"I find it hard to believe that this alone is the root of your passion. Because your passion radiates from some deep source. It catches up everyone around you. That's why they follow you, you know. Not because you're queen."

"Ah." This was a compliment she had never heard before. "I'm sure you know my story. Am I not the scandal of the kingdom?"

He shrugged. "I've heard things. They were obvious distortions. I came to you because I wanted to hear the story from the source."

"Why?"

He considered, staring out at the amber sky. "I have been reading the books in your library. They all point to something... a mystery. I mean a mystery in the religious sense, almost. A meaning. When I came here I thought I was after facts, but now I see I'm after more than that. I want answers."

"You? The man whose very mind is an impregnable fortress of history?" She laughed. "You astonish me."

Serious, he said, "In the bits and pieces of your story that I've heard, I catch echoes of that mystery. I believe you know more than you realize. You have wisdom you have hidden from yourself."

"And can you show me this wisdom?" Her hands trembled, as they had in the garden when his messenger fluttered down to land on her knee.

"I don't know."

"You toy with me!" She had leaned forward in anger, and felt the folds of her dress fall apart at her back. Galas sat back again quickly.

"No."

"And what will you give me in return for my story? I think I no longer wish to hear your own tale."

He looked at her for a long moment. Something like a smile danced around his lips. Galas found her heart racing at his examination, and her eyes traced the muscles in his arms, the set of his shoulders.

Then he did smile, rather impishly. "I should be very much surprised if you do not have the answer to that question by noon," was all he said.

"Well."

Maut leaned forward, the weariness returned to his eyes. "Tell me your story," he said.

Galas closed her eyes. In her life, only one other had asked her for this—not the story, but her story. Grief choked her momentarily.

"All right. I shall try to tell it as a tale—as I've often wanted to. I... I pictured myself sometimes, setting my child on my knee and telling it. There will be no child. But here is the story."

20

First, you must understand that I was considered mad as a child, even as I am today. The reasons were not the same, however—in my childhood it was my sense of justice which went against me. I treated peasants and servants with the same respect as kings and princes, and this evoked great ire in my mother, with whom I warred constantly. She strove to impress upon me the war between classes and the divine rightness of this war. It was not that I sided with the lesser people against my own—which however reprehensible would mave made sense to her—it was that I saw no difference whatever between us.

And then, when I was twelve summers old, that thing happened without which I might have grown up to become an ordinary princess—ha! Yes, there is such a thing.

You see, my father kept a book—as his predecessor had, and all the kings back into antiquity. This book contained various proclamations of the Winds made over the centuries, along with interpretations and auguries. And it came to pass that the unusual weather of the springtime and a disastrous fire in Belfonre matched some of the auguries in the book, and the only interpretation that my father and his wise men could make of the augury was that the queen must die.

In later years I came to understand that this was a pretext—he had his eye on another woman, who in time he married. She turned out to be barren, but he was not to admit the fact for many years. Anyway, at the time, I understood nothing, save that the Winds had commanded the death of my mother.

I was in the gardens with my favorite duenna when word came of the arrest of my mother. My duenna immediately burst into tears, falling on her knees before me and clutching at my skirt. She being older had grasped immediately what was occurring but I had yet to. We had been idly discussing some aspect of human nature, its rigidity I believe, which she took for granted and I in my young zeal rejected absolutely. "Nothing in us is fixed", I had pouted. My mother's execution was now fixed, however, and this duenna cried out, "Oh Princess, your youth is forever gone now! Where is the young girl I played with in these summer gardens? Soon you will be an embittered woman with revenge against life driving you. You will cease to laugh, you will weep at life, and you will send me away for reminding you of times lost now when you could be happy!"

"Lady, this is no sense in your words", I said to her. I could feel the emotions overspilling around, the shaking of the messenger, the crying of my older friend, and saw how the windows that opened on the gardens were closing, one after another, shutting inside the airs of grief. For that moment I was the only calm stone in the rising flood. I shall not be carried away, I resolved. In moments all that the messenger and the duenna were possessed by would strike out to possess me—their human nature, of the same order, I felt, as the artificial distinctions between class which even they supported.

It was a moment of supreme mystery. How could the brightness of the flowers, the coolth of the air, my own happiness be so swept away by an event that was, now rumor, later merely fact against which I could do nothing? I loved my mother, and knew that would never change, whatever happened. I looked into the future and saw myself weeping alone in my bedroom, and it was as a figure from a drama that I saw myself, moving to commands issued by some forgotten playwright. I felt a certainty at that moment that it was so, that my duenna's shock, my coming grief were roles cast for us by someone, someone great far in the past. I could be other than grief-stricken, if I chose. I could go mad, in other words.

I chose to go mad. In that moment I decided that although I could not change the fate of my mother, there was no law immutable in the heavens that decreed how I was to react to it. Only much, much later in life can I look back and see that whether I knew it or not, I was under the sway of an emotion then: fury, which I swallowed so deeply that I was unable to experience it until... oh, very recently.

"Come," I said to the duenna. "Rise, and let us practise a while on our dulcimers. The day is still fair, and the next ones will not be." She looked at me with a new horror in her eyes, and I knew I was lost. I wondered what was to come of it, now that I was no longer playing my role in the drama begun by my father.

He was terrified of me from then on. The servants treated me with gentle respect, as one does the mad. They knew I was so overtaken with grief—although I did not witness my mother's execution, and I had seen her a few afternoons a week since I was a babe, never for more than a few hours at a time—that I could no longer feel anything. The king, however, believed I was training myself in hate, keeping inside me a desire for revenge that was willing to wait. He thought perhaps that I would kill him in his dotage, when he could not raise a hand to defend himself. As I grew toward womanhood, he began to look for ways to dispose of me. For I was sunny and cheerful, I claimed to forgive him for slaying my mother, and I was gracious to his new queen. I harbored no instinct for revenge, in fact; on that day when I was told of my mother's arrest I had embarked on a great journey, which I am on to this day, and there was nothing but gratitude in my heart for being given the opportunity to be alive, and yet to have left the human race behind me.

They danced around me as I daydreamed, the figures of all those storied lovers, traitors, thieves and kings and saints and I saw them all as actors even to themselves. If there was a human nature it lay buried far below such inventions as grief and love, so I was sure, and the daring of this vista intoxicated my youth.