by How it seems to work with storytellers is: they arrive, noisily. People among the quickly-gathering crowd begin shouting out requests for stories. The tale-bearers pick whichever suggestion best suits their fancy and, for a little while, the drums stop in favour of their voices. Jay, Alban and I watched for a little while, taking their measure, and heard a spirited tale of an ancient hero called Gostingot who stormed the strongholds of corrupt sorcerers an unspecified number of centuries ago. The storytellers were good: he with his great, rumbling, booming voice and she with her light, musical tones, they had everything.
Once Gostingot’s tale was done, the giant resumed his drumming and off they went again, collecting more of an audience, until somebody’s called-out suggestion caught their attention once more.
‘This is going to take way too long,’ I said, sotto voce.
‘Right,’ said Jay. ‘It’ll have to be kidnapping, then.’
I stared. ‘What?’
‘That is what you were going to suggest, isn’t it?’
‘Nothing quite so daring—’
‘You disappoint me. Crazy Ves is becoming positively staid.’
I punched him. But only a little bit, on the arm.
I was actually looking at Alban.
‘What?’ said his highness, eyeing me back warily. ‘I don’t like that look in your eye, Ves.’
‘We want tales of displaced royalty, don’t we? How lucky that we happen to have a displaced royal right in our very midst. And from the same source, too!’ I gave him an encouraging smile.
He sighed. ‘So I am to be sacrificed for the sake of today’s mission, am I?’
‘Only your dignity.’
‘That’s reassuring.’
A short while later, a twitch or two of my intensely magickal Sunstone Wand had pepped up the prince’s appearance. His simple, stylish attire now resembled something far grander: he had velvets and silks, a fine, billowing cape, and a golden coronet.
‘Lose the crown, Ves,’ said Alban from between gritted teeth.
‘It is a bit too much,’ Jay agreed, surveying the prince critically.
I pouted a bit, for it made a splendid addition to his bronze-blond locks, but I obeyed.
‘And I’m not sure about the cape,’ Alban added, twisting around to look at the length of it swirling behind himself. ‘Must it billow like that?’
I’d given him the magickal equivalent of a wind machine. ‘Of course it must. We want pomp, we want majesty, we want hints of unearthly powers from afar. We need these people to take you seriously.’
‘That last part is sort of what I was getting at with the billowing thing.’
‘If this were a film, you’d have all that plus a mantle of palpable power, crackling around your muscled frame like a lightning storm—’
‘Please don’t give yourself ideas, Ves.’ He rolled his shoulders, stood a bit straighter, and sighed. ‘Just don’t let anybody trip on it, all right?’
‘Will watch like a hawk,’ I promised, probably mendaciously. I was given an immediate opportunity to prove myself, however, for Ms. Goodfellow made a sudden lunge at the cape’s floating ends and closed her teeth around the half-corporeal fabric. I bonked her on the nose with the Wand and she sneezed in surprise, releasing the cape at once.
‘You’re up,’ I told Alban, and nodded in the direction of the storytellers. We had ducked into a side street as they had paused again for another tale, and by the looks of it the story was winding down.
Alban closed his eyes briefly, opened them again for the pleasure of staring daggers at me, and then walked off.
‘He’s had practice at this,’ I murmured to Jay. We watched in momentary silence as our princely prince strode, with undeniable majesty and enviable grace, across the street and approached the storytellers’ audience. Somehow, that crowd parted for him like the sea; he did not even have to slow down. When he stopped, he was mere feet away from the giant and the sylph, and he seemed to my unbelieving eye to have grown a foot taller since he’d left us. Even the giant could not make him look small.
Jay and I hastily scuttled after.
‘I, Prince Alban of Mandridore,’ he was saying, ‘have come in search of answers to an age-old mystery. My noblest of ancestors, Torvaston the Second, is said once to have visited these shores. I would know the truth of these rumours.’ The fact that Alban was adopted and therefore no relation to Torvaston was quite by the by; I approved of his creative reinterpretation of the truth. He had a flare for it.
There followed some due flattering of the tale-bearers and their superior knowledge, wisdom, etc, most of which seemed to hit the mark. When he’d finished speaking, silence fell.
I noticed the giant’s merry eyes had travelled from Alban to Jay to me, and there was a twinkle of amusement discernible there.
‘I am sorry to tell your highness,’ he said in his deep, deep voice, ‘we know no tales of a Torvaston the Second.’
Alban appeared thrown by this, for when he opened his mouth nothing came out.
‘However,’ the giant went on, his smile broadening, ‘we do mayhap know a tale of another king of the trolls, who named himself Furgidan the Dispossessed.’
I knew the word furgidan. It meant “king” in Court Algatish, the language spoken upon more formal occasions at the Troll Courts. The Dispossessed King. That sounded about right.
‘A tale of tragedy, mystery, and adventure!’ the giant went on, addressing the crowd now. ‘And it takes place right here, upon your own Whitmore! Who shall hear it?’
Happily for us, the cheering that followed said everyone quite effectively.
‘Well, then,’ said the giant. ‘Some hundreds of years ago, the said Furgidan arrived with a royal entourage of more than thirty trolls, all members of his former court. Dukes and barons and marchionesses all, they caused quite the stir, for they were clad in finery rather like their descendent here,’ (Alban’s cape billowed obligingly at these words), ‘and they made the grandest of claims! “I am a king from afar,” said Furgidan, “from Farringale, on another shore.”
The sylph took up the tale. ‘I do not know that everyone believed him, for all knew of Farringale. The splendid Court of the Trolls, rich and age-old; there could be no other. But something about these grand strangers caught at the eye, and at the heart. They had travelled long and far, for there was a weariness about them, and a melancholy.
‘Offered bread and wine, the king declined, and so did all his party. They needed no sustenance, they said, and asked nothing of those who greeted them, save for one thing only. “We come in search of a home,” said Furgidan. “Some distant place, rich in magick, where we will be of trouble to no one.”‘
‘It is not known whither the dispossessed king went,’ said the giant, beginning to play the soft rhythm on his drums that indicated the story was drawing to a close. ‘Some say that he went into the south, to the Seas of Segorne and the islands there. Others trace his path deep into the North, to the Hyndorin Mountains and their Vales of Wonder. None can say for certain.
‘But a whisper once reached my ears about Furgidan the Dispossessed. It’s said that, wherever he and his courtiers made their home, they are there still. Not even the passage of centuries can defeat the lost King of Farringale.’
The tale ended there, for the giant returned to his drumming as his partner called for more requests. To my puzzlement, the drummer winked at me.
I mulled over the possible meanings of this gesture. I supposed he meant to indicate that he’d taken some liberties with the tale, which of course I had guessed. For one thing, this event — if it had taken place at all — had not happened on Whitmore, or Melmidoc would have met Furgidan the Dispossessed. Instead, only a whisper of the story had reached the Redclover brothers’ ears, which argued for a much more distant setting.
For another thing, I highly doubted that Furgidan — or rather, Torvaston — and his court were still alive somewhere, three and a half centuries later. That smacked to me of a cute way of ending a tale which, in its natural form, had no real ending at all. A twist of the storytellers’ art: a tendency to adapt the details of a story to suit the tastes of their audience.
And I didn’t want to get started on the question of how Torvaston had known of the sixth Britain when, according to Alban, his descendants knew of only three Britains, not including this one.
But what truths might we glean from the tale, having stripped away the embellishments? Some parts of it did not altogether make sense. Then again, some parts of it were highly interesting.
We went back to the library.
‘Points of interest,’ I said a little later, as I stalked shelves overflowing with history books. ‘Why were they weary? They had travelled far, yes, in the technical sense, but they hadn’t travelled long. They must have arrived by Waymaster; they hadn’t journeyed for months on foot. What was the matter with them?’
‘And why were they melancholy?’ Jay put in. ‘Yes, they’d lost Farringale, and perhaps that’s reason enough. But no mention of that was made in the story. Why did they come here, instead of going to Mandridore with the rest?’
‘Third point,’ said Alban, dropping a heavy tome down onto the nearest study table with a boompf. ‘These Seas of Segorne and mountainous Vales of Wonder. Were they pulled out of thin air for the tale, because they sound good? Or were they significant? I think the latter. Look.’ He riffled quickly through the book, careless of its aging paper, and skimmed a page or two. ‘The Seas of Segorne,’ he said. ‘Place of myth, said to have existed somewhere off the southwest coast of Britain. The islands there weren’t the traditional kind, for instead of floating on the water they drifted in the air, several feet above the sea’s surface. It was thought that the area was so soaked in magick that it had been warped by it, and nothing there was as it should’ve been.’
He turned several more pages. ‘Then the Hyndorin Mountains and those Wonder Vales. Same thing. Sounds to me like there were some magickal Dells scattered about up there, but unusually potent ones, flooded with magick. They, too, had gone a little strange. One was the site of a plethora of magick-induced mutations; nothing living that went in ever came out quite the same. One was said to have made a bubble of itself and floated away. Etc.’ He looked at me. ‘They asked for a place rich in magick, according to the story.’
‘Not just rich, but drowning in it,’ I mused. ‘Even to the point of being highly unsafe.’
‘Mm. But what does that do to our theory about old Farringale? If there was some kind of magickal disaster there, and the place was flooded, then it’s natural that Torvaston and company would flee from it, like everyone else. But why would they go searching for another home much the same?’
‘I wonder if they left voluntarily,’ said Jay, leafing through a book.
‘As much so as the rest, I suppose?’ I said. ‘Nobody wanted to abandon Farringale.’
‘I don’t mean Farringale, I mean Mandridore. We’ve been assuming that they chose to come here instead. What if they were exiled?’
‘Torvaston the Second, exiled from his own court?’ Alban was incredulous. ‘And exiled by, presumably, his own wife? How could that be?’
‘I don’t know, but it would explain the melancholy, wouldn’t it?’
‘That might just have been a detail for the story,’ Alban objected. ‘Included to get the audience to pity the dispossessed king.’
‘Might be,’ Jay agreed. ‘Then again, might not.’
I mulled this over. ‘It would take something very, very big to get the king kicked out.’
‘To say the least,’ said Jay.
‘As in, catastrophically big.’ I didn’t want to air the direction my thoughts were tending in. My vague new hypothesis bordered too much on the treasonous.
So I kept it to myself.
‘If something like that happened,’ said Alban, ‘there must be some record of it at Mandridore. There must.’
‘If so, I’m guessing it’s deeply buried,’ I said.
‘Luckily, I happen to know the queen.’ Alban grinned, a shade rueful.
