The Queen of Penesthelia and Firman The Brave 12
In the ship in the ice
There they stood at the world’s top, night falling, with the air about them growing colder and threatening to turn to liquid around them. The winds blew, and the sun began to vanish below the horizon, and in the dark, part of the sky sheets of fire danced high above, which, they say, come from the sun itself.
Firman the Brave knelt in the snow and the ice with his sword and clasped the hilt in gloves of fur, and he closed his eyes and imagined the face of Arsinoe, Queen of Penesthelia. He imagined her dark eyes and her fair hands and her long hair, and perceived that no matter how brave he might be, he could not outlast the cold, and that though he might think that it sounded like no challenge, that only told what he knew.
Here I shall lie and here I shall remain, he thought, forever more by a ship that fell out of the stars which also shall lie until the world is ended.
Then the lights from the sky seemed to descend upon them like a curtain of cold fire, and the sword gleamed with them, and they were laced on and around it, and flowed over the ship half buried in the ice. There was a great sigh, and a great shiver, and the ice cracked, and a door opened up, ice and snow falling with a sound of glass tinkling. There was light inside the ship, and a seat amid many controls such as one would expect in such a vessel, and in the seat lay a wooden box. Firman reached in and picked up the box and opened it and the silver cap lay inside on a cloth of velvet.
Firman the Brave stepped back, and he and his companions looked at the cap in the box, and with that the light went out in the ship, and the door closed, and the curtain of cold fire ascended back into the sky and disappeared, and the sun was gone, and Firman the Brave said, “We must also leave, or we die.”
Long, long they traveled, and cold, cold it was as they left the snow lands and the ice lands, and the lands where no stone or mountain could be seen, and found the long, deep cañon and came down into the lower lands to the vilaĝos that even the Queen of Penesthelia did not know, where they lingered for a while and got healing from those who had it of old, so fierce was the cold and so much they had suffered, that they nearly died and new toes had to be made for Firman and for the child and the dog, and his steed’s hooves had all but cracked.
When they were healed, they traveled south, leaving the riven red clifflands where winter fell and coming in time to the court of the Queen, where he met her. She sat upon her throne, with all that Firman had brought on her, gathered to her, and waiting upon her. He offered the box, which she opened, and the cap, which she removed from its velvet cloth and placed upon her head so that she could hear and speak clear to the farthest stars, if she so chose, in less time than it takes to tell about it.
So the sixth task was accomplished.
“Now,” she said, “it comes to the time of the seventh task that must be accomplished before I will we you, Firman the Brave of Ortrera.”
“Name the task,” he said, “and I shall do it as I have done them all before.”
“Very well,” she said. “We shall match riddle for riddle, three riddles I tell thee and thou shalt solve, and three that thou shalt tell me and I shall solve, and in the end, if thou defeatest me, Firman, then I shall marry thee, and if not, then so shalt thou suffer a cost greater than thou canst pay.”
“That sounds like no challenge,” said Firman the Brave,
“This only tells what you know,” the Queen of Penesthelia said, and she left his company.