She stared as he rose to his knees and covered his face with his hands, wailing, “I do not deserve such a death! Nay! It would be far too noble an end for so ignoble a creature as you see before you, to die from the glance of one so fair! No, name instead some other manner for my demise, and I shall run to do your bidding. Shall I cast myself from yon cliff?”
Leaping to his feet, he sprang over to a statue on a pedestal a few feet away. It was the figure of a king looking over his shoulder in stern scrutiny of the world. Lionheart clambered up onto the pedestal and put his arm around the stone king’s waist. “She says I must die,” he told it, indicating the girl with a sweep of his hand. She stood with her mouth open, hardly seeming to breathe. “Will you mourn for me?”
The stone king scowled. Lionheart turned and gazed with great melancholy across the garden, pressing a hand to his heart. “Farewell, sweet world! I pay the just price for my clumsiness, my vain shenanigans. My grandmother told me it would come to this. Oh, Granny, had I but listened to your sage counsel while I was yet in my cradle!”
He made as though to jump but paused and turned to the girl. “Farewell, sweet lady. Thus for thee I end a most illustrious career. The Siege of Rudiobus was hardly a greater tragedy, but then, Lady Gleamdren was not such a one as thee!”
He gathered for another spring, catching hold of the stone king’s fist at the last moment. “I don’t suppose my end could be put off until tomorrow, could it?”
The girl started to speak, but afraid it would turn into a scream, Lionheart interrupted with a hasty, “No! For you and your wounded dignity, I must perish at once. Go to, foul varlet! Meet thy doom!” With a cry, which he dared not make too loud, he flung himself from the pedestal, turned a series of neat somersaults, and stopped in the path just at the girl’s feet, flattened like a swatted fly. He twitched once, then was still.
Silence followed.
He opened one eye and peered up at the girl, who was staring down at him. “Satisfied, m’lady?”
To his huge relief, a smile broke across the girl’s face and she laughed out loud. At the sound of that laugh, Lionheart, for the first time in his life, fell in love.
It wasn’t all that difficult, the whole falling in love business, Lionheart thought later on as he sat in a tiny room in the servants’ wing of Oriana, darning his jester’s motley. Inconvenient, to be sure, but not difficult.
The girl, it turned out, was a princess. Of course she was. He should have known the moment he set eyes on her that she could hardly be anything less. Princess Una of Parumvir, only daughter of King Fidel, out for a stroll on a fine summer evening, alone with her thoughts and a book of poetry.
And a fine opal ring gleaming on her finger.
Just like the oracle had said. Lionheart’s face hardened into a scowl as he focused on his stitching. “You will know this ring by two things: its stones, fire opals, as hot inside as a dragon’s flame; and its giver, a princess who will fear you at first, but later will laugh.”
So the ring was found. That was well done, and about time, after months of weary travel.
But Una was a different matter altogether. Lionheart had never once considered, from the moment he crawled from the oracle’s presence, that the princess in question would be so sweet, so pretty, so ready to laugh. She was nothing like Daylily. Certainly not as beautiful, but that was no great disadvantage on Una’s part. Una laughed. Lionheart could not recall ever hearing Daylily laugh save in the most affected manner. What’s more, Una thought he was funny.
There was something most appealing in that.
Don’t forget your chosen dream.
Lionheart licked his lips and put a knot at the end of a seam. He snipped his thread, knotted it, and started another patch.
You will be Eldest of Southlands. You will deliver your people.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he growled.
Then take the ring, my darling, and be on your way.
“I can’t just take something from her. She trusts me. She got me this job . . . didn’t even ask to see my papers.” He finished another seam and knotted his thread again. “I’m not going to betray that trust.”
A snip and the thread dropped free. Lionheart, standing before a dusty little mirror, put his jester’s jacket back on, buttoning it slowly as he regarded himself. He certainly didn’t look a prince anymore. Neither did he look a boy. Five years of exile had passed, taking with them the last of his childhood. Lionheart gazed at a reflection he scarcely recognized; he gazed into a man’s face.
Beneath a jester’s hat.
“I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
What a wretched time to fall in love.
Don’t forget your dream.
“Maybe my dream can grow,” he said, tugged one last time on his shirt, picked up the lute he had been loaned for the evening, and stepped from the room.