Page 9 of The Summer War
They spent the rest of the autumn and the winter practicing, going on walks together through the mountains and hills around Todholme.
Roric practiced the lute even more, and Celia read many books about the Summer Lands—accounts from song-spinners who’d been and come back again—and made a list of what was important to take and how to pack it, so the two of them could carry it all by themselves without the help of servants.
But they didn’t get the chance. In the spring, right after Celia turned fifteen, another letter came, but this wasn’t from Gorthan.
The king had sent Father a royal command to bring her to the Green Bridge, to be married in the old royal palace that stood near the border of the Summer Lands, at the great festival that would open the summer tourneys.
There wasn’t any good way to refuse. It was a formal command, with the words without fail, and also a little too reasonable.
King Morthimer had written that it was past time for Prince Gorthan to be married, and everyone in the kingdom would agree with that.
He was nine-and-twenty, and he still didn’t have even a bastard child living.
And more people than not would even agree with the king that fifteen was old enough for her to be married, since she wouldn’t bear her first child before sixteen.
Just barely reasonable, and nothing in the letter was a lie, but Celia was certain that it also wasn’t the real reason.
The king had wanted her at twelve, and the prince couldn’t possibly have gotten an heir on her then without shocking the country and risking her life, so that wasn’t what he really wanted.
It was only the excuse that the king was using now to make Father hand her over to him as quickly as possible.
And he wanted that too much; making it an ultimatum was a risk, because there were also plenty of people who would agree with Father, if he dug in his heels and refused to hand over his daughter so young, and then the king would have to decide between giving in and looking weak, or declaring Father a traitor and picking a fight with him, which would have made him look unreasonable enough to let Celia just take the throne with sorcery after all, with most people, especially the common folk, ready to take their part.
Father did finally recognize that something was wrong, but he’d spent too much time with his brain shut up inside a dark room, and he couldn’t take it out and use it again right away.
He said finally, “I’ll muster a thousand men for our escort, and raise another seven thousand, in case it comes to war,” but that was just flailing.
He didn’t really know what to do. He’d still know what to do if it did come to fighting, but Celia didn’t believe it would.
The king wouldn’t count on winning a war against Father—no one would have—so it couldn’t be fighting.
“I’m coming too,” Roric said, as they left his study together.
“You can’t,” Celia said. “If they killed Father and you, they could do anything they wanted with me, and there wouldn’t even be anyone to object. I can’t just slaughter the entire army of Prosper.”
“If they kill Father, they can do anything they want with you anyway,” Roric said, which was probably true.
“Anyway, I won’t let anyone know I’m coming.
I’ll dress like a song-spinner and go to the Green Bridge as if I’m thinking of going into the Summer Lands for the season.
No one in the royal court knows anything about me. They might not even know I exist.”
Roric left the castle that same day, with her mother’s lute and a red cap on his head.
While the more elaborate preparations for her own journey were made, Celia grimly finished the last part of the embroidery, a little bit quicker than she’d meant to, so the two figures being married under the trees had to be left a bit indistinct, and she sewed it onto a beautiful silk gown of green and yellow, the colors of summer, for her wedding day.
Castle Todholme was a long way from the border: Father hadn’t wanted to be in range of a surprise attack.
It took two weeks to make the journey to the Green Bridge.
She sat tensely next to Father in the coach the whole way, and it wasn’t reassuring to feel him just as taut beside her.
On the last night of the journey, he ordered his men to stop and make camp a little early, at the crest of a hill overlooking the Evergreen Valley.
He and Celia got out of the coach; she followed him to the ridge and they looked down together into the wide green half valley below, with the snaking line of the Meanwhile River running along the border of the Summer Lands, still shrouded in thick mist: it wasn’t yet the first day of summer.
The Green Bridge wasn’t really there yet, but you could glimpse it like a shadow, on the verge of emerging from the mist.
Taverns and market stalls were clustered on either side of the royal road running from the Green Bridge.
Celia had heard many of their song-spinner guests talk with enthusiasm about the reopening of the Summer Market, and all the lovely enchanted summer work they’d seen.
But there were many more half-crumbled stalls still abandoned than there were repaired, and all of them looked deserted at the moment, as if the mortal tradesmen were hanging back and would only turn up after the summerlings arrived.
The challenge grounds were just a large rectangle mowed into the ground near the river, with pavilions set up around it and one block of tall wooden stands.
It wasn’t especially impressive. Their training yard at Castle Todholme was almost as big.
The old royal palace stood on the other side of the road, upon the tallest rise along the bank of the river, but it was more than half a ruin, of pale soft limestone streaked with dirt.
For a hundred years of war, no one had lived there, and no one seemed to have done much work to rebuild it since.
Prince Gorthan wasn’t even staying inside.
The royal flag with its crown was flying from a large pavilion outside the walls, surrounded by a large company of royal armsmen, who looked more like a military camp than an embassy, with many sentries on high alert.
Father stood silently frowning down into the valley while the leading edge of nightfall gradually crept in from the east. “What is it?” Celia said, looking at him.
“ This is what’s wrong,” he said after a moment, like rusty gears turning. “It’s the peace that’s a lie.”
And as soon as he said it, Celia could see the lie of it herself.
The legends all said that the town of Green Bridge was almost part of the Summer Lands, truly halfway between.
The trees never lost their leaves, and summerlings would often pole out of the river mists on an unseasonably warm day, even if the bridge wasn’t open, and attend feasts in the royal palace.
That was why Princess Eislaing had been able to marry Sherdan, and come to live with him here.
But the town below was just a perfectly ordinary mortal place.
Some of the market stalls were nicely fixed up, others half built.
There were untidy piles in places and ugly ruins left uncovered, weedy plants and irregular patches of tall grass growing.
Those makeshift grounds weren’t a place for the flower of summer knights to do battle.
The palace ruins were picturesque but not achingly beautiful, and the towers were surrounded by the rotting heaps of the long-collapsed autumn halls, which no one had cleaned up.
The summerlings hadn’t really come back. They were just pretending.
“But—the summer war ended before I was born,” she said. “It’s been almost twenty years.”
“What’s twenty years to a summerling?” Father said.
“They don’t change. Time is a river; it carries us along.
But they’re only on the banks, watching it go by.
They can be changed, if we throw a rock and hit them, but they don’t change on their own.
” He shook his head. “If the king had let me kill Elithyon, that might have ended the war. Some other summer lord would have become king, and likely he’d have forgotten that any Elithyon and Eislaing even existed.
No summer king really remembers that there was ever a king before him.
But Elithyon would never give up vengeance for his sister.
To him, we’re still the same people who murdered her the day before yesterday. When he agreed to peace, he lied.”
“But what about our king?” Celia said uneasily. “What’s he lying about?”
Father was silent a long moment, and then he gave an impatient shrug.
“Unless Morthimer is a complete fool, he wants you to bear Gorthan an heir. That’s even more true if he knows the peace is false.
And then—” He seesawed his hand. “He’ll see how biddable you are.
If you’re difficult, or too much under my thumb, you could die in childbirth, or of some sickness. ”
And that all made perfect sense, only Celia felt too much that she was working on a puzzle with some pieces shoved into the wrong places, not quite fitting, and the picture not coming clear.
But there still wasn’t a better choice than going forward.
If the summerlings were just waiting to attack again, starting a civil war in Prosper would be a terrible idea, especially on the first day of summer.