Question Quest by Piers Anthony Page B

Dana and the King's attendants stared.
    “The King is dead,” I said. “I am the new King.”
    “The Magician of Information. Of course!” an attendant said. “He was grooming you for it throughout.”
    I looked miserably at MareAnn and Dana. They knew the truth. They could spare me this awful thing by speaking out.
    But both bowed their heads. “Your Majesty,” MareAnn said. Dana did not disagree. I was indeed stuck for it.
    The burial arrangements were routine. In a day good King Ebnez was buried, and his house was mine. But my travail had only begun.
    MareAnn approached me. “You must marry,” she said. “It is a requirement for kings.”
    “That is true,” I agreed. “And I want to many you.”
    There were tears in her eyes. "King Humfrey, I can not. I love you, but I love my innocence more. I must depart, to free you to marry another.”
    “No!” I cried. “I need you!”
    “You need my talent with equines,” she said, with much accuracy. “But if you will marry another quickly, then I will stay and serve you.”
    I realized that to keep her near me, I would have to do as she said. “But who else can I marry?” I asked plaintively.
    “Ahem.” I looked. It was Dana Demoness.
    Suddenly the meaning of the oracle's message came clear. “You have to marry a king! And I had to make a demon conquest. Why did you help me so loyally, Dana?”
    “Because I love you, Humfrey,” she said. “You did indeed make a conquest of me.”
    “But you had no idea I would become king! You had nothing to gain by loving me.”
    “Indeed I did not,” she agreed. “And my conscience prevented me from making my sentiment known to you, because I would not want to disrupt your relationship with MareAnn. So I focused on King Ebnez, and I would have married him had he wished and made him deliriously happy, but my true love was always yours. So I had more patience with his slow progress than otherwise, because it gave me a pretext to continue working closely with you.”
    I had never suspected. MareAnn had been the only woman on my mind; my heart was numb with the shock of her refusal to marry me. I had really appreciated Dana's help, and perhaps had not questioned her-motive because I did not want to disrupt the arrangement. I had willfully blinded myself to the obvious, and that, I realized, was dangerous. I would have to guard against that in the future, especially now that I was king.
    “I suppose your soul enables you to love, as normal demons can not," I said, continuing to work it out. I was also postponing the question of marriage to a demoness, for the moment.
    “Yes, friendship and love became possible for me,” she agreed. “And I must say, they have their compensations. I was frankly bored much of the time before I got the soul, and sad after I had it, but loving you has made me happy.”
    I still found this hard to accept. I was of small stature and not handsome, despite my excellent health. I had helped MareAnn when she was injured, and I understood about her need to preserve her innocence, so the love between us seemed natural. But the demoness was a creature as spectacular as she chose to be, capable of impressing even a king. Why should she care about me? “When did—I mean, there must have been some event which—”
    “When we worked together to fight the wolf spiders,” she said. “We performed so well jointly! You understood how to do it, being very intelligent, and helped me to choose the right form, and then you supported me to make it effective, showing your courage. I felt really good about that, and it was wonderful, because I had never felt either good or bad before. Then at the end you said you thought I did have a soul, though we had both forgotten about that in the heat of the battle, and we smiled at each other. I never smiled at a man without ulterior reason before, or had one smile at me who wasn't looking at my body. We had true understanding and camaraderie, and it was such a