CHAPTER 9 

Three places were laid for dinner on the balcony which opened from the anteroom of the royal suite. Liveried servants waited there in feral nervousness—for diners; for orders; for anything, even a chewing-out, because that would be better than frightened uncertainty. Nobody knew what was wrong in Emath Palace; but everyone knew something was wrong. 

Nobody knew but King Hale; and now, his son. 

The servants leaped to attention when Dennis and Chester entered the suite. "Your highness," said the carver, bowing with a watery shimmer of the blue and silver flounces of her dress. 

"Your highness-ighness-ness," echoed the three placemen—bobbing like birds and slightly out of synchronous in their haste to do the right thing. 

"Will you be dining now, your highness?" asked the carver. 

"Not—" Dennis began. He realized that he hadn't eaten since the night before. He ought to feel starved—and probably he would, if his stomach weren't so knotted up with fear. 

He wasn't afraid yet of the sea hag—because before he confronted her, he had to face his father. 

"Not yet, thank you," he said, marveling that, though his face burned with the emotions he felt, his voice remained steady. "Ah—do you know if the King has returned as yet?" 

The servants darted quick, side-long glances at one another. A placeman bowed and said, "Your highness, I believe one of the cooks did mention that King Hale had entered the suite by the back stairs." 

Dennis realized that he was still limb-in-limb with Chester. He released the tentacle and said, "Thank you. I can't give you much direction on dinner, I'm afraid." 

Terribly afraid. And what did it matter to them that the prince clung to a mechanical toy the way infants do a blanket or a fuzzy doll? 

Dennis reached out as he stalked toward his parent's suite. His friend's looping grip was waiting for his hand. 

Hale's chamberlain was outside the room Dennis' parents shared. "Your highness," he said, bowing. 

The door was crystal with the look of water in the depths of the sea, dense and an indigo blue scarcely removed from black. It was as solid as the walls around it, but Dennis could still hear the angry shouting from within—Hale's deep, booming drumbeats punctuated by Selda's shrill insistence. 

The chamberlain stepped aside, looking off down the corridor as if oblivious to the sounds. Dennis opened the door, held it for Chester, and closed it behind him on the sudden stillness with which his parents greeted his entry. 

"Father, Mother," he said, bowing formally. "I need to talk to you about tomorrow." 

Selda's face was still contorted with the angry words she'd been ready to hurl at her husband. She remained poised for a moment, staring at her son and his companion. Then she collapsed into a chair carved delicately from a single giant fishbone and began to cry with her hands over her face. 

Selda was a plump woman but on those rare occasions when Dennis could think of his mother as a human being instead of a fixture in his life, he could see that she was good-looking. 

When Dennis was very young, Selda's hair had been a sandy, pleasant red; for the past while, however, her locks had a harsh vibrancy that nature had intended only for the preparation of crushed leaves that she used to dye it. She wore increasingly more make-up as well. Now it was running from beneath her fingers in streaks of black and scarlet and bleached-flour white. 

"Mom," Dennis said, striding to her. He felt her shoulders quake beneath his hands as she cried. 

"I don't have anything to talk to you about," Hale grunted as reached to a lacquered sideboard. "Neither of you!" 

The cabinet stuck. Hale's great shoulder muscles bunched and jerked the brass latchplate out in a shower of splinters. 

The sideboard held an assortment of liquors. Hale took out a square green bottle like the ones Ramos had been guzzling down. He unstoppered it by pinching the end of the cork with his fingernails. 

"I've seen the sea hag," Dennis said. "Tomorrow I'll go to her as agreed." 

Hale shifted his hand on the bottle, gripping it by the neck. 

"What does he mean, Hale?" Selda asked, looking up fearfully like a startled nestling. 

Hale smashed the bottle against the edge of the sideboard. Lustrously veneered wood shattered instead of the thick glass. 

Hale swung the bottle at the wall. Fortified wine streamed from the spout as his arm moved, exploding in bubbles and aroma among the fragments of glass. 

He turned to his son. The bottle had broken just below the neck. It winked from the clenched fist like a lamphrey's mouth of jagged, translucent teeth—a fisherman's weapon in a madman's hand. 

"You will not do that thing," Hale said in a voice of absolute certainty. 

For a moment, Dennis thought his father was about to kill him. It was just a thought, a fact, like the weather or the hour of the day. If Hale killed him, then Dennis wouldn't have to see in life the creature whose lightning-lit image had been terror to watch... 

"H-hale?" Selda said. She got up shakily and faced her husband, standing between the two men in the room. "Put that down. Please put that down." 

Hale brushed her aside with his left arm—not a blow, but forceful enough to have pushed the woman out of the way no matter how willing she was to have resisted. Selda caught herself on the chair back, then slid with it to the floor and her sobbing. 

Hale threw down the bottleneck. It broke further and skittered in a dozen directions. He stared at Dennis; Dennis met his father's eyes. 

"You don't think you're a boy any more, is that it?" Hale said softly. "Well, maybe you're not... But you're still my son, laddy. And I say you'll not do this—d'ye hear?" 

Dennis felt his expression tremble. He could face anger, now that he knew what the anger hid; but his father had undermined his composure by treating him for the first time as an adult. "Father, if I don't go—" 

Hale shook his shaggy head. "It doesn't matter to you. It's my bargain, and my decision." 

"But—" 

"It's my decision!" 

Dennis spun to the door and jerked it open. It took all his remaining strength of will to plunge into the anteroom again before his own tears joined those of his mother. 

This time, the cause was more complex than anger and frustration, though; and he half thought he heard his father start to cry also as the thick panel slammed shut.