Two days before. He'd lost a day.
Insects still buzzed around the corpse of Malbawn. Two of the creature's limbs rose at twisted angles. The breeze whistled across their hollow interiors.
Dennis flexed his aching muscles. More had been at risk than a day of fever dreams.
He looked at the cows, nestled for the most part into bowers their bodies had flattened out of the jungle's edge. Their jaws moved in quiet contentment, chewing cuds of the grass they'd cropped in the cooler hours of morning.
"You know, Chester...?" the youth said. "If I'd brought a pail, I bet I could get some fresh milk. I don't like depending on the—you know, food in Rakastava."
"I have brought a pail, Dennis," the robot said. He reached into the battered shopping bag from Emath and came out with a large bowl of the same smooth, brown material as Rakastava's surface.
Dennis smiled at his friend. "We will gather some fruit, Chester," he said. "And some nuts, may be. And then we will try to find out whether to milk a cow is the same as a goat, and whether I remember to do even that."
He paused. "But first," he said, looking at the gloomy, cave-like entrance of Malbawn's hut, "we will look in the mirror and I will see my father."
When Dennis entered the hut immediately after his battle, he'd been keyed up by the fighting and nervously ready to react to any new horror.
The second time he saw the interior, it was dingy and depressing; nothing more. He couldn't imagine anything willingly living in such squalor, not even a creature as foul as Malbawn.
But he couldn't imagine people willingly living in Rakastava, either; and he was willing to live there himself for a time, with its food that had no flavor and its air that had no life.
Dennis thought of Aria and said, "Mirror, show me my father."
The surface blurred and cleared into the remembered brilliance of Emath Palace.
Hale was on his throne in the audience hall. He'd aged more than the few weeks since Dennis saw him last.
A deputation of villagers, leading citizens in their robes and heavy golden chains, stood before the throne. They were angry and, though no sound came through the mirror's glint, it was obvious that several were shouting at once while they shook their fists at the king.
Nothing like that had ever happened in Emath.
"What...?" Dennis said, more to himself than to Chester.
The robot responded anyway. "When a fool refuses the service he owes," Chester quoted, "he will lose his goods to another."
Parol stood at the foot of the throne, facing the delegation with a set smile. A merchant whose cheeks were as ruddy as his thick velvet robe turned from Hale and pointed toward the apprentice wizard.
Of course. The villagers were demanding that the perimeter be expanded—and that meant replacing Parol with a competent wizard.
Parol's face didn't change. He gestured, and a phantom formed in the air. It had smokey bones and the head of a pig, also in shadowed outline. It stepped toward the delegation.
Villagers backed, stumbling on their unfamiliar formal garments. Then they turned and ran. Parol's expression was the unchanged. Behind him, Hale covered his face with his hands.
"I don't want to see this!" Dennis shouted. His words were still ringing in the air when Emath Palace became the gray reflection of a hut and a young man staring back from the glass with an anguished look on his face.
"I don't understand why that's happening," Dennis whispered.
"Your father was a king because the sea hag made him a king, Dennis," his companion said. "Now he must be a king on his own—or no king at all..."
Chester's tentacle squeezed Dennis' hand.
Dennis hadn't looked at himself since he awakened. The ointment had done a wonderful job of healing his wounds. Pink welts marked the tan of his skin, but he'd expected deep scars at the least...
Dennis' left hand rose and tugged at his ear as he watched the mirror. He'd been sure that Malbawn had torn it off with his first blow, but the ear was fine, just twinges of pain in it as in almost every muscle of his body.
"Show me the Princess Aria," he said softly, and the mirror shimmered in response...
She had set the bracelets and jeweled combs from her hair on the table beside her bed, but she still wore the crystal pendant. As Dennis watched, she took off the dress she'd been wearing when she and Conall visited his room.
When Dennis had insulted them both; and they'd deserved it, Dennis knew they'd deserved it... but they'd been coming to check his condition, and their faces from his delirium were surely memories of earlier visits.
She tossed the dress toward the cabinet into which it vanished like fog melting before the sun.
Aria wore nothing beneath the dress. The fine hairs on her body gleamed like liquid gold as she stepped into the tub. Steam rose as her slim legs stirred the surface.