riches beyond the imagination of man to frame them. He had heard the stories all his life—the fabled City by the Sea, the enameled Palace of Easterness, where the blood of the people, descended from the Ancients—golden haired, golden skinned—ran with magic and power. These were people of knowledge and grace, revered in all the world.
That was the throne he ached for.
He had chosen his castle because it was as far east as anything in his country could be, snug up against the great forest that was the border between east and west. He had looked eastward, hoping for some interchange, or at least for invitations, or at the very least, for trade. But every year the forest had grown older and darker and denser, and every year, infestations of robbers gathered strength and hedged up the road so that only heavily armed caravans had any hope of making it through. There was no casual trade. There were no interchanges. There were certainly no invitations. The king sat in his keep and remained unsatisfied.
Then one year, acting on good advice, he put on his finest things—polished armor that reflected the glory of the sun—and assembled a caravan of his finest soldiers and his most remarkable and impressive courtiers. In this array, he made his way through the lowering forest, into the East. He traveled magnificently across the countryside, only stopping once to ask directions, and arrived at last at the gates of the City.
To find that it was everything he had been taught to expect.
And it was then that he realized—he had never loved, never desired, never truly lusted until the moment his eyes had looked upon that city.
As it happened, the Great King of Easterness, Fairbairne, Father of the World, Keeper of Knowledge, Patriarch of the Seaborn Clan, had a daughter. She was young—or seemed so; you could never tell with the people of that country—and beautiful—of that, there was no question—golden, as all of her people were. She was the oldest child of that king. She was also a widow, having lost her husband only a year or so before. This, then, was the advice the hungry king had gotten: marry a princess and win, by that, the world.
So he was on his best behavior—or perhaps it was someone else’s best behavior, because the charm and wit and courtesy this minor king now exhibited surely exceeded anything he had ever before achieved. After a few months, when he was reasonably certain that he had won the lonely heart of the golden sylph and her slip of a son, he asked for the hand of the Princess of Easterness in marriage. To his tremendous surprise—the eastern king had never warmed up to him—the alliance was granted. The wedding ceremony was performed.
By this, the second-rate king became the husband consort of the heir of the Seaborn Clan, and she, a thinning life away from the most powerful position in the world.
He was finally satisfied.
He took his new wife and her little golden haired son and went west again to his own place. There, he waited patiently for the king of Easterness to kick off.
He also took off his best manners, folding them up with his best silks and got back down to the business of running of his own kingdom.
His court did not grow fond of the Eastern princess. They were suspicious of her golden fragility and her sea green eyes and her intellectual and private ways. And she, herself, was not happy, not once it became obvious that the man she had married was less than kin to the one with whom she now lived. But she had brought with her a few of her own people to rely upon, and there was her little son who, if anything, was lonelier than she. The princess spent more time with him than was generally thought healthy, and no one knew exactly what kind of odd knowledge she passed along to the boy, but there was something so odd and foreign about them both that the arcane and untrustworthy were assumed.
After that, there was very little communication with the east. The only messengers that could get through the border forests with their lives intact were armed ones in substantial companies, and that kind of thing was only available for the king’s own private use. The messages he sent to his exalted in-law were usually full of pleasantries and assurances and absolutely nothing of substance. And so it went for miserable years.
And then the princess, who had never quite been queen, took a fever and died.
The king did very little mourning. His wife’s absence was no more intrusive than her presence had been. He sent a properly prostrate missive to the north, received in response a request that the boy be sent home—but blocked that request very neatly with protestations of fatherly devotion, and of the wonderful education the boy would miss, and the dangers of tearing a child from the bosoms of dear friends and familiar surroundings that would remind him of his mother.
Because the old eastern king would only get older. And a boy could not possibly sit on such a throne without a doting regent.
So the little prince went from golden to pale, and over the solitary years grew taller and straight, but took very little warmth from his life. And very few knew him.
All this time, the king waited. But the old man over east never seemed to change.
The costs of running even this small court were exhausting the niggardly king’s royal treasury. And persistent obscurity was wearing on his patience.
* * *
Bess, the Miller’s daughter, bathed with otters.
In the beginning, when she was very small and had just fallen in love with the mill pond, the otters kept to their own side. In the most provoking and joyful fashion, they played on banks slippery with leaf mold, cool and green in the shadows of the great and mysterious forest. Having no mother to tell her otherwise, small Bess determined that if otters could swim, she could learn to do it too. And so she did—with some help from Robert, the smith’s oldest son, and Bess’ surrogate brother. Her miller father, a man of philosophical bent and thus a bit blind where reality was concerned, never even knew.
The otters didn’t mind her. She was too little at first to swim across and bother them, and too polite later. So, the girl splashed in the shallows or sat silent and watchful on her side, the otters played on their side, and the years went by.
But on a fine spring day when Bess had just turned twelve, one young otter took an interest in her, perhaps because he wondered how any living creature could bear to keep so still for so long. Whatever the reason, he swam through the late afternoon shadows and climbed out onto the bank a dozen feet away from her, sat himself down and studied her. And though her heart was hammering away, and she wanted dearly to make a grab for him, Bess held her stillness. Soon enough, the otter skittered away again, bored and baffled and itching for play.
Still, as each day went by, his curiosity remained—and each time he crossed the pond, he came a little closer. And every day, she held quite still, not even daring to look straight at him. Until the afternoon when he came to swim circles about her as she bathed.
After that, the other pups joined him, and the girl and the otters were all young animals together—as long as they kept to the water. Once out on the bank, she had two feet, and they had four. And though that was disappointing, still, the honor of sharing the water with them was very sweet to her, and the arrangement continued over two summers.
The last time she saw the otter, he seemed ill. It was an afternoon late in that last summer of her childhood. He left the others and dragged himself up on the bank where she was sitting. He was very close, and she watched him with concern; one of the greatest tragedies in the world is a drooping otter. But she was surprised beyond words when he came creeping across the mud and climbed up into her lap.
He stayed there until dark, allowing her to touch him. And so she stroked the thick fur on his back and scratched behind his ears, and when he finally slipped into the water and disappeared, she wept. It was a day she was not likely to forget: in the morning, the mill stone had slipped and jammed. In the afternoon, the poor young eastern princess had died. Everything good, it seemed, had mourned.
Months later, when Bess was more than busy helping her father with the mill, she began to dream about the otter. The dream came, off and on, every few months, and it was always the same; the otter sat in the lap of a man who was reading a book. It was a very peaceful dream, and that’s all there was to it. Years went by, and so did suitors. Bess had taken over the mill accounts and was known as a sharp woman of business. Tom Carpenter came courting; he had sweet ways about him and his eyes were full of her. Bess found it flattering, if not engrossing, and entertained the idea of accepting him.
Then, one night, the otter dream came again. But this time, it was changed. This time, the otter swam in the mill pond, squeaking with distress. She dreamed herself on the bank, but immobile. To her horror, she saw the man; he was floating motionless, face down in the water, and the otter swam around and around him. Somehow, the man got himself up on the bank. He lay limply on the moss, still face down. Then she could hear that he was weeping, a terrible, desolate, lost sound. Bess came awake all at once, sitting bolt upright in her bed, sobbing. It was the worst dream she had ever had.
That afternoon, she sent Tom Carpenter away.