In the Land of Stories Old

Chapter 49

Jack woke early the next morning, as tired as Ari had said he would be and also rather quiet. “It is a lot to take in,” was all he would say, and although his hand hovered over the medallion he did not touch it. He was rather easily persuaded to go for a swim, though—apparently Sel had told him the same thing Ari had told his friends—and he seemed much more awake and rather more cheerful once he had pulled himself out of the water. He also emerged with a bag woven from long fronds of seaweed in his hand, which he gave over to Hans. “Morning greetings and a gift for breakfast from the merjin,” he said, and winked. “Your regard was noted and appreciated, but they know I would be unhappy if they ate you.”

“And I maintain that there are worse ways to go,” Hans said, taking the bag happily. “Ooh, mussels. I know I still have some of the wild garlic left…”

Jack took the blanket Arthur handed him and wrapped it around himself, plopping down next to the renewed fire with a sigh. “I do not think I can tell you most of it,” he said, mainly to Merlin. “But all is well, and I am now Jacques de Valeureux, King of both Arendelle and Valeureux through blood and claim, witnessed by seven sea kings.”

Ari started. “Seven?!”

Jack nodded. “Well, six, as the seventh was a sea queen, wild and passionate.” He saw the looks, snorted. “No, not like that—she is a goddess! No, I felt her passion, and that of those people who were once hers, in the music I heard when she touched me.”

“Seven,” Ari said again, and his gaze sharpened. “She claimed you as well.”

“Yes, because I could hear her song, along with Lord Sel, Lord Triton, and Lord To,” Jack said. “Lord Sel for my birthright, Lord Triton for the alliance between the Sea Kingdom and Valeureux, and Lord To because I was a diver and kept his ways and laws, albeit without knowing I did so.”

Ari still seemed to be trying to wrap his mind around this. “You were claimed by four sea kings—or rather, three kings and a queen. Four.” He shook his head. “This is…how are you even standing?”

Jack shrugged. “It occurred in the Dreaming. The effects were lessened considerably when I woke, of course.” He’d been told by Sel that those effects would not stay lessened forever, as past a certain point Jack’s true Mark would become visible on his body in the waking world, but Don had told him not to worry about it, as when it did come it would be the right time and safe for it. Jack had a feeling that meant the pain would be coming back with it, so he was doing his best to neither worry nor actually think about that. And To had said it wouldn’t be any time too soon. He took the steaming mug Arthur handed him gratefully; the water in the Hole had been no less cold this morning than it had been the day before. “So, should we continue to the South and East, in search of the Kingdom of the Rock Trolls?”

“Probably,” Merlin said. “Since we’ll have Ari as a guide. I can enchant a stone for him and we’ll carry it along with us, that should let him leave the Hole.”

“You don’t know how much I want to leave the stupid Hole,” Ari grumbled. “I was tethered to Arendelle, mostly to the castle,” he explained. “So without Lord Sel to release me, I’m now stuck here where the castle used to be.”

“I saw it,” Jack said. “Well, part of it. I could not believe the size of it.”

That made Ari smile. “There was a reason it was so big. Huge storms would come in from the sea sometimes, so large you could see them coming days before their arrival, and they could make their way inland to a ridiculous distance. Regular buildings didn’t stand much of a chance against the winds which those storms brought with them, or the huge waves, or the flooding. The Castle of Arendelle was built specifically to allow the people to take refuge from such storms, the entire population could fit inside the walls with ease.”

Snow’s eyes widened. “I wonder if that’s why the Black Castle is so large…but the oldest records we have say the castle was nowhere near the sea, in spite of the docking cavern beneath it.”

“Large how?” Ari asked, but when she started to draw him an example in the sand Pino took the stick away from her. “Pino!”

“He wants to see it to know how it is structured, not to see an artistic representation,” he told her, not unkindly. “Her drawing master was one for making things look like but not too like,” he explained to Ari. “It is an interesting effect, and she is good at it, but such a drawing will not convey the information needed.” He deftly sketched out a rough diagram of the Black Castle in the sand. “It was partially carved into a black granite mountain,” he explained. “Arthur has been mapping the upper floors, there are thirty-eight at last count.”

“We’re still not sure whether to count some of the towers as separate floors or not,” Arthur explained further. “But Snow’s ancestors have lived just in the bottom four or five floors for several generations.”

Ari frowned and drifted around the sketch. “That…I mean, Arendelle’s castle was long and wide, not tall, and it had very thick walls. The only reason I could think of for building something like this would be flooding…but then why wouldn’t they have just started higher up?”

“Oh, it does start high.” Noki pulled out a little notebook and paged through it, then turned it so Ari could see. “There, this is where I was estimating the elevation one day. The entrance to the Black Castle is quite high, as you can see, and the King’s Road is somewhat steep. There are lower levels to the castle, we know, but all other than the docking cavern have been sealed and no one wanted to borrow trouble by opening them as we had many other things already to deal with.”

“I found some odd things in some of the upper levels,” Arthur explained further. “Rotted traps that would have been deadly when they were built. A room with no windows that had been set on fire. Skeletal remains of rats and birds that told me there had once been cats or somethin’ huntin’ through the castle all the way up to the upper levels. I even found a room stuffed with treasure where this really complicated lock had failed because the door rotted through, although I couldn’t figure out why that door had rotted when most of the others hadn’t.”

“I half expected the treasure to be either cursed or poisoned,” Merlin snorted. “We were very glad when it wasn’t, believe me.”

That made Ari smile. “Sounds like Arendelle when my descendant John took over as king,” he said. “The councilors had all but drained the treasury with their excesses, but they’d stopped taking care of almost everything else. They’d even stopped paying the staff, everyone was working for their keep—not to mention, ‘everyone’ was less than a quarter of the staff a castle that size should have had. He and Elsa had a lot of work to do to bring things back up to the proper standards.”

“I don’t know what we’d have done if Princess Elana hadn’t been able to get us a contract with the elves,” Snow said. “They work for their keep by preference, all they ask beyond that is that we let them do as much work as they want and that everyone is polite.”

“Hmm, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such a thing,” Ari said. “But then, my experience was rather limited. I was a simple seaman until Lord Sel came and Marked my captain and then me, and after that I lived in Arendelle and never really left. What sort of creatures are these elves?”

“About three feet tall, and in appearance a bit too thin,” Kio said. “But they are quite strong in spite of that. They have large, somewhat bulging eyes and very large pointed ears, and a good deal of magic.”

Ari thought, then shook his head. “Some sort of fey, I’m sure. We may have known them as something else. I recall hearing stories of fey creatures in other countries who wanted only to work, and if you tried to pay them they’d become offended and curse you.”

Merlin shrugged. “The elves have it specified in their contract that they’ll just take what they need from the household accounts, but I can imagine them becoming offended if we tried to pay them over and above what they requested.”

“Rose would scold you for days,” Snow agreed. She took her stick back from Pino and made her own sketch. “There, that’s the ‘artistic representation’.”

Ari looked, and shook his head. “It is that. Your drawing master must have been a very interesting man.”

fanfiction In the Land of Stories Old