Lessons in Etiquette (Schooled in Magic series)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Zed threw her a surprised look. “I’m sure that their monarch took care of them,” he said. “Those who showed no sign of ill effects were released. The others were…”

  “Killed,” Emily snapped. The magic inside her was responding to her anger and horror, growing stronger and stronger. Unless Zed was blind, he would be able to sense it. “They were killed after being used as test subjects.”

  Control yourself, she thought. It was hard to concentrate, but somehow she managed to tame the magic, absorbing it back into herself. Remain calm.

  “The experiments produced a successful result,” Zed pointed out. There was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before. Alchemist or not, he had definitely sensed the surge of magic. “We have a Royal Bloodline.”

  “I know,” Emily said. She forced herself to focus. “What does someone have to do to join it?”

  “They need treatments,” Zed said. He nodded towards the door leading into the lab. “I am brewing up the first batch now. The prince who wins the hand of our fair princess will drink it and begin the shift into the Royal Bloodline. It is not a pleasant process. We actually had to tie Queen Marlena down to force her to drink.”

  Emily winced, then a thought struck her. “You said that Alexis I had four children,” she said, suddenly. “Where are their descendents?”

  “The daughters married into other royal families,” Zed said, as if it wasn’t particularly important. “The king’s younger son went to command the army that tried to liberate Gondar and died there, without issue. I think there was a big argument among the Allied Lands after that, because the liberation was a complete failure and cost thousands of lives…”

  “Oh,” Emily said. Something was nagging at her mind. “I assume you keep a copy of the Royal Family tree?”

  “Of course,” Zed said. “We have to know who might have been touched by the Royal Bloodline.”

  Emily scowled. She didn’t want to ask the next question, but there was no choice. “After Alexis I, how many of the reigning kings had more than one child?”

  “Alexis II had five; two legitimate and three bastards,” Zed said. “Bryon had only one legitimate son and a dozen bastards. Alexis III had only two children; Randor has only one daughter, Alassa.”

  “A dozen bastards?” Emily repeated. It seemed excessive, although if the barons had wanted to keep Bryon from realizing that they’d turned him into a puppet, giving him unlimited access to women might have worked. “What happened to them?”

  “Most were killed when Alexis III took the throne,” Zed explained. “A handful might have vanished, but the records have been carefully sealed or destroyed.”

  Emily stared down at her hands, unable to fully comprehend the scale of the disaster facing Zangaria. It should have been obvious to her, if not to anyone else. Living close to other girls had made her sensitive to their monthly cycles, even though the potions they were given at Whitehall helped to keep them under control. But she’d never seen Alassa having a period.

  I could be wrong, she told herself. I don’t share a room with her…

  But it was hard to deny the evidence. The number of legitimate births had fallen sharply in the Royal Family; hell, it was possible that King Randor had tried and failed to produce a bastard son. Or Alexis III, for that matter. What if Alassa couldn’t have children at all?

  A king could sleep around as much as he liked–and if he slept with an unmarried noblewoman, he might just be able to convince his aristocrats to accept the child as a heir to the throne. Or maybe he could con them into believing that the bastard was the queen’s son. Alassa wouldn’t have that luxury…if the prince she married couldn’t give her children, the Royal Bloodline would come to an end.

  They don’t know what they’re doing, she told herself. Or was it deliberate? No; no one, not even a necromancer could hatch a plan that would take centuries to work. And they’ve knifed themselves in the back.

  “I need to talk to Alassa,” she said, suddenly. Her friend might be able to put her mind at ease. “Thank you for the Kava.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ALASSA’S ROOMS WERE MUCH LARGER THAN Emily’s and crammed with servants, half of whom seemed to be doing nothing more than standing around trying to look attentive. Unlike the maids she’d encountered on the journey, there were clear hierarchies amongst them, with one of the maids firmly in charge of the others. Alassa herself sat in the middle of the room, waiting patiently while the maids fixed her hair. The fact that she was wearing nothing more than a shift in the middle of a crowd of people didn’t seem to bother her.

  “Take a seat,” she said, when Emily arrived. “They’ll be done in a few minutes.”

  The servants turned to face Emily and curtseyed, almost as one. Emily flushed brightly; somehow, she suspected that she would never get used to the regal treatment. At least they weren’t staying on their knees this time, she told herself, as the maids turned back to watching Alassa. She couldn’t imagine how her friend could tolerate having so many people around her at all times. Did they even sleep at the foot of her bed when she finally went to sleep?

  She looked around the room, shaking her head at the sheer luxury of it all. The walls were painted bright blue, decorated with portraits of royal women throughout the ages, starting with the first Queen of Zangaria. She had been a determined woman, from the look in the picture’s eye, but it was hard to see how she was related to Alassa. But then, the Royal Bloodline practically defined the looks of those who were born with it. Queen Marlena didn’t look anything like her child either.

  One large window looked out over the castle grounds. Emily walked over to it and peered down to see a group of workmen constructing a small stadium on the grounds far below. It took her a moment to realize that it was actually being set up to allow the princes to joust, although she honestly wasn’t sure why King Randor would allow it. If one of the princes felt humiliated, what might happen next? They should have been warned to be on their best behavior, but they were royal princes, unused to anyone telling them no.

  Emily wondered just who they expected to impress. Alassa hadn’t been any more amused by team sports than Emily herself, though she’d had different reasons. Maybe the commoners from the city would be invited to come and watch…no, that was unlikely. There was no reason anyone would invite people who had nothing to contribute. The thought was absurd.

  “You are all dismissed,” Alassa said, from behind her. “Go.”

  Emily turned, just in time to see the servants filing out. Few of them looked happy at being dismissed, even though they’d had nothing to do. A handful even threw cross glances at Emily, as if she was personally to blame for their misfortunes. Did they actually think that she had ordered them out? But then, it was safer to blame the visitor than the royal princess.

  “I used to like having them around,” Alassa complained, once the door was firmly closed. “And now I feel crowded. When I am queen, I am going to tell Nightingale to get rid of half of them before I have a child myself.”

  Emily snorted. It probably wouldn’t be that easy. With only one royal child in the castle, there would be an immense struggle if anyone’s patronage was cut–and it would have to be cut, if Alassa wanted to reduce the number of attendants. Maybe most of the servants were low-born, although even that was questionable, but their patrons would be noblemen. Hell, most of them probably owed their positions to Nightingale.

  “Sit on the bed, but don’t let them see you doing it,” Alassa added, mischievously. “They will talk.”

  “Oh,” Emily said. “How many servants do you have?”

  “My own household, which isn’t actually under my control, has three hundred people,” Alassa said. “And it seems to have expanded while I was at Whitehall.”

  She smiled. “But thank you for coming,” she added. “It gave me an excuse to chase them all out without resorting to threats.”

  Emily smiled back, then started casting privacy wards into the air. Alassa
’s eyes opened wide, but she said nothing as Emily completed the spells. She had no idea if it was rude or not to use them in the castle–they weren’t blocking anyone’s way into the room–but Alassa could probably approve it for her. Besides, she didn’t want anyone overhearing their conversation.

  “Let me guess,” Alassa said. “You’ve discovered that one of the princes secretly likes boys.”

  “Worse than that.” Emily said. “Can I ask you a rude question?”

  Alassa frowned. “Ruder than the ones my father asked me before you came to join us for breakfast?” She asked. “They were very rude–and personal. And I had to answer them.”

  Emily felt a moment of pity. One of the odder traits of the Royal Bloodline was that anyone who was sealed to it–either through birth or marriage–could not lie to the prime member, the ruling King. Alassa could never have lied to her father, nor could she have knowingly misrepresented the truth. If her father had decided to question her about potential boyfriends, she would have had to answer. It was easy to imagine that one of the questions might have been about her virginity.

  “I’m not sure,” Emily admitted. “Do you…do you bleed?”

  “Irregularly,” Alassa said, after a long moment. “Why do you ask?”

  Emily took a long breath and explained what Zed had told her, starting with what Alexis I had done to establish the Royal Bloodline and about the decline in royal births that seemed to follow the modifications woven into the Royal Bloodline. There was no way she could ask if her father had a bastard son, but given Alassa’s sex and her behavior prior to Whitehall, it seemed unlikely. Surely, the king would have tried to put such a son forward as a potential heir.

  Alassa stared blankly at her when she’d finished. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “Your family needs, in every generation, at least two children,” Emily said. “Ideally, they want two male children, an heir and a spare. Right now, your family isn’t getting what it needs.”

  Alassa nodded, impatiently.

  “So what happens if you can’t have children?” Emily asked. What did it actually mean if someone bled irregularly? A weak fertility cycle or something else, something worse? “What happens to the kingdom then?”

  “Disaster,” Alassa said. Her entire body tensed. “Do you think that it’s likely?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily admitted. “I’m not sure that the alchemists really knew what they were doing.”

  Alassa stood up and rounded on her. “Explain,” she snapped, in a tone that would have gotten her in deep trouble at Whitehall. “What is happening to us?”

  Emily hesitated. How did one explain genetics to someone intelligent but completely ignorant of the fundamentals? And if she did, she’d have to explain where the knowledge came from in the first place. She might have promised Alassa the truth, when she took the throne, but what would happen if Alassa told her father about Emily’s words? King Randor wouldn’t be satisfied with vague evasions, not on a matter so fundamental. He’d want definite answers.

  But there was no choice.

  “Imagine…cooking,” she said, finally. Alassa didn’t take Martial Magic. She’d probably never cooked in her life. Still, it was the best she could do. “You mix up the ingredients, cook them and produce…whatever you wanted to cook. Making a baby works on similar principles. The man contributes, the woman contributes…and the baby is the combination of both of them.”

  “I learned that from my mother,” Alassa said, sarcastically. “So what does that mean for us?”

  “If a couple has five children, they are all made from the same ingredients,” Emily explained, as patiently as she could. Maybe she should have studied genetics, as well as a hundred other subjects that would have been more useful at Whitehall than on Earth. “The only thing that’s different is the mixing.”

  Alassa giggled.

  Emily shot her a sharp look and continued. “The problem is that some of those ingredients are bad ones,” she said. She knew enough to explain about dominant and recessive genes, but that would have taken too long. The analogy was simpler. “If you have a bad ingredient, it can be overshadowed by the other ingredients, but it isn’t actually gone. If those children actually happened to marry each other, the bad ingredients would be strengthened.”

  “But if those people happened to be perfect,” Alassa said slowly, “wouldn’t perfection reinforce itself? That’s why the high nobility refuses to even consider marrying commoners. Their blood is purer than their social inferiors.”

  “Except the bad ingredients would combine and grow stronger,” Emily said. On the face of it, Alassa’s logic was perfect, as well as making perfect sense for her world–but it just didn’t work that way. “Incest is an extreme example; the bad ingredients would definitely find partners and grow stronger. Depending on the exact mixing, the bad ingredients might be the ones in control. However, even if you had a larger population without overt incest, the bad ingredients would still be there. Sooner or later, they would be reinforced when two carriers meet, marry and produce children.”

  “I think I understand,” Alassa said, doubtfully. “The nobility has only a handful of people it can legitimately marry, so any bad ingredients will eventually pop up into the open.”

  “Close enough,” Emily said. She held up a hand before her friend could say anything. “The problem is that the alchemists started fiddling with the Royal Bloodline to engineer traits they found desirable, without fully understanding what they were doing. It’s quite possible that one of the traits they created had a side effect that reduced fertility. Or that they tried to select for male children and simply failed to get it quite right.”

  “If they had, I wouldn’t have been born,” Alassa snapped. “But why did it even happen?”

  “They didn’t know what they were doing,” Emily reminded her. “It’s possible that they never noticed until it was too late, if they noticed at all. Your father has a brother, remember. The real problems might not have appeared until your father took the throne.”

  She hesitated again, then plunged on. “Your mother had to be treated to join the Royal Bloodline. Is it possible–now–for someone without the treatments to bear royal children? Or could you get pregnant if your partner wasn’t treated?”

  “I do not know,” Alassa said, after a moment’s thought. “My mother told me never to experiment with boys, not even a mere kiss.”

  Emily noticed that she didn’t say that she’d obeyed, but kept that thought to herself.

  “It could get worse,” she said, instead. “The Royal Bloodline might be destroying the vigor you need from outside families. Instead, it may be folding over and over itself. In the long run, it could destroy your family.”

  “My Uncle has no children,” Alassa said. “His wife never took the treatments.”

  Emily reached out suddenly and hugged Alassa as tightly as she could. Who would know about the problem? The aristocracy probably paid close attention to the king’s child–and to the king himself, who might be seeking comfort in the arms of a mistress. Would they notice that he’d only had one child, legitimate or otherwise? It was certainly possible to prevent conception–there were potions that could do that–but King Randor might not have used them, not if he needed a male heir. And yet he’d failed to produce one.

  It struck her that they could have simply given the treatments to other women–a short-term solution, at the very least–before she realized that might have given their children a claim to the throne. Or perhaps a stronger claim…she shook her head, wondering why someone had deliberately set out to make such a complex system. No; it was more likely that it had grown up over the decades, as the Empire was slowly replaced by successor kingdoms. Every time she tried to follow the lines of quasi-logic that marked the difference between legitimate and illegitimate children she felt her head starting to hurt.

  “They don’t know what they’re doing,” Alassa repeated. There were tears in her eyes. “Where is it all goi
ng to end?”

  “You should be able to do something about it,” Emily said. “Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe there are ways to make someone compatible with you without giving them the rest of the bloodline. It needs research…”

  It crossed her mind that she should call Professor Thande. He was younger than Zed, but very well thought of in the alchemical field. Maybe he would be able to offer suggestions.

  But it wasn’t her call to make.

  “I shall discuss it with my father,” Alassa said, finally. She pushed Emily away gently and walked over to the chair, sitting down on it with a sigh. “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “So do I,” Emily said.

  But she had a feeling that she wasn’t wrong. Royal families on Earth had suffered badly because of inbreeding, most notably the Hapsburgs. Charles II of Spain–the last of the line–had been a suffering animal, unable even to chew his food properly. And he’d been impotent, unable to continue the line. Perhaps it had been something of a relief. Other branches of his family had had similar problems, even if nothing quite so extreme. She’d worried about Alassa before she realized the true nature of the Royal Bloodline.

  Alassa straightened up. “There will be another dinner tonight,” she said, changing the subject. “And then a dance. A number of young noblemen have requested the pleasure of your company, but as most of them are really boring I have arranged for you to be escorted by Sir Xavier. Officially, he’s a diplomat who has represented Zangaria to the White Council several times in the last four years.”

  Emily frowned. “Don’t I get to choose my own escort?”

  “I thought you hated having men trying to court you,” Alassa said. She stuck out her tongue, then smiled, brilliantly. “I can arrange for you to be escorted by Prince Wandering Hands, if you like, or Baron Ambitious, or even Sir I-Want-To-Be-A-Lord. You’re my best friend–just how many of them want to get close to me through you?”

  Her smile died. “This way, you get a reasonably entertaining companion and I get to look like I control your life,” she added. “They’ll draw the right conclusion and leave you alone.”