Magic Three of Solatia by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page A

Questions must be asked and answered, old man?” said the king.
    Sian nodded.
    The king thought a minute. Then he laughed out loud. “Yes, there shall be questions, old man. But you did not say who shall ask them. And I shall ask them. Yes, I shall ask the questions. Of anyone else who would try to marry your daughter. She shall have till the last day of The Seven to find someone who can answer my four questions. At the castle fair she may invite as many as she dares. If there is anyone who can answer my questions, he shall marry your daughter and live in fine style with her here at my own castle. But I do not think there will be any who will be able to guess my riddles. And those who try and fail—shall die.”
    Sian gasped. Things had not happened as he and his daughter had planned, and he did not know what to say to make things right.
    But the king dismissed him then. As Sian was led to the castle door, he heard Blaggard saying, “Come, my ministers. With your wisdom and my wizardry we shall make four Elemental Questions that even Sianna of the Song cannot answer.”

4. The Castle Fair
    F OR ALL THE SOLATIANS, The Seven had been a success except for Sian and his daughter. The merrymaking had been added to by the free casks of apple wine sent down from the castle. And not one of Sian’s neighbors had thought to ask why the button maker’s cottage was dark and Sianna and her father did not take part in the holiday. But, as Sianna herself had remarked to her father, “It is difficult to see another’s pain when one is brimmed up like a wineskin.”
    But on the seventh day, Sianna and her father were summoned to the castle for the fair, and they could not refuse. Indeed, Blaggard sent guards to escort them, carrying pikestaffs twined with garlands.
    Slowly Sianna and her father, flanked by the guards, made their way up the hundred steps. Neighbors and friends greeted them lustily. They were offered leather bottles half full of wine and joints of meat still warm from the spit. But Sian, dressed in a clean linen shirt, and his daughter, in a long white linen dress with yellow lace and crowned with seaflowers, looked neither left nor right. They marched stonefaced to the castle door, where they were greeted by the king himself.
    “Come, my lovely,” Blaggard said to Sianna and took her hand. “I shall have you dressed in silk like a queen. For queen you shall surely be before The Seven’s last eve is out.”
    Sianna raised her head and stared into Blaggard’s eyes. “I shall be wed in this dress and no other. I made it with my own hands after my mother’s design. I wove the cloth and tatted the lace. The buttons are my father’s work. What I came in, I shall go in. It is the Old Way. It is my way.”
    Sian was astounded. He had never heard such firmness, such power in her voice. At last he understood why Blaggard might fear her, and he wondered if Blaggard might not be right to fear.
    Blaggard looked away from Sianna’s strong gaze. “As you wish,” he said, and forced himself to shrug.
    The king led the two to a platform that had been constructed on the castle grounds. It had three steps. Blaggard sat on a throne on the topmost part. Sian and Sianna sat in carved chairs on the next. And guards and counselors stood on the bottom part of the platform.
    A blare of trumpets greeted their arrival. The merrymakers at the fair bowed, and a group of dancers began to leap and twist, the bells at their ankles and knees making a merry company to their steps.
    At the moment of the trumpets’ sound, posters were hammered onto doors and pasted onto walls around the kingdom so that all at the fair and in the countryside could read at once:
BE IT KNOWN
    that Blaggard the King
    will wed the maiden known as Sianna
    unless
    there is a man who can answer the
    FOUR ELEMENTAL QUESTIONS
    before fall of night at The Seven.
    To try and fail in answering the riddles will mean
    Death by the Sword.
    “You certainly do not encourage any