Page 7 of The Summer War

She’d sent messengers riding after Argent, and to the Green Bridge, but so far no one had caught him.

She had no idea how to mend the curse she’d made, or at least to find some way around it, but she had to try.

She was only grateful that she hadn’t done anything that would be impossible to undo; she was glad that she hadn’t wished Argent a heart of glass, or told him to go jump off a mountain.

But that was a cold comfort. She knew it was almost the worst thing she could have done to him, because he’d thrown away everything else.

He’d given up his name and home and family, his power in the world and the pride and fame he’d won with his years of hard work and drill, all to be free to go and find someone to fall in love with, who’d love him back.

She had to fix it, even if Argent hadn’t loved her —even if she was still angry and wounded deep in her own heart.

But to her surprise and almost her sorrow, it had already become easier to forgive him.

The last small hot flame of rage was dying away inside her a little more with every day spent in the cool peace of her mother’s room, with Roric sitting next to her, wanting to be next to her: someone for her to love, who meant to love her back, as if she’d stolen Argent’s dream and kept it for herself.

She’d discovered that she could be useful herself, to Roric.

When they were eating alone together, she told him bluntly that he needed to improve his table manners, and to bathe more often and take better care of his teeth.

He’d been neglected after her birth, the nurse abandoning him in a hurry to take care of the more-valued newborn child, and the servants had only indifferently looked after him, so no one had taught him how he should be looked after, even by himself.

At first Roric scowled at her about the reminders, and snapped, “I know!” when it was plain that he didn’t, and stormed off; she was annoyed enough to almost stop wanting to sit with him.

But at breakfast the next morning, he’d washed his face and cleaned his teeth properly, and he watched her as she ate and carefully mimicked her manners.

He came back to the sitting room that day pretending they hadn’t quarreled at all, but she didn’t mind; she preferred the apology he’d already made, by listening to her.

When he lost his temper one day struggling through a page of accounts that wouldn’t add up properly, and started scratching over the whole page back and forth with his pen, she caught his hand to stop him before he ruined it badly enough to be punished.

“It’s stupid!” he said, furious and miserable. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

So she made up a story for him out of the numbers, about a troop of summer knights being defeated by spring lambs throwing horseshoes over a wall built out of sacks of flour.

It didn’t make sense either, but at least he laughed, and then looked surprised at the sound out of his own mouth, and was able to work through the page from the beginning.

Even in just a few weeks, Roric was already looking better, happier.

They told more account-stories to each other together, one step at a time as he came to each new number in the ledger, and the work of it stopped being a burden to him.

He liked to make up rhymes, and sometimes he even sang them out loud—more often after he stopped looking guiltily at the door, afraid of being overheard and caught.

And Celia understood, seeing the change in him, that it made her matter to him.

She wasn’t just a doll that he was playing with that he could put down carelessly and never really miss, like she had been to Argent.

That thought still stung, but not terribly, even though Argent had only been gone for so short a time.

It was already much worse to worry about him, and whether he’d already vanished into the Summer Lands forever, doomed to live all his days without love.

“I don’t want to stop caring about Argent,” she said, when Roric, jealous, tried to say she shouldn’t be upset.

“It wasn’t all stupid. He did care about me, even if I cared more,” which now she could believe, with the sharp agony fading.

“And it wasn’t his fault that Father doesn’t care about you,” she added.

Roric scowled at that, too, but then he spent the next two days bent over the big household ledger, and at the end of it he told her abruptly that they could afford to offer a purse of fifty silver coins for any song-spinner who came out of the Summer Lands and brought them a true story about Argent.

“Grand Duke Torvald offers thirty gold for the best summerling songs, and he usually gets at least ten each year,” Roric said, a little sullenly, as she stared at him.

“We’ll hear whatever there is to hear, at least,” and Celia realized that he’d made himself useful to Argent, for her sake.

She put down her embroidery and got up and went to him and kissed his cheek and hugged his thin shoulders while he flushed and stared at the ground trying not to show how much he liked it.

A few days later, though, she had to start worrying about herself, instead.

The king’s reply to Father’s letter came as quick as a messenger could have ridden to the capital and back.

He told Father that he wanted Celia for the prince, which was only to be expected, and that he wanted her sent to the capital so she could be married right away, which wasn’t to be expected at all, when she was only twelve and barely become a woman.

Celia was taken aback; it wasn’t a reasonable thing to ask.

Even a proxy marriage would have been a little strange.

She wasn’t some foreign princess, with her marriage the seal on an important treaty.

“He wants you under his control as soon as possible,” Father said, dismissively, and wrote back to say he couldn’t agree to have her married until she was eighteen, although they were honored by the betrothal.

Celia wasn’t sure she believed that comforting explanation.

If that was what the king had been thinking, surely he’d recognize that Father was going to keep her under his control for as long as he could possibly justify, and there wasn’t any point asking.

But she also couldn’t think of any other good reasons why the king would want to get her so young, which only left unpleasant ones.

But she couldn’t get Father to put his own brain on the problem.

He was still refusing to care about anything, since what he’d cared about the most was gone.

“You could use your magic,” Roric said, but Celia couldn’t see what to do with the magic.

She could have smashed open a castle gate or blasted a dozen enemies into smoldering ash.

She could have called down a hurricane or raised a flood.

She could have raised the dead or cured the sick.

Selina had done all those things, and when Celia read about them, she felt the magic still churning inside her, eager to answer, and could see just how she’d do it herself.

Or she could have marched into the capital and taken control of the mind of the king and forced him to tell her.

But then she might as well simply crown herself the new Witch-Queen, and just accept that the rest of her life would be spent watching her back for assassins and her front for liars and cheats.

Celia didn’t want that any more than Father had wanted it, back when he could have taken the throne himself.

She’d been perfectly ready to marry Prince Gorthan, with Father and sorcery on her side to make it an equal match, and to work with him to make a happy and well-run kingdom, and a happy and well-run life for both of them inside it.

She’d even let herself imagine, before the ominous message had come, that maybe she could care about him, and he about her; she’d thought that she would ask him to, when they met, the way Roric had asked her, and see what he said.

Now she was just afraid, and she didn’t even know what she was afraid of.

Roric did hire a passing song-spinner to quietly go to the capital and dig up anything he could about Gorthan, but when the spinner came back, all he could tell them was that Gorthan had a reputation for courtesy and caution.

He’d had a couple of common-born mistresses, pretty girls within a year or two of his own age, who had been very happy in their positions as far as anyone knew, and he’d ended the liaisons and arranged marriages for them with landed knights after they’d each borne him a bastard child.

Neither of the children had lived past the age of two, but that was still a sensible thing for a prince to do, to avoid having one woman bearing him many children, and setting her up as a rival to a future queen.

He sounded as good as you could hope for, when you were marrying a throne, and a little uneasily Celia tried to believe that Father was right, and that the king had just thought it was worth a try to get her.

Maybe he’d hoped that Father would want to get the match sewn up, and become the father-in-law of the crown prince right away.

But she couldn’t quite convince herself.