“I am not handing over my father’s kingdom so easily,” I answered.
Constantine paused. Then he took my hand and held it clasped lightly between us on the table, as he continued his gentle, obstinate persuasion. “Goewin, I shall not force you. And I don’t want to coerce you. But you have nothing without me. You have no following, no army, no great income—”
“Telemakos,” I interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“I have Telemakos,” I said. My voice sounded cold and calm in my own ears.
For several long moments he did not speak.
“What can you mean?” he said at last.
With my hand still clasped beneath Constantine’s, I let these words spill steady and quiet from some dark place in my heart:
“I have Telemakos. My father would not let the kingship pass to Medraut, not because he was illegitimate, but because he was the child of incest. Telemakos is removed from that. He is the son of the high king’s eldest son. Who would deny that he has a greater claim to the British throne than you, or even I?”
Constantine said in astonishment, “Telemakos is Aksumite!”
I leaned toward him so that we stared across the table into each other’s eyes. I held his gaze. “You are British,” I said, “and no one questions your place on the Aksumite throne. What makes you think anyone will question Telemakos in Britain? He is the high king’s grandson. I am his daughter. Who are you?”
“Is that a challenge?”
“You may take it as one,” I said.
Constantine stood up and paced to the window. There was a bowl of small white highland roses sitting on the sill. He stood there a long time, still, looking down at the roses.
He said at last, “Have you a plan that goes with your posturing threat?”
“You let me choose Britain’s king myself, regardless of our marriage,” I answered straightaway. “Or I take Telemakos to Britain as high king in waiting, and sever our alliance with Aksum’s viceroy.”
“You can’t do that,” Constantine snapped. “My wealth comes through my father, and I do not need the high king’s benediction to gift Aksum with it.”
“What you do as a private citizen is your own concern. You will have no military support from your king, no treaty, no royal sanction, no ambassador.”
“You fled Britain because Morgause wanted you dead. What will stop her from killing both you and your child minion?”
I answered through clenched teeth.
“He’s her grandson.”
Constantine suddenly picked up the roses and dropped the bowl out the window. I heard the crack of ceramic on the ground outside.
“Excuse me,” Constantine said. “I have much to attend to this morning.”
“I, too,” I said. “I want to speak with my ambassador. Where can Ir. ve muc find Priamos?”
“He is in council with the bala heg. They will be in session until dark, and again tomorrow. Come back in two days, if you want to see him.” He paced to the door. “You will not mind if I leave you here to finish on your own.”
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A Biography of Elizabeth Wein
Elizabeth Wein was born in New York City in 1964. She moved to England at the age of three, when her father, Norman Wein, who worked for the New York City Board of Education for most of his life, was sent to England to do teacher training and help organize a Headstart program at what is now Manchester Metropolitan University.
When Elizabeth was six, Norman was sent to the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, to do three years of similar teacher training. In Christmas of 1970, while Elizabeth was living in Jamaica, her maternal grandmother, Betty Flocken, gave her a self-styled book-of-the-month subscription. Over the following three years, her grandmother sent her one book every month—some of them new, some of them having belonged to Elizabeth’s mother or grandmother when they were young. Elizabeth was introduced to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and The Lost Prince; all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books including The First Four Years and On the Way Home; Beverly Cleary’s Henry Huggins and Ellen Tebbits; Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series; and an obscure but adored favorite, The Horse Without a Head by Paul Berna (translated from the French). The anticipation of the arrival of these books, and the newly acquired satisfaction in being able to read them on her own, made Elizabeth decide at the early age of seven that she wanted to write books, too.
In 1973, Elizabeth’s parents separated, eventually divorcing a year later. Elizabeth and her younger brother and sister moved back to the US with their mother, Carol Flocken, to live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Carol’s parents, Karl and Betty Flocken, were based.
Life in Harrisburg was a shock to Elizabeth’s system after living in Jamaica, and she found herself besieged with homesickness. Going to school in Jamaica had left her fluent in Jamaican Patois and essentially “color blind,” and the racial divide she encountered in Pennsylvania in the mid-1970s was so ludicrous to her that she found it hard to fit in. She became an easy victim—when she attended an inner city school, it was because she was white; when she lived in the suburbs, it was because her friends were black.
So of course she took refuge in books. She wrote her first “novel” in sixth grade, setting herself the challenge of producing five pages a day on yellow-lined school tablets, eventually producing a time-travel novel of over two hundred pages. At fifteen years old, she completed her next work, an epic fantasy.