Free The Kingmaker by Nancy Springer Page A

Come.” I rose from the throne, beckoning dismissal to others hunkered against the stone walls; they could return on the morrow. “Show me this remarkable spotted sow.”
    *
    Surely, striding out on the moors, I looked not at all like a scion of the high king, the sacred king, Gwal Wredkyte, earthly avatar of the sun. I, his daughter, wore only a simple shift of amber-and-brown plaid wool, and only ghillies, ovals of calfskin, laced around my feet. No golden torc, no silver lunula, nor am I royal of stature or of mien.
    Nor did I care, for I felt like a scullery girl on holiday. Laughing, I ran along the heathery heights, gazing out upon vast sky and vast sea, breathing deeply of the salt-scented wind making wings of my hair.
    “Take care, Wren,” one of the clansmen called. “’Ware the cliff’s edge.”
    He thought I had no more sense than a child? But my mood had turned so sunny that I only smiled and halted where I was, not so very near to where the heather ended, where sheer rocks plummeted to the breakers. Long ago, folk said, giants had carved these cliffs, playing, scooping up rocks and piling them into towers. Atop one such tower nearby balanced a stone the size of a cottage, rocking as gently as a cradle in the breeze that lifted my hair. It had teetered just so since time before time, since the giants had placed it there.
    “Wren,” urged the other clansman, “ye’ll see my pigsty beyond the next rise.”
    Sighing, I followed.
    A sturdy circle of stone it was, but no man has yet built a pen a hog cannot scramble out of. For this reason, and because swine require much feeding, customarily they roam from midden heap to midden heap, gobbling offal, with stout metal rings in their snouts to tug at their tender nostrils if they try to root. Otherwise, they would dig up every hand’s breadth of land in search of goddess-knows-what, while the geese and sheep and cattle would have no grazing.
    Laying my forearms atop the pigsty’s stone wall, I looked upon the denizen.
    The accused, doubly imprisoned. Tethered by a rope passed through the ring in her nose.
    There she lay, a mountainous sow, unmistakable, as the complaining clansman had said, because of her bristly black skin splotched with rosettes of gray as if lichens grew on her. A great boulder of a sow all mottled like a sable moon. Shrewd-nosed and sharp-eared, with flinty eyes she peered back at me.
    I felt the force of something fey in her stare.
    Almost whispering, I bespoke her courteously, asking her as if she could answer me, “Are you the old sow who eats her farrow?” For such was one of the forms of the goddess, the dark-of-the-moon sow who gives birth to a litter, then devours her young.
    I sensed how the clansmen glanced at each other askance.
    The great pig growled like a mastiff.
    The clansman who owned her cleared his throat, then said, “You see the ring in her nose, Wren?”
    “Yes. She looks disgruntled.” Still oddly affected, off balance, I tried to joke, for a “gruntle” is a pig’s snout—the part that grunts—so “disgruntled” could mean a hog with its nose out of joint, as might be expected when a ring of iron—
    I stared at the ring in the sow’s snout, all jesting forgotten.
    No ordinary swine-stopper, this. Despite its coating of mud, I saw flattened edges and spiral ridges like those of a torc.
    “Where did you come by that ring?” I demanded of the owner.
    “Digging turf one day, I found it in the ground. She needed a new one, hers was rusting to bits, so—”
    “I want to see it. Come here, sow.” Reaching for the rope that tied her, I tugged.
    “She won’t move for anything less than a pan of buttermilk.”
    But as if to make a liar of him after all, the sow heaved herself up and walked to me.
    Reaching over the stone wall, with both hands I spread the ring and took it from her snout, feeling my heartbeat hasten; in my grasp the ring felt somehow willful, inert yet alive. It bent to my touch, so I