She reined in her horse and pulled it around. Lady Barb was cantering after her, her face twisted with concern. She slowed to a halt as she realized that Emily had stopped and looked over at her. Oddly, Emily had the sense that the concern was genuine. Maybe Lady Barb wasn’t as bad as Void had hinted. Or maybe she knew better than to allow her dislike for Void to contaminate her relationship with the princess’s best friend. If she still was the princess’s best friend…
“Are you all right?” Lady Barb asked, finally. “You gave everyone a scare.”
Emily stared at her. “I…no,” she admitted. Fresh tears welled up as she realized that she was on the verge of crying. She never cried. “How can anyone do that?”
Lady Barb studied her for a long moment. “Would it help if I told you about his crimes?”
“No,” Emily said. She slipped off the horse and leaned against its flank. “It would have been kinder to kill him outright.”
“He robbed and murdered travelers leaving the city,” Lady Barb said, ignoring her. “One of them was a young girl, about the same age as yourself. The guardsmen who found her were hardened men, but they all felt sick when they saw what he had left of her. And when he was dragged in front of the judge, the judge felt that hanging was too good for him.”
Emily felt her entire body shaking. How could anyone, even the brat Alassa had been, do that to a human being? But it should have been obvious; if transfiguration was common, why not use it as a punishment? Why not create new game to hunt by transforming criminals into animals? And with truth spells, they’d know who was guilty and who was innocent. The innocent had nothing to fear.
And yet it was still horrifying.
The horse shifted as she shivered against its bulk. She heard Lady Barb climbing off her mount, then felt her wrapping her in a hug. Something broke inside her and she started to cry openly, great heaving sobs that tore through her as tears fell from her eyes. Lady Barb patted her on the back, holding Emily until she finally regained some control. And then she reached into her pouch and produced a small gourd of water.
“Drink this,” she ordered, flatly. “Water helps calm people down.”
Emily scowled at her, but obeyed. The water tasted oddly flat, as always. It would have been boiled, along with the gourd itself, just to kill all the germs.
She wiped her eyes, suddenly aware that she’d broken down in front of Void’s enemy. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lady Barb said, briskly. She loosened her grip and stepped back, leaving one hand resting on Emily’s shoulder. “You’re a teenage girl. No teenage girl is ever stable.”
Emily flushed, angrily. “I’ve messed up Alassa’s wedding plans, haven’t I?”
“I don’t think so,” Lady Barb assured her. “Prince Jean made a snide remark, which made Alassa give him a piece of her mind. But he didn’t have a very good chance of winning her anyway. They cantered off in the other direction while I went after you.”
“They’re all going to be laughing at me,” Emily said. She’d made a mistake…simply by not bothering to think through all of the implications. The princes might not say anything out loud to Alassa, but they would certainly snigger amongst themselves. “I…”
“The world doesn’t revolve around you, Child of Destiny or no,” Lady Barb pointed out. “What makes you think they care?”
She was right, Emily realized. If Alassa could ignore the presence of a lower-ranked man in her bedroom while she was dressing, the princes certainly wouldn’t consider Emily to be very important, even if she was Void’s daughter. And even though they had seen her trap a cockatrice, they might still not take her seriously when they were here to court a princess.
“You’ve upset enough kingdoms already,” Lady Barn added, a moment later. “Give them a chance to get used to the last set of changes, hey?”
Emily found herself giggling helplessly. They thought the changes she’d introduced so far were upsetting? She couldn’t wait to see their faces when they saw the steam engine. Maybe it would take years to produce a working locomotive, but the basic theory was easy to describe and spread around the Allied Lands. And steam power led to all kinds of useful applications, from steamboats to railroads. What would happen to the Allied Lands once there was a network of rails binding them together?
And if they worried about the roads having military applications, she thought to herself, they will panic when they realize what the trains can do.
Lady Barb squeezed her shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “That isn’t funny,” she snapped. “Your changes have put one guild out of business already and risk damaging others…”
Imaiqah’s father had told Emily that the Accounting Guild–or at least some of its members–had been corrupt. Even those who hadn’t been outright thieves had used their advantages ruthlessly over those who couldn’t read a balance sheet. Or at least one of the old balance sheets. Double-entry bookkeeping, Arabic numerals and abacuses had made it laughably easy to spot the fraud. The Accountants might have survived–there would certainly still have been a place for them–if they hadn’t been so unwilling to punish their guilty members.
“They could have adapted,” Emily muttered. Sooner or later, someone would have stumbled on something comparable to Arabic numerals, something so useful that it would have spread like wildfire. “The world changes all the time.”
“You’re just like your mentor,” Lady Barb snapped. “Doing something without ever bothering to consider the long-term consequences.”
Emily flinched. She wanted to defend herself, but Lady Barb was right; she hadn’t considered the long-term consequences of what she’d introduced to Zangaria, let alone the rest of the world. Some innovations–like stirrups–would have been adopted by the various armies without dissent, but others…the printing press alone was likely to cause problems. And, on Earth, some of those problems had become the bloodiest times in the planet’s history.
And she’d been wrong. Lady Barb still disliked her because of her connection to Void.
She stared down at the muddy ground, her thoughts churning around and around in her head. If she did nothing, if she went native and allowed her knowledge to die with her, what would happen? The world would remain stuck in a rut that would last until a native produced similar changes, or until the necromancers came over the mountains and destroyed the Allied Lands. No, that wouldn’t happen. What she’d done already had ensured that change would come. The only real question would be just how much chaos it would bring in its wake.
What should she do? What could she do? It hadn’t been her who had perfected the first printing presses, or produced the increasingly advanced designs. Local craftsmen had done that, working from her ideas and then improving on them as their experience grew. They’d done the same with the abacuses and would probably wind up doing the same with steam engines, once they produced a working model. Come to think of it, they could combine science and magic to make it work; a binding spell on the locomotive might stop it leaking or exploding if metallurgy wasn’t quite up to the task.
“Tell me,” Lady Barb said. “Where is this leading?”
She’d told King Randor that it was leading to a better world, a simple answer that hadn’t really told him anything useful. It certainly didn’t include the troubles that were going to come, when education was widely available and merchants were making more money than the aristocrats could extract from their estates. The king might side with the Assembly and use them to weaken the barons, or he might side with the barons and try to strangle the changes in their cradle. Either way would almost certainly lead to civil war.
It was easy to say that the aristocrats needed to be removed, but what would happen then? France had fallen into civil war after the revolution, eventually leading to dictatorship; Britain and Russia had gone through similar phases. And she knew Alassa; she was Emily’s best friend. If they were still friends…and how well had she known her, if Alassa was capable of
killing a man? But she came from a very different culture. It was easy to forget that at Whitehall…
“I asked you a question,” Lady Barb said, a hint of steel in her voice. “Where is this leading?”
Emily swallowed hard, then tried to answer. “The vast majority of the population never has a chance to use its full potential,” she said. It was true enough. “The changes I have introduced will allow more of them to attempt to realize their potential, allowing them to produce greater wealth…which in turn will make the kingdom wealthier.”
Lady Barb studied her for a long, thoughtful moment. “Do you really believe that?”
“Yes,” Emily said, simply.
“So you do,” Lady Barb observed. “Explain.”
Emily blinked at her, then realized that a combat sorceress would have ways to tell if someone was trying to lie. Or at least lie deliberately. Sergeant Miles had talked about the various levels of truth spells, although he had only taught them to the more advanced students; there was one that could detect a spoken lie, without compelling the speaker to talk. Ideally, the speaker would be completely unaware that the spell was even in place. Emily certainly hadn’t realized that Lady Barb might be testing her words for truthfulness.
“Money is useless if it is tied up,” she said, carefully. She’d worked out the basics of economic theory at Whitehall, but she suspected that theory was going to prove insufficiently close to practice. Plenty of fine-sounding theories had run into unsuspected rocks and shoals in real life. “Those who have money can simulate the economy by spending it.”
She grinned suddenly as she used concepts that few others in Zangaria would even have considered. “If a man makes two gold coins by…selling tunics, he can use that gold to buy food from a farmer’s stall, passing the gold on to the farmer. The farmer in turn can use that gold to buy farming tools from a craftsman, who needs to dress himself so he goes to the tailor and buys more tunics.”
“Craftsmen don’t wear tunics,” Lady Barb said.
It took Emily a moment to realize that she was being teased. “Or whatever craftsmen wear,” she said, tiredly. “The point is that the money keeps going round and round. Every stop on its journey means that someone new can have the power to buy something for themselves…and so on. In the meantime, the authorities can tax a little from each person, which gives the state the funding to produce things that help stimulate the economy further.”
Lady Barb frowned. “Really?”
“Yes,” Emily said. “Projects like…producing a new harbor, or making roads, can be expensive, too expensive for small businessmen. But if the authorities have the funds, they can do something that benefits everyone–better roads mean faster transport between the farms and the cities, while better ports mean that there can be more shipping heading out to the rest of the world. All of which will bring in more wealth.”
“And your changes help people to do their own accounts, and to read,” Lady Barb said. “How does that create wealth?”
“The more they know, the more they can do,” Emily said. It had actually been the motto of a college that had been trying to recruit students back home, although she’d never been convinced that the collages were worth the mountains of debt she would have had to assume to go there. “Sharing information leads to greater progress. That’s why we have places like Whitehall.”
“How true,” Lady Barb mused. “And do you think that the barons are going to be happy when they realize their peasants are moving off the land?”
Emily hesitated. Zangaria’s lowest class–apart from the slaves, who were treated as animals–was tied to the land, forbidden to leave the noble estates on pain of death or enforced servitude. Unsurprisingly, their treatment was horrific, even by the standards of most of the world. Equally unsurprisingly, many of them had been slipping off the land and fleeing to the cities, or learning to use the new letters and alphabet. Emily couldn’t understand how anyone could expect the peasants to be grateful when they had no reward at all for their labor, but it wasn’t unprecedented. The slaveholders of the American South had believed the same thing.
And what would it mean for Zangaria?
“I wish I knew,” she admitted. But she had a feeling that she did know. There would be repression, and resistance, and outright war…just like in Russia, prior to the Revolution of 1917. It had been the Bolsheviks who had finally crushed resistance from the peasants. “Maybe the king can do something…”
But what? The barons would resist any attempt to strip them of their power. Given time, it was quite possible that the Assembly would be able to create enough wealth to support King Randor’s military–or produce an army for itself–but would the barons realize the danger in time to stop it? They seemed pretty sure that they’d gelded the Assembly…
“I think you’d better think about it,” Lady Barb said. She looked into the forest, then back at Emily. “Do you want to go find the hunters?”
Emily shook her head. Whatever else happened, it would be a long time before she forgot the dead body. “No,” she said. “I want to go into town and find Imaiqah. I need some space.”
“Most people wouldn’t give the princess any space,” Lady Barb said. Her tone was so artfully neutral that it was impossible to tell if she approved or not. “But you would be well advised to return to the castle and go visit your other friend tomorrow. Send a message, tell her that you’re coming, and I will accompany you to her home.”
“That isn’t necessary,” Emily objected. “I…”
“Oh?” Lady Barb interrupted. “You know how to find her house?”
Emily flushed again, cursing herself. She should have realized that it would be impossible to find Imaiqah’s house without a street map, or a local guide. Come to think of it, did they even have numbered houses? All of the letters Imaiqah had sent home had been mailed directly to her father. Lady Barb was right. She would need someone to help her.
“Point,” she admitted, grudgingly.
Lady Barb motioned for Emily to mount her house, then mounted her own. “For what it’s worth, I agree with you,” she said. “Transforming someone–anyone–into a different form is not amusing…and hunting them for sport is unpleasant. But I cannot change it.”
Emily looked at her, sharply. There had been something in her voice…
“The Kings believe that punishment must be horrific in order to deter,” Lady Barb added. “And you will agree that the punishment is horrific?”
Cruel and unusual, Emily thought. But what did that mean here? And was it even unusual?
“Who judges?” She asked. “Does King Randor pass sentence?”
Lady Barb snorted. “The king hear every case in Alexis, let alone the rest of the kingdom?”
She shook her head. “Most cases are heard by a Town Councilor,” she added. “Anything involving the nobility is judged by the Noble Estates–the noble part of the Assembly. Anything involving magic is the problem of the Court Wizard. Thankfully, Zangaria doesn’t have many magicians. Zed is more interested in alchemy than actually carrying out the duties of his post. I’ve often ended up dealing with them myself.”
Emily listened as Lady Barb outlined what happened at court. A criminal case was always conducted under truth spell, with everyone involved bound to speak the truth. Civil cases tended to be less simple, with–Emily guessed, reading between the lines–a great deal of bribery involved. The person with the most money probably won. At least there was no chance of sending an innocent man to be hunted to death. By the time Lady Barb had finished speaking, they were almost back at the castle.
“I’d suggest that you make an appearance tonight,” she said. “Most of those cocksure men think women are too frail to be sorceresses. They’ll take your departure as proof they’re right. You owe it to Alassa to look strong this evening.”
Emily winced. “How often do they give you trouble?”
“The first day I came here, I had to whip three Royal Guardsmen in a bare-knuckle fight to
convince them that I had earned my rank,” Lady Barb said. “You can’t fight the Princes, any more than Alassa can. So you need to look strong.”
“I’ll do my best,” Emily said, finally. She didn’t want to attend the dance at all, but Lady Barb was right. She had weakened Alassa’s position, even though Alassa probably looked strong compared to her. But then, most of the princes probably didn’t think of her as the fearsome Necromancer’s Bane. “And tomorrow you can take me into town.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I THINK THE COURT WIZARD IS ANNOYED with you,” Alassa said, the following morning. “You might not want to visit his lair alone.”
Emily winced. King Randor would have had time to talk to his daughter–and then to the Court Wizard. It wouldn’t have been a very pleasant discussion. Even if Emily was wrong–and she had to admit it was a possibility–the long-term effects of the Royal Bloodline could be disastrous. And that would be bad enough for anyone, but Zangaria’s political stability depended upon a line of succession.
“Very annoyed, I should say,” Alassa added. “The last I heard, father had to speak to him quite severely about not threatening guests.”
Alassa’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure about this?”
“I don’t know,” Emily admitted. “It just seems odd to have a fertile line start to have fewer and fewer children until you wind up an only child.”
She looked around Alassa’s dining room, shaking her head inwardly. What sort of mentality suggested that a young girl needed her own place to eat? But she was glad of it–and of Alassa’s invitation to a private breakfast. The last thing she wanted to do was face King Randor, or the princes.
What if she was wrong? There would be panic, perhaps some paranoia, but no serious harm. But if she was right, the Royal Family was in deadly danger. It would simply come to an end. Emily wished she knew more about genetics, but for once Zangaria and the Allied Lands seemed to be capable of doing more than Earth. As far as she knew, it was impossible to produce children to order, at least outside science fiction.
Lessons in Etiquette (Schooled in Magic series) Page 24
