The captain blinked. He narrowed his eyes at Cahe, expecting a trick. The farmer regarded him mildly back.
“You have chosen a wise course, peasant,” the captain finally said. “All hail Tirulia.”
The folk of Adam’s Rock murmured a ragtag and unenthusiastic response: all hail Tirulia.
“We shall be back through this way again after we subdue Serria. Prepare your finest quarters for us after our triumph over them and all of Alamber!”
And with that the captain shouted something unintelligible and militaristic and trotted off, the flag bearer quickly catching up.
As soon as they were out of earshot, Cahe shook his head wearily.
“Call a meeting,” he sighed. “Pass the word around…we need to gather the girls and send them off into the hills for mushroom gathering or whatever—for several weeks. All the military-aged boys should go into the wilds with the sheep. Or to hunt. Also, everyone should probably bury whatever gold or valuables they have someplace they won’t be found.”
“But why did you just give in to him?” the man next to Cahe demanded. “We could have sent word to Alamber. If we’d just told the soldiers no, we wouldn’t have to do any of this, acting like cowards and sending our children away into safety…”
“I did it because I could smell the wind. Can’t you?” Cahe answered, nodding toward the south.
Just beyond the next ridge, where the Veralean Mountains began to smooth out toward the lowlands, a column of smoke rose. It was wider and more turbulent than what would come from a bonfire, black and ashy and ugly as sin.
“Garhaggio?” someone asked incredulously. It did indeed look like the smoke was coming from there. From the volume and blackness there could have only been scorched earth and embers where that village had been just the day before.
“I bet they told the captain no,” Cahe said.
“Such causeless destruction!” a woman lamented. “What terrible people this Prince Eric and Princess Vanessa must be!”
Eric woke up.
He was having that dream again.
It came to him at the strangest times—when reviewing the menu for a formal dinner with Chef Louis, for instance, or listening to the castle treasurers discuss the ups and downs of dealing with international bankers. Or when his beautiful princess went on and on about her little intrigues.
All right: it was when he was bored and tired. If a room was stuffy and he was sleepy and could barely keep his eyes open.
Or right before he fell asleep properly, in bed—that moment between still being awake and deep in dreams. The same split-second when he often heard angelic choirs singing unimaginably beautiful hymns. He could only listen, too frozen in half-sleep to jump up and quickly scribble it down before he forgot.
But sometimes, instead of the choirs, he had this:
That he was not Prince Eric wed to Vanessa, the beautiful princess. That there had been some terrible mistake. That there was another girl, a beautiful girl with no voice, who could sing.
No—
There was a beautiful girl who could sing, who somehow lost her voice forever on the terrible day when Eric fell asleep. He had been dreaming ever since.
There were mermaids in this other world.
He had known one. Her father was a god. Eric’s princess was an evil witch. And Eric had touched greatness but been tricked, and now here he was, dreaming…
He looked down suddenly, in a panic. His arms were crossed on his desk over pages of musical notation, supporting his dozing head. Had he spilled any ink? Had he blurred any notes? A rest could be turned into a tie if the ink smeared that way…and that would ruin everything…
He held the papers up to the moonlight. There was a little smudging, there, right where the chorus was supposed to come in with a D major triad. But it wasn’t so bad.
His eyes drifted from the pages to the moon, which shone clearly through his unglazed window. A bright star kept it company. A faint breeze blew, causing the thick leaves of the trees below to make shoe-like clacking noises against the castle wall. It carried with it whatever scents it had picked up on its way from the sea: sandalwood, sand, oranges, dust. Dry things, stuff of the land.
Eric looked back at his music, tried to recapture the sound and feel of the ocean that had played in his head before waking, aquamarine and sweet.
Then he dipped his pen in ink and began to scribble madly, refusing to rest until the sun came up.
It seemed as if all of Tirulia were crowded into the amphitheatre. Every seat was filled, from the velvet-cushioned couches of the nobles up front to the high, unshaded stone benches in the far back. More people spilled out into the streets beyond. No one was going to miss the first performance of a new opera by their beloved Mad Prince Eric.