"I always used to like the night, Chester," Dennis said as he watched the sea surge and glow. "Remember? We'd lie out here and wonder which star men really came from?"
His back was supported by one of the smooth-contoured crenelations that decorated this roofline. The crystal was slightly chilly—it remained cool even in the direct glare of the summer sun.
The metal of the robot's case was warm and reassuring as Dennis reached out to his companion.
"Well, I still like it," the youth admitted aloud. "It's just that I haven't been having a good time at nights recently. I—"
He paused and looked at Chester, a dull blur against the vague light retained by the structure of the palace. "I don't know what to do, Chester. My father's been a good ruler, a really great one, even if he..."
It was hard for a boy who's been raised a prince to find that he is both a man—and a fisherman's son. Though a prince as well, of course.
And Dennis was still a boy, too, unless he was careful about the way he reacted to danger and frustration.
"If you listen to the judgment of your heart," the robot said with the pompous weight of wisdom in his voice, "you will sleep untroubled."
As a friend in the darkness, Chester added, "What is it that you would do, Dennis?"
"I'd go out to the sea hag," Dennis said simply. Stated that way, he could forget all the doubts and terrors that the decision implied. "But I can't go against Dad."
"Do not leave a fool to rule the people," Chester said; but that was the program talking and not the friend Dennis had made over sixteen years together.
Hale was being foolish in this.
"...all will be yours to command..." the sea hag had bargained as Hale stood on the deck of The Partners. Knowing that, Dennis couldn't be sure how much of the way he obeyed his father was a result of the sea hag's magic...
Chester would ask what Dennis wanted to do if he couldn't do the right thing—and even in his princely willingness to be sacrificed, Dennis felt an underlying joy that he didn't have to hurl himself into that waiting, stinking maw. But if he couldn't do that—
"Chester, I can't stay in Emath," Dennis said in sudden resolution. "My father never told me not to go out into the jungle. I'll do that tonight. I'll find—some other place to live."
He couldn't live in Emath and watch it be destroyed because of something he hadn't done, something his father wouldn't permit him to do. Perhaps if he left, the sea hag would spare the village.
And perhaps one of the jungle's hidden monsters would gobble Dennis down; and then he could stop worrying about what he ought to do.
"Oh—" Dennis said. Death was something he knew only from books, where it seemed noble and heroic. Being alone was a fear of a much more serious order.
"C-chester, would you go with me if I leave Emath?" he asked.
A tentacle looped his shoulders and tickled the back of his left ear. "I will go with you wherever you wish, Master Dennis," the robot said softly.
Dennis jumped to his feet, speaking quickly so that emotion wouldn't choke him. "Right," he said, "great. I'll need food—I'll get some bread and sausages from the cooks."
He frowned. "That's the sort of food people take when they go out in the jungle, isn't it, Chester?"
Everything Dennis knew about the jungle was from books or the little he saw across the dragon-guarded perimeter. No human beings left the village for the lowering back-country. Occasionally, men straggled in wearing rags and a look of fear, but they weren't the sort who got invited to the palace. All the inland trade was in the scaly hands of the lizardmen.
"People might well take bread and sausage when they went out into the jungle, Dennis," the robot said. Dennis couldn't be sure from the tone whether Chester was agreeing with, warning—or gently mocking his human companion.
"Right, well," the youth said, deciding to take the words at face value. "And I'll take a fishing line too, so that we can catch our own food. Ah—"
He looked down at Chester. Dennis' first enthusiastic movement had left him still on the roof, poised by the casement of the window opening to his personal suite. "Ah, there's water in the jungle, isn't there? I mean, pools and streams?"
It struck him suddenly that Chester might be as ignorant of this business as Dennis was himself. After all, the little robot had been brought to Emath by sea and hadn't left the perimeter since.
"There are pools and streams in the jungle, Dennis," said Chester, calming that momentary fear. "And there is also rain."
"Sure, but I'm not going to walk around with my mouth turned up," the youth said while his mind concentrated on things he thought were more important.
He pursed his lips, squeezed the cool crystal of the transom with both hands, and added, "And I'll need a sword. Chester, I'm going to take the Founder's Sword from his tomb."
He waited for Chester to respond. Nothing happened. Dennis looked down at his side and found the little robot waiting as motionless as he was silent.
"Do you think I should do that?" Dennis prodded.
"It is not mine to think or not think about what you should do, Dennis," Chester said, as close to a lie as the youth had ever heard from his mouthless companion; but when Chester continued, "It may be that I can open the vault without your taking your father's keys," Dennis knew that he'd been answered after all.
"Right," said Dennis buoyantly, hopping into his suite without touching the waist-high transom. "First the fishing line and the food, then the sword—and then the jungle."
And escape forever from the sea hag, relief whispered in his mind; but he wasn't proud enough of the thought to speak it aloud.