A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham Page A

wait as an old man objects to the new tax being levied on every denizen who lives past the age of eighty, which is the king’s way of claiming as his own that which would otherwise be passed along to his subjects’ heirs.
    As you stand in line, you see that the queen sees you.
    She looks entirely natural on the throne, every bit as much as does her image on banners and mugs and key chains. She’s noticed you, but nothing changes in her expression. She listens with the customary feigned attention to the woman whose goats are sitting down to dinner with the family, to the man who doesn’t want his fortune sucked away before he dies. It’s widely known that these audiences with king and queen never produce results of any kind. Still, people want to come and be heard.
    As you wait, you notice the girl’s father, the miller (the former miller), seated among the members of court, in a three-cornered hat and ermine collar. He regards the line of assembled supplicants with a dowager aunt’s indignity; with an expression of superiority and sentimental piety—the recently bankrupt man who gambled with his daughter’s life, and happens, thanks to you, to have won.
    When your turn arrives, you bow to queen and king. The king nods his traditional, absentminded acknowledgment. His head might have been carved from marble. His eyes are ice-blue under the rim of his gem-encrusted crown. He might already be, in life, the stone version that will top his sarcophagus.
    You say, “My queen, I think you know what I’ve come for.”
    The king looks disapprovingly at his wife. His face bears no hint of question. He skips over the possibility of innocence. He only wonders what, exactly, it is she must have done.
    The queen nods. You can’t tell what’s going through her mind. She’s learned, apparently, during the past year, how to evince an expression of royal opacity, which she did not possess when you were spinning the straw into gold for her.
    She says, “Please reconsider.”
    You’re not about to reconsider. You might have considered reconsidering before you found yourself in the presence of these two, this tyrannical and ignorant monarch and the girl who agreed to marry him.
    You tell her that a promise was made. You leave it at that. She glances over at the king, and can’t conceal a moment of miller’s-daughter nervousness.
    She turns to you again. She says, “This is awkward, isn’t it?”
    You waver. You’re assaulted by conflicting emotions. You understand the position she’s in. You care for her. You’re in love with her. It’s probably the hopeless ferocity of your love that impels you to stand firm, to refuse her refusal—she who has on one hand succeeded spectacularly and, on the other, consented to what has to be, at best, a cold and brutal marriage. You can’t simply relent and walk back out of the room. You can’t bring yourself to be so debased.
    She doesn’t care for you, after all. You’re someone who did her a favor, once. She doesn’t even know your name.
    With that thought, you decide to offer a compromise.
    You tell her she has three days to guess your name, in the general spirit of her husband’s fixation on threes. If she can accomplish that, if she can guess your name within the next three days, the deal’s off.
    If she can’t …
    You do not of course say this aloud, but if she can’t, you’ll raise the child in a forest glade. You’ll teach him the botanical names of the trees, and the secret names of the animals. You’ll instruct him in the arts of mercy and patience. And you’ll see, in the boy, certain of her aspects—the great dark pools of her eyes, maybe, or her slightly exaggerated, aristocratic nose.
    The queen nods in agreement. The king scowls. He can’t, however, ask questions, not here, not with his subjects lined up before him. He