Daughter of Alnia

Contents
1........................................Castles
2.....................Backwards Quellen
3...The Vest of Feliciano Montgard
4...............................Jester's Mule


Castles

    I hate castles. I think it comes from living in them all my life.

    As I've told my mother countless times, being royalty is supposed to mean we can do whatever we want, within reason—and it's perfectly reasonable not to live in a castle. The one we're in is a horrible thing, musty and full of old tapestry and without enough secret passages, which are the only good reason for living in a castle anyway. But we have to stay because it's ancestral, just like all that furniture in the southwest tower that we're not allowed to sit on, and if we moved out it would go to some cousin in the north. I tell my parents he can have it if he wants it, I don't care, but they never listen.

    When I become queen—along with my sister Adeline, of course—I'll leave this castle. Addie can have it, if she likes, but I'll be off the moment the coronation is over. I'll find a nice cottage, near the castle but far enough that I don't have to look at it; my house will be just big enough for me and my dog Gammon and maybe my parents if they come to visit. And Addie, of course; I could never keep her out, even if I wanted to. We'd probably alternate having meetings at the cottage and the castle, since we couldn't just not meet as queens of Alnia, and I'd want to spend as little time in that dingy heap of stones as possible.

    I plan my house when I have the time, between all those lessons a princess has to have. It'll have one floor, maybe an attic, bright yellow walls and big round windows. A garden, a proper one, with every flower I can find. Near the woods or at least a stand of trees, or maybe a river, so Gammon has somewhere to go when I let him outside. There'll be exactly three front steps, just enough to hide things under, and the door will have one of those little half-circle windows in the top. And a sign, I think, with little flowers on it, that says "Madison's Place".

Backwards Quellen

    The thing about castles is that they do have secret passages, even if there aren't enough of them. Ours has three, and I know exactly where each of them is and where it goes and how to get the bricks out so you can see what's going on. I like all of them, of course, and I use them frequently, but my favourite is the twisty one that goes under the northeast tower and coils like a snake once or twice before slithering off to the stables. It's always clean down there, not all mossy like the other two, even though moss can be interesting sometimes. Once I saw a dragon in some moss splotched on the floors down there, but it's gone now.

    I use my favourite passage sparingly, because otherwise it wouldn't be any fun. Today is a good day for it, though: Mother and Father are meeting someone from the city of Rablar, in the east, about some agricultural nonsense, and they're using the northeast tower so they can see the land they're discussing. I don't really care too much about what they're saying, but I'm interested in the delegate, since I've never been to Rablar and maybe I'll get a hint about what it's like by looking. So I go up the stairs to one of the ancestral furniture rooms, which seems like a funny thing to do for a passage that goes underground, but I didn't build the stupid castle. Why should it make sense? Anyone who thinks the world needs another castle is more than a little mad anyway.

    The entrance isn't obvious—it wouldn't be secret if you could find it easily—but it does stand out just a little from the other stuff. There's a carving on the wall, the same dark wood as all the dusty furniture, shaped like a flying horse; all the details are gone now, from centuries of people handling it, according to Father. That might be true, actually, since if you press it a certain way it slides to the right and you've got yourself a door. Some days the mechanism is a bit slow, but today it moves fine, so I climb in and press the spot on the wall that shuts the door behind me.

    When I first found this place, I brought in a candle, thinking it would be dark, but there's a torch every three feet on each wall, so it's easy to see. I make my way along the tunnel as it winds down through the walls of the tower, until it reaches the flat part that leads to the northeast tower. Every other time I've been here, it's been empty, so I don't expect any different today, just start counting torches as usual so I know when to stop walking.

    Somebody coughs.

    There is someone in the passage today, a woman with a broom. Although the floor around her is clean, her dress is dusty and torn at the edges; it might once have been purple. Her hair seems to be trying to escape from her head, and there's something of a hunted animal in her eyes. She watches me, not quite backing away, and I realize that I'm the hunter. She knows I come through here fairly often; she must know, if she's the one who keeps the tunnel clean. Now she's waiting to see what I do.

    I don't know how long she's been down here; maybe she can't speak, or has forgotten how, and won't understand what I say. But I can't think of another way to find out who she is, so I ask, "Who are you?"

    She watches me for another long moment, and whispers, "Quellen."

    Quellen? It must be a name, because it isn't any sort of question, and if she didn't speak Alnian she probably would have answered with one. On the other hand, Quellen isn't any sort of name that I know of, so while it could be simply a foreign name or the result of unorthodox parents, it's also possible that she's made some kind of statement. Maybe she's telling me to leave.

    I have no way of knowing what it means, so I decide not to address her with it, in case it was a threat or something. "Do you speak Alnian?"

    "Of course I speak Alnian." She's still whispering, but there's an undercurrent of irritation to it.

    "You don't have to whisper, you know. No one will hear you. These walls are a foot thick, at least." I rap on one of the more solid bricks to demonstrate.

    She shakes her head. "I am used to whispering now. It would be a hard habit to break, with nobody to talk to down here. You are here now, of course, but you have never come through while I was working before." She looks at her broom, which is old and ratty, with bent straws. "I wish I had a better broom. I have to keep this place clean, you know. I could never live somewhere dirty."

    "You live down here?"

    "Oh, yes. I have lived here a long time."

    "But..." I can't imagine why anyone would choose to live in a secret passage, even a clean one. "But why?"

    "Because I do not belong anywhere else." The hunted look is gone—it vanished when she started talking about whispering—but now it's been replaced with one of sadness, or maybe loneliness. "I am different from the people in the world above the passage. I was always different." Her whisper takes on a strange intensity; clearly she has been without company for a long time, and now she has someone to talk to she's not about to waste it. "It started when I was very young. Maybe it happened gradually at first, but I did not notice then. I only know that there was a turning point. One morning my mother had prepared breakfast as usual, nothing wrong with it to the eye of another. But I saw some imperfection in it—an asymmetry, perhaps, as I have always equated symmetry with perfection of a kind. I only know that I refused to eat it, refused to touch it, until my mother fixed it. To her credit, she tried. She tried several times, because my strange demands could not be satisfied. It was nearly noon when I finally gave up and left the room in disgust.

    "It seems like a stupid, small incident to me now, as it must have seemed to my mother. She was very careful about the food from then on, and for a while I was satisfied. But I grew more demanding. If it was not absolutely perfect, I would not touch it. This became true of other things as well. I drove away many of my friends because they did not meet my standards. I refused to wear most of my clothes. I spent most of my time away from the house because it was imperfect, but I found it was closer to perfection than the forest, so I returned. Still, my standards became impossible to meet. I had to become entirely self-sufficient, doing my own cooking and cleaning and everything else."

    She pause, and for a moment I think she won't continue. "Go on," I prompt, after a few moments of silence.

    "No matter what I did, the need for perfection became stronger, and more difficult to achieve. By the time I was sixteen, I could no longer meet my own standards. The world was too complicated for me to get everything right. I spent some time worrying about this, and driving myself harder, as if that would help. But eventually I realized that only one thing would solve my problems.

    "I told my parents that I planned to go to the castle, which at the time was empty, and live in one of its secret passages; I knew it must have at least one. I explained that the passage would be simpler than the world I lived in then, and that I would live more easily in a place where perfection was uncomplicated. My parents were concerned, but I managed to convince them. It took me only a day to say goodbye to my sister and the few friends I had left. They laughed, called me 'Backwards Quellen' for wanting to live alone in a tunnel under a castle. I left anyway, of course, taking only my broom with me. The clothes, my appearance: these things do not matter to me since then. I never see anybody. But the halls of my home must be clean, and my food must be prepared a certain way, and I live under these restrictions as I have for so many years."

    Quellen stares at me. She is clearly finished with her story, and waiting to see what I make of it. All I can think to say is, "You must be lonely."

    "I have no choice. All my old problems may return if I begin socializing again. I am only speaking to you because, at the moment, I have nothing else to do."

    I decide not to be offended by that. I can tell she doesn't mean it offensively, and that she's simply telling the truth. Before I can steer the conversation elsewhere, she continues, "I must be going now. I am not on a schedule, but I have told you all I can, and the coils need cleaning." And without another word, she turns and walks the way I was going before. Forgetting my plans, I turn back in the direction of the southwest tower entrance and start walking.

    I never do learn anything about the delegate from Rablar, but I do find the closest broom closet. After a few moments of looking through the brooms, I grab the newest one and take it to the southwest tower, where I drop it into the passage.

    The next time I use that passage, the broom I left is gone, and the halls are cleaner than ever.

The Vest of Feliciano Montgard

    Feliciano Montgard came to the castle two years ago, looking for work. He presented himself as a man of many talents, and offered to be Addie's and my tutor and entertainer by turns. Our parents conferred, and agreed quickly, and Feliciano soon became a fixture of the castle.
    Even now, living at the castle, he is not a rich man and does not dress richly. But this doesn't matter when he begins what we've always called the Entertainment. Suddenly his voice and expression change, and he becomes the king or the bandit or the roof-climber or all three at once, a one-man play; and it doesn't matter that his clothes are those of a pauper, because they become the clothes of the character as we watch. Other times, in an educational mood, he plays the humble tutor, but this too is an act, as he becomes serious and quiet and gives us disappointed looks when we don't do our work. Most of what he does, what he is, is only put on, something he wears for a moment and then discards for a personality of more interest.
    The first time we saw what Feliciano is like underneath was a year after he arrived. Mother had called him into her chambers during one of our lessons, and he came back almost immediately, wearing a vest we had never seen before. It was a fantastic vest, we agreed later, but its extravagance didn't quite fit him; black, heavily embroidered along the bottom edge with blue dragons, bright flowered vines climbing over the shoulders and meeting in a spiral on the back. The vest was too bright and stood out too much from the rest of him, overshadowing everything.
    "That's a very nice vest," Addie said politely, because she's more worried about offending people than anyone should be. "Did Mother give it to you?"
    "Yes." That was all he said; no long explanation like those he usually launched into. We didn't think much of it at the time, because everyone has some private things, and maybe he didn't want to tell us about whatever he'd done to be rewarded with it. Or punished, although when I half-jokingly suggested this to Addie later she didn't laugh.
    The lessons continued from where we'd left off, some old nonsense about past rulers of Alnia, but they were different now. Even playing the tutor, Feliciano's descriptions were animated and full of life; he had made the Lexton Conference interesting, quite an accomplishment, since the conference had been about livestock imports. But standing at the front of the room, that vest distorting our impressions and making it hard to focus on his face, he was indefinably subdued. He told us what happened to King Radumat and Queen Lucinda, the Lexton Prince and famous Admirat; all rulers who had led interesting lives and died interesting and sometimes bloody deaths, which described in the normal way would have seemed quite exciting. With the addition of the vest, though, Feliciano's lessons fell flat. He spoke softly, sometimes to the extent that we could barely hear him, and corrected himself in a too-apologetic way; he admonished us to take notes but didn't force the issue; the vibrant hypotheticals he usually filled the room with were replaced by wavering suggestions, with hasty disclaimers that they were only his opinion and not professional. He behaved, in short, completely unlike any of the Felicianos we knew—and we knew quite a range of them.
    The lessons concluded in the same indecisive way, and Feliciano looked eager to creep out of the room. But, presumably because it was our custom, he commenced with the Entertainment. I have already described its normal course; this time it was all wrong. He tried to portray the kings and whatnot just like he always did, but he wasn't transformed or carried away by the personae. They no longer fit him. The vest superseded all, so ostentatious it was, and while it might have been fit for a certain kind of king, it certainly didn't belong to the bandit or the roof-climber. After a sad kind of struggle, Addie approached Feliciano and asked, politely, if he'd like to go do whatever he usually did after our lessons. He nodded vigorously and fled.
    Addie and I returned to her bedroom, which is better for private discussions because our parents trust her more. After some theories that led nowhere, I came up with the answer: as I've said, everything we saw of Feliciano was an act, even outside the Entertainment and lessons. Neither of us had ever wondered why before, but now we understood that he hid behind the characters of himself because, in reality, he was shy and lacking confidence. His opinion was (and this continues to be true) clearly that the real Feliciano had nothing of interest to say, but the ones he invented and put on were interesting and had valid opinions, and so he wore them all the time.
    Addie beat me to my final point. In his ordinary, inconspicuous dress, it was easy to impose the pretend Felicianos over the real one. The vest, though, in its aggressive fanciness, was powerful enough to dispel the illusion. It couldn't be hidden by an assumed identity, and exposed the person beneath.
    Both of us came to dinner that night hoping that our tutor had shed his vest, but he had kept it on, probably at Mother's request, though he looked unbearably uncomfortable. In sharp contrast with his usual animated and wildly veering conversation, that night Feliciano was nearly silent and spent almost the entire meal staring into his plate. When it ended, much like after the failed Entertainment, he bolted.
    I caught him out in the hall, and suggested that maybe he didn't have to wear the vest all the time? Maybe only for important court things, and sometimes not even then? He agreed that this would make everyone's life easier, and resumed walking toward his room, though much more slowly and unbuttoning the vest at the same time.
    At the time of this writing we've been unable to convince Mother to let Feliciano get rid of the vest. The best we can do is make sure we get warning before days that he has to wear it, and everybody is very nice to him on those occasions. No one looks at the vest at any other time.

Jester's Mule

     Mother has always maintained that we don't need a jester in court because we have Feliciano, and I'm inclined to agree with her. We're actually sort of famous for it, and a lot of the foreign royalty think we're strange because of it, so Feliciano has taken to wearing a red and yellow hat with bells when Mother and Father hold court—it's been decided that the dreaded vest isn't required for those occasions. Today we're not holding court because we just did yesterday, and no one is expected, so it's with great surprise that we hear someone shouting for us to lower the drawbridge, a moat being one of those stupid traditional things castles have. There is a flurry of movement as our parents rush to assemble the court, with impressive-looking advisers holding scribbled-on papers scattered everywhere, Addie and me cross-legged on the floor in front of the thrones, and Laila the musician and counselor leaning on Father's throne with her lute in one hand. Feliciano perches on a window sill—yes, we have windows in our castle, thank the gods—and tilts his head to one side so the hat slips over his eye. Addie is dispatched to lower the drawbridge.

    When she returns, she wears a puzzled expression, and we see why when the visitor enters the room. He's quite obviously a jester, patterned in dark and light blues with tassels on his bells, seated on a brown mule with his legs improbably sticking out to either side. Seeing my parents' startled looks, he grins, inclines his head, and tosses his hat jingling into the air. Another surprise: he is completely bald. He does a cartwheel off the mule's back, bows deeply, and gives a speech which sounds natural but must be rehearsed:

    "Hello, fair ladies and gentlemen, and greetings to my lord and lady proper. I am Capricorn Pressarius Langledock, known in all the world's courts as the Blue Jester, and I come with an offer for you. Behold Pithel, my humble mule."

    We behold as instructed, although no one is sure why. The mule is to all appearances quite ordinary, and looks bemused at the sudden attention. The Blue Jester laughs at a joke no one else sees and continues his speech.

    "He appears to be the usual sort of mule, no? Some days I wish for an ordinary mule! Yes, when the wind is low and I try to enjoy a nice ride on a pleasant day, the beast refuses to obey my commands, for he wishes to exercise his wonder! Behold! Pithel, stretch!"

    The two shaggy patches on Pithel's sides, which I at least had assumed were just thicker areas of fur, lift away from the mule's body. Stretched to their full length, they are revealed as great furry wings. I stare, and I'm fairly certain everyone else—with the exception of the jester—is doing the same. Pithel snorts loudly, as if in modesty or dismissal, and the Blue Jester snickers. He's not finished yet, it seems:

    "Now you see the great gift which I bring to you. But you are wondering, are you not, what the catch is. I will tell you, then! I will give you this fine beast, this magnificent specimen of a mule, in exchange for—wait for it—a position as your official court jester! What do you say to that?"

    It seems that nobody has anything to say to that, all being too busy gaping at the jester. Feliciano's hat has fallen off, but he doesn't notice. To take on an official jester now, after all the time we've spent protesting the idea, would be rather pathetic. But the Blue Jester does have a point: the mule is quite fabulous, and the man himself even now amusing. After a long pause, Mother turns to Feliciano and asks, "What do you think?"

    Feliciano thinks for a bit, picking up his hat and twirling it idly on a finger. Then he says, to the jester, "What would you think of a double act?"

    The jester leaps into the air, bells jingling, clearly delighted. "Wonderful, wonderful! Twice the ideas, acts running twice as fast! Yes!"

    "I say we keep him, then," Feliciano tells Mother, who gives the Blue Jester a nod. "Welcome to the castle, Capricorn."

    The jester takes the mule's halter, the wings folding with a quiet command, and leads the beast out to the stables; he seems to know where they are, somehow. The court disassembles with an air of relief, and most everyone leaves the room. I stay, though, waiting for the Blue Jester to come back.

    I wait an hour, then two, and no jingling hat is thrust through the door. Impatient, I leave the room and stride decisively to the stables, planning some scathing remark about keeping royalty waiting. The stable doors are still open, and when I enter, the mule's halter is hung with the horses'. I only have to make one turn to see the jester, leaning on my mare Astrid's stall with his hand on her nose, and am about to unleash my well-thought-out comment when I notice something: the jester's demeanour has changed. He is no longer flippant and satirical even in his movements; there is a strange calm in his features. Now I can hear him talking to the horse:

    "...don't know what I would have done if they'd said no, you know. 'Known in all the courts of the world'—well, I am, I suppose, but not favourably. Been thrown out of everywhere it's possible to be thrown out of, just about. You won't tell, will you? 'Course you won't, you're a horse, you keep secrets well..."

    I leave silently, without alerting him to my presence. I get the idea his words aren't meant for human ears.