If the name of Prester John provoked any reaction, he did not know how to read it. Nicholas Bonner laughed outright—if you heard that sound enough times, some damn thing would break, maybe not your heart, but something—while Aiffe blushed in patches like poison oak. The Lady Criseyde began tapping her drum lightly, and Aiffe took hold of Farrell’s free hand. “Well, we can dance anyway,” she said. Her hand felt hard and sticky—long fingers bunched around a tiny hot palm. She said, “They will play the Earl of March’s Galliard next. Do you know the turns?”
Farrell said, “I think so.” Beside him Nicholas Bonner was bowing to Julie, offering his arm. She accepted him calmly, showing no fear and not looking back at Farrell as Aiffe pulled him away. Nicholas Bonner did, though, and the angelic mouth twitched once, like the tail-tip of a hunting cat.
Dancing with Aiffe was neither a sinister experience nor a particularly exciting one. She was a deft and meticulous dancer, executing her ruades, her springing cadences, her fleurets, and her high-kicking greves without a flaw or a variation, easily matching her steps to Farrell’s less practiced ones. But her brief interest in him seemed to have lapsed completely: she did not speak or smile, and if she did anything further with her tongue, it must have happened while he was trying to watch Nicholas Bonner with Julie, envying, even as it terrified him, the climate of devouring happiness that accompanied the yellow-haired boy. He said to Aiffe, “Speaking of Prester John. He asks to be remembered.”
She blinked vaguely at him—a long-jawed adolescent, plain as an adult, almost embarrassing in her stark lack of the menace and mystery for which she was prepared to badger hell. It was only during the last strain of the galliard that she spun violently away from him into a jagged, blazing scurry of half-steps that carried her as far as the dais—himself three floundering beats behind her—then wheeling back to end with a high jump like a cry of rage, and a reverence so dazzlingly scornful that Farrell stood flat-footed, feeling as if every woman he had ever known, beginning with his mother, were laughing at him in the curve of her arm.
The music ended, but no one ever bowed to thank the musicians for that playing of the Earl of March’s Galliard, for Aiffe shook her dust-colored hair and cried out, “Now is the geas fulfilled, and now are you free to speak your name to me. For I am a king’s daughter and a maiden, and behold, we have danced a galliard together.” The pupils of her eyes had gone oval, and there was a faint, pulsing corona of yellow-green around each one.
In the clearing, the bright voices were guttering and going out, two and three at a time. The dancers stared and murmured and sidled closer, most moving heavily now in tunics veined with sweat and gowns too damp to rustle. Farrell looked for Julie, but Nicholas Bonner hid her from him. Aiffe flung one arm wide, without turning, and Garth de Montfaucon prowled to her side, left hand on his sword hilt, right hand fretting with a wilting end of his pince-nez mustache. Farrell said, “Sweet Jesus in the underbrush. He’s your father?”
“Aye, indeed,” Aiffe answered clearly. “King Garth that was and will be, first ruler of Huy Braseal and still the longest-reigning.” Farrell liked her just then, for the pride in her voice. He gazed around among the dancers, wondering numbly who her mother might be. Maybe the kid’s a changeling. Maybe he is. Why didn’t Julie tell me?
“My daughter is a princess of many realms,” Garth de Montfaucon said quietly, “whether I am king or no.” Aiffe put her arm through his, and they stood like that, smiling the same long, supple smile at Farrell. It made him think of Briseis’ habit of laying her head alongside Sia’s head, so that they could look at everything together.
“Now we will have your name.” She spoke with the toneless cheer of a clubwoman at a reception filling out gummed lapel tags. Farrell was certain that he could challenge her on a technicality—Garth’s grandchildren will be terrific with animals and metal futures—and knew equally well that he had neither the courage nor the meanness for it. Turning, he saw Nicholas Bonner looking on, all golden wonder, and he felt a sudden deep vertigo teasing him to let go of his real name, announcing loudly as he fell, “It’s Joseph Malachi Lope de Vega Farrell, Rosanna, you want to make something of it?” Names don’t get stolen, for God’s sake, credit cards get stolen. Why should I play by their rules?
But Julie was pushing past Nicholas Bonner and through the dancers, shaking her head at him as urgently as if his temptation were flashing above him in a bubbly comic-strip thought balloon. Gaping and swaying next to a bemused King Bohemond, Crof Grant hummed Will Ye No‘ Come Back Again? in his nose. A trickle of sweat fluttered down Farrell’s side, and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory leaned forward a little.
“Come, fair knight,” Aiffe said, “your name.” She hugged her father’s arm, shivering with delight, looking like a puppy grinning around a stick it has no intention of retrieving. She held out her free hand to Farrell, palm up, wriggling the long, rag-nailed fingers.
There were no names in his head. Later that was to disquiet him as much as anything else; that he—junk-man of the lost, curator of the truly useless, random cherisher, keeper, keener—should come to bay without so much as a third string Round Tabler or journeyman superman out of Italian romances at his call. Aiffe widened her strange eyes, attempting or burlesquing seductiveness, and Farrell found that he could not look away from her. The effort made him dizzy and short of breath, almost sick. He felt Nicholas Bonner’s smile trailing across his shoulders, burning where it clung. Aiffe said three soft words that Farrell had never heard before. The sickness moved, spilling thickly through him like some spoiled wisdom that he knew he could not bear. She said the words again, and then a third time, and Farrell began to tell her his name, so she would stop.
Close at hand, a man was singing, or rather declaiming in a high-pitched rhythmic drone that sounded like stones and shells rasping back down a beach with the ebb tide. Farrell had no idea how long the man had been doing this.
Aiffe looked up, and Farrell, released, stumbled a step forward, turned his head and saw Hamid ibn Shanfara. The Saracen’s voice had again played its trick with distance; he was standing alone on a hummock of bare earth near the pavilion, with his shoulders back and his hands tucked into the sash of his white robe. He nodded very slightly to Farrell, touching a forefinger airily to the indigo turban, which was coming loose again.
Farrell laughed, feeling as though his throat were full of old straw. With the laughter came the next lines of the lonesome, gentle, possessed madman’s song. He said to Aiffe, “My geas is still upon me. I may speak my name to no other hearing than yours.”
She lowered her eyes to his again, but no power clenched on him this time, and he could tell that she knew it. She did not move until he whispered mockingly, “Come on, Rosanna, be a sport.” Then she came toward him, and he half expected to see the ground rise in small surges under her feet, as the surface of the mountain lake had done when the storm came pacing across it.
When she was very near, he said the name, holding it out between them like holy water or a kitchen chair. “I am the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.” Muscles crawled in Aiffe’s temples, as though she were trying to lay her ears flat back; her lips all but disappeared. Farrell bowed to her.