He's Gone

Illumina distanced herself from the Prince once they were settled in Nina's village. He took to spending a lot of time with Taddeo, either learning to ski or hunting. Nina hovered round the edges of the relationship between Taddeo and the Prince, unwilling to impose herself but also unwilling to just leave them alone. She would stand on the porch of the village hall and watch them as they walked off into the surrounding countryside with a closed and anxious expression on her face.

Several times Illumina tried talking to her but to no avail. Nina would not discuss anything about herself or the Prince other than the events that the three of them had been involved in. Even there she was cautious, offering nothing more than a superficial participation in any discussion that took place.

Illumina was reluctant to pry beyond the limits of what Nina herself would say, so she avoided asking questions about Nina, although there were people in the village who had known her when she was a child and through the period when the King and Queen took refuge in Loro. Inevitably, in the long winter evenings, stories were told and more bits of information came her way.

She was sitting next to an old woman one evening after dinner. The woman looked at her curiously as though wondering what she knew. "I hadn't given a thought to the Prince and the Queen for nearly twenty years before he and Nina came down into the valley together again. What a strange thing that they should be together again after all these years. She's been living in the Margrave's hall hasn't she?" Illumina confirmed this, adding some details about her relationship to Nina and then about the recent trip to the King's City and the circumstances that led Nina to accompany her.

"So she took to nursing him again did she? You know she had a child and lost him, literally lost him. The King and Queen had gone off to the Winter Lands after some negotiation or other. They left the Prince here with Nina. She nursed him and her own child when she could. I don't think the King and Queen even knew she had a child. Well, I suppose they must have, given she was nursing theirs, but I'm quite sure they never took any interest."

Illumina could feel her pulse racing at the prospect of what the woman was going to say. She almost interrupted her, urging her to stop talking round the subject and get to the point. "It wasn't more than a few days after the King and Queen left. There was a scare over some raiders from the Winter Lands. Times were bad. There were small groups of bad men all over Loro. Raiding for food and anything else they could get. They couldn't get through the passes down to the lowlands you see, so they were all slowly starving to death. Anyway, there was a scare and all the women and children took off into the forest. We were camping a good way into the forest by the forest river. A broad steady stream it is there. One day Nina comes screaming back to the camp, saying she had lost her child. She put him down in his basket by the side of the river while she nurses the other one and next thing you know he's gone. I think she must have fallen asleep. A nursing woman will do that you know. The river is fed by the melting snow up in the mountains and rises and falls with the warmth of the day. I'm sure what happened was the river took him. He just floated away."

Illumina found herself shaking with the horror of it; a child lost to the river, left to who knows what appalling fate. She sat staring into the distance for a long time. The woman spoke again, "In some ways the worst of it was the Queen; when she came back, she accused Nina of neglecting the Prince, said he looked sick. Somehow, she found out about Nina losing her own child. Incredibly, she threw her out, saying she was a useless mother and so no good to her as a nurse. Can you imagine the cruelty of it?" The woman shook her head, "Nina was beside herself. I think she took to the Prince in lieu of her own child. When he was taken away from her, it was as though she had lost her child all over again. I think she went quite out of her mind for a time. Then your mother heard about it. There was little love lost between her and the Queen. She had Nina brought to the Margrave's hall and gave her the care (though not the nursing) of her own children, you among them I imagine. It's a sad story, one that is not often told, you can understand why. You know Nina has never been back. This is the first time. It must be hard for her, even after all these years."

Illumina took to walking with Nina. Persuading her to just walk around the village or up into the surrounding hills. She was careful to avoid the forest or the forest river. It was cold and walking was hard work so they never went far. They spoke little and mostly on indifferent subjects around the Margrave's household when Illumina was a child.

Illumina found herself thinking over the various things she had seen of Nina and the Prince. While the old woman's story helped a great deal in understanding what caused Nina to behave as she did, it still seemed to Illumina that some things didn't quite fit. She couldn't help thinking back to when the Prince fell through the ice, Nina moaning, 'My boy, my boy after all this.' There was something in Nina which didn't make sense so far as Illumina was concerned. She was willing to admit that it might be just her own ignorance of what could become of someone suffering through such dire circumstances but it still made no sense to her why Nina would become so attached to the Prince.

To follow this thread in the story go to: A Mystery

The next section to read is: Dodging Arrows

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