Grand Conspiracy

by Janny Wurts

  Through the long mild days, while deer browsed in the dappled shadows at the verges of the oak forests, and barley ripened in Avenor’s tilled fields, the sharp-faced old seneschal sat in the regent’s raised seat and oversaw petitioners and grievances. Lord Eilish turned the cellars inside out and dulled pens through his strict yearly inventory. The common sinew of the realm bent its back to trade and husbandry, which left High Priest Cerebeld immured like a spider in his tower above Avenor’s chambers of state.

  From there, he oversaw the brisk traffic of servants bearing ribbons and fine silks from the market. His view of the entry to the grand hall showed him plasterers and painters and gilders, coming and going through the labor of adorning the massive decorations with fripperies. Their industry scarcely pleased him. He held a dim view of the ancient festivals, whose dances took root from Paravian traditions, and whose masks and gaiety were imbued with rune lore and sun symbols disturbingly close to the seals sewn in shining thread on the robes of Ath’s adepts. No high-handed fool, to ban an extravagance the Light’s core of faithful could not yet suppress, Cerebeld delivered the obligatory blessing to open the gathering and retired to engage in private rites with his devoted new coterie of acolytes.

  Lord Eilish’s sallow clerks were whisked away, also, since the memorable year Ellaine’s ladies had seduced them with fruit spirits that left them flushed and by lengths too talkative on sensitive issues of policy. Other absent factions pleaded boredom as year followed year; the arena of male politics quit the floor in self-defense as the celebration of summer solstice devolved into a dance ball arranged for the young.

  Tysan’s women now reigned, clad in tissue and finery. Their guest list was first drawn by invitation from the three principalities of the realm. As Avenor gained weightier influence across the continent, solicitations were sent to cities far and wide in the kingdoms to the east. Nor did power and influence stand aside in hiatus; each year, the matrons of high privilege and wealth bedecked their daughters in lace ribbons and jewels, and waged fiercely fought contests of matchmaking.

  Princess Ellaine presided from her husband’s raised dais, clad in a shimmering gown in Tysan’s royal colors. Gold and blue had never set off her fine points. The richest tinseled sapphire brocade turned her dark eyes to sunken pits and made her complexion seem sallow and tired. The few women closest to her recognized that glazed mask, paint and subtle powder applied with the ritual care of steel armor. They knew that the desperation she hammered down under trained deportment was not due to sore feet or exhaustion.

  The young prince, Lysaer’s heir designate, was to be presented this night. Avenor’s princess had not seen her son through the year since Avenor’s high council had obstructed her maternal right to arrange his education. The cost of that ruling had abraded her, body and spirit, from the hour of the boy’s separation.

  A swirl of changed movement stirred the dancers, then a stiffening of attention from those nearest the closed double doors; the musicians muted their instruments. Against abrupt quiet, the tabarded heralds by the rear wall raised their horns. A flurried bustle of silk saw the couples cleared from the floor. Then the flourish of brass announced the young prince’s entry. Sharp-eyed ambitious matrons formed two lines on either side, with the youngest and prettiest of their pedigree charges placed to the fore to be noticed. The curious craned their necks. The worldly bored murmured gossip; handfastings would follow, but tonight’s groomed display was unlikely to yield the sought-after royal betrothal. The weight of Avenor’s title rested as yet on the shoulders of a boy of twelve; until Lysaer s’Ilessid consented to hear formal offers of contract, the heir designate he had sired to rule Tysan would stay a child, enamored of swordplay and horses.

  Given the growing tapestry of Alliance power linking cities east to west on the continent, none at Tysan’s court could afford to prevaricate. A perilous folly, to regard the legitimate issue of Lysaer s’Ilessid as more than a flesh-and-blood cipher.

  Princess Ellaine sat stately and still on the dais. Her expression appeared patient. Only the nearest observers might note the tremulous flicker of the seed diamonds strung in the gold wire lace of her collar. When the liveried footmen at the far end of the hall swung open the sunwheel-bossed doors, her ringed hands tightened, powerless in her lap. The young prince marched through the entry.

  He came alone. No nurse attended; the engaging, small pages he had counted his friends through the years he had laughed in the nursery were nowhere in evidence. Nor was he clothed as a child anymore, but bore up, straight shouldered, under the weight of a blazoned tabard. The sword at his waist was ceremonial steel; the knee boots were new and, by the scuff of his heels, very likely still pinched him.

  He managed to stride with manly dignity, nonetheless. Only as he mounted the carpeted stair could anyone see that his face was too pale, mouth pinched tight to stop his lower lip from trembling.

  ‘My mother,’ he piped in a dutiful treble. He bowed, as her station demanded. His reddish honey hair caught burnished light from the candles. The eyes of dove gray he raised afterward stayed wide with unsettled conflict. His deportment pleaded to be treated as adult, while the child he still was craved a mother’s affection.

  The impact of his suffering stopped Ellaine’s breath.

  ‘My lady, your son,’ said Gace Steward, arrived without sound, his weasel interest ever lurking at her shoulder to observe and keep notes and gloat.

  Rage flared and restored her poor color as she rose. ‘Kevor, my young prince.’ She could smile despite Gace, let her son see for himself she still loved him. ‘I’m proud of you, beyond words. Your grandmother is here, and your aunt, and three cousins. All of them honor your courage, as do I.’

  Kevor’s chin jerked. His eyes turned suspiciously bright.

  And Ellaine ached for each tear stubborn pride would not let him shed. Words fell too far short. She must find a state gesture that would shake her child from the belief she had abandoned him with complacency. Her smile returned, this time whetted to acid-bright triumph.

  As though her son were grown, and crowned king of Tysan, she curtsied to the floor at his feet.

  Her gesture raised a breezy rustle of surprised murmurs. Gace lost his unctuous humor before that public slap of effrontery. The implicit message she delivered to Avenor’s ranking guests all but shattered the young prince’s bearing. He flashed a glare of pure hatred at the steward. Then, in a voice that firmed toward the note of authority he aimed for, and just missed, the heir designate of Tysan asked his mother please to rise and be seated in his presence.

  Young as he was, he had inherited his father’s sharp instincts. Kevor understood better than to stay beyond the requisite ceremonial appearance. Such a moment of hard-won, prideful victory could last only a handful of seconds. ‘Let the solstice festivities resume.’

  He kissed his mother’s hand with mannered formality. His tears fell then, despite all his care, and traced hot, salty warmth through her jewels. Ellaine turned her wrist. She cupped his chin with utmost tender subtlety and let her silk sleeve dry his cheeks. Grateful for that shielding, the boy collected himself. He gave her a smile to melt snow into sunlight, then arose and turned his back to a punishing squeak of new boot leather. As the heralds sounded the fanfare marking his exit, none but Gace saw how close he had come to breaking down in blind shame at her knee.

  ‘You will say nothing,’ Ellaine hissed through clamped teeth to the steward, as the musicians struck up, and the couples on the floor flowed back and revolved to the figures of a stately slow-step. ‘Or by the name of the powers more ancient than man, I’ll see you and Cerebeld’s inner circle to Sithaer and the joys of Dharkaron’s black vengeance. You are excused from my presence this moment.’

  Gace Steward’s expression curdled to surprise, hard followed by a stare of dangerous calculation. ‘As my lady wishes.’ Insolent as gall, he made no move to leave.

  Clever beast that he was, he had the effrontery to cut her back. Just b
arely in time, Ellaine perceived the cruel, subtle trap of innuendo: an authoritative show of muscle to enforce her command would destroy her small gesture to shelter Kevor.

  Tired now, heartsore and aching, she stiffened her spine to endure.

  ‘How like a man, to carry his pea brain in his scrotum and not realize when overbearing male company’s unwanted.’ That waspish, crone’s scorn came packaged in clanborn accents that sheared like wire through the soothing harmonies of the strings. Heads turned. Two of the dancers broke step in the line, and a group of plump matrons tittered.

  Undaunted, as disdainful of royal propriety as her relatives, the straight little grandmother continued her marching advance up the dais stair. Her hair was short cropped, neat as salt, and unadorned. A gown of white voile wrapped her, wrist to throat, pinned at her high collar with a teardrop ruby strung on a thin, gold chain. Overtop, she wore a shoulder sash of vivid s’Brydion scarlet. One porcelain fist clenched two goblets of wine; the other, with evident, battle-schooled relish, brandished a black briar stick with a silver knurl hefty enough to knock back a charging bull.

  ‘Go away, foolish man,’ she snapped at Gace Steward. ‘If you don’t, I shall certainly get annoyed.’

  The stick spun in her grasp with a speed to whistle air, and just missed the steward’s tucked groin.

  Gace fled, as any man must when assailed by Grandame Dawr in a temper.

  ‘Duke Bransian’s grandmother, if you please,’ the peppery old woman introduced herself. Her acid-bright smile flashed and vanished, as clever and genuine as her steel character. ‘We met in the receiving line, which doesn’t say much. A captain on a battlefront isn’t likely to recall names and faces for all the rank and file.’

  Despite herself, Ellaine choked back startled laughter.

  The grandame, whose name she recalled very well, spurned every pretense of royal prerogative. Her dainty self-assurance could have wrecked mountains as she settled in the carved chair beside Lysaer’s titled princess. ‘I thought you looked peaked. Will you take wine?’

  The goblet was pressed into her hand with a firmness that made refusal a frank breach of manners.

  Ellaine drank a sip, overwhelmingly grateful as she realized the parched state of her mouth.

  ‘There, dear, that’s better.’ Dame Dawr raised her own glass in a salute of grimmest irony, then brushed the rare vintage to her lips in a token gesture of camaraderie. Her deep, brown eyes held amusement for the fact that, alone of any invited guest in the chamber, she could brazen through every stilted rule of protocol and chat woman to woman on the royal dais. Clan law did not recognize the s’Ilessid claim to crown rule; if the s’Brydion granted Avenor a warbond alliance, no one had ever managed to enforce the custom of court manners on any of the duke’s outspoken envoys.

  Nor had the representative sent from Alestron been anyone closer than a distant second cousin for more then a decade, a lapse the inner circle had noted. The remedy for that slight faced them this night. Tysan’s writ of invitation had pointedly requested that a female blood relation of the duke should attend the solstice festivities at Avenor.

  Lord Bransian s’Brydion had recast the request at his whim, had in fact ignored the salutation addressed to the name of his eminently marriageable youngest daughter. In the girl’s stead, he had dispatched his acid-witted grandame; or perhaps not. Now confounded by the formidable collected presence of the woman, Ellaine wondered if the state voyage to Avenor had been Dawr’s idea from the outset.

  Which twist of cunning politics did not leave her ungrateful for an outright act of human kindness; the wine accomplished a miracle’s work of restoring her. ‘Thank you,’ she said, earnest. Her hands, for a blessing, had ceased trembling.

  ‘I shan’t linger,’ Dawr said. ‘Your rat-faced little steward seems to have an unpleasantly prying personality. Someone should slap his face for listening at doorways, or at least break his slippered foot. With a limp, he couldn’t slink. Take greatest care, my dear. Your predecessor, Talith, found her way to a terrible end.’

  Ellaine looked up, met and locked eyes with the old woman’s shrewd glance. A charged moment passed. The princess took a fast breath, then gambled upon the earnest spark of challenge shared through that split-second contact. ‘A suicide. So sad.’

  Dame Dawr regarded her back, her reply a scaled snap of honesty. ‘No mere sorrow over that one’s death, madam. I believe my grandson Mearn, who spoke fierce words on the matter.’ She raised her goblet yet again, her gesture pure sarcasm as she yielded proud principle and delivered her withheld courtesy. ‘To your s’Ilessid husband and his oath to serve true justice.’

  Ellaine caught back her breath in surprise. S’Brydion had never given deference to royalty throughout all the years they had paid court to Avenor.

  Dawr’s fingers were fine ivory, and deliberate as she set the flute aside on the massive carved wood of the chair arm. ‘My dear, I wish you well. My duke sends respects. You have seen all you need of my company.’

  On that abrupt note, the old woman grasped her black stick and arose. She absented herself with no bow, no apology, never asking or receiving word of leave. Her steps down the dais stair were frail, but assured. She reached the marble dance floor on her own before she snapped imperious fingers to summon her retainers to her side. They came, two armed swordsmen clad in s’Brydion scarlet, and faultlessly attentive to her wishes. In respect, they assisted Dame Dawr’s measured retreat through the double doors of the grand ballroom.

  On the dais, Princess Ellaine did not miss the final irony: that the wine in the lady’s abandoned goblet stayed untouched. Clan custom, by rigid code of honor, never drank to the name of an enemy. Dame Dawr had exposed the terrifying answer to the question Avenor’s princess had dared to broach through a perilous exchange of small talk.

  The suspected truth, affirmed, shot fear like black ice through and through Ellaine’s guarded heart.

  By the word of s’Brydion, Princess Talith’s death had been no suicide at all.

  Shaken to her core, sadly wiser than the girl she had been on her wedding night thirteen years in the past, Princess Ellaine took the implicit warning to her breast. Whether or not she let the matter bide, or if she chose to resume her doomed struggle to keep a hand in her young son’s destiny, she had been clearly told of the possible deadly consequences.

  If Dawr’s grandson Mearn had discerned the rotten truth, then secret factions existed in Avenor, underneath the Light’s glory and Lysaer’s banner. Their machinations had not stopped at clandestine murder. Against those unknown faces, alone under the heel of such power, the princess dared not leave the hall, or show any sign of her undermining dismay. She must do her utmost to smooth over appearances, as though Dawr’s words had held nothing more than the usual banal court courtesy.

  The princess retrieved the old lady’s abandoned wine flute before Gace Steward’s sharp vigilance should notice and discern its private and sinister meaning. While the dance couples turned to the bright beat of the tambours, and the gold-embossed suns for summer solstice glittered by candlelight, she raised the glass to her lips and drained the contents in admiration for Dawr s’Brydion’s astonishing, insolent courage.

  Summer Solstice 5667

  Encounter

  Morvain’s seaside quarter languished under thick fog as midnight drew nigh, the odd burst of raucous song and snatched laughter stitched through the slap of the riptide’s first currents. Solstice revelers staggered home under fuzzed torches, or banged into the taverns demanding more wine, determined in their excessive, high spirits to drink and dance until sunrise. The noisiest quarter fronted the dockside. There, the shanties of the poor who worked Morvain’s looms crammed up against the alleys where mariners on shore leave bought grog and solicited entertainment. The mill hands and the wenches who knotted carpet all mingled with tarred topmen, stevedores, and the free galleymen muscled like bulls from paid service at the oar. Misunderstandings abounded, over which women were troll
ops, and which cherished wives or grown sisters. In these sordid streets, lit by pitch pine brands, even the lighthearted pranks played for solstice might start roughhouse fights, or end with a knife thrust in bloodshed, if a body jostled into a mean drunk, or miscalled the start of an argument.

  As the captain responsible for a young deckhand who had broken his watch orders and slipped ashore without leave, Feylind of the Evenstar snarled in justifiable bad temper. ‘In here?’ Her jerked gesture of contempt encompassed the gaping door to a wineshop, which spilled light and screaming laughter into the damp, foggy street.

  The strapping first mate at her shoulder returned a clipped nod. ‘Aye, Captain. In there.’ He stood back and allowed the lady first entry, well warned not to cross her when she wore her capped boots and the belt which hung her black-handled cutlass.

  Feylind snapped a rude phrase under her breath, tossed back her flax braid, then squared her trim shoulders and plowed in.

  Across the stone threshold, the intense, steamy heat and dense noise, and a churning mass of twined bodies impacted the senses like a wall. The tang of summer sweat pressed the air into felt. Feylind never hesitated. The first goatish lout who fingered her hair found himself spun aside, then crunched facefirst against the oak lintel. The next one, who jeered, received a reviling curse and an elbow that folded him, speechless. The third lecher, who pinched to apprise her willing womanhood, dropped howling to the bricks, felled by a lashed kick to the kneecap.

  To judge by his swift faint as he tried to stand up, he might not walk again without the skilled help of a bonesetter.

  The florid wine seller behind the bar looked around, harried, as the swirl of recoil jammed the dancers and jostled the blithe singers off-key. He beckoned, warned that trouble had entered his establishment, and two muscled heavies pushed off their stools to attend him. Not to be caught weaponless, he snatched up the wood mallet kept at hand to hammer the bungs into barrels. Then he bore through the press to eject the brawling fool who had dared to assault paying customers.