Free The Hero King by Rick Shelley Page B

before he fully comprehended the question. When the question did register, it seemed to jolt him like an electric shock. He stared at me for a moment, then he seemed to slowly focus beyond me. His face went blank, his skin pale. I didn’t pay much attention to the others at the table, just enough to register the shock or surprise they felt at my apparent non sequitur and its sequel. I suspect that Aaron was affected least. And Kardeen recovered quickly, before Parthet spoke.
    “As well, I imagine, as you remember your father,” he said—eventually, and very slowly. His voice sounded as if it were coming from far off, in time if not in space.
    I had been expecting something of that nature, but the others were obviously taken by surprise … by something even beyond surprise. Mother’s mouth dropped open. Kardeen’s lips pressed together more tightly. Joy’s hand gripped my arm as tightly as a fully inflated blood-pressure cuff. Aaron showed no reaction at all.
    “Just how old are you?” I asked Parthet. “Straight out this time.” I had asked him often enough before, and he had never given the same answer twice. But I had never asked as king before, and never in such constricting circumstances.
    “Straight out? I can’t say precisely,” Parthet said. There was something wistful, and terribly sad, in his voice. “Time isn’t a constant. You found that out on your journey up the Isthmus of Xayber.” I nodded. “And time hasn’t always run at the same rate here as in the world where you were born. There used to be a”—he hesitated for a moment—”a considerable differential. Time ran slower here before the lesser world discovered clockmaking.
    I may have raised an eyebrow at that. If I did, Parthet didn’t seem to notice. I had started his mind down an ancient trail. The answers we needed might be buried back there, and if no one disturbed him at the wrong moment, the answers might surface. I hoped.
    “I was his second son, of course,” Parthet said after a long pause. “My brother Paterno inherited the kingdom. I came into this calling. Perhaps the kingdom would have been better served if Paterno and I had reversed our roles. His gift for wizardry may have been greater than mine. Wizards are—to a great extent—born, not made, and they are not born equal.” He glanced at Aaron, and then he shrugged. “I used up all of my envy before the fall of Camelot.”
    Statements like that didn’t surprise me any longer. Parthet had hammered one lesson home over and over since I first came to Varay. We create our own history, changing the past generation by generation, sometimes moment by moment —not just the interpretations, but the facts themselves. It’s something we all contribute to, some people more than others, according to Parthet. Call it an alternate-worlds theory turned backward. Parthet claimed Merlin as a mentor and friend. He talked about Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Prester John as freely as I might talk about people I knew in high school.
    “Things were different here in the days when Vara was still King of Varay. The distinctions among the three realms were … different from what they are now. Fairy was more advanced than the buffer zone, and we were more advanced than the lesser world. The pyramids had yet to be imagined. It was possible to move back and forth quite freely from one realm to another—not that many people had much cause to travel far. There was the occasional lordling who wanted primitives to impress. I guess that at one time or another, there were plenty of those—men and women of Fairy who liked the idea of being worshiped as gods and goddesses in one area of Earth or another.”
    He fell silent again. I waited a bit and then asked the next important question. “How did Vara die?”
    “We never knew exactly. It happened in Battle Forest. He didn’t come back from a hunt. The few soldiers he had taken with him were found first. Vara was found nearly three miles