Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  The last of the minor business was disposed of. The Councilors put up their papers, some of them poured themselves wine, and there was a great deal of coughing and shuffling of feet. Then, as she expected, really, it was Lord Gartheser, more portly now than he had been before the Tedrel Wars, and more florid of face, who cleared his throat awkwardly and put the subject on the table.

  “About the matter of Your Majesty’s marriage—” he said, and stopped.

  Selenay smiled sweetly, a smile that went no farther than her lips, as she looked down each side of the horseshoe-shaped table before she allowed her eyes to rest on Gartheser.

  He makes a poor conspirator, she thought. It was from him that Talamir had learned what was toward, though Gartheser himself was probably completely unaware that he had betrayed anything. But he gave himself away, according to Talamir, in a hundred ways, by little nervous tics, by being unable to meet a person’s eyes, by dropping far too many hints when he was satisfied with himself. At that point, both Talamir and Alberich had gone to work, and no secret was secure when those two were ferreting it out.

  Though it occurred to her that Talamir had probably not done nearly as much work as Alberich. Talamir’s sympathy was probably at least in part with the Council. Well, give credit where it was due; he had told her in the first place.

  “My marriage?” she asked, in feigned innocence. “I wasn’t aware I had been betrothed, much less that there was a marriage in view. Certainly King Sendar never said anything of the sort to me.”

  “Ah, well, Your Majesty, that’s the whole point,” Gartheser managed. “You haven’t one, you see. Betrothed, that is.”

  She took her time and looked carefully around the horseshoe-shaped table again, making sure to look each one of her Councilors steadily in the eyes. The silence was deafening. No one moved. “Indeed.”

  “And you—that is, we thought—that is—” Gartheser couldn’t look her in the eyes anymore. He dropped his gaze and stared at his hands, and stumbled to a halt.

  “We have some candidates in mind, Selenay,” Lord Orthallen took up the thread smoothly. Orthallen looked the part of the senior statesman; he had retained a fine figure, and the silver streaking in his dark blond hair in no way detracted from his handsome appearance. Women younger than Selenay threw themselves at him on a regular basis, though she had never heard so much as a whisper to indicate that he was unfaithful to his wife. “You really must marry as soon as may be, of course. A young woman cannot rule alone.”

  “Indeed,” she said levelly, hiding her rage with immense care. She wanted to scream at them, then burst into tears, and nothing could be more fatal at this moment.

  But the others took that lack of objection on her part as the signal that she was going to be properly malleable, and took heart from it. Only Elcarth and Talamir understood that Selenay had her own plans. Elcarth winced a little at her tone; Talamir’s lips quirked, just a trifle.

  “The first, and indeed, the most eligible candidate is my nephew Rannulf,” Gartheser said brightly, “who—”

  “Is not eligible at all, I’m afraid,” she interrupted smoothly, with feigned regret. “He’s related to me within the second degree, on his mother’s side, through the Lycaelis bloodline. You know well that no King or Queen of Valdemar can wed a subject who is within the third degree of blood-relationship. That is the law, my Lord, and nothing you nor I can do will change that.” She raised her eyebrows at them. “The reason is a very good one, of course. I shall be indelicate here, for there is no delicate way to say this. As my father told me often, the monarchs of Valdemar cannot afford the kinds of—difficulties—that can arise when a bloodline becomes too inbred.”

  And with you and yours marrying cousins and cross-cousins with the gay abandon of people blind to consequences, that’s the reason half of your so-called “candidates” are dough-faced mouth-breathers who couldn’t count to ten without taking their shoes off, she thought viciously.

  :Harsh. With justification, but harsh,: Caryo observed sardonically.

  Gartheser blinked, his mouth still open, and stared at her. Finally he shut it. “Ah,” he said at last. “Oh—are you quite sure of that?”

  She opened Myste’s report to the relevant page. “Rannulf’s mother is Lady Elena of Penderkeep. Lady Elena’s mother was my father’s cousin through his mother. That is within the second degree.”

  “Oh—” Gartheser said weakly.

  “Then there is my nephew, Kris—” said Orthallen quickly.

  “Related to me within the third degree on both sides of his family, as his mother was a cousin-by-marriage of my father, and his father was a cousin-by-blood to my father,” she said briskly, already prepared for that one. “Besides being so young that there is no question of consummation for at least eight years.” She smiled dulcetly at Orthallen. “Which does rather negate the entire reason for marrying with such remarkable speed in the first place, before my year of mourning is over. Doesn’t it?”

  To her great pleasure, Orthallen was left so stunned by her riposte that his handsome face wore an uncharacteristic blank look. Not that she wanted to humiliate him—she was really awfully fond of him, after all—but it gave her no end of satisfaction to make him understand, in no uncertain terms, that just because she was fond of him, she was not going to allow him to manipulate her into something she did not want to do.

  And blessings upon Myste; she suspected that not even Orthallen knew about the nearness of her blood relation to his nephew. He proved it in the next moment by saying, cautiously, “I assume you have the particulars of these degrees?”

  She went to the second page of Myste’s notes and gave him the genealogical details, chapter and verse, in a no-nonsense, matter-of-fact tone of voice.

  “Ah,” he said. And wisely said nothing more.

  So it went. Every single candidate that any of them brought up, she cut off at the metaphorical knees. Including the ones that she had not given Myste to research; that was why Myste was shut up in the library. She would leaf through her thick sheaf of papers to give Myste the chance to trace pedigrees, then pretend to read what Myste Sent to her.

  At last they ran out of names—or at least, of names that they could all agree on. Now the daggers were out, and the looks being traded across the tabletop were wary. Any new candidates would be men and boys that had already been rejected, because one or another of the Councilors objected to them for reasons of his or her own. She could sit back and let them play against each other, which was the better position to be in.

  At least, that was true among the highborn Councilors; the Guildmasters were a different story entirely. None of them—and no candidate outside of the nobility—would be related to her, which eliminated that argument.

  However, she thought she could count on the highborn Councilors to fight tooth and nail against any common-born man being put up as a potential Prince Consort. There was an advantage to snobbery.

  Mind, if she did happen to fall in love with a commoner, she wasn’t going to let snobbery stop her—

  That would open up a whole new set of problems which she wasn’t going to think about right now. The current set was more than enough to deal with.

  It’s too bad Alberich isn’t here now, she thought, letting her anger begin to die. This is the part he’d really enjoy—watching them cut the legs out from under each other.

  Ah well. She hoped the installation of his window had gone well. She was looking forward to seeing it. It would be the only part of her day she was able to look forward to.

  Why would anyone want to be a Queen?

  ***

  “Oo wouldn’t want t’be a Queen?” demanded the rather drunken tart sitting at the table next to Alberich’s. “Larking about, doin’ whatever ye please, gettin’ waited on ’and an’ foot—”

  Not from Haven, thought Alberich to himself. Though you have the accent, it isn’t quite good enough, my girl. And you aren’t nearly as drunk as you seem. What’s your game,
and who put you up to it, I wonder.

  Now perhaps, at any other time, perhaps in another year or so, she might have gotten away with such an ill-considered remark. But not now. Not when barely six months had passed, and Selenay had been making herself very popular with little gestures like the “Queen’s Bread.” People down here had a lot of trouble keeping their children fed, and one guaranteed free meal a day, at the trifling cost of lessons in rudimentary literacy and numeracy, was a small price to pay. A youngling down here couldn’t earn the price of that breakfast himself in the course of a morning. It was good economics to send your younglings to a temple until noon, then put ’em to work.

  “’ere now!” a man just near enough to have overheard the speech stood up, glaring at her. “Our Selenay ain’t like that, ye owd drab, an’ if you was a man, I’d’a thrashed ye fer that!”

  The woman shrank back, and well she should have. He was big and broad, and looked as if he knew very well how to handle that cudgel at his belt. “No offense meant, I’m very sure,” she said, hastily. “I didn’ mean Queen Selenay! I just meant, a Queen, in a gen’ral sort of way.”

  The man glared at her. He was as drunk as the whore pretended to be, and he was at the very least going to say his peace. “Our Selenay ain’t no layabout!” he insisted. “Why, I seen ’er, I even talked to ’er, couple’a nights afore the last battle. Come right to our fires, she did, ’avin’ a word with our officers, seein’ we ’ad good treatment!”

  “Oh, yeah, an’ she talked t’ you, did she, ye old liar!” jeered someone else—

  Ill-advisedly.

  The drunk rounded on the skeptic with a roar, and grabbed the man’s shirt in one hamlike fist. Only the intervention of the “peacekeeper” that the proprietor of the Broken Arms had seen fit to hire prevented mayhem from breaking out. But there was the start of a fight, and under cover of it, the woman slipped out.

  Alberich followed.

  She wasn’t at all difficult to follow, the silly wench. She paid absolutely no attention to what was behind her. The man she accosted just outside the alleyway next to the tavern was a little more careful, but not enough to spot Alberich. He was a darker shadow in the alley—people always thought that wearing black would make them blend in with shadows, but it didn’t; it made them into man-shaped black blotches in an almost black place. Alberich was wearing several shades of very, very dark brown and gray. Each leg was a slightly different color. So was each arm. And his tunic was blotched. There was nothing about him that was man-shaped, when he stood in shadow.

  “I’m not doin’ that no more!” the woman shrilled at her contact, just as Alberich eased within listening range. “You go do your own dirty work from now on!”

  There was a murmur, too low for Alberich to make out the words.

  “I didn’ get but a word out,” she said sullenly, “an’ up jumps this drunk bear and nearly thrashes me!”

  More murmuring, and the clink of coins. The woman departed, muttering.

  Alberich followed the man.

  There had been a lot of money exchanged there for such simple services—a lot for this part of town, at any rate. Alberich hoped that his new quarry would try another quarter, one where such a payment would be the norm rather than the exception. And lo! As if his wish had flown straight to the ear of Vkandis, that was precisely what his quarry did.

  It wasn’t a wealthy part of town; working class was more like it, but working class that got work regularly, of the sort that came with weekly pay packets and a little something extra on the holidays. A place, in short, where there were City Guards and constables on patrol regularly.

  A place where Alberich could manage to do something to get them both arrested.

  Which, as soon as a constable hove into view, Alberich did.

  He nipped back around the corner so as to be able to intercept his quarry coming, apparently, from the opposite direction. It wasn’t hard; he knew this part of Haven better than the back of his hand. There were few yards with high fences and even fewer with dangerous dogs tied up in them. Once he came back around, he saw that the constable was strolling along at a leisurely pace that would take him past his quarry before Alberich reached the man. Good. He didn’t want the constable to actually see what was going on between him and the stranger, only hear it and make some inferences that, as it happened would be entirely unwarranted.

  :You’re enjoying this,: Kantor accused.

  :Hush. I’m busy.:

  The fact was, he was enjoying this. It was the first hint of trouble, real trouble, his sort of trouble, that he’d had in moons.

  As he approached the man, he stared at him—easy enough to do, since there were streetlamps here. Then he contorted his face into an expression of rage and roared.

  “You! You bastard! Thought you could ruin my sister and run away, did you?”

  And then he flung himself at the startled man.

  As he had expected, the man was not startled for long, and he was armed. So what the surprised constable saw when he turned was a man with a knife attacking an unarmed man. Since he couldn’t know which of the two of them the accusation had come from, he assumed—as any good constable would—that the man with the knife was the attacker, not the defender.

  That Alberich was in no danger from a mere knife was something he couldn’t know. So, to his immense credit, he waded in himself, wielding his truncheon and blowing a whistle for dear life to summon help. He was aiming most of his blows for the head of the knife wielder, and Alberich helpfully positioned the target so that, by the time the help arrived, his quarry was out cold and he was able to protest feebly that he didn’t know what the madman was talking about, he’d just jumped for him with a knife, screaming about a sister. . . .

  ***

  “We have to stop meeting like this, Herald,” said Captain Lekar of the City Guard, with a feeble attempt at humor. “People are going to start talking.”

  “I fervently hope not,” Alberich replied, rubbing his wrists where the conscientious constables had tied them—being too wise ever to take one potential miscreant’s word over another’s. He warmed his hands on his cup of tea, but did not drink from it. The herbal teas consumed by the night shift of the City Guard were not drinkable, even by the standards of a former Karsite Sunsguard. “If talk they do, my personae will in danger be.”

  “Yes, well, I wish you’d find some other way of catching your lads without getting the both of you thrown in jail,” the Captain replied wearily.

  Since this was only the third time that Alberich had used that particular desperation ploy, he held his peace. “Keep him safe,” was all he said. “Speak with him under Truth Spell I wish to, when he awakens.”

  The Captain did not ask why. The Captain did not want to know why. The Captain was an old friend of Herald Dethor, Alberich’s mentor in this business, and he knew very well that he did not want to know why. And Alberich knew that he knew, and both were content with the situation.

  Now, if this had been Karse—he reflected soberly, as he left the City Jail by an inconspicuous exit, making certain that there was no one to see him leave.

  :If this was Karse, and you were an agent of the Sunpriests, that man would be in extreme pain for a very long time, and at the end of it, he would be dead,: Kantor said.

  :He may still be dead when this is over,: Alberich replied, grimly, making his way toward the stable of the Companion’s Bell. :But if he is, at least it won’t be by my hands.:

  :If he’s lucky, we’ll find out he’s just a troublemaker.: Kantor didn’t sound as if he really believed that would be the case.

  Yes, and if that happened to be true, well, there was no law against speaking out—or having someone else speak out—against the Monarch. Laws like that only made for more trouble; some people always had to have a grievance, and making grumbling illegal was a guaranteed way of ensuring that grumbling turned into resentment, and resentment into anger. If that was the case, he’d be let go, with the vague memory
of having proved he didn’t know anything about anyone’s sister to the satisfaction of the City Guard.

  If it was not the case—

  Well, there was one Herald in the Circle who had no trouble with dirtying his hands with difficult jobs. Alberich would find out who had sent this fellow down into the dark parts of Haven to foment discontent. And he would follow that trail back as far as it would go.

  And the man would still be let go—but this time with the very clear memory of having been questioned under Truth Spell by a Herald. Chances were, he would cut and run, and hope his employers never found him. That would be convenient, because it would take the problem off of his hands.

  And if he didn’t run—his employers would probably take the problem off Alberich’s hands a little faster.

  He collected Kantor and the two of them made their way up to the Collegium—Alberich feeling the effects of the truncheon blows that had connected with him, and Kantor brooding. Alberich didn’t press him as to the subject of his brooding; whatever it was, Kantor would talk about it when the Companion was good and ready and not one moment before.

  And in fact, as Alberich hung up his saddle, Kantor finally spoke. :I hope this doesn’t mean it’s all starting again.:

  Alberich sighed. :My good friend—I hope this doesn’t mean it never finished.:

  2

  “Why is it always me?” Myste asked, as Alberich made his second trip of the night down into Haven, this time with her in tow. The scholarly Herald pushed her lenses up on her nose and shivered beneath her cloak.

  “Because you have the strongest Truth-sensing ability in the Collegium,” Alberich said. “And because the two of us can speak in Karsite. If our naughty boy doesn’t understand Karsite, he won’t know what we’re talking about, and it will make him nervous, and if he does, you’ll know it, and we’ll have him where we want him.”