"Why is he still alive?" Stella demanded as she saw hate as cold as black ice glistening in the eyes of the prisoner bound in the palace courtyard. "Hermann, you're a fool!"
"Don't use that tone on me, woman," the king replied. His tone was too querulous to be an order. "Anyway, you don't understand. His work is—"
Sparrow smiled at the queen.
King Hermann saw the mirrored expressions on their faces, his wife's and the smith's, and looked away quickly. "Get the loot brought in at once!" he shouted to the servants already unloading the baggage mammoths.
The evening sky was pale and streaked by high clouds that threatened an early snow.
"You're the one who doesn't understand, Stella," Hermann resumed, drawing strength from the protectively-wrapped bundles which slaves lifted from the baggage nets. "He's too valuable to lose."
"What did you bring for me, Father?" asked Miriam. The princess wore an ermine cape, clasped at the throat with gold and garnets. She flared it open with her elbows to display the gown beneath, scarlet silk brocaded with gold.
"Oh, there'll be wonders for you, darling," Hermann said. "Wait till we get things in—Bran! Don't do—"
The king shouted too late, though the twins rarely paid attention to commands anyway. The twins had stretched a boot thong at ankle height between them, in the path of the burden bearers. A wizened slave in rags tripped, grunted as he tried to catch his balance—
—and crashed forward on his bundle. Metal tinkled into junk despite the layers of deerhide.
"Hell take you!" Crowl shouted as he kicked the fallen slave. The slave tried to rise. Crowl kicked him again.
"I want my things now!" cried the princess.
The remainder of the slaves had frozen. They resumed moving, but they stepped well off the usual path in order to skirt the incident.
The twins had run away. Their laughter chirped from an alcove of the stone-built palace.
"You're a fool, Hermann," Queen Stella repeated with her eyes still locked with the smith's, "if you think a few baubles are worth the risk of leaving this one alive."
"Bring that battlesuit over here at once!" the king shouted. "At once!"
"Daddy!"
"Darling," Hermann said to his daughter desperately, "you'll see it all, every bit of it very soon. And you can have—ah!"
Eight slaves approached, carrying the considerable deadweight load of Sparrow's battlesuit. Platt led them.
"Here is the suit I won for you, Your Excellency," said the outlaw with an unctuous bow.
"Well, open it up, then!" cried the king. He turned to his wife and continued, "You'll see, my dear; you'll see what I mean."
"I've seen armor before, Hermann," said his wife as she watched tight-lipped. The slaves carefully set the battlesuit down on its own legs and held it while Platt opened the frontal plate. "I'm sure it's very nice. It's this man that—"
"Mother," snapped Princess Miriam, "can't you make—"
"Hush, dear," said the queen.
While mother and daughter faced one another beneath the slowly darkening sky, King Hermann clambered into the undecorated battlesuit and closed it over him. The edges of the thorax and faceplate mated with the remainder of the suit like layers of rock in a cliff face.
The battlesuit's sensors gave a visual display sharper than the same scene by daylight. The suede lining was initially at air temperature but the suit's environmental control began quickly to warm the pads.
Hermann swung his arms. Normally there was inertia, a lag before the suit's servos converted the operator's motion into movements by the powered armor itself.
Not with this wonder. The whole mass of steel and circuitry slid through the air as if it were Hermann's own skin.
The slaves who had been holding the armor ducked away. One of them slipped. The king pirouetted like a dancer and kicked out. The armored boot lifted the man a meter in the air, then dropped him like a burst grainsack.
Hermann laughed like a god.
"Look at me, Stella!" his amplified voice thundered. "Look at me!"
He raised his gauntlet and said, "Cut!" to the artificial intelligence controlling the battlesuit. A flaring arc ripped into the air, ten meters, twenty meters—
Hermann continued to narrow the angle between his thumb and index finger, controlling the flux that leaped from them and seared still higher without the arc breaking. "Is this a bauble, Stella?" he shouted. "Is this a—"
He swept the arc down across one of the palace's projecting roof drains, ten meters above him. The stone cracked. Rock fragments and a bright blazing spray of quicklime flew in all directions.
Onlookers flattened and cried out; even the queen flinched. A scullery maid watching from across the courtyard knelt with her eyes closed and her hands over her ears. She screamed like one of the damned until the cook clubbed her silent for fear that the maid would bring royal displeasure on his department.
"—a bauble?"
Stella looked upward. The fractured stone still glowed. Streaks of molten lead from the drainpipe had twisted a meter down the face of the wall before cooling.
"Hermann," said the queen in a distant voice, "get out of that armor before you hurt somebody."
The king unlatched his battlesuit. His face was flushed with the power he had worn. "You do see," he said with assurance.
Platt and a slave—both of them hesitant—jumped to Hermann's side to help him out of the armor. "I know you do."
The mirror flashed against Hermann's chest as he was lifted from the battlesuit. Princess Miriam pointed toward it.
"Daddy, what's that?" she demanded. Her voice was thinner than usual because of the way her father's demonstration had frightened her.
"This?" said the king, lifting the loop over his head and showing it to her. "This is a wonder too. Just hold it in your hands and think of anything."
Miriam took the mirror. Her expression was a mix of her normal petulance with anger at the recent fear. Her face cleared. "Oh!" she said. For a moment she was truly beautiful.
"Oh, darling!" her father gasped. Even Queen Stella's face softened.
"It's my room!" Miriam squealed. "Oh! And it changes! It's my garden and it's springtime again! Oh!"
Suddenly a more normal emotion drew the princess' lips back, in a feral grimace. She pressed the mirror against her brocaded bosom. "This is mine, isn't it?" she insisted. "You have to give it to me!"
"Of course, darling," said the king, stroking his daughter's ermine shoulder.
"King Hermann," said a voice like a tree splitting with the cold, "don't do that."
They all glanced around. It took a moment to identify the speaker—the prisoner lying on the ground where the slaves had dropped him.
"Not that piece," Sparrow said. His eyes were the same color as the lead had been while it dripped over cold stone.
Miriam continued to clutch the mirror tightly. She backed a step, looking down with horror and disgust.
Hermann turned to his wife and said with the false brightness of unease, "You see, my dear, what a smith like this can mean to the kingdom?"
"He's too dangerous," Stella muttered. Her glance now vibrated between the mirror in Miriam's hand and the face of the man who had made it.
"There won't be any danger," the king wheedled. "We'll put him in the old tower, the citadel my grandfather built, and he'll work for us."
"If he has to live," said the queen slowly, "then at least be sure that he stays locked up forever. And—"
Her smile was as cold as winter dawn. "—why don't you just cut his hamstrings, too?"
"Of course, of course," said King Hermann, beaming. He glanced at Platt and snapped, "Well, what are you waiting for, you?"
The outlaw drew his knife and knelt beside the prisoner. Sparrow tried to kick him. Withies bound the smith's thighs as well as his ankles.
Platt dodged back from the clumsy blow and gripped the prisoner's feet. "Hold him!" Platt shouted.
Half a dozen slaves piled onto the bound smith like dogs on a bear. Sparrow twisted in speechless fury, but Platt waited his time. The knife slid forward as smoothly as a viper's fang. It cut the backs of the supple deerhide boots and withdrew.
Blood followed the knife, but not much blood.
Platt sprang away; "All right," he said. "You can let him go."
Sparrow's muscles bunched like steel hawsers, but his feet lolled loose now that the tendons to them were cut.
Hermann looked at his prisoner in satisfaction—and looked away, because Sparrow's face was the face of a beast.