“I—Your Majesty, it seemed the—the best thing—”
“I don’t doubt that, with Ocher panting on your neck,” the Empress said. “A vow of chastity at the Shrine of Stars would have been inappropriate, considering your position as Lys’s heir.”
“I didn’t know who he was really. I mean Otto,” Luneté tried to explain, terrified. She had never considered becoming one of the Shrine’s virgin priestesses.
“You didn’t?” The Empress stared at her.
“No, Your Majesty,” whispered Luneté.
“My soul, you fell in love with the fellow first and— This is what comes of rearing girls in places like Sarsemar,” the Empress said to herself, more than to Luneté. “Indeed. Sun above, my dear, I quite understand, but do you understand that you must be very careful?”
“Careful?”
The Empress sighed. “My dear child, you cannot be so naive as to have ignored the possibilities of your army and your husband’s ambitions.”
“No, Your Majesty. I have not. We have discussed it. The army of Lys is the army of Lys, and it is not the army of Ascolet. And we have discussed—ambitions. He is the Baron of Ascolet and he has taken the oath to the Emperor.”
“Very good. I have presented your case as favorably as I could to His Majesty, and I am pleased to hear you speak such good sense as shows I was right to do so. I pointed out to His Majesty that the present arrangement may well be the best, under the circumstances, and that the time to emend it is past. The Crown will recognize your marriage.”
“Oh, thank you, Your Majesty,” Luneté said, weak with relief.
“However,” the Empress went on. “As you have no mother, and have displayed a certain willfulness, I shall be blunt: there is another possibility. Your husband may dust off his ambitions someday. If at any time the Crown suspects for any reason that Lys and Ascolet conspire, the Crown will exercise its right to annul your marriage ab initio. You must avoid not only disloyalty, Countess, but any appearance of it which could give rise to rumors. You must maintain your County and Barony separately. You must not lower tariffs or duties, favor one another in trading agreements, make one another large interest-free gifts of money to cover unexpected expenses— I believe you understand me?” And the Empress’s look was very significant.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Luneté said in a small voice, nodding, guilty though not charged.
“I strongly recommend, Countess, that you find an advisor. Someone who is not your husband—the Baron is a forceful and persuasive man, and will sway you easily. Take counsel with your counselor, and not with your husband, in decisions affecting Lys.”
Luneté nodded again.
“As you have led rather an isolated life,” the Empress went on, “I shall undertake to find someone suitable for you. Sarsemar presents a reasonable alternative, or does to the Emperor’s eye, but I suspect such an advisor would have entirely the opposite effect desired.”
“My husband would cut Ocher’s throat, Your Majesty,” Luneté said, and then she blushed scarlet—had she said that? Oh, Well.
The Empress laughed. “He would be no son of Sebastiano otherwise, and therefore your advisor must be prudent, diplomatic, and—uninclined to wooing. Or a woman, but there are few who would suit and who could be sent to you in Lys. Will you dwell in Lys or Ascolet?”
“Both, Your Majesty, as opportunity or events require. We are discussing that. Still.”
“I see. Kindly keep me informed, Countess, as to how your experiment proceeds. As I said, the Emperor has been persuaded that it may not entirely be a bad thing, but one must not tempt Fortuna.”
“Indeed I agree, Your Majesty.”
“Good. You are a sensible young woman. I wish—” The Empress stopped herself, made a moue with her pretty mouth, and smiled. “Now you have been browbeaten and the evening is spoiled.”
“I hope not, Your Majesty. I am very grateful for your advice. It has been difficult to know what to do, sometimes.”
“I am sure it has. You have chosen a hard road for yourself. My dear, I hope I will hear more of you than rumor and gossip from passing travellers. Indeed I heartily desire to see you at Court.”
Luneté bowed her head, grateful. “There is much to do in Lys at the moment, Your Majesty, and I feel strongly that I must go back soon, but I hope to attend Court after I have settled myself at home.”
“I shall remind you of that, Countess. Your mother was a great friend to me and I should think ill of myself if I allowed her daughter to slip away unnoticed. There is always a place for you here, and an ear. Remember that.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty. Thank you very much. I shall.” Luneté bowed her head again; the Empress was being very kind, much more so than Luneté had expected.
“I shall be annoyed if you forget. Now run and take a glass of wine—you look quite pale—and a bite of something, and ask Lady Elis—in the violet gown—to come here. We shall all go out to the ball presently, and of course you shall join us.” And the Empress smiled on Luneté, who stood and curtseyed and took the extended porcelain-white hand, kissed it reverently, and curtseyed again and backed away.
8
“PRINCE PROSPERO!” SAID THE EMPRESS, RAISING her voice slightly, and the tall dark figure at the other end of the corridor paused, turned, bowed a fraction of an inch, and approached.
“Madame Empress,” he said, giving a chill glare to the bevy of attending ladies as a group. The Countess of Lys stepped back a half-step. Princess Evote sniffed. The Empress flicked her fan and stepped forward, and the women hung back.
“It is unfortunate that your daughter is indisposed,” the Empress said, failing to find a truly euphemistic way to describe the scene in Court.
“My daughter is unfortunately disposed,” Prospero said coldly, “disposed of as the Emperor would, in such a way as to curdle the best of dispositions, which I freely admit she hath not, and to bring on indisposition most extreme.”
The Empress shooed her ladies back further with another flick of her fan and walked a few steps with Prospero. “I cannot see it as so poor a match, Prince Prospero,” she said, “though it is arranged hastily and without consulting the hearts of the principals. Good has come of worse pairings, and ill of better.”
“This is true, madame, and rarely hath a marriage been so clouded from its inception, so that we must hope for favorable downpours from Fortuna in compensation. I would be hard put to find a peer less objectionable than your son, madame, nor objections stronger than my daughter’s.”
The Empress weighed his mood and hazarded more. “Do you not object, yourself?”
“To the manner, but not the matter, and let that stop at thy ears and never pass thy lips, madame. I believe you have some sway with your son, as do I with my daughter, and if they be subtly reconciled to the thing it may come off tolerably well. But Avril’s blessing is a curse; he inverts all nature in his person and influence.” He was looking at her shrewdly, and his voice was low.
“I did think it might be thus with you,” the Empress said, equally quietly, “it is often so in these things, that a dislike is made where none need be, if all is not arranged properly. I told His Majesty it should not be hastily done, but it’s done.”
“E’en so. I shall wear at the one, and do you the other, and mayhap ’twill settle smoothly.”
Heartened by her success thus far, the Empress decided to attempt another act of diplomacy. “Indeed,” she said, smiling at him.
“I bid you good-night, madame. The conceit o’ the dance ill fits mine,” Prospero said more loudly, and he bowed and started away.
“Prince Prospero, a word more—”
He halted, looked back, lifted an eyebrow. The Empress realized with a twinge of annoyance that he was not going to come to her—the man’s manners were arrogant in the extreme—and she moved to join him. She lowered her voice again. “I ask that you soften your evident hostility to Prince Golias—”
“Prince Golias?”
repeated Prospero, turning toward her. “Hath come to pass a happy wedding of jackal and harpy? I marvelled at his face in Court.” He stared down at her with a look of such steely coldness that she felt herself dissected, forced to speak.
“The Emperor has confirmed the title twenty days ago, remedying Panurgus’s obstinacy, and Golias has sworn in return his fealty and aid,” the Empress said. “He is to pass the Fire as soon as—as soon as the Emperor sees fit to arrange it.”
Prospero still stared down at her, his eyes widening.
He began to laugh, slowly, chuckling softly, then more loudly, then giving in to full-throated mirth. Leaning against a pillar, he repeated “Prince! Prince!” between gusts of laughter.
Empress Glencora watched this display icily. “It amuses you?” she said, when Prospero had begun to calm down, weakened but still chuckling.
He laughed harder again. “Aye, madame,” he said after an indecently long interval. “It amuseth me right well. Ah, Avril, thou onager, blindly bent on hammering asunder any edifice of wisdom left behind by thy sire! Think you, madame, that Panurgus might willfully deny his own? Was he such a two-faced tergiversator as his self-raised successor? Nay, the pillars that ward the streaming Roads bear one face apiece, and that the King’s; and the King’s visage, though ’twas uncomely, wore truth upon its brow. Why, Golias is no son of his! Whose son he be his mother only knoweth, but Panurgus was a wise man and knew the Well’s ways, and he knew by the truth the Well’s Fire shows, as I know, that Golias was none of his get, no more than yon cub Ottaviano is Sebastiano’s— Ah, Glencora, I thank you, for I had feared Avril showed some glimmer of intellect! Now may I console me that no wit, only Fortuna, hath turned the days so drear, for Avril hath all the wit of a wood-bird that knoweth not the cuckoo’s egg. Prince Golias!” Prospero snorted and was off again, laughing as he spoke. “I thought him a but mercenary turncoat, gold-lured, and now he’s revealed a wool-clad wolf: and doubtless shall soon ravage the wolf-clad sheep that think to blunt his fangs. A fitting addition to this company of exalted scoundreldom and rascality! Prince Golias! Ah, dear me. I thank you, Glencora, it is long since I laughed so, and I shall cherish to my grave this hour that afforded me such cheer.”
Glencora was dumbstruck. The ladies behind her were whispering behind their fans, a sibilant symphony of gossip and astonishment, except for the Countess of Lys, who was quite still.
Prospero, smiling yet (not wholly pleasantly), went on. “I thank you further, Empress, for I see your hand in’t that Avril hath chosen to enrich my daughter with your son, not this ill-struck coin Golias. And I bless Avril’s arrogant ignorance, that would go ’gainst what he could of Panurgus’s doing, for had he known how false and foul this Golias is, he surely had bestowed her there instead, poor maid, to torment me thereby.”
“You say that Golias lies?” the Empress inquired in her chilliest voice.
“Aye! The bastard lies, else his mother falsely lies—rather, lay, for where she lieth now she lies no more—seeking to gild her folly. He’s no son of Panurgus; weren’t so, he’d be another man, no Golias. A false Prince made by a false monarch! All façades, no substance behind ’em: Avril seeketh his own kind.”
“I do not understand,” the Empress said after a moment of schooling herself deaf to the slurs upon her husband, “how you are so certain of the truth of what you say.”
“Why, ’tis writ in the Well, Glencora, the very Well which Avril cannot control. The Well’s currents flow true, and who knoweth their mark sees their working on the world as plainly as you see the flood cut the riverbank, the fire melt the iron bar. Aye, here’s the great evil in Avril’s ignorance: that he knoweth not the world he claims to rule. He governs it not; it floweth where it may, gnawing and breaking Panurgus’s Bounds; in ages soon this mighty Landuc shall be naught more than a bright spot in an undistinguished cosmos, rather than a very sun to light the world’s day, diminished for not being maintained.” Prospero’s merriment was gone; he was stonily sober now and looked on the Empress with an unsympathetic eye. “He ruleth no more than he can see, and that which he sees not, is unruled, lawless, unruly.”
Dewar caught the Baroness of Broul’s eye as she entered the ballroom with the Empress and her flock of women and the Emperor and his favorites, the procession winding around slowly to stately, brassy music. The Baroness smiled at him, her fan failing to screen the look from the Baron of Broul, who followed it with a glare of his own before recollecting that he ought to preserve his dignity by cutting the upstart bastard sorcerer. The Baroness puckered her lips and blew a kiss to Dewar and then looked forward also. The procession coiled in on itself; the Court knelt to the Emperor and Empress (Dewar remained standing at the side, behind the Emperor’s back), and then the Emperor seated himself and his consort on a pair of low thrones at one end of the room. The music became livelier, and the formal order of the procession fragmented as people moved, chatted, and partnered.
“Careful,” a voice at Dewar’s ear murmured, “he has a short temper.”
“Among other things,” Dewar murmured back, without looking, “Your Highness. His face is rather red; has he a history of apoplexy as well?” He inhaled a little: musk and roses.
“If he doesn’t, he will, especially if he hears what she has told several bosom-friends. But careful. He’s one of the Emperor’s favorites, first after Pallgrave.”
“Women talk,” Dewar shrugged. “Who listens?” He glanced at Josquin for the first time. “Husbands certainly don’t,” he said, “or they’d not be talked about. Good evening, Your Highness.”
“Good evening, Sir Sorcerer. Lady Filday is giving you the eye from the north-northwest, and I advise you not to return it. She has a poor repute and minor wit, and I presume her inheritance is of no interest to an ascetic scholar like yourself.”
Dewar smiled. “Sorcerers do not marry, my lord.” He glanced back at the crowd in the middle of the room, arrayed in squares now; the music changed, and they began to dance. The Countess of Lys met his eye for a moment and gave him a disturbingly serious stare, no smile whatever on her face. She wasn’t talking to her partner, either, though the ladies around her were gossiping and flirting in the prescribed pattern, complementing the dance’s partings and approaches. Dewar lifted an eyebrow and returned his attention to the Prince Heir.
“I believe I’m not supposed to be seen speaking to you,” Josquin continued in a private tone, “and at any rate I have something of an appointment, of a sort, elsewhere, but we really must talk sometime—privately.”
“I agree. Until then,” Dewar said, bowing, and Prince Josquin smiled charmingly and moved off among the crowd, graceful and shimmering, acquiring a cluster of duller satellites. Dewar gazed absently at the dance again, envisioning Josquin’s appointment and wondering whether the Baroness of Broul had embroidered her account or bleached it. No one else spoke to him, though particular notice by the Prince Heir ought to be good for a few hours’ social success, as hangers-on who hoped to capitalize on royal favor cultivated the new possible favorite. Dewar, in stance and expression, further discouraged approaches. Landuc’s Court was a bore, compared with what he had known in Phesaotois under Oren. The women were abysmally stupid, the men were dung-licking lackeys to the Emperor (not a good plot or rebellion among them), and their wine—Madanese wine, in honor of the betrothal he supposed—was chokingly sweet and thick. And he was the only adept sorcerer in the room—Otto was no more than a journeyman—making it an inferior party by any cultivated standard. He would dance with Luneté, he decided; it had irritated Otto amusingly the last time he’d danced with her, at their wedding in Lys, and Dewar felt like irritating someone tonight, someone of more interest than the Baron of Broul. Freia had behaved abominably, Prospero had dismissed him without even thanking Dewar for keeping her under control for as long as he had, and Dewar wanted someone else to suffer inconvenience tonight.
The dance was closing; Dewar went round the perimeter to the place where Lun
eté, partnered with a weedy, adolescent-looking nobleman in ill-cut red velvet, must end. The music ceased; bows and curtseys followed, and Dewar moved in.
“Countess, may I crave the pleasure of a dance, or are you engaged for the next?”
Luneté looked at him with the same intense, peculiar expression she had used before, then glanced away, blushing. “Dewar— Lord Dewar, I— Where is Otto? I must speak to him.”
“Around here somewhere. Ah, there—with the Baroness of Broul. Charming lady.” Ottaviano was smiling and leading the Baroness to the dance. He asked her again, in a lower, more intimate tone, “Shall we dance, Luneté?”
“I must talk with Otto,” she said, but she allowed him to lead her into the flow of the dance. “Could we trade partners?”
“It is a Court dance, madame, not a country dance. I think it is not done thus these days. The Emperor is very strong on keeping the same partner, unlike his father.” Dewar watched Luneté. She seemed genuinely agitated. “Did the Empress say something distressing?” he inquired solicitously.
Luneté met his eyes for the first time, instead of gawking after her husband. “It was Prince Prospero,” she said.
“Prospero has made a career of upsetting people at Court,” Dewar said. “Don’t take it to heart. Wherever did you meet him?”
“Dewar, would he lie?”
“Prospero?”
“Yes. Would he say something he knew wasn’t true?”
Dewar considered. “I think not, madame,” he said. “He has a gentleman’s sense of honor and conduct and a sorcerer’s Well-governed tongue: he would not lie, might omit a fact, but would not embellish one.” He wondered how Luneté had run into Prospero and what Prospero might have said to her. It would require little priming to pump her dry; Luneté wasn’t very cautious.
“So if he said something—outrageous—something incredible—something—”
Dewar led them off to the side gracefully, lifted a glass of the sweet red wine from a passing servant’s tray, and offered it to Luneté. “Please drink,” he said. “You’re making little sense.”
The Price of Blood and Honor Page 14
