The Widow and the King Read Online Free

anyway.
    Whatever he did, he must retrace his steps through the mountains. And Chatterfall, he remembered, was a manor house at the northern end of the lake – a week's journey, perhaps, from where he stood; not more than a day's ride from Watermane and other gateways to the Kingdom. A child on foot, finding his way through the mountains, would go slowly. If he turned and made his way back now, he might yet catch the boy before he got to the lake. If not, it would not be very far aside to go to Chatterfall. Aday or two out of his path – what difference would it make?
    Cunning old mind, he thought again. You always are when you deceive yourself. What if you find the boy? If Chatterfall cannot keep him, what then?
    What child deserves to be long in
your
care?
    And yet – I am still a man.
    And Angels! I am tired.
    Slowly he made his way back to the foot of the throne where his bundles were lying.
    ‘I think … Best you tell me about this enemy who is hunting your son,’ he said.
    There was no answer.
    The throne-step was empty. She was gone – gone, and he had not seen her go. He looked around him.
    ‘Phaedra,’ he called softly, using her name for the first time. ‘Phaedra.’
    Nothing stirred among the shadows of the colonnade. No sound came from the dark doorways of that place.
    ‘Phaedra – I will go.’
    She was gone. And though he walked through the rooms and courtyards, calling softly, and sat up hour after hour by the moonlit throne, there was no answer but the emptiness of the mountains.

II
The Enemy
    mbrose was still very small when his mother pointed out the carved moon to him, on the arch above the gate of their home. He was interested at once, because she said his father had put it there. He had never known his father.
    So he would often look up at it, in the years when he spent so much time playing with his white pebbles in the outer courtyard. And later, when he was old enough to take the goats along the mountainside to the pasture or to go down to the stream and fish, he would pause beneath it for an instant before leaving the house. And sometimes he would go to it in idle moments, between chores or even during them.
    The moon was a blank disc, chiselled in deep cuts on top of older, fainter carvings that he could barely see. It had a jagged mark on its left-hand side, and it lay within a coiled serpent that snaked around and around it. The serpent was Capuu, his mother said. Capuu was good, because he held the world together. Ambrose understood that the moon itself was not so good, even though his father had put it there. She hadn't told him why, but hethought maybe it was not good because of the mark on it. Or maybe it was like his family name,
Tarceny
, which was never used because she said people did not like it any more. But he didn't worry very much about that until some time after his tenth birthday.
    Then a nightmare came to him without warning.
    He dreamed he was a small child, awake in a dark room. Perhaps it was a room at Uncle Adam's house, far away at Chatterfall. There was a window, and the sky outside was paler than the darkness in the room. And something moved between him and the window. It was a shape, with a curved back or shoulder that could not have been a man's.
    That was all he saw.
    He woke in a rush, thrashing and crying. His heart hammered, and he stared around in the darkness, in case the thing he had seen was already standing beside his pallet.
    The Thing! He could not remember what it had looked like. He thought … He did not know if this had been in the dream, but he thought that the curved shape had had long hairs on it, that stood up like bristles, and a neck that had slumped to a head that …
    He hadn't seen the head.
    But it had
been there
, in the room. It had been looking for a way past a line of his white pebbles; looking for a way to where he sat wide-eyed in the darkness.
    ‘Mother!’
    She rose, warm and sleepy, from where she lay on the other side of the