1. The Changeling King

On the last evening of the embassy from the Faerie Court, Waldo the Second, King of Wisconsin, at last perceived that something had to be done about his sons. Before the feast began, five of his sons were yet alive. By the cheese course, only three remained.

The choking death of Lord Galen, the Duke of Oshkosh and thirdborn of Waldo's seven sons, was embarrassing enough, though the Ambassador was kind enough to take no notice. But even he was stirred out of his elvish unflappableness when Prince Ludovic, the heir apparent, was skewered by a crossbow bolt that somehow leapt out of the fat goose he had been carving in front of His Excellency.

Two gruesome deaths were a bit much, the King felt, even on a state occasion. Over brandy after the plates were removed, the Ambassador impressed on him that more was at stake than his social reputation. "I fear," said His Excellency, "that some one or more of your sons may be causing these accidents."

"On purpose?" King Waldo cried, looking scandalized. "Never!"

"There is a proverb in Faerie," the Ambassador rejoined gravely: "Never say never. If this keeps up, you won't have any sons left. Except, perhaps, the one least likely to enjoy the loyalty of a happy people."

After much talk of this sort, His Majesty was persuaded to see the Ambassador's point of view. Indeed, a few additional tumblers of brandy may have helped. Before they retired to their separate apartments, the King tipsily agreed to permit his wise friend to take the youngest prince abroad. It wouldn't do to leave him exposed to the sorts of "accidents" that lately seemed to happen, all too frequently, among the King's sons. Besides, a foreign education might do the lad some good.

And so the following afternoon, a confused and tearful Bruno, Duke of Sheboygan and latest-born of the royal children, saw the flag at the top of the West Tower vanish below the horizon for the first time in his seven years. It was the last he would see of the royal palace until his twenty-first birthday, when he arrived to claim his throne.

Young Bruno soon forgot his homesickness. As part of the Ambassador's traveling retinue during the next few years, he saw awe-inspiring countryside and mighty cities. He was dressed in exquisite finery, fed sweet bread and heady wine and salads dressed with savory herbs, and trained in manners, magic, and manly arts. He was petted and fawned over by queens and duchesses. He learned history, letters, human and faerie languages, poetry and music at the Ambassador's patient knees. And when the movable embassy was at last recalled to the High Court of Faerie, Bruno went with it and beheld wonders unspeakable.

The date of Lord Bruno's first romantic adventure is not recorded. Suffice it to say that the ladies of the Faerie Court were not restrained by moral scruples such as chastity or monogamy. They enjoyed Bruno's innocence, candor, and enthusiasm. But, being long-lived creatures, they little understood his instinct for passionate attachment. So by the time a half-human princess from Toronto, named Sophie, came to the High Court, Lord Bruno was a little spoiled but greatly frustrated in love.

And then he discovered her. Unlike her fullblooded kin, the Princess Sophie had imperfect looks and an uneven temperament. With moods ranging from violent agitation to sulky silence, she was the most troubled, insecure, and vulnerable person Bruno had met in years. He soon fell blindly, blazingly in love with her.

Her folk were very happy to promise Sophie to Lord Bruno in marriage. It wasn't so much that they wanted an alliance with his kingdom, as that they didn't expect to do better by such an unfaerielike princess. Bruno was sixteen years old, and Sophie fourteen when the promise was sealed. It was only a few years later that he persuaded her to accept their union. Being bartered like a pig did not like Sophie well.

Meanwhile, sordid goings-on were afoot in the Kingdom of Wisconsin across the sea. King Waldo, already long a chattering fool, became increasingly demented while his last two sons laid cunning traps for each other. While the boyish Bruno was wooing his reluctant bride, Prince Harold died under mysterious circumstances; no one could ever explain how the box jellyfish got into his bidet. At the same time, by a most unfortunate coincidence, his brother Duke Nolan was crushed by a grand piano that had, by some strange means, become airborne just as he walked out of his mistress's hotel directly below it. If King Waldo had a theory about how these misadventures might have come about, he never mentioned it before his own death of old age nine months later.

In some respects, Bruno became King at that time. But then, he was hardly eighteen years old. By law, he could not come to power until he reached his majority. Historians call the next three years the Regency. It was a time when the Ministers who had already been running the kingdom during Waldo's dotage now ran it on behalf of Prince Bruno. No one knows what they thought about the idea of giving up power to a young stripling who had spent most of his life at the High Court of Faerie.

Some of them probably supported the Bonnie Prince Arleigh, a first cousin twice removed of the late king, who now claimed that he had more right to the throne than Bruno. Arleigh found a lot of supporters in the southern and western counties of the kingdom. An army of them, in fact. Soon Kingstead at Appleton, the royal palace, was under siege. But the Regents had their own followers. Within a few months of King Waldo's death, the succession question ignited into open war.

Through all this, Bruno remained safely in the custody of the Faerie Court. The Ambassador had promised his royal father to keep the lad alive. A step toward doing this, His Excellency found, was to keep Bruno ignorant as well. The young prince never suspected that such interesting things were happening back home in Wisconsin. No one had bothered to write to him in years, even in response to the announcement of his and Sophie's marriage. So, from Bruno's point of view there was nothing unusual about the lack of news. There wasn't much he could have done anyway, except wear a target on his chest.

During the king's absence, three leaders emerged, three young men who helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the Regents. When he finally returned to Kingstead, Bruno had been briefed on the situtation well enough to know that he owed his throne to these three men. He rewarded them accordingly.

The first of the three heroes was a dazzlingly handsome baronet named Yardley of Ironwood. It was Yardley who had persuaded the barons of the northeastern peninsula to swear fealty to King Bruno and his regents. Few people know that Yardley secured this promise by making one in return. Yardley fulfilled that promise twenty-two years later, at the feast celebrating his wedding to the king's eldest daughter. The Princess Spring had been betrothed to Yardley since six years before her birth, when Bruno still sat uneasily on his throne. When the king, flushed with wine and overcome by emotion, commanded his friend and son-in-law to name his heart's desire, Yardley replied: "Replace your court with a chamber of deputies elected by the citizens of every county in the kingdom."

At this the king's face turned another color. Though Yardley's demand took away a third of the king's power and put a strain on a long friendship, it pacified the northeasterners, who had always chafed under the laws of a faraway king, even when their territory belonged to the neighboring land of Michigan. Eventually, King Bruno realized that the establishment of the Chamber had saved Wisconsin, and he was happy when Yardley was elected First Deputy.

The second savior of the regency and of Bruno's throne was a tidy little marquess named Damon of Beloit, who even as a teenager was so well-known for his scholarship that the regents themselves consulted with him on questions of legal precedent. Damon, too, exchanged promise for promise. When Bonnie Prince Arleigh started rewarding his most illustrious officers with lands and titles in the southwestern counties, the former barons of those lands appealed to Damon for advice. They didn't care to turn over strong houses they had built themselves to a cadre of jumped-up fops.

It was Damon who persuaded the new barons to let the old barons stay on as stewards, in return for a percentage of the land's produce as rent. The results were so satisfactory to everybody that the old barons never petitioned King Bruno to nullify Prince Arleigh's land grants.

For settling a rebellion in the southwest almost before it began, Damon won the hand of the king's second daughter, the Princess Summer. At their wedding feast, twenty-five years later, King Bruno reluctantly made Damon the same offer he had extended to Yardley three years earlier. He winced just as bitterly, too, when Damon asked that the king cease judging cases appealed from the lower courts, and set up an independent Supreme Court instead. Nevertheless, Damon of Beloit proved such a wise and well-respected Lord Chief Justice that, in the end, King Bruno forgave him for taking away another third of his royal power.

The third hero was a ferocious fighter named Count Thorn of Westbridge. Thorn saved the Regency from having to fight on two fronts when he easily repelled a barbarian invasion and drove the brutes out of Duluth. Using that formerly savage settlement as a powerful base of operations, Thorn then led a series of attacks on the flank of Prince Arleigh's forces, ultimately splitting the pretender's army in two. Thorn accepted Arleigh's surrender in person and, later, enforced his exile to Fitzwilliam Island, part of the Manitoulin group the High Court of Faerie gave King Bruno as a coronation gift.

For his acts of valor and his military victories, Thorn won the hand of the king's third daughter, the Princess Autumn - though he had to wait nearly 30 years for it. By this time neither she nor the king much loved or trusted Thorn of Westbridge. But debts are debts, and promises are promises; and wish though he might that he hadn't set a precedent of offering the groom his heart's desire, King Bruno risked it a third time. All Thorn wished for, as it happened, was a professional standing army, of which he himself became the first Commander-in-Chief.

King Bruno's throne was now completely secure. He only lacked two things: a shred of real power, and an heir. As things stood at the opening of his thirtieth regnal year, the first in line for the throne, by virtue of his marriage to the eldest princess, would be his best friend and Prime Minister, Lord Yardley. Next after him was the right honorable Lord Chief Justice Damon. Even at three removes from the throne, Lord High General Thorn made the king uneasy. If the memory of his six elder brothers was good for anything, it was to increase King Bruno's uneasiness for the first two lords. Having a male heir would have made things much simpler. Or so the king thought at the beginning of his thirtieth year on the throne.

By the last day of that year, however, he was thinking differently again. For even then, on the day of his birth, there was nothing simple about Prince Winter.