The Tangle Box

“Goodbye, Earth Mother,” she said, for there was nothing else to say, no other words to speak. “I will remember what you have said.”


“Goodbye, Willow. Keep strong, child. All will be well.”

It was almost exactly the same thing she had said to Ben. All will be well. The words reached out to mock her. Willow’s smile was bleak and ironic. She turned and walked to the edge of the clearing.

When she looked back again, the Earth Mother had disappeared.





Ensorcelled



When Ben Holiday woke that first morning to find Willow gone, he was not a happy man. She had told him she was leaving, of course, so he was not surprised to discover she wasn’t there. He even understood why she had left without waking him to say goodbye; he probably would have reacted every bit as badly as she had imagined. But none of that made him feel any better about the situation. He simply didn’t like being separated from her, even for the best of reasons—and he wasn’t sure this visit was one. He had listened to her explanation and tried to be fair about what she was doing, but in the end he still didn’t understand any of it. Why did she have to go alone? Why did she have to go now?

Why did the feeling persist, despite his efforts to suppress it, that she was keeping something from him?

He might have sat about stewing for the entire day or even the rest of the week if it hadn’t been for the fact that once again he had scheduled a full day of meetings in his continuing effort to find a way to be a good King. It wasn’t as easy as people might suppose. In the first place, there was a decided clash of cultures at work in his stewardship of Landover. This was a place in which the feudal system had been at work for hundreds of years (according to Abernathy’s carefully maintained histories), while Ben Holiday was a product of what passed in his world for a democracy. Instinctively almost, he found himself from day one looking for ways to implement the kind of government he knew and believed in. The lawyer in him wanted law and order to be the cornerstone of his government and to guarantee justice of, for, and by the people. But you didn’t come into a strange country and simply throw out the system already in place. That was a swift and certain path to anarchy. As they were fond of saying where he came from, you had to work within the system.

So Ben settled early on for working toward the establishment of a benevolent dictatorship (still didn’t sound too good when he said it, but it remained the best description he could come up with). The emphasis, of course, was supposed to be on the word benevolent and not on the other. The trick in all this was to introduce the changes he wanted without making it too obvious. People always accepted change more readily when they didn’t realize it was happening. Thus the need for Ben Holiday as King to constantly walk a tightrope. Of course, after two years he was getting pretty good at it.

The process was convoluted, and only Questor and Abernathy really knew what was going on. As the King’s closest advisors (not counting Willow), they were pretty much privy to everything that happened. In most instances, they supported Ben’s ideas, arguing mostly on the side of caution and restraint in the introduction of his somewhat-revolutionary ideas. Once Ben had established himself as an acceptable and resilient King, one not likely to be dislodged, the next step was to bring the Kingdom’s warring factions into some kind of accord. That meant getting at least a semblance of cooperation from such diverse peoples as the once-fairy, the humans, the kobolds, and the rock trolls—not to mention various smaller groups—none of whom wanted much to do with the other. Ben had succeeded in that endeavor through a combination of threats, promises, and bribes. A King had to be something of a magician—apologies to Questor Thews—and there was a great deal of on-the-job training. Thus a hard stand here led to a compromise there. You had to know when to bend and when to hold fast.

Starting out as a lawyer was good training, as Ben was fond of saying, for becoming a King.