Five

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The boar and the bolt of lightning leaping out of the keep made Talis' name a kitchen word for a day or two. The hall-servants told the tale of the burrowing, deadly sorcery, the frenzied dogs, the spilled cups, the furious king, each a different way, as if each had seen a different light. The other tale came piecemeal from the hall: Something had happened to the prince. He had fallen off his horse. He had broken a leg, he had broken a rib, he had broken any number of bones. He had been dazed, he hadn't heard, and then there it was, coming at his back, and he turned, and next thing, they were pulling his silver spear-point out of the boar's heart. It wasn't magic; it was all as he had been taught, just as his father had done in his time, and for that instant, with his hair and his shoulders, he had looked just like his father.

Saro, deep in her wash water, heard his name echo around the iron cauldron. It was one more kitchen noise; if he had called her name to fetch a dirty pot, she might have put the name to his voice. Princes were no more real to her than roses or gold or a living boar, or the world beyond the kitchen garden. Anything could exist in that magical "beyond," except Saro. The prince's name was simply a word she could ignore, since it had nothing to do with pots. So she scrubbed and did not think, and gradually the dancing flame that was the prince's name grew still and, unfanned, became an ember of memory. The day Prince Talis… The day when the light… When he almost killed the King, and then was almost killed himself…

And then, unexpectedly, the ember flared again, became an argument, scraps of which Saro heard as she picked up dirty bread pans from beside the ovens. The hall-servants, gathering for the midday meal, flurried around the kitchen, feathers rustling, preparing for flight.

"I'm not going."

"I'm not going. It's not our place to be asked to go up there."

"Up all those steps. Let the guards take it. They're used to it."

"It's not just the steps, it's-"

"Pitch-black. And ghosts wander. Hungry ghosts. You'd have to be mad to go among them. It's one thing for Prince Talis; he's got his magic, and the guards are armed, but-"

"And when you make it past the ghosts and up all those stairs, then where are you? Face to face, so I've heard, with a Thing in the door opening its eyes and glaring at you."

Saro, loaded with trays, set them down beside the cauldron. A mincer darted to her side, grabbed a misshapen dove left on the tray, and vanished under a table. Bending, she began to scrub, and heard little more for a while than the slosh of water, the scrape of metal on iron, her scrub brush on stubborn grease.

"Saro!"

She pulled herself upright, turned to the iron stoves, where an undercook had scorched a sauce. Carrying the hot pan carefully, its long handle wrapped in her skirt, she edged around an argument between the tray-mistress and the head hall-servant.

"It's not my job," the tray-mistress said roundly, "to find a tray-bearer for Prince Talis in this muddle. Who should I send?" Her fingers pinched, crablike, caught a peeler's small, translucent ear. "Him?" He squinched his eyes shut, knife in one hand, potato in the other. He looked as grimy and knobbed as a new potato. "Boy, take a tray to the prince in the great keep." His mouth gaped; he endeavored to disappear down his shirt. "How far do you think he would get with it? Two steps into the dark and he'd flee, leaving Prince Talis' meal to the mice."

"It's not our job to go among ghosts and cobwebs," the head servant retorted.

"Well, it's none of mine, either." The tray-mistress glanced at the ear in her fingers, as if wondering how it got there, and loosed it distastefully. "If he's a mage, Prince Talis, why can't he levitate his meal from here to there?"

"He's busy with his other sorceries," the head servant said portentously. "And making a new lens so he can read his spells."

The tray-mistress breathed heavily through her nose. "It's your problem," she said, and turned to add linen in a gold ring to the tray under dispute. Saro heard the head servant's voice rise as she left them behind and eased around another obstacle: two apprentices coming to a boil over spices in a pudding. She dumped the scorched sauce down the drain and added the pan to her pile.

"Saro!"

She threaded her way through the servants and cooks, hurrying now, as they drizzled a latticework of chocolate sauce on a stewed pear, and placed walnut halves on small tarts of egg and cheese and finely chopped mushrooms. She collected the empty tart pans, and then the saucepans, added them to her pile, which was beginning to teeter. Working quickly, she had twin towers, one dirty, one clean, before she heard her name again.

"Saro!"

The voice belonged to the tray-mistress, who, scowling with frustration, dropped a fresh lily on a tray and handed the tray to Saro.

"Take this to Prince Talis in the keep. All she thinks about is pots," she added to the head servant, who looked battered but victorious. "Nothing else penetrates. She won't know enough to be afraid. Go," she added to Saro, who was adjusting the heavy silver tray in her slippery hands. "And quickly, before it cools entirely."

The head servant wrinkled his nose fastidiously. "But not through the castle. Not looking like that. Go around through the kitchen garden. Is she mute? Or just dense?"

"Both."

"Then how will we know if she actually makes it to the top of the keep with the tray?"

The tray-mistress rolled an exasperated eye at him. "Follow her," she snapped, and showed him her back.

Saro, who hadn't seen the woodpile and had scarcely seen the sky since she was found, ignored both on her way to the keep. She dodged gardeners, dogs, guards, as easily as she dodged elbows, tossed spoons, and mincers waving mincing knives at each other. One world was no more perilous than the other, for there was only the task at hand. All else could be ignored, as long as she herself was. And even the guards who thought to question her forgot the questions as they looked at her blank face, and then forgot her face. It was only when she opened the door to the keep and stood in the thin fingers of light falling from the narrow archers' windows along the stairs that she stopped, midstep, in the middle of her task. Something was happening inside her head. It seemed as if she saw two things at once: the broken, shadowy, mysterious keep, cloudy with owls in the upper rafters, and another tower, rising through it, at once solid and transparent as a dream. This tower had walls through which roses bloomed, and a broad sweep of ivory stairs that led to… something. Someone? Her pale brows crumpled; her lips moved soundlessly. Who was it at the top? She moved again, slowly, up stairs of white stone and stairs of dark stone, while owls did and did not swivel their heads to look at her through their great golden eyes. The door at the top was of dark, carved wood; the door at the top was painted white and gold. The door was always closed; the door was always open… She moved through time and memory, scarcely noticing the endless steps, trying to make the picture clear in her head before she reached the door. The door was dark and limned by fire and guarded by a face. The door was always open and someone came to meet her, smiling…

The door opened. Snow swirled out of it, and she glimpsed for one instant the terrible figure who had come to meet her. Something tried to leap out of her mouth. She brought up both hands to hold it back, and the tray crashed to the floor at Talis' feet.

They stared at one another, the prince and the pot-scrubber. Then they both crouched, picking up goblets, cutlery, broken plate, while the guards and the face in the door watched bemusedly, and Talis examined the remains of his meal.

"What had we here? Salmon swimming in gravy, roast beef on a bed of broken meringue… The bread is only slightly damp. And what was this?" He tasted a finger. "Too sweet. But it was pretty, whatever it was. Now. I only have to wring the salad out. I frightened you, opening the door so quickly after you braved ghosts and owls and endless stairs. You're not crying, are you?"

He looked at her. Then he touched his lenses and looked again. His eyes widened slightly, lingered on her face. He said softly after a moment, "You have the strangest face. It seems… to shift. Or blur. Something…" His own face did not; it was quite calm under her gaze. There was something odd about it she could not have described, except that it was the only face she had ever seen that made her want to keep looking at it. He asked, "What is your name?"

She averted her face abruptly, touched her mouth with one finger. He made a soft sound. She stood swiftly, her face still turned away, for she was not used to being visible. "Wait," he said, and she did as she was told.

Something appeared in her line of vision: the white lily on the tray. "Take it," he said. "I want to give it to you."

She stared at him. She did not take the flower, but she felt her face rearrange itself in a very strange way and realized, as he smiled, that she was smiling.

She thought of him all the way back to the kitchens. She found his face at the bottom of every pot she scrubbed, between her eyes and every face she looked at in the kitchens. It was still in her mind after supper, even while she cleaned the great mess of pots and pans and kettles, to clear the cauldron for its nightly dreams. Pausing between pots, she touched her face once, in curiosity, tried to see it in the water. She only saw dark cloud with suds floating around it.

And then, unexpectedly, Talis' face formed instead, as if the cauldron had taken the thought out of her head. She blinked, for he no longer looked calm; he was not smiling, as in her memory. He was seeing something, trying to move away from it without moving. She leaned farther into the cauldron, trying to see what he saw. His face grew small then; he acquired a body, surroundings. Fire behind him illumined the tangle of oak boughs above his head. As she stared, a young woman flung herself toward him. Her hair was long and tangled, her face wild in the light, strained with fear. She cried something: Fire flashed out of her mouth, then diamonds, then a small black bird of horror. And then an arrow of white streaked out of nowhere, passed between them and shattered the lens over Talis' eye.

Blood spilled across the black moon rising among the oak boughs. The boughs turned into horns, moving slowly into Saro's vision, lifting the moon higher until its bloody face filled the cauldron. Then it waned upward out of her sight, until she saw the face beneath the moon. The eyes, masked in pelt, moon-black, seemed to stare back at her through the dark water.

And then it was her own face, a dark, vague cloud, rippling now with her quick, terrified breathing. The tray-mistress, passing behind her, said, "Wake up and finish, girl, before you fall in."

She left the pot where it stood.

This time she saw only one tower, and it was dark and full of owls, questioning her when she disturbed them. She felt her way up with her hands. The steps seemed endless, but she was used to having no end in sight. She could not think; over and over she saw the white fire strike, the prince flinch back as the lens shattered. And then the terrible, inhuman face staring at her through water, as if it were scenting…

She saw the door finally, impossibly far above her, a blackness outlined in fire. She climbed higher; it jumped closer, closer, the face on it awake and watching.

She ignored the face, and the guards who were making meaningless noises as she pounded on the door. It opened abruptly. The prince gazed at her, one lens sparking, the other oddly empty, she saw, as if it had already shattered.

He quieted the guards with a gesture, and asked gently, "How can I help you?"

She realized then that, with no words and no voice, she could tell him nothing.