Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [9]
“Sleep in the pigsty!” the King shouted. “It’s all you’re fit for!”
He had landed out in the main courtyard, beside the stables, and all the boyars were there, mounting their horses to go to the guesthouse outside the Palace walls. There were no guest quarters in the Palace itself; there was only the inner building for the family, and the barracks built into the fortifying walls that surrounded it. In less gracious times, guests would have been housed in the Great Hall, sleeping on the benches and under the tables there. But for at least four generations now, life had been a good deal more gracious than that. There were guesthouses enough to hold up to a hundred important folk, with their servants and guards, and nothing could possibly be wanted from the accommodations. There was even a steam bath attached to each, and from the stink that had come off some of those rancid old men, they could well use it.
The boyars hooted and tossed insults after him. He was laughing as he ran; he used Beast-Speech to call the Wolfhounds to him, so that it looked as if he were being pursued by the pack, when in fact, they were running with him.
He hoped that his father would get the bride that he wanted. But if he didn’t—it would not be because of Sasha; it would be because The Tradition didn’t want that girl married into this family at this time.
In order to keep up the pretense, he had to flail his way past the guesthouses, then through the village, inviting further insults from the peasants. This was why he had called the pack; they would protect him from anything like an actual attack. “Prince Borzoi,” the peasants called him, after the hounds he so often ran with. He’d even been known to sleep with them as a child, in summer, all of them tumbled together in a heap in the kennel. He didn’t do that now, of course….
Though in a way, he missed it. The hounds were just about the only creatures on the Palace grounds that he didn’t have to keep up some form of pretense with.
Once out of sight of the village, he dismissed most of the pack and sent them home. He kept his favorite, his particular pet, a stunted fellow he called Ivan. This was no Wise Beast out of The Tradition, but he was a faithful old fellow, and good company, and quick to warn him if someone was approaching so he could put on his Fool face.
The two of them ambled down a path they both knew well, to a spot deep in the forest that long ago had earned itself the designation of the “Heart of Led Belarus.” As Sasha understood these things, it was not so much the physical center of the Kingdom, and it certainly wasn’t the cartographic center, but something about the place ensured that anything done there would have resonance with the whole of the country.
And now that he had been insulted, derided, and thrown out of the Palace, Sasha took his brimming Luck into the Heart of his land to be spilled out over it all.
The path wandered, twisted, and turned like a snake trying to tie itself into five different kinds of knots. The trees here were old, old, old, very tall, broad of trunk and spreading of branch. Sunlight penetrated only here and there, piercing the gloom with shafts of slanting light; his feet made no sound on a path layered years-deep in evergreen needles. In fact, the only sounds were the trickling of water from one of the many little streams that cut through here, and the calls of birds high up in the trees,
He understood those calls perfectly, of course. Nesting season was over, babies fledged, so mostly the calls were all “I’m here! I’m here!” Not even “Get out of my space! Interlopers beware!” nor “Where are you, gorgeous creature, whoever you are?”
But there was one, far off in the distance, a heartfelt outpouring of “I’m happy!”
Oh, how he envied that bird.
Occasionally the dog would dart off after something scuttling