Perhaps it was the care that they had put into the invitations, or perhaps the creatures themselves sensed that they might be needed at the party, but each of them came. This was not tradition. We might pay lip service to them, or see a fiery feather or bright flash flitting through the heather at night, but no one had laid eyes upon any of the guardians in decades. I was devastated for weeks afterward to have missed them, for I did not think I would ever see their like again. My mother described them to me, though, as lovingly as she could, even while her life was falling to shreds all around her.
The piskey and the sprite had been the most entertaining. Both of them fliers, but small enough not to cause alarm on the scale of the others, they had danced with one another in the air above the tables, the harpist providing accompaniment for their antics. The sprite swooped and dove, to the delight of the children, while the piskey shed fine gold dust behind her as she flew in stately circles.
The dragon arrived with an apology, of all things, as she was only a child herself, and was worried she would appear uncultured in so fine a court. Her mother, she explained, would be unable to fit inside the castle without breaking the roof, and so the younger, smaller dragons had cast lots to see who would get to attend. Rasima did an admirable job of keeping her face straight and welcomed the dragon with all the pomp and ceremony she would have given an elder statesman, before calling the steward to settle the great beast somewhere close to the main hearth.
My mother could never quite recall where the gnome had sat. Sometimes when she told me about her, the gnome stayed at the king’s knees, and whispered to him about which flocks should graze in which meadows. Sometimes, the gnome disappeared to the kitchen garden and sank her hands into the soil there. Sometimes my mother forgot the gnome entirely, which I would have thought unfair, except gnomes were shy, and far happier to repay any gift they received quietly and immediately before going on their way again.
The phoenix perched on the back of the unicorn, and the two did not eat, nor speak to anyone once they had greeted the king and queen. They took their place, unbidden, beside the princess, and the Little Rose stared at them, quite forgetting that she had gifts she was meant to be opening and food she was meant to eat. They had gifts of their own for her, of course—gifts that would ensure she grew to be a good and wise ruler—but they were not the sort of gifts a child could open, or even readily understand. Instead, they were gifts to her body and to her mind: discernment and resilience and grace and the like, each tailored with a ruling queen in mind.
And so the birthday celebration was a remarkable success, a wonder for all those in attendance, even for the small boy who was sick in bed and would only ever hear about it secondhand. If the feast had ended as well as it began, the stories would have been much shorter. My mother would not have been forced out of her home, I would not have lost all I cared about, and the kingdom of Kharuf would have continued its quiet march through history.
As it was, a demon came, and the march was not so quiet after that.
I ROLLED HARD ON THE DIRT, and would have come up spitting grass had we not trod it all to mud some hours ago. I had to use my fingers to scrape my teeth clean.
“Come on, Yashaa,” said Saoud. “You can do better than that.”
It was true, and we all knew it. Saoud hadn’t laid me out on the ground like that since I was twelve, and I’d been only just tall enough to carry a bow staff without tripping on it. With six more years of experience to my credit since then, I hit the ground only when I wished to, as part of a feint or as a way to lure my opponent past his center of balance.
“Get up.” Saoud waved his staff in front of my face. “Unless you yield, of course.”
I had no intention of yielding. Usually when Saoud and I sparred, we were evenly matched, but he had finished another growth spurt in the past few weeks and was still finding out where his arms and legs had ended up, and I was trying not to take advantage of it. Moreover, I had argued with my mother again, trading words until she could no longer speak for coughing, and that made me angry. I didn’t want to hurt Saoud like I had hurt her.
“I do not yield,” I said, bracing my weight on the staff to get to my knees, and then my feet.
“No mercy, Yashaa!” That was Arwa, cheering from the fence post. Her voice was still high with youth at eleven years of age, but hearing it always made me feel better. Tariq sat beside her, four years older and far more unsure of his seat upon the rails.
“Oh, please have mercy,” Saoud taunted, grinning so I would know he didn’t mean it. “Spare me, Yashaa, from your powerful blows and quick—”
That was as far as I let him get. I could have hit his staff aside and taken him at his knees, but that would not have been sporting. Instead, I tapped lightly on his left hand where it gripped the wood; well, as lightly as you can tap with a bow staff, which is to say: not very. He bellowed, of course, but he did drop back into guard, which gave him half a chance. It was still over very quickly.