Free Magic Three of Solatia by Jane Yolen Page A

She thought wildly that she must pluck the third button from her petticoat and wish upon it. But the petticoat was across the room and she could not get to it in time. All that was left was to take the blow upon her own head, and she scrambled from the bed. But she was not fast enough. For even as her foot touched the floor, Blaggard brought the bone flute down upon the knight’s head and it cut like a sword.
    The castle rocked with an invisible blow. Sianna was thrown back upon the bed, the three guards upon the floor. And when the castle was quiet once more, the king was gone. Disappeared. And no one had remarked his leaving.
    Rolan and Andel and Bran were weeping near the doorway, for reasons they could not quite say. Noises came from the hall as the castle folk woke to seek the answer to the shaking. Only Sianna was dry-eyed and still.
    “Sianna, beloved,” came a cracked voice from the floor where no man could be seen.
    She came off the bed and knelt by the side of a shimmer that began to fill the room with its light.
    “Do not be sad,” said the voice. “I am returning to my own kingdom where I rule over all who have lived and will live again. It was but for the power of the button that I came at all.”
    She looked down at the light that seemed at once so familiar and yet so strange to her. In the back of her mind she heard the three men weeping at their own loss. “Then I shall use the Magic Three and keep you here for good,” she said.
    “Nay, for who knows what consequences that would yet call forth,” the voice replied. “Besides, it is time for me to go.”
    “Then take me with you,” Sianna replied.
    “Nay, beloved, not yet. For you shall bear our son,” said the voice, becoming stronger as it faded. Or so it seemed to Sianna, though she could not think how this could be so.
    “Our son,” she said in wonder, and then in hope: “How I do wish it.”
    “And he shall be the one who shall avenge his father, though he must do it with no thought of vengeance but out of friendship and love,” the light said.
    “Can such a thing be so?” Sianna asked, trying to hold the light in her hands and yet finding nothing to hold on to.
    “It must be so,” the voice went on. “There is no other way, for vengeance destroys those who seek it. Do not teach our son of hatred and revenge. Teach him rather of friendship and love, and he will accomplish it all.”
    Sianna felt the light dying as it grew brighter still.
    “Call him after the first living thing you see at his birth,” said the voice.
    Then with a giant bursting, like a dying sun, the light was gone. The dark was suddenly colder and deeper than any Sianna had ever known. Yet the memory of the light burned within her and kept her warm.
    “Come,” she said to the three men as she stood.
    They knelt to her first, then rose.
    “We did not know, My Lady,” said Rolan haltingly. Andel and Bran were unable to speak at all.
    “We know now,” she replied quietly. And they went down the corridor to seek out Blaggard the king.

11. And After
    B UT BLAGGARD WAS NOT to be found. Not in the castle or in the village or on the Solatian shore. For days the dogs bayed and howled down the paths of the forest and out toward the New Mountains. After several weeks, the Solatians accepted that he was gone, taking naught but his magic flute and the robes that he had worn that night.
    “Did he fear your vengeance, My Lady?” asked Rolan. Since that night he had become Sianna’s self-appointed protector.
    “Revenge exacts a harsher price on those who seek it, Rolan,” she replied. “For so my knight cautioned me. You heard the same as I.”
    “But surely you hate Blaggard and us who killed that king you wed.”
    “I sorrow. I do not hate,” she said. “For have we not all lost him?”
    And Rolan knew then that she spoke the truth and understood why he had stayed to protect her. At that moment of first seeing the black knight in his own true body he had known