Free The Kingmaker by Nancy Springer

The Kingmaker
    By Nancy Springer
    Destiny, I discovered upon a fateful day in my fifteenth year, can manifest in small matters.
    Tedious matters, even. In this instance, two clansmen arguing about swine.
    Barefoot, in striped tunics and baggy breeches, glaring at each other as if they wore swords instead, the two of them stood before me where I sat upon my father’s throne. “His accursed hogs rooted up the whole of my barley field,” complained the one, “and there’s much seed and labor gone to waste, and what are my children to eat this winter?”
    “It could not have been my hogs,” declared the other. “I keep iron rings in my pigs’ snouts.”
    “Better you should keep your pigs, snouts and all, where they belong. It was your hogs, I’m telling you.”
    Outdoors, I thought with a sigh, the too-brief summer sun shone, and my father, High King Gwal Wredkyte, rode a-hawking with his great ger-eagle on his arm and his nephew, Korbye, at his side. Meanwhile, in this dark-timbered hall, I held court of justice in my father’s stead. No easy task, as I am neither the High King’s son nor his heir; I am just his daughter.
    My cousin Korbye is his heir.
    But I could give judgment and folk would obey me, for I had been guiding my father’s decisions since I was a little girl, sitting upon his knee as I advised him who was telling the truth and who was lying. In this I was never mistaken.
    This is my uncanny gift, to know sooth. When I lay newly born, I have been told, an owl the color of gold appeared and perched on my cradle. Soundlessly out of nowhere the golden owl flew to me, gave me a great-eyed golden stare, and soundlessly back to nowhere it flew away, all within my mother’s closed and shuttered chamber. “This child will not die like the others,” she had whispered from the bed where she lay weak after childbirth. “This child will live, for the fates have plans for her.”
    If those plans were only that I should sit indoors, on an overlarge chair draped with the skins of wolf and bear, listening to shaggy-bearded men quarrel, I wished the fates had kept their gift.
    The accused clansman insisted, “But it cannot have been my pigs! They can’t root, not with rings the size of a warrior’s armband through their noses.”
    “Are you telling me I’m blind? You think I don’t know that ugly spotted sow of yours when I see her up to her ears in the soil I tilled? Your pigs destroyed my grain.”
    I asked the accuser, “Did you see any swine other than the spotted sow?”
    “His sow destroyed my grain, then.”
    “Answer what I asked.”
    “No, I saw only the spotted sow. But—”
    “But how could one sow root up the whole of a field by herself?” cried the other clansman. “With a ring in her snout? It could not be so, Wren!”
    I scowled, clouds thickening in my already-shadowed temper. I possess a royal name—Vranwen Alarra of Wredkyte—yet everyone, from my father to the lowliest serving boy in his stronghold, calls me Wren. Everyone always has, I suppose because I am small, and plain—brown hair, brown eyes, clay-dun skin—but plucky in my stubby little way. Although no one, obviously, is afraid of me, or they would not bespeak me so commonly.
    “Wren, I am not a liar!” insisted the clansman with the ruined barley field.
    I held up my hand to hush them. “You both speak the truth.”
    “What!” they exclaimed together.
    “You are both honest.” My sooth-sense told me that, as sometimes chanced in these quarrels, both men believed what they had said. “The real truth flies silent like an invisible owl on the air between you two.”
    “But—but….”
    “How…”
    But how to resolve the dispute, they meant.
    Customarily, in order to pass judgment, I would have closed my eyes and cleared my mind until my sooth-sense caught hold of the unseen verity. But on this day, with my father and my cousin out riding in the sunshine, I shook my head. “I will sit in the shadows no longer.