by David Weber
“Darling, we all know what you and Cayleb thought. For that matter, we agreed with you,” Alahnah said, reaching out to lay a slim hand on her daughter’s forearm. “I won’t pretend I didn’t resent the decision that kept you there so much longer . . . until I met Cayleb on his way through to Corisande, that is.” She smiled warmly at her daughter and rolled her eyes. “Such a delicious young man! You managed to land quite a catch with that one, Sharley!”
If her object had been to listen to her daughter’s giggle, she succeeded admirably, and Sharleyan shook her head at her.
“I can’t disagree with any of that, Mother,” the empress said. “On the other hand, you might want to think about the fact that he’s made more visits to Cherayth over the last, oh, half-year or so than he has to Tellesberg.”
“Of course he has. That’s how I know your decision to stay in Tellesberg was one of state, based on cold political calculation and your sense of duty, my dear. Given how . . . tasty he is, that’s the only conceivable reason you haven’t been right here all that time!”
“I’m glad you appreciate the sacrifices I’ve been willing to make.”
“We certainly do,” the queen mother said rather more seriously. “And the fact that we may have agreed with your decision doesn’t mean we didn’t miss you.”
“If only I could be in two places at one time,” Sharleyan sighed.
“If you could, life would be a lot simpler,” Green Mountain agreed. “Since you can’t, we’ll just have to do the best we can, won’t we?”
“And if I haven’t mentioned this before, I want you to know how thankful I am that I have the two of you to help do that,” Sharleyan said with utter sincerity.
“I believe you have mentioned it, a time or two,” he said.
“Possibly even more often than that,” the queen mother added. “I’d have to check my diary to be certain, of course.”
“Good.” Sharleyan smiled. “My mother raised me to thank people whenever they did me little favors like, oh, running my kingdom for a year while I go galavanting off to get married.”
Green Mountain laughed, but the skin around Alahnah’s eyes tightened.
“It wasn’t the getting married that worried me, dear. Not, at least, after we met Cayleb.” She tried to keep her voice light, but she failed, and it was Sharleyan’s turn to touch her arm with a comforting hand.
“Mother, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am,” she said quietly.
“Don’t be silly,” Alahnah said. The briskness she put into her voice was belied by the unshed tears glistening in her eyes, and she straightened in her chair and drew a deep breath. “Byrtrym always made his own decisions—you know that, if anyone does. He made that one, just like all the others, and no one else is responsible for its consequences. I only thank God that that monster Halcom didn’t succeed!”
“You can thank Edwyrd and the rest of my guards for that, Mother,” Sharleyan said somberly. “Without them . . .”
She let her voice trail off, shaking her head, and Green Mountain nodded.
“I already have—thanked Edwyrd, I mean,” he told her. “I offered him a more substantial token of my gratitude, as well. He turned it down.”
“Politely, I hope?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Green Mountain smiled at her. “He was very polite, in fact.”
“Good,” Sharleyan said again, then leaned back in her chair, thinking about the past few five-days.
She’d been back in Cherayth for almost a full five-day, and every one of those days had been an incredible whirl of events. She could scarcely sort them all out in her memory, and she felt relatively certain that several of those memories had gotten themselves arranged out of order, but despite her sense of exhaustion, she’d found herself feeling an enormous relief, as well. She’d had her mother’s regular letters, of course, and Green Mountain’s—and Cayleb’s—for that matter, but that hadn’t been the same thing as actually being here. After more than twelve years on the throne, it had seemed . . . unnatural to have to rely on the reports of others, no matter how much she trusted those others. And it had to have seemed even odder to them to have their monarch off living in another kingdom, entirely.
“I have to admit,” she said aloud, after a few moments, “that, overall, things have worked out even better than I’d hoped they would.”
“Aside from any minor plots to murder you, you mean?” Green Mountain’s voice was just a little edgy, and Sharleyan realized he’d been less calm about the assassination attempt than he tried to pretend. Her eyes softened at the thought, and she smiled at him.
“Aside from that, of course,” she conceded.
“I must say, dear, that however well we might have managed in the long term with you in Tellesberg, the decision to come home was a good one,” her mother said. Sharleyan looked at her, and the queen mother shrugged. “When word of the attack on Saint Agtha’s reached us, the public reaction was . . . unhappy.”
“As always, your mother is a mistress of understatement,” Green Mountain said dryly. “On the plus side, I expect that any of your nobles who may have been feeling restive again about the keenly felt injustice of finding themselves saddled with a mere queen have rethought their positions. Meeting Emperor Cayleb face-to-face would probably have produced much of that effect, anyway, of course. While he may not have struck them as a ‘delicious young man,’ I rather doubt that any of them would like to find him angry at them. And even if they were prepared to risk that, the Kingdom’s reaction to the attempt on your life should have been sufficient warning for anyone but a complete idiot. Your people haven’t forgotten what happened to your father, you know, Your Majesty.”
“Neither have I,” Sharleyan said darkly.
“No, of course you haven’t,” Alahnah said, and her own eyes were hard. “I’m rather looking forward to paying our debt to Hektor Daykyn. In full, with all deferred interest.”
“As we all are, Mother,” Sharleyan replied, reminding herself that word of Hektor’s assassination hadn’t yet reached Chisholm. Or, rather, it hadn’t reached anyone else in Chisholm. That was going to change almost momentarily, of course, but she was beginning to fully appreciate the enormous advantage Merlin Athrawes’ “visions” and the ability to communicate information over vast distances almost instantly truly conferred.
Not to mention the pain in the posterior Cayleb must have found it when he couldn’t share that sort of information with me.
“The most important thing, aside from the fact that you’re still alive, is how well you succeeded in communicating who was truly behind it to everyone here in Chisholm,” Green Mountain said. She looked at him, and he smiled at her approvingly. “Your mother’s right about your decision to come home. No message from you could have been as convincing as actually seeing you here, on Chisholmian soil, and it’s a very good thing that you arrived so close on the heels of the news itself. Whatever anyone else may say now, for the first five-day or so there was an enormous amount of suspicion. Halcom’s plan to drive a wedge between Chisholm and Charis almost worked. In fact, if he’d managed to kill you after all, it would have worked.”
“I know. I was afraid of that from the very beginning,” Sharleyan admitted. “That’s why I waited long enough for Baron Wave Thunder’s investigation to confirm at least some of the details. I needed to be able to tell people here who really planned the attack, and why.”
“And the price your Charisian guardsmen paid to keep it from succeeding,” her mother said softly. “I’ll never forget what those men did for you, dear.”
“Neither will I.”
Sharleyan felt her eyes burn once more and made herself draw another deep breath.
“Neither will I,” she repeated. “But since they did manage to keep me alive, I suppose it’s time the three of us got down to work.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Green Mountain said rather more formally, and she smiled at him.
“First, Mahrak,” she said,
“I’d like to discuss your view of the way Uncle Byrtrym’s allies on the Council are most likely to react to all of this. Then I’d like your personal impressions—and yours, Mother—on how our own Temple Loyalists are likely to respond. After that, there are a couple of treasury issues I promised Baron Ironhill I’d look into. It’s past time Cayleb and I got a common imperial currency established, and now that we have the Imperial Parliament just about fully organized, we can start thinking about other things. So—”
Her mother and her first councilor sat back, their expressions intent, as Sharleyan set briskly to work.
Sharleyan looked up as Edwyrd Seahamper opened the door and cleared his throat politely.
“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, but a courier has just arrived from the Emperor.”
“He has?” The empress’s eyebrows arched, and Seahamper nodded gravely. Without, she reflected, so much of a flicker of expression to betray the fact that he and Sharleyan had already known the man was on his way. She smiled mentally at the thought.
At least there’s one person I can discuss things like this with without worrying, she told herself. Cayleb may have Merlin, but I’ve got Edwyrd, and that’s almost as good.
“He says his dispatches are urgent, Your Majesty,” her personal armsman added, and she nodded crisply.
“In that case, by all means, admit him at once.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Seahamper withdrew briefly, and Sharleyan looked around at her mother’s and her first councilor’s faces. She was a little surprised by how much they’d managed to accomplish since lunch. There was still far more to accomplish, of course. It could scarcely have been any other way, after her long absence, but they’d made a sizable dent in the backlog. It was fortunate that so much of it consisted simply of approving and confirming decisions they’d already made.
And the best of it is that, for all intents and purposes, Mother has been ruling Chisholm in my stead, and there hasn’t been even a hiccup. Not on the secular side, at least. Maybe I’ve actually managed to convince the Kingdom that a monarch doesn’t have to be male?
Of course, there was always the religious side. The good news there was that between them Archbishop Pawal, Green Mountain, Sir Ahlber Zhustyn, Chisholm’s equivalent of Baron Wave Thunder, and Earl White Crag, the Kingdom’s Lord Justice, had managed to keep their feet firmly on the neck of any Temple Loyalist temptation towards some sort of active re sis tance. The fact that it had been Temple Loyalists in Charis who had attempted to murder their queen—and the fashion in which the rest of the Kingdom had reacted to that news—had undoubtedly strengthened the inclination for Chisholm’s Temple Loyalists to keep their heads down.
Unfortunately, that didn’t mean they’d decided to accept Sharleyan’s “heretical defiance of Mother Church.” Thanks to Merlin and his SNARCs, Sharleyan was probably better aware of that even than Zhustyn or Green Mountain, neither of whom cherished any illusions in that respect. In fact, Sharleyan knew that at least three members of her own council were currently in communication with the deposed Bishop Executor Wu-shai.
At the moment, she and Merlin were both convinced they’d identified the “major players,” as Merlin described them, but that, too, had its drawbacks. Knowing who to watch was a priceless advantage; fighting down the temptation to have them arrested for what she knew they were doing but would find difficult to prove in open court wasn’t easy. In fact, she’d found herself sorely tempted to manufacture the evidence she needed. Fortunately, she’d decided long ago that policies like that were what got kings and queens overthrown by their own nobles. The fact that she’d always been scrupulously just in her treatment even of her enemies among the Chisholmian nobility was a major factor in the readiness with which the majority of her nobles accepted the justice she handed down when she had clear and compelling evidence of wrongdoing by one of their own number.
Well, eventually you’re going to give me that evidence, My Lords—or, at least, show me where one of my merely mortal agents can “discover” it. And when that day comes . . .
The council chamber door opened once more as Seahamper returned with Cayleb’s courier.
“Your Majesty,” the courier—a Chisholmian, Sharleyan noted—said, bowing profoundly.
“Your name?” she asked.
“Commander Traivyr Gowyn, Your Majesty.” Gowyn smiled, obviously pleased that she’d cared enough to ask. “I have the honor to command the armed schooner Sentinel.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling back at him, then sat back in her chair. “Sergeant Seahamper says your dispatches are urgent, Commander Gowyn?”
“I fear they are, Your Majesty.” Gowyn’s smile had disappeared into a sober expression.
“In that case, Commander, may we have them?”
“Of course, Your Majesty.” Gowyn opened his dispatch case and extracted a thick envelope, sealed with Cayleb’s personal seal and addressed to Sharleyan in Clyfyrd Laimhyn’s clear, strong script. He laid it in her extended hand with another bow.
“Thank you,” she said once more, weighing it in her palm. “Does your vessel require supplies or service, Commander?”
“I would prefer to take on fresh water before returning to sea, Your Majesty. With that proviso, Sentinel could sail within the hour.”
“I don’t believe we’ll need to pack you back off quite that quickly, Commander Gowyn,” Sharleyan said with a smile. “I’m pleased to hear that we could if we had to, but I expect you’ll have time for at least a fresh salad and a shore-cooked meal before we send you back to Corisande.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Gowyn replied, bowing once more as he recognized his dismissal. Seahamper escorted him back out of the council chamber, and Sharleyan turned to Green Mountain and her mother.
“And now,” she said whimsically, her smile crooked as her slender fingers broke the heavy wax seals, “let’s see what fresh bad news Corisande has seen fit to provide us with.”
“. . . so I’m none too sure they believe you.”
If any of Empress Sharleyan’s subjects, aside from her personal armsman, had happened to glance into her bedchamber they might have had significant reservations about their monarch’s stability. She sat in one of the huge, over-stuffed chairs, with her feet tucked up under her, speaking to apparently empty air. It was very late, and she’d sent Sairah Hahlmyn off to bed hours ago. Mairah Lywkys was still recovering from the injury she’d suffered when Byrtrym Waistyn had “arranged” her riding fall to keep her safely out of the way at Saint Agtha’s, and getting her to turn in reasonably early hadn’t been difficult, either. Now Sharleyan sat in the candlelit bedchamber, watching the silver orb of Langhorne, Safehold’s single moon, climbing steadily higher beyond her window, and cocked her head to one side while she listened.
“I wish I could say I was surprised to hear that,” Cayleb’s voice said in her right ear. “Unfortunately, if I were they, I might very well have thought I’d done it, too.”
“I think they’ll come around to accepting the truth eventually,” Sharleyan assured her far distant husband. “Mahrak is already more than three-quarters of the way to acknowledging just how remarkably stupid it would’ve been for you to have Hektor killed at this particular time. At the moment, he seems to be torn between admiration for your apparently ruthless pragmatism, wondering just how you could have been dumb enough to do it, and concern over what it says about your character in long-range terms.”
“And your mother?”
“Well, Mother already thought you were a ‘delicious young man,’ ” Sharleyan chuckled. “I think she’s been both pleased and surprised by how much she likes you, and to be honest, the thought that you might have had Hektor murdered after what happened to Father only makes her like you even more. Frankly, I think she’s going to be disappointed when she finally realizes you really, really didn’t do it.”
“I suppose that’s better than having her running in horror from the cold-blooded murderer wh
o could do such a thing,” Cayleb said dryly.
“Trust me, Cayleb. The only thing that could have made Mother love you more than the notion that you’d collected Hektor’s head would be the birth of her first grandchild. Which, by the way, she mentioned rather pointedly to me this afternoon. She seems to be of the opinion that having you in Corisande and me in Charis or Chisholm isn’t very likely to provide for the succession. A thought which has also occurred to me, if not for such purely pragmatic reasons.”
“You’re not the only two people it’s occurred to,” Cayleb said with feeling. “And, as you say, not necessarily for purely pragmatic reasons.”
“So just when are you going to darken my doorway so we can begin working on this little problem?” Sharleyan asked, and her own tone was rather pointed, Cayleb noticed.
“Soon, I think,” he replied more seriously. “This afternoon, I met with Tartarian and Anvil Rock for the fifth time. There were a couple of points they wanted to talk about, but they obviously realize they have no choice but to sign on the dotted line in the end. They’re going to, Sharleyan, and as soon as they do, I’m installing General Chermyn down here as my interim viceroy, and Empress of Charis and I are setting sail for Cherry Bay.”
“Good!”
“The only question in my mind is how I’m going to be greeted when I arrive,” Cayleb continued.
“If you mean here in the Palace, I don’t think anyone could care less, either way, whether or not you had Hektor murdered,” Sharleyan replied. “Oh, some people are going to be worried about it, and still more are probably going to pretend to be horrified by the very notion, but the truth is that everybody knows Hektor would’ve had you and your father assassinated in a moment if he’d thought he could get away with it. In fact, I’d estimate that half the nobles in Chisholm think he was involved in Tirian’s assassination plot, whatever Nahrmahn—or you—might have to say about it. And the possibility that you did order it is working in our favor, in some ways. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out Merlin’s SNARCs are reporting that the members of the nobility most likely to conspire against us with the Temple Loyalists are . . . reevaluating their positions in light of the belief that you’ll simply have them killed if they turn into too much of a problem.”
