Cards of Grief by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page A

nothing when I was done but waved a languid hand, which his servants interpreted correctly as a call for food. I was too nervous to eat but began instead to babble about music. He silenced me with another wave of his hand and finished his small meal of succulents without a word. A servant appeared with a bowl of scented water. D’oremos washed his hands and mustache, then dried them with a rainbow-colored cloth.
    When the servant left, D’oremos turned to me, his hard marble eyes staring into mine. “Your music moved me deeply,” he said, though there was no clue to it in his voice. Then he leaned back against his pillows and closed his eyes.
    After a moment, I realized the audience was at an end. I rose, careful to silence the plecta’s strings with my palm, shouldered the other two instruments, and left.
    The second time he was no warmer, but at least he spoke more. It was two years later when my organs had descended and I was about to go out on my mission year. Since he was the official Father of Princes, at the Queen’s own appointment, it was his duty to inform each prince in turn of the Rites of Sowing.
    He was brusque in his explanations, having me strip and using my body as the template for his talk. Much of what he told me I had learned already in the vernacular, in giggling embraces with L’eoninanos and G’al’ladinos in the baths or at night when we fumbled in wine-fogged attempts to draw one another’s immature organs out. But there was much that was new as well, for I had never lain with a woman. That was for the mission year. And I learned from D’oremos that night the secret of the Royals: of the short years we have to sow and why there is so little reaping done. It could have been a painful discovery had he chosen to make it so. But his dry explication made it seem no more than a minor burden, a small payment for the many and varied pleasures of being a Royal. I accepted it without tears as a prince should. Grieving, after all, is an art, not an indulgence.
    But this third invitation was of a different sort. Though I had not completed a full year of sowing, though I still had four or five good years to plow our Queen, I was considered a man, to be summoned, as a man is summoned, to D’oremos’s quarters. I went, plecta slung across my back, fast enough to show him that I was willing to partner him in this venture; slow enough to indicate that I did not plan to bend to his will.
    He opened the door himself, an indication of the importance he attached to our meeting, though he smiled me no greeting. I matched his control, merely nodding my head, the young prince to his father.
    He gestured to a set of ten pillows. Ten pillows! It was better than I had hoped. I set the plecta on the floor and sank back against the pillows, waiting.
    He lay back on his twenty cushions and stroked the long graying strands of his mustache before speaking. “You are home before time. I will not insult your intelligence or mine with games. Tell me what you have to tell me and then we will eat.”
    I had thought to make a long, convoluted tale of it, with choice anecdotes about the plump and pretty girls I had met and my successes in the Halls. And if it had been the other major prince, C’arrademos, such a ploy would have worked well. But one look at D’oremos’s face stayed me. I was direct with him.
    “In a minor Lands Hall I met a girl. Her name is Lina-Lania. She is tall, yellow-eyed, slim, and in her first Hall has written a poem that is like no other I have ever heard. It has simple grace and is the most moving thing…” I stopped.
    “You sound like a fool made from tumbling,” D’oremos said. He said it without rancor or judgment. It was a simple statement.
    “I would not ally with a Middle Lands girl, though I might tumble her,” I said. “But her words fit my songs, the songs I have not yet written, the ones I am meant to write.”
    He did not answer.
    “We were told to look for Royals begat in