His Majesty's Elephant by Judith Tarr Page B

thought of that? What if they get hold of me, and use me against him?”
    â€œNonsense,” said Kerrec. “They’ve got Gisela. What do they need you for? You’re a coward, that’s all. Your father needs you, and what can you think of to do but run away and leave him to it?”
    â€œ I’m a coward?” Rowan sucked in her breath. The rest of it came out by itself, without any help from her. “Oh, you would know, wouldn’t you, Kerrec of the Bretons?”
    His face was quite pale and quite still, and quite terrifying. He would kill her, she thought.
    She was not afraid. It was fascinating to see that there was so much to him after all. So much fire. So much rage, so pure that it was white.
    It transformed him. Maybe this was what the Basques had seen of his cousin Roland at Roncesvalles, before they died at his hands.
    Then he moved, and he was Kerrec again, a half-fledged boy-man in a ragged shirt, with an elephant standing behind him. “One would think,” he said coldly, “that I would know. Wouldn’t I?”
    Shame burned her cheeks. It started with Kerrec, but it ran through everything else, till she would have gladly died.
    â€œThere now,” he said in his soft Breton lilt. “You were afraid; you had every right to be. It’s terrifying, after all, to be so strong, and never to have known. And everybody teaching you that it’s an ill thing, and mocking your mother’s memory. Of course you ran away.”
    That brought her back to life again, and temper too. “I don’t need your sympathy!”
    â€œThen you’ll get it unneeded,” said Kerrec. “If you go back now, people won’t ask too many questions. We’ve been out exercising the Elephant, haven’t we, and your pony needed a run. Is that breakfast in your saddlebag? We could eat it, you know, and be convincing.”
    â€œI hate you,” said Rowan, but without force.
    â€œThat’s better than indifference,” said Kerrec.
    She would never best him in a war of words. She did not know why she had to keep trying. Stubbornness, she supposed. She had enough of that for a troop of runaway princesses.

Seven
    Rowan got a tongue-lashing for running out unannounced, but it was no worse than usual, and everybody settled down soon enough. They had more than her delinquencies to occupy them, with the palace still so full of people. And the Elephant’s house was ready at last, which she had been too preoccupied to notice.
    Abul Abbas would not escape so easily now. Instead of the stable with its open courtyards and its gates that were always seeing people come and go, he was given a place in the big half-wooded park of the Emperor’s menagerie, with a tall wooden building for him to sleep in. The gates here were barred, and the most dangerous or the most flighty creatures lived in cages: the lion, the leopard, the birds that sang and the birds that were merely brilliant to look at.
    Abul Abbas had his house with its great door that could be barred to keep him in or left open to let the air blow through, with his own bit of yard to walk in. Sometimes he came out into the wider space of the park, with Kerrec riding on his neck.
    Children were always asking and grown noblemen demanding to ride in the litter that was made for the Elephant’s back, and once in a while Kerrec allowed it. He was growing princely, was Kerrec, for being the Elephant’s keeper.
    Rowan stayed away from both of them. She cherished a conviction that if she did not speak to them, did not look at them, did not think about them, the magic in her would go away.
    And so it seemed to. She did not even talk to her mother’s memory. She was as close to just-Rowan as the Princess Theoderada could be, going to lessons in the school, attending her father at dinner, stitching at her altar cloth.
    But Rowan did not ride her pony, who grew fat and bored in the pasture, and bit one of