"Whore!"

A petite young thing hid her face behind a fan of ostrich feathers. Her bodice was drawn breathlessly tight while a thin-iron corset with hooks, latches, and bolts lay open on the floor; an unlocked padlock dangled from the form-fitting cage.

"Wagtail!" A man struck her with the knuckle plate of his glove. Ostrich feathers exploded, and the mistress collapsed on the floor, her arms coiling back over her head. A young man with long dark hair, wearing shining armour, loomed over her. His brow wrinkled with rage, and his black-fire eyes stood wide and glaring.

"Wardrobe Keeper!" he shouted to another.

A fellow wearing orange and white hose with a chequered pattern on one leg and a striped on the other dashed merrily into the lord's chamber.

"At hand, sire."

"Where's Mira'?"

"Miranda's down by the sea collecting shells with the nursemaid. Shall I..." The mistress rolled onto her side, groaning as she drifted in and out of consciousness. "Shall I fetch her young highness, milord?"

"No."

The servant dipped his chin. Straightening, he said, "Etesia, Mother Windseer, requests an audience."

"What's the old windbag want now?"

"She wouldn't say-"

"Typical," he snorted. With a flick of the wrist, he snapped, "Bring her."

The keeper of the royal attire disappeared through a door and returned moments later. Etesia, wearing a high-necked maidenly gown, inclined her chin just so as she entered the chamber. Her pale blue eyes flashed to the scantily dressed woman sprawled on the floor. The beautifully aging Etesia kneeled down to the woman and applied a silk kerchief to the bloodied lip.

"Mother Windseer!" Etesia half turned and felt the king's nearness, the heavy breathing, his manliness towering over her. "You wish to see me?"

She stood up with flowing grace. "I'm here on an informal matter-"

"Indeed?"

She nodded submissively. "I'd like to speak about your future: the future of our land."

He returned a thin, half-lidded gaze.

"My lord, there was once a keen optimism that gemmed your eye." She looked remorsefully down at the groaning mistress. "What happened to that young man?"

He glanced away from Etesia, his breathing slow and measured, and his eyes avoiding hers.

"Is it Helene...? You still mourn your queen?" she asked with a deep, reverential bow, a kind of calculated gesture to reassure the king that despite the audaciousness of her probing he was still lord and ruler. "Two years is long enough for any man in the prime of life to grieve-"

"Fate made me a widower, and Helene will never be replaced. So be it. But I'm still a king, still a father."

"Yet you've grown distant from Miranda. She needs her father more than ever. The princess spends all her days with nursemaids while her father spends his with whor-" she cleared her throat "-with ladies of the court."

"Now you're giving counsel on how I should raise my child!" His knuckles bulked up, he visibly trembled. "Isn't it enough that you wind-devils forever stick your nose into matters of the king, and now you-" He threw his hands up. "Ugh!"

Glancing uneasily down at the bloodied whore, Etesia said, "Forgive me, but the sisterhood is concerned for its king. Windseer disciples pray nightly to the Tapestry for the mending of your heart. It's in the best interest of the land that you recapture your lost happiness-"

"The sisterhood even consults the cloth," he said with a disgusted curl of his lip, "in matters of my heart? I'm sick to bloody death of the Tapestry and its disciples meddling in my affairs. Tell me, do you check with the cloth if I break wind in the wrong direction?"

Etesia's pale, egg-shaped face tightened. "The Great Weaver fashioned the Treaty of the Cloth so our warring nations could know peace-"

"Yet I've watched the King-Seer Council reduce the kingdom of my ancestors to an irrelevant constitutional monarchy. I long for the age of swords and knights, not windseers and their breezy prophecies. That would bring me happiness."

"Save your good Lordship," said the wardrobe keeper, who was sometimes known to give advice on matters other than fashion, "but the pact between your family and Lady Etesia's sisterhood has held the land steady for four hundred years." The king flipped a shoulder. "Should you ... complicate the alliance, the Great Weaver will punish us-"

"Poppycock!"

"But too many died when the sisterhood and the royal ancestors last fought over the Forever Heights." The young king looked stupidly at him. "If you break the treaty, my lord, you spit in the face of the Great Weaver."

"The King-Seer Council is an imperative for the peace," added Etesia, drawing herself up, her nose wrinkled with reined-in anger. "The Tapestry has hung undisturbed in the Wind Garden for centuries-"

"That thing's an old rag woven by windseer witches long dead." Etesia scoffed. "You glean your so-called prophecies from that cloth, and for hundreds of years wind-witches have duped king after king with false counsel." He gazed into Etesia's eyes. "You've used the cloth as a cloak of sorts, disguising your real intent: to one day usurp rule of the land. I'm no fool, old lady. You might've deceived my father, and the fathers before him, but you won't pull the Tapestry over my eyes."

"The treaty is-" She pursed her lips. "The treaty is set in cloth. The Tapestry is the treaty."

"Too long windseers have interfered with the wisdom of kings-"

"What you're suggesting would be an ill-advised action, your kingship," said the wardrobe keeper, bowing his head to avoid the king's burning gaze.

The king drew up his hand, made a fist, and swore an oath as if swearing over a relic. "I hereby declare the King-Seer Council dissolved." He turned his dark, brooding eyes on Etesia. "The treaty is no more."

And there was a low boom from the earth beneath them, a reverberation through all the stone floors and walls of the castle. Bells rang. A voice cried from afar:

"The Tapestry has fallen! The Tapestry has fallen!" The alarm was cried out by many voices until the air itself thrummed with a kind of doomsday drone. Etesia fainted. The wardrobe keeper caught her in his arms and eased her onto the floor, fanning her with the whore's fan.

"Leave her alone, you idiot, and get my sword! I wish to see this fallen tapestry."

The wardrobe keeper rested Etesia on a settee and then dashed off, returning with a long sword and a fur-trimmed cape of royal blue.

"Hurry up, man!"

The servant fumbled over the pewter buttons of the cape and then handed over the sword, which the king slid into a sheath. "Your helmet, sire?"

The king shook his head no and then turned to a groggy Etesia. "Leave my kingdom, Mother Windseer, or I'll have you and your disciples tried for witchery." He ripped open the door and stormed away with a ringing of metal against stone.

"Our young king has surely brought woe to the land," said the wardrobe keeper, breathing a tearful sigh.

"Let it be sewn," Etesia intoned, her chest beginning to heave at the thought of the fallen cloth.

~*~

The king stampeded across the domestic hall, kicking up greasy floor rushes, and into the buttery where he backhanded a platter of goblets across the floor. He put the foot to a stack of bread plates and charged through an emptied kitchen. He punched open the door to the scullery where kitchen hands had vacated their posts. Cowards, he thought. The alarm of bells had probably sent the entire staff into hiding.

He barged into the Wind Garden and found a circle of windseer disciples wailing melodiously over their fallen tapestry, which was piled up on the ground. The garden was enclosed by an open-air colonnade festooned with vines and blue windflowers, the petals of which begun to sigh as if the sun had set, yet the sun still shone bright. Wind-dials and chimes hovered motionlessly. Saliva formed round the king's mouth as he thought to slaughter the women who had bedevilled his reign.

"Steward!" Within moments, the house steward arrived, clenching the staff of his office in both hands.

"Highness?"

The king levelled his sword at the disciples. "Seize them." The steward's old eyes thinned at the king's order. "Do as I say!"

"Guards!" cried the castle steward, knocking the butt of the staff three times on the stone floor. "Guards!"

The king sneered at the pathetic mewling noise made by the windseers over the cloth that had hung for centuries in their garden. "Take them to the cells. The very sight of them makes my armour crawl."

The steward bowed as low as his old back would permit. "My lord, this is a grave order-"

"Don't question. Just do." The king brushed the tips of his fingers over the hilt of the sword. "I want them all, including Etesia, rounded up. The Treaty of the Cloth is no more. This rug," he said, glaring at the piled up tapestry on the floor, "has proven to be nothing but a fancy wall hanging-"

At that moment, just as the king drew breath to give another order, he heard a shrill cry cutting through the noise of the grieving windseers:

"Help ... help Miranda!"

His eyes flashed to the Southwest, and he mouthed his daughter's name: "Miranda?"

He toppled the old steward as he rushed through the garden, forsaking its winding, leisurely path for a more direct course over sacred flowerbeds to a nearby walkway, which led to the courtyard. Outside, he crashed through panicked crowds, bowled over peasants, trampled goats and children, and yet he still heard the woman's piercing cry:

"Miranda!"

His muscles went slack. "Marshal!" With armour slowing him, he lumbered across the courtyard, the point of his sword dragging like a dead limb in the mud. "My horse!"

The marshal rushed out from the stable. "Sire, Doygen is not saddled-"

"Bring him now!" Moments later the marshal returned with a large-chested black gelding, a groomsman struggling to buckle the throat lash of the bridle as the horse was led out. Sheathing his sword, the king climbed with a boost onto the bare back of Doygen. He then drove the spikes of his spurred heels into the horse's flank, gorging it with its own blood. "Hyah! Hyah!"

Down through the gates the king rode, his cape snapping in the wind as he bolted his hunting horse along the short trail to the sea. Its hooves thundered across the royal burial grounds, tearing up the grassy mounds, one of which housed Miranda's mother Helene. His black hair streamed on the salty air as he sped towards the seashore with its throbbing waves and hissing blowholes. The entire shoreline was fringed with fog.

He wheeled his horse but couldn't see past the haze stretching up the coast. Sea spray exploded into the air and sprinkled sweat-like on his brow. A woman shrieked from somewhere near by. Doygen broke into full career.

The king heard the thunder of surf crashing over the rocks. He tasted salt on his lips. The haze parted with a gust of wind, and the young father came suddenly upon his dread.

His heart clenched at the sight of Miranda's caretaker kneeling alone in the grass, rocking back and forth, wringing her hands. "Where is she?!" The woman pointed to the sea.

Terror ripped his voice to shreds as he tried but failed to call Miranda's name. He heaved his armoured bulk off the horse and crashed with a metallic clunk on the ground. Doygen reared up and strings of blood hung off its flanks. Then the thing bolted, kicking its legs out as if to cast off the injuries caused by the king's brutal spurring.

He clambered towards the cliff, stumbling and tripping as though he were in one of those dreams where legs are rooted to the earth and refuse to move. He fell to the ground by the cliff, his gaze flashing over the rocks below. He found his voice again when his eyes found his daughter.

"Hold on, Mira'," he said. "Papa's here."

Miranda clung to the stump of a prickly shrub in the side of the cliff, which was treacherous with jutting crags. Her body swayed effortlessly in the wind, her pretty, white dress torn and her silk scarf tangled in the branches of a nearby bush. Miranda's wild staring eyes barely registered her father's presence.

He reached down ... inched closer. He stretched each limb to its end, but he was a knight in armour. Carefully, he jammed his spiked boots into the earth, braced himself, and made a grab for Miranda's hand.

He caught her by her wrist. He leaned closer to the prickly shrub to gain leverage but a thorn raked him across the head, splitting his brow to the bone. His jaws locked. He hissed his pain through clenched teeth.

Blood from his forehead streamed down his face. He tried blinking the redness away and jerking his head side to side, but he couldn't clear his vision. Blood spilled down his outstretched arm, leaking over the metal joins of his gauntlet, and onto Miranda's hand. His grip turned slippery, and her hand seemed to grow smaller and smaller in his until he held her by the fingertips only.

~*~

The blunted sound of her body striking the rocks below hit him like a battering ram to the chest. Tiny limbs huddled together, foetal-like, Miranda's face turned towards the sky. Blonde tangles of hair clung to the boulder like a knot of seaweed. He thought of scratching his eyes out.

He climbed to his feet, wiped the blood from his eyes, glanced around for the nursemaid, and went to her.

"The wind took 'er, milord!" The caretaker dropped to her knees and kissed his feet with her teary, snot-rimmed mouth. "A cursed wind came from there-" she pointed back at the castle "-and blew out across them waves."

"And it's where you must go." He pulled his feet free of her clawing, grovelling embrace, drew his sword, raised it, and brought it down across her neck in a blinding arc. He picked up her loose head and threw it like a discus into the sea. "It's where you must go."

And the king dropped knee by knee and stared across the sea, over the red rolling waves. His blood-washed eyes stood paralysed to the pupil, for he had watched the unthinkable....

~*~

A breeze came over the lowlands and talked in whispers, telling things to those who could read the wind. High on a craggy outcrop, under a cut moon, a robed lady sat cross-legged in front of two linden trees. Looming in the space between the trees was a woven tapestry, grey and gloomy in complexion. The tapestry hung stiffly in the branches the way rawhide is stretched and hung to dry.

With eyes closed, the lady raised her head just so and breathed the air. The tapestry did not flinch in the coming breeze, not even a rippling on its stony front. The woman drew her hood off and listened to the sigh of the air. She heard the rumours of the future.

Flames from her campfire danced and waved, reached out to the breeze as it sailed through, and behind the scouting breeze came the Proper Wind, as she had foreseen. The wind fingered her long red hair. It tugged at her robe, brushed her bosom, perhaps even tried prying her legs apart. The Proper Wind gusted to and fro, and her campfire sputtered, amber sparks bursting into the air as if the fire itself had coughed. She knew the wind was not really in an amorous or playful mood. It had come to reopen the way.

The tapestry shimmered. Its threads of stone loosened. The complexion of the thing changed from a dull grey to greens, blues, and golden yellows. It appeared to regain consciousness as wind played with it, and just as the tapestry awakened, the Proper Wind wisped away with a soft purring. She watched it tumble down the slopes of the hill, away into the desolate lowlands. She gave a thankful nod and turned back to the revivified tapestry.

Her hazel eyes did not stir with the peculiar transformation of the cloth. Her hands did not clench nor her breathing quicken. She had foretold this moment, read it in the night air. The tapestry heaved and writhed as if it were a mother in the throes of childbirth, and from the centre of the tapestry, a metal glove emerged.

Mist hung over the cloth, which now held still, and through it came a gauntleted hand holding a sword. Then the sabaton of an armoured boot poked through followed by a helmet and breastplate. She heard the clacking of articulated metal plates sliding in and out of position as a blood-smeared knight stood half-emerged from the tapestry.

Dark hair hung raggedly beneath the neck guard of the helmet, while alternating patches of firelight and shadow swam over the metal face. The knight took the helm off, and his hair flopped down in blood-coated knots to his shoulders. Blood oozed like candle grease from a vicious slash across his forehead. Young, strong, he strode from the tapestry, which dropped with a 'flump' onto the ground with his emergence onto the soil. The woman watched un-amazed as his black hair thinned and turned silvery white.

Youthfulness withered as a multitude of scars grew over his face, turning it into something deformed, grotesque. His teeth loosened or just disappeared entirely. The loose-fitting skin of old age now hung over everything that was once young and virile. A crimson tear streaked down the knight's wrinkled cheek, because the chance to make amends in the past, the opportunity to right a wrong, had again escaped him.

"My King." The young lady bowed and then stood to face him. Her pale, soft complexion was somewhat hardened by despairing eyes. "I'm sorry to see you again, my lord."

His hands trembled, one of which barely held to the sword, and he shuffled forward with the bent posture of a feeble peasant. "Fate will have its way," he said with a faint wheezing, "always its way." He flicked his chin at the tapestry. "Fold it, windseer. Put it away. I can't bear its sight."

"But the Proper Wind may return tonight," she said, "or by morning. The wind's in a giving mood. We shouldn't waste it-"

"Bah!"

"Sire," she began softly, "I understand your pain."

How could you, he thought.

"I mean to say I can understand your disappointment. But my lord, the Tapestry should be raised again."

"Let it rot!"

"But if the wind returns..." She tried holding his gaze but his severely stooping posture, his heavy heart, compelled his gaze to the ground. "You can't risk losing another chance to go back just because you're feeling ... let down."

Using his sword as a walking stick, he turned his back on her and stumped away to the campfire. The bottom of the windseer's cloak fluttered as she strode after him.

"We've camped forty nights on this hill, this bump of a place," he said, huddled by the fire. "My rendezvous with Mira' is continually frustrated by- by you windseers." He threw her a backhand.

Paleness went out of her cheeks. "I'm not some knave of a fortune teller who makes predictions by studying the flight of birds. The Proper Wind is ... frenzied in its activities. It just so happens, that it's in a giving mood right now, and when the Wind feels this way, it's as easy for me to read as it is a nursery rhyme."

He leaned to one side and let the weight of his armour pull him to the ground. "How many generations of windseers must walk with me before the curse is broken: you, your mother Lisaya, her mother Etesia? How many times do I have to enter through the tapestry and go back to that day ... only to fail ... only to fail over and over? I can't do it anymore, windseer. I can't keep going back only to have my heart ripped out again and again. I'm damned," he said, "to relive my greatest horror until the end of days."

She kneeled by his side, touched his cold metal shoulder. "Please, don't do this..."

"Then tell me what I can do differently next time to save her. Take a faster horse, carry a lighter sword, and shed my armour? How do I get to my daughter before she dies?"

"I can't answer for you, my king."

"Ach! You and your sisterhood!"

"It's not the fault of windseers," she said with uplifted hands, her wide sleeves slipping to reveal the scrawniest arms. "This is your quest, my lord, not the windseers'. By rescuing Miranda, you rescue the land from hardship, and you restore the Tapestry to its primal function: that of Treaty of the Cloth."

"So you say," he said blithely. "So I've heard from others before you." He spoke of Lisaya, her mother, and Etesia, her grandmother, both windseers and both now deceased. The olden king had outlived them all. He had outlived his own grave.

Her jaws clicked, but she curbed her impulse to windblast him into that overdue grave. She must endure him for the sake of the Tapestry, and, ultimately, for the good of the once fruitful land.

Over seventy years gone, she thought, and he still blames the sisterhood for his troubles.

He stared into the distance at the skin-and-bones province, which was once his living kingdom. The dry, fallow land was tight with rigor, forsaken seventy years ago by its people when the young king broke the Treaty of the Cloth.

"Sire," she said with a breezy, uplifting voice, "although the treaty was broken, your bloodline and mine are bound to it." She breathed a sigh as if to give herself time to find her thoughts. "If the treaty can't be restored then the land will remain broken by drought and desolation."

"Forgive me," he said with a solemn shaking of his head, "but I'm afraid-" He jerked his head sideways. "I fear Miranda will always be just beyond my grasp."

"Sleep sire. I'll raise the Tapestry." She glided into a deep, respectful bow, and the king felt something like a warm summer wind brush over him. Perhaps a supple breeze rather than common blood flowed in her veins. She pulled her hood forward and walked away.

"You'll wake me up," he shouted after her, "if the Wind comes back?"

Nodding, she drifted into the darkness beyond the firelight.

The knight pulled his helmet back on and then tried rolling onto his side but couldn't. He kept his hand on the sword in readiness and drew no blanket for warmth. His eyes stared heavenward, to where he imagined a shape in the night sky, a human constellation—his beloved Miranda.

"Hold on, little Mira'," he whispered. "Papa's here."

~*~

Frost lay like icing over the hilltop, and the linden trees seemed to lean into the tapestry for warmth. The knight's few remaining teeth chattered with the morning cold. He rose with the creak of metal and the cracking of old bones. But up he got, and he and his walking-stick sword made slow passage towards the tapestry.

His battle sword now had a very different purpose. Forged in forgotten times, and passed down to him from ancestor kings warring against the windseer sisterhood, it had been many years since it cut the air in search of blood. He planted its tip in the ground and leaned exhausted on the hilt. The wind reader was kneeling by the tapestry, her hands cupped in front of her face.

"Has the Wind spoken to you?"

"No, my lord," she replied, rising to greet him.

He removed his helm. "Then I must appeal to my god." He pulled off his glove, handed it to the windseer. "Hit me."

She lowered her chin and shook her head no.

He pushed the glove closer. "There are sins that blacken my soul. I'm obliged to atone for them. Now hit me."

She put an unwilling hand out, took the glove, and struck him. Blood spurted from his lip, yet he did not cower from the gauntlet, as he had not in seven decades of atoning. These self-imposed beatings had turned his face into a ghastly thing. Small folds of white scar tissue covered his face like maggots crowding a dead thing....

~*~

Three windless days followed and the tapestry hung limply on the hilltop. The seer had kept vigil night and day by the cloth, but on the fourth day, prayer stopped. With one flowing movement, she was on her feet, her hood thrown back, eyes glaring.

"Take cover, my king! A rogue comes!"

It ripped open the still air, rising out of the flatlands with a shrieking howl, gathering grey, churning clouds before it. The knight's hand gripped the hilt, and he set his feet firm on the ground. And the rogue wind came upon the hill like the fist of a god, bending the linden trees close to snapping, yet the tapestry would not yield. The king's silver hair flew in a webbed swirl.

Winds pressed him down to his knees, his face stretched into a fit of agony as he waved a fist at the heavens, and then his expression became one of sorrow, the eyelids drooping as he gazed longingly at the ground. Sadness and agony flowed on and off his face, for his thoughts were always with Miranda.

"Grant me a solution, Great God Almighty!" But the wind grew so loud, so fierce, that not even the knight heard his own plea.

As if suddenly bored with mortals, the rogue flew away with a wailing cry that made his skin crawl. Dust slipped off the knight in sheets as he stood up knee by knee.

"Fold the Tapestry!" he shouted with a hacking voice. "We're leaving."

"But-" She choked on her tears for him, or on the dust still clogging the air.

He rubbed the long, singular scar across his brow. "The memory of Miranda's death is like a dagger always pushing through my brain-"

The cloth shimmered.

Another wind came to them in unheralded silence. It tickled the limbs of the linden trees and gave the tapestry a gentle awakening.

"Look, my lord."

The tightly threaded face of the cloth loosened as the Proper Wind tumbled through the air, once again bringing hope to the king's old face. He gripped the sword tighter and tugged his helmet on.

"Lady o' the Wind, I hope that we never set eyes on each other again; for if we do, I'm sure to have failed my quest once more."

"Even in her death, my lord, you have proven a devoted father-"

"Mira's not dead! She's..." He pulled a calming breath. "Pray that I, a grieving father, widower king, servant of the Lord, do not relive that dreadful moment. Wish it for me, wind watcher."

It occurred to her (and not for the first time) that should the king finally succeed in amending the tragic events of seven decades ago, the land's fate and that of its people would undergo drastic, immeasurable change. So drastic, she may not even be born if he were to succeed at altering the past. But the windseer was duty bound to the tapestry and to the rebirth of the land and could not dwell on her private fears. Yet in the deepest, darkest places of her innermost being, she might have wished for his failure.

He reached through the billowing tapestry and disappeared into the world of the past....

~*~

There was no measure of time, or time that was measurable, whenever he went back. The windseer knew nothing of the passing or recounting of time because she would place herself in a semiconscious, meditative state during the king's sorties into the past. So she was neither shocked nor surprised when her eyes instinctively flicked open upon his return.

He stepped out of the tapestry and removed his helmet. Before the windseer's eyes, the knight's youthful skin fractured in to wrinkles, and the old scars bubbled anew on his face. His black hair turned grey and wispy. Nothing had changed. He had not altered the past. He had not been forgiven.

"Fold it up, windseer." He stumped away.

The young windseer folded the tapestry and carried it across her arms to where the knight sat slumped by the fire. The king of old gazed across the dormant lands, his bottom lip trembling.

"I failed her ... again."

She put the tapestry on the ground and came to his side. A tear slid from her eye as she reached a comforting hand out to him, but even the breezy touch of a windseer is sometimes not tender enough.

"I'm doomed to watch her fall from the cliff time after time." He shook his head side to side. "It has no end!"

"You should rest, my lord."

"I need to speak. I have to-" His whole body shuddered as if old age took another bite out of him. "I've never spoken of that day, not to anyone."

He left out no detail. She would know his every thought and action of that day. To her he confessed many sins....

~*~

His eyes had grown grey after he recounted the tragic event.

"What should I do differently next time? I think I have the answers but whenever I go back into the cloth I somehow forget ... I become that angry young man again." He clawed at his silver locks for a solution.

The windseer tugged her hood forward. Her face fell under shadow.

"I've failed a thousand and more times to save her," he whispered. "What would another thousand chances mean? I might as well try to swallow the sea in one thirsty sitting, because Fate will always have its way."

And nothing more was said.

With only the rubbing sound of cicadas heard, a windless calm settled on the hill. Night became day, which turned into night again, and they remained hunched over the fire. The seer and the king looked into the twirling flames but never to each other. On the evening of the third day she sat bolt upright like a watchman alerted by a sound.

"Sire, nothing you can do will bring her back."

He squinted at her meaning. That was the last thing he wanted to hear from someone.

"Of course," she whispered to herself, and slapped her forehead for not thinking of it sooner. "There's not a thing you can do, my lord, to save Miranda."

He just stared into the fire and listened to the crackling of flames rather than the pessimism of the windseer. She suddenly rolled her hood back and gazed out at the night, tense and listening, watching the horizon.

"You should rest, sire."

He gave in without a blink and fell quietly to sleep; three days of wakefulness had taken its toll. The windseer again looked at the horizon. She cupped her hands over her face. Something other than the heat of fire warmed her glowing cheeks. Through her long red locks came a breeze, a scouting breeze. The Proper Wind was imminent.

She dropped to her knees and began unbuckling the various sections of the king's armour. Once she removed the last piece, she wrapped a blanket around him for warmth, and then kissed him on the head. He let out a snore.

"I'll do what you cannot, my lord."

Heaving the tapestry onto her shoulder, she moved to the lindens, which swayed with the coming of a Proper Wind....

~*~

The mistress looked at the eyes peering back at her through the helm's visor. She hid her face behind ostrich feathers, anticipating the king's knuckles yet wishing for a moment of intimacy; but she was the king's whore, and she was only one of many.

"Wardrobe Keeper!" cried the king, in a voice that seemed strained and broken.

Within moments, he arrived. Frowning at the king, who oddly wore his helmet indoors, the man said, "At hand, sire."

"Dismiss the gentlewoman here."

"Do you have a cold, sire? You don't sound well." The king said no, and the wardrobe keeper bowed. Escorting the mistress away, he returned, and said, "You're wearing your helmet, sire. Will you need your sword?"

The king grunted a no and then turned awkwardly for the door, staggering a little as if drunk.

"Milord ... Etesia, Mother Windseer, requests an audience."

The king left without a word, striding along the passageway to the domestic hall, entering the smoky kitchen and nodding to cooks and bakers, the fruiterer, and the slaughterer too. They all bowed to their king.

"A sweet meat before supper, your highness?"

The king waved off the cook and pressed on through the scullery where boys scrubbed utensils, then passing by the Wind Garden with its tapestry hovering a few feet above the ground. A hooded disciple bowed as the king swept by, but the blue windflowers kept their heads high, their petals alert for prophetic breezes that might enter the garden.

Marketers jostled and barked out their wares in the courtyard, chickens clucked, geese squawked, children wrestled and played.

"Sire!" called the steward, who arbitrated a dispute between cheesemongers. "Are you jousting today?"

The king just pressed on and came to the stables. "Marshal, my fastest horse."

"Her hoof needs picking, sire-"

"I'll be gentle with her."

The stable master soon returned with a chestnut mare, a groomsman struggling to buckle the throat lash of the bridle as the horse was led out. The marshal and the groomsman boosted the king onto the horse's bare back.

"And marshal, unclip my spurs."

He removed them and wheeled the horse round. At that moment, just as the king galloped away bareback, the marshal heard a shrill cry from afar:

"Help, help, Miranda!"

"Hyah! Hyah!" bellowed the king, whose horse thundered through the gates and down to the sea.

Horse and rider skirted the burial ground, disturbing none of its sacred barrows. I swear I'm ahead of Fate. The king broke through the fog and came abruptly on the scene, dismounting the horse with equestrian grace, and then scrambled to the cliff edge. The horse, fatigued but not injured and bloodied, remained to graze on the grass.

The king saw the nursemaid reaching down to Miranda, but she could not quite grasp the little hand. Hearing the rider’s approach, the woman scampered away to make room for the king, who dropped to the ground with a clanging of metal.

Miranda hung on with bloody fingers, her body swaying in the wind. Panting, the king reached down, braced against the earth and made a grab for Miranda's hand, taking hold of her wrist. Got you!

The king leaned closer to the prickly shrub to gain leverage, and a thorn raked across the helmet, snapping harmlessly on the visor. With all the zeal and might of angels and demons fighting over heaven and earth, the king roared, the king pulled Miranda to safety.

"Got you," said a soft, almost squeaking voice from behind the helmet face.

The nursemaid frowned. "Sire...?" She took a step forward but then hesitated and withdrew, letting the king and princess bask in the moment.

The king hugged a sobbing, shivering Miranda, and then lifted a hand to the helmet. "Papa's here." This voice was also soft, but almost motherly, as the helm was slowly removed.

Long black hair flopped down onto the armoured shoulders with the removal of the helmet. "Papa's here," came a manlier voice from a weeping, laughing, near hysterical young father, king of all the land.

And at that very instant, away in some alternate future, where a campsite was set up on a craggy hilltop; a tapestry hung between two trees; an old king had made sorties into the past; and a young windseer had held vigil ... that place and time never was. She, the windseer, would never be born.