“I’m here now. Oh, Ma, I thank Eda you know me.” He lifted his head and looked at me. “Thank you, sir. I’ve got my ma back. Thank you.”
“What happened to me?” The query was a shaking moan.
“A bad magic,” the stable boy comforted her. “The same bad magic that happened to everyone else here. It made everyone forget what happened on Winterfest eve. Everyone but me.” He knit his brows. “Why not me?”
Chade and I conferred with a look. Neither of us had an answer. Thick spoke in a soft voice. “’Cause they didn’t have you with the others. When they told them to sing the forgetting song. So they couldn’t make you forget. And you don’t hear the song at all. Not any songs.” He looked sad for the boy.
Bulen startled us all when he strode forward. I’d almost forgotten he was in the room. Without a word, he lifted the cup from the saucer Chade still held. He drained off the cup of tea, stood like a statue, and then, unbidden, sank into a nearby chair. For a time, he simply sat. When he looked up, his face was pale. “I was there,” he said. He rolled a glance at Lant. “I saw them kick you in the head, after they stabbed you, and I stood there. I saw that same horseman knock Lady Shun to the ground. He called her filthy names and said if she dared to get up, he would—” He paused, obviously sickened. “He threatened her. Then they herded us into a tighter group, as if we were sheep being bunched. And other people came to join us, the folk from the cottages. A lot of the children had been hiding somewhere, but they came out in a group. And the soldiers began to shout at us about a pale boy.
“Then a woman came out of the manor. I’d never seen her before. She was dressed all in white, very warmly. At first she scolded the old man in charge. He was cruel and seemed to care little about what she said. She was angry that people had been killed. The bodies would have to be dealt with, and it would make everything harder to conceal. She said he had done it badly, that it was not the path she had wanted. And he told her to leave him to the business of war, that she had no idea how territory was captured. And that when they had finished, they could set fire to the stables and get rid of the bodies that way. I could tell she was not happy with him.
“But when she turned to us, she was calm and smiling. She didn’t yell. She spoke so kindly that all I wanted was to find whatever would please her. She was seeking a boy or a young man who had come recently to stay with us. She promised they were not there to hurt him, only to take him back to where he belonged. Someone, Tavia, I think, shouted that they’d killed the only young man who had recently joined us. But the woman began to walk among us, looking each of us in the face. I think someone was with her …” Bulen’s voice and expression went bland. I sensed he pushed against a barrier he could not pass. There was yet another layer to all this.
“You!” Bulen said suddenly. He pointed a finger at Perseverance. “It was you on the brown horse, and Lady Bee on the gray, wasn’t it? Everything changed in the instant. The woman was urging and urging us to think of a boy who had come recently, and then one of the soldiers shouted and pointed, and we all looked. And you were running the horses dead-out, and then three of the soldiers wheeled their horses about and went after you. Including that cruel old man. And one was drawing his bow and shooting as he rode. I remember seeing him do that, guiding the horse with his knees.”
“He got me, too,” Perseverance said quietly. He lifted his good hand to his bandaged shoulder. His mother gave a gasp and pulled him closer.
“For a short time, while they were chasing you, there were just a few soldiers guarding us. And I remember that we started talking, asking one another what was going on, how had this happened? It was like waking from sleepwalking …” His gaze was unfocused. “But then we all calmed down. And there were other people there, younger and, well, softer people in the pale clothing. They were walking among us, telling us to be calm, be calm. They looked worried, but were trying to reassure us. For a time, though, I think I knew how wrong everything was. I knelt down by Lant because Shun was there, crying over him. And I told her he wasn’t dead. Then the round-faced woman came back and she had Bee with her. But Bee looked as if she were asleep with her eyes open. She was calling to everyone that they had found him, they’d found an unexpected son. I remember now, I thought they meant the stable boy. But she had Bee with her and … someone else. Someone …”
Again he floundered, reaching after something buried beyond his ability to recall it. I heard his words with a rising chill in my heart. They’d captured Bee. And spoken of the Unexpected Son, the child from the White Prophecies. The boy upon whom the fate of the world turned. Once, the Fool had believed that was me. And now he thought it was a son he’d left behind, a child he had fathered without knowing he’d done it. However he meant those peculiar words. I could not imagine why anyone might think it was my daughter. The drive to do something, to do anything, was rising in me, an irrational storm that insisted I could not simply wait and gather information.