Treason's Shore

by Sherwood Smith

  Hadand was enthusiastic, Tdor interested, and Evred inscrutable but he listened, so Tau tried to make his reports entertaining. He strove to hide his increasing frustration at the Marlovans’ resistance to such seemingly simple ideas as planning the actions so that the audience could see, instead of standing face-to-face on the stage “Because that’s the way people really stand.” Then there was the conviction that the painted flats (because there were no stage mages here) simply had to be exact in every detail lest some House take insult and declare a feud.

  Within a week after assembling an enthusiastic body of volunteers from the closest taverns, Tau had quietly put away the plays he had so carefully selected while in Anaeran-Adrani. Everyone seemed to want a play by New Year’s Week, so he’d decided to adapt one of the ballads everyone knew. Easy, right?

  After rewriting the play script every single night for another two weeks, he’d gone back to the simplest types of plays, the ones that turned on a story everyone knew, with the players making up their own lines or using ones from ballads. He’d decided to approach written plays by degrees.

  As the players recommenced their exchange (galloping through their words in the syncopated rhythm of ballads, despite Tau’s attempts to coach them out of it) and happily hefted their wooden weapons for their favorite part of the play, the door creaked on its ancient hinges.

  When Evred’s First Runner Vedrid entered, Tau knew this had to be a royal summons. Scarcely a watch after the mud-splashed Runner from the border mountains had been seen? Not good.

  The players launched into their mock duel. Vedrid stood beside Tau in silence, watching the mock duel until the end. When the two stage Jarls fell to arguing about who got the better-looking strikes, Tau flicked an interrogative glance at Vedrid. “Summons?”

  “When you have liberty.”

  Tau understood that there was no emergency—but then he would not be the one summoned in an emergency. That would fall to Inda.

  “All right,” Tau cut into the argument. “Put together a fight you think is both fair and exciting. The rest of us will meet on the morrow.”

  And while the others began talking over one another in their efforts to share their ideas, Tau slipped out.

  A short time later he was ushered into Evred’s private study with no one else at hand. Evred was busy at his desk; inevitable were the marks of tiredness under his eyes, but his countenance no longer exuded lethal tension.

  Evred sat back and tossed over a heavy rolled paper with the remains of the royal Adrani seal affixed to it.

  “Read that.”

  Tau sat down in the wing-backed chair, and looked at the signature first. Wisthia Shagal? Evred’s mother.

  He read the letter through twice then laid it down. “And so?”

  “First, I had no idea you were part of the Dei family. I thought we knew them all, except for the ones in Sartor. There was a rumor in one of my father’s letters about runaways from treaty marriages, but everyone assumed they’d gone east.”

  “And came back. And had my mother, who had me.” Tau lifted his hands. “I found out the summer after I left here. Does it matter?”

  “You are oath-sworn to no one, as far as I am aware,” Evred observed, avoiding the question.

  “True.”

  “I understand that you do not see yourself as Iascan, much less Marlovan. Now, perhaps, I understand why.” Evred touched the name Dei on the letter.

  “I grew up without awareness of the family name.”

  “You did not tell anyone.”

  “Arrogant as it might sound, I still wanted to be accepted or rejected on my own merit,” Tau said, shrugging. “I take it your mother’s suggestion has gained your approval?”

  Evred’s brows lifted. “I don’t have anyone else to send. Vedrid has twice been outside the border, but I promised him he would never have to leave again. And I don’t know how well he’d do negotiating with these people.”

  Tau thought about Bren’s court scene, the spies, innuendo, lies, and crosscurrents of ambition and intent. Then he shook his head. “It would be difficult.”

  “So permit me to ask what experience you have had with trade negotiations.”

  “I was often put with the purser when they discovered my facility with languages,” Tau said. “After the Pim ships were lost, Kodl frequently had me as well as Testhy on hand when he dealt with captains and cargo. Later on, Inda relied on Barend and me to handle all our trade matters, such as they were.” He smiled. “Turing pirate loot into ship repair and supplies is probably not what most would consider training for the stately pace of international trade, and yet I saw enough while in Bren to convince me the two are not so far removed as one might think.”

  “This Prince Kavna seems to think you would do well.” Evred looked wry. “I would not be inclined to take the recommendation of some other prince had I not my mother’s assurance as well. So. Do you have any questions for me?”

  Tau knew the cost of that. “What did your grandfather want? Regulation of trade, besides military control?”

  Evred’s face closed, and Tau watched him struggle with a lifetime of secrecy. He waited.

  Evred said at last, “The question is not merely one of control, though that is a part of it. You can see how much simpler things are with one rule rather than competing interests, the most successful often the most corrupt.”

  “Ah. Your Iascan guilds,” Tau guessed. He knew from growing up in Parayid Harbor that the Marlovans had pretty much isolated the guilds to prevent them from being in contact with the rest of the world.

  “The archives are filled with dire tales of corrupt guilds bringing down thrones,” Evred said. “Changing prices at whim for political ends. When we Marlovans came to Iasca Leror, the first treaty was with the Jarls, of course, but the second was with the guilds. Their business goes through us.”

  “And northern trade was limited to the Nob and Lindeth, once your grandfather took Olara. I know that much. So, I take it you want to open the kingdom to world trade again?”

  “It will go through my people in each harbor. Everything honest—everyone pays according to the same standard. No bribery or secretly doubled fees for this person and cut rates for that friend.”

  Tau had no doubt that Evred meant exactly what he said, which was more than he’d allow many other monarchs. “A sound policy. What would be my role? Listen to royal gossip, follow world affairs, and reestablish guild contacts?”

  “Does that not constitute a sufficient start?”

  Evred was not issuing orders; their relationship was anomalous. Tau liked it that way. Evred had learned to tolerate it, which Tau thought a good sign.

  But below that, another truth: Evred was willing to send Tau away. So much for believing myself indispensable to a king and a queen. He knew just how much Jeje would laugh at him for that. Have I the Dei ambitions after all?

  No. The truth was personal, not political. Evred’s accession to power had deepened those wells of reserve that, when he broke free and surfaced, made the resultant ardency as incandescent and dangerous as lightning. And about as brief. Tau knew himself addicted to those moments.

  “I can do that.” Tau forced a smile, an easy voice as he added, “It sounds intriguing.” And when Evred made a wry grimace at the word play, Tau laughed. “How do we communicate? Do you really want half a year between letters?”

  “It suited my ancestors.” Evred pinched the skin between his brows, his tone dry. He sighed. “But it seems to put us at a disadvantage. So address the question to my mother.”

  It was late when Tau reached Hadand’s rooms.

  Hadand welcomed him with her customary calm practicality, but, like Inda, she could not hide the expression in her eyes. “You are going to be missed by more people than just me,” she said.

  “So you heard I was leaving?”

  “Evred showed me his mother’s letter and said he had asked you to serve as his Voice over the border.”

  Tau sm
iled. “Marlovans! I use my own voice, but I’ll represent his interests.”

  Hadand frowned a little. “Do you understand what representing the King’s Voice means?”

  Tau waved a lazy hand to and fro. “I understand your military chain of command. It seems the only way to force your formidable captains not to take things into their own hands on a whim. I’m sure Evred will not be issuing any military commands through me. I certainly won’t have a small army of armed dragoons to enhance my prestige, as I am traveling quite alone. And I prefer it that way,” he added when he saw her about to speak. Then he tipped his chin toward the window. “I was just at the theater. Thought I ought to explain why I would not be there. They still seem to want to continue, though on their terms, not mine.” He made a face in self-mockery.

  “I know you don’t consider your theater a success.” She gave him a crooked smile. “Maybe we Marlovans will come to it in time. When I was in Nente with Queen Wisthia, I came to realize how much training is required just to learn how to watch a play.”

  And when he laughed, she crossed for the first time the boundary they had each observed so scrupulously. When they were together they had talked about everything except Evred.

  But Hadand was hungry for the kind of insight she knew Tau could give. She sensed he was unsettled, maybe even upset, so she said tentatively, “I think Evred will miss you, too.”

  Yes, he was upset. Tau glanced back over his shoulder, the mockery pronounced. Then he walked around the room, the lamplight glimmering in his neatly queued golden hair, a bright contrast to the dun stone, the darkwood low tables.

  “If that is true, why am I leaving?” he asked finally and perched on the windowsill, his profile illuminated by torchlight. “He doesn’t trust me now because his mother told him my family name? I don’t know if that’s worse or better then losing his trust by my own effort.”

  Hadand clasped her hands over her knife handles hidden in her sleeves. “Tau, he doesn’t trust anybody. Except Inda.”

  “He trusts you.”

  “No, he wants to trust me. And Tdor, and to a certain extent he trusts Cama and his cousins and others to diminishing degrees. He has trouble trusting women because we hold secrets apart from men. Oh, I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and as near as I can figure his distrust goes back to when we were young, and he started discovering that we had secrets, but he couldn’t see why. And I hadn’t told him. He respects me, but he must have decided that my first loyalty lay with Aunt Ndara and my mother, not with him. Which wasn’t true, it was just that I’d promised them. So that leaves one person.”

  “Inda,” Tau said, looking away.

  Hadand said, “I know what you all hid from me, but I saw Evred’s face when Inda rode off to Idayago. It was stupid of me not to have seen it before. It’s Evred’s nature; I should have expected him to fall in love with my brother.”

  “There are all kinds of love, Hadand. Have you considered that some of Evred’s passion for Inda might be the more intense because Inda’s blind to his feelings?”

  “Except he’s always loved Inda. Ever since they met as scrubs down there in the academy. They didn’t even use the word love, except for foals and puppies and their favorite foods. And I think it happened because Inda trusted him, without question. Without calculation. Without ambition. And this was ages before either of them had any interest in sex.”

  Her unhappiness strengthened his conviction that he’d failed not just Evred, but Hadand as well. Sex is sex, his mother had said once. Do not look for it to be a solution to anything but desire. Salutary! He said, “And then Inda left. Did his passion for Inda become a habit, or a dream that was easier to maintain than dealing with real people?”

  “I don’t think so. In Evred’s family they’re all like that. You should hear the stories about his great-great-aunt, and her ride across—oh, now I’m being a bore. As for Inda, yes, he’s blind . . . selfish. He expects everyone to love him, and they do.” Hadand’s voice trembled as she prowled around the room, fingering her belongings. “At first I thought that when Inda got back from the north, I’d take him to task for his blindness. I thought, if Inda gave Evred a night, just once, maybe the . . . the power of anticipation would at least end.”

  Tau made a movement of protest. Hadand said quickly, “I know. After I got my own feelings out of the way, I saw just how much Evred would hate that. Who wants a pity tumble? That’s why I haven’t—” She smacked her hand against the wall in exactly the same way Inda often did. “But that road leads to thinking oneself a victim. There are no victims where there was no attack. Inda doesn’t like men for sex, and Evred knows it. I love Tdor dearly, but I don’t want to crawl into bed with her. We’re made the way we’re made, and anyway, Inda has Tdor and Signi—when would he have the time for Evred, too? He’d have to spent his nights hopping from room to room, unless it would occur to him not to leave one of his women out, as they got along so well when Signi was here, but oh, no—”

  Tau concentrated on the rapid flow of words, the tremble in Hadand’s voice and the disjointed thoughts convincing him that the real issue was not Inda’s selfishness in not sleeping with both women together. “Tdor would hate a threesome,” he observed.

  Hadand tapped her fingers on the knife hilt in her other sleeve, the angry flush fading from her cheeks. “I know.”

  The calm in her voice, her honest gaze caused him to broach the real subject. “Evred would hate a threesome.”

  “I know.” And again she struck the wall. “I’ve been wishing that you and Evred being together would somehow come to include me. He hasn’t come near me in a year. I think he’s relieved that you spend your nights with me when you’re not with him. Then he doesn’t have to.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “No. I used to wait outside his study for him to end working, and I’d fall asleep on my feet. He’d always worked hard, but this working through nights began around the time that Inda and Tdor came.” She rolled her brown eyes. “And didn’t stop until you returned and made him stop. How long did it take me to see what everyone else seems to have known?”

  “First things first. I don’t think a threesome would ever happen, whoever the third was. Not Evred. One at a time is about all he can bear.” Tau grinned. “Threes only work if the connections go equally all ways.” And because she was too close to the devastating discovery that her brother unwittingly had the place in her husband’s heart that she would never have, he said with a mild air, “And it can be lots of fun. Four, now, that’s even more rare, but it can be quite fun, too.”

  “Four? You’ve sported with four people?” She laughed. “You’re joking with me. How would that even work?”

  “I’ve done it. For triple pay, I should add. People being made the way they are, one must be agile as well as imaginative, but even so it’s almost impossible to avoid a knee smacking into a nose. And there are always way too many feet.”

  She chuckled, and as he described some unfortunate instances illustrating the impracticalities of human design versus imagination, she finally gave way to gusts of laughter, then wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Her anger was gone.

  “No, I’m not fair to Inda,” she admitted. “Everyone loves him, and he loves everybody, but he doesn’t expect it. It just is. He just doesn’t see how Evred’s feelings are—”

  “Unswerving.”

  “I was going to say unyielding. Sometimes it frightens me, how intense Evred’s love is. And his trust. Maybe because they are both so interdependent. I just wish . . .” She shrugged, her mouth bitter. “He’d hold me. But as much as he’d hate a pity tumble, I’d hate pity hugs.”

  “Evred knows nothing about affection, because the only person who gave him any was you, then you stopped. Yes, yes, I remember what you told me, and yes, he stopped coming to you for comfort. Whatever his reasons were, they no longer hold true, do you see? He has no defense against tenderness, just a lifelong dearth of it. With me, he can shed pass
ion with violent play because I can take it and give it right back. I hope it’s done him some good, despite the fact that he’s sending me away.”

  “Maybe he’s afraid to think so,” Hadand said, with that narrow gaze so much like Inda’s when he was evolving a plan. “He would see that as dangerous weakness.”

  “Could be.” Inward laughter accompanied Tau’s thought, I sound so all-knowing. “I just hope that when I’m gone he’ll be sensible and go back to the House of Roses.”

  Hadand looked down.

  Tau stepped away from the windowsill and took her hands. “I need to get my things ready. I’ll ride out well before morning. Prevent awkward leave-takings. Here’s my second thing. If you want your beloved in your arms all night, then you’ll have to make your wishes clear. If you ask with no attempt at guilt, you will not get pity.”

  She backed away, hands pushing out. “I can’t beg.”

  “So don’t beg. But ask. Pity is not the only emotion that brings people together when the fire doesn’t burn for both. People who grew up with no affection seldom know how to offer it. You cannot force the fire to burn, but you can teach people tenderness.”

  He kissed her and left.

  He was gone before the sun rose on a new day.

  That night, Evred was surprised when Hadand did not part from him with her friendly “Good night,” as had become their custom, but invited him into her bed.

  He stood there looking down at his hands, thinking of all the work he’d set aside for the night watch. But he chanced to look up, and there was Hadand with her own hands pressed together in a way he had not seen for a long time.

  An unpleasant wash of guilt chilled his nerves. When he drew in a cautious sniff, he did not catch the distinctive astringency of the gerda root that women took when they wished to conceive a child. So she had stopped drinking the steeped herb and he had not been aware.

  He looked up gravely and said, “I have been remiss. I beg your pardon.”

  Remiss? There was no sense in arguing the word. She would take him as he was, just as she’d promised when he’d come home to find his father dead and offered himself, saying All I ask for myself is truth between us.