King Lanius eyed him. “That’s the oddest sort of modesty I think I’ve ever heard.” Lepturus snorted and spluttered. The king went on, “How well will Count Corvus do—how well can Count Corvus do—fighting the Thervings without Corax and this army of Heruls that was supposed to attack them from the rear?”
“We drove them back last summer, you know,” Lepturus said.
“Yes, but Corvus wasn’t commanding our army then. You were,” Lanius said.
“Count Corvus has his connections with the Heruls, and he makes a pretty fair soldier, when he pays attention to what’s going on around him,” the guards commander said. “And now, Your Majesty, if you’ll excuse me—” He left before King Lanius could ask him how often Corvus paid attention and how often he didn’t.
With a sigh, Lanius got to his feet and walked through the hallways of the palace. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He should have been doing his lessons, but writing verses wasn’t his favorite part of them. He would sooner have poked around in the archives. He would have gotten his shirt and breeches dusty, which would have annoyed his mother, but so what? But his tutor was a conscientious man, and would insist that he do the verses.
Later, Lanius thought, and kept on wandering.
When he went by, servants bowed if they were men, curtsied if they were women. “Your Majesty,” they would murmur. It was almost as though he really ruled Avornis—almost, but not quite.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” a serving girl said. She smiled at him.
“Oh. Good morning, Marila,” Lanius answered. He smiled, too. Marila was a couple of years older than Lanius. But she didn’t smile at him as though he were just a little boy, as so many of the servants did.
“Where were you going, Your Majesty?” she asked. “What were you doing?”
“Nowhere much,” he said. “Nothing in particular.” He took a deep breath. “Would you… ?” he began, and then stopped. His ears felt as though they were on fire. Try as he would, he couldn’t go on.
Marila curtsied. “Would I what, Your Majesty?” she said, and gave him another smile.
That encouraged Lanius to try again. “Would you… like to come with me?” The last few words came out in a rush.
Her eyes got big. They were very blue—not as blue as his mother’s, which would have alarmed him, but very blue even so. “All right, Your Majesty,” she said. “Where will we go?”
Panic rolled over him. “I—I—I don’t know,” he whispered.
Marila laughed. Had she laughed at him, he would have run away. But she didn’t—or he didn’t think she did. She asked, “Well, where would you go if I wasn’t coming along?”
That, he could answer. “To the archives,” he said at once.
The serving girl blinked. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. She nodded, though, and then brushed back a lock of hair—somewhere between brown and auburn—that had fallen down in front of her face. “All right, Your Majesty, we’ll go to the archives.”
They weren’t far. Lanius’ feet might have been leading him there even when the rest of him had no idea that was where he planned to go. He opened the door, then stood aside to let Marila go in ahead of him.
.She looked at him as though he were utterly mad. “You’re the king!” she exclaimed.
“Well,” he said. Feeling foolish, he walked in. She followed. He closed the door.
They were the only ones in there. He would have been surprised had it been otherwise. The room was surprisingly large. Halfhearted sunshine filtered in through a skylight and a couple of windows high up on the southern wall that hadn’t been washed for a long time. Books and ledgers and scrolls and maps—some a few months old, some a few years old, some a few centuries old, and a few even older than that—were piled, stacked, or sometimes just thrown on or into tables and chests and trunks and cases. The air smelled of leather and parchment and ink and dust. Motes danced in pale sunbeams.
“What a funny place!” Marila said. “What do you do here? Uh, Your Majesty?”
“I come here to look through things,” Lanius answered. “When I go through these parchments, I never know what’ll be on them. Sometimes it’s interesting—things nobody’s seen for years and years. Sometimes it’s boring.”
“What do you do then?” the serving girl asked.
Lanius shrugged. “Then I look at another one.”
“How funny,” Marila said. If she’d laughed then, he would have taken her out of the room and that would have been that. But she didn’t. In the dim light, her eyes seemed enormous. Her voice dropped. “It’s so quiet here.”
“I know. That’s one of the reasons I like this place,” Lanius answered. “It’s just me and… whatever I can find. I’ve seen parchments in here that go back to the days before the Banished One was banished. I could show you.” He ought to do something with the girl besides stand there and gab at her.
“If you want to.” Now Marila shrugged—a motion more complex and interesting to look at than Lanius’ simple gesture had been. She giggled. “I thought you brought me in here for something else.”
“You did?” he said. “What?”
“I could show you.” More than half to herself, Marila added, “You’ll need some showing, won’t you?” She giggled again.
“What are you talking ab—?” Lanius began. That changed to a sudden, startled bleat. “What are you doing?”
Marila pulled her tunic off over her head. She slid out of her long wool skirt, then eased off her breastband and let her drawers fall to the floor. She stood before Lanius, naked and smiling. “I could show you, if you like,” she said again.
Lanius stared. He’d started to notice girls, yes, but hardly more than theoretically. In that same theoretical way, he knew what went on between men and women. But it was all theory. “Are—are—are you sure?” he quavered.
“You’re the king. You can do whatever you want,” Marila answered. “Besides, I think you’ll like it.”
“All right,” he said warily. “I’ll… try.”
Years later, he realized Marila must have done a lot of acting in the next few minutes. He also realized how clumsy and puppyish he must have been himself. At the time, every moment brought a new discovery, a new astonishment, a new pleasure: a first kiss, the softness of Marila’s skin, the funny way the tips of her breasts crinkled up when he put his mouth on them, and then… He’d never imagined his body could feel like that.
“Let me up, Your Majesty,” Marila said from beneath him.
“Oh! I’m sorry!” If she hadn’t said something, Lanius would gladly have stayed there forever.
The serving girl dressed. More slowly, Lanius followed suit. She smiled at him again. “Everything’s fine,” she said. “You were sweet.”
She didn’t say he’d been good, or that she’d enjoyed it. He was too amazed to notice. “So this is why people sing about love,” he said.
“Of course it is. Didn’t you know?” Marila answered her own question before the king could. “No, you didn’t.” Lanius could never remember that without a blush, either.
At the time, he just answered, “No.” Then, slower than it should have, something else occurred to him. “When can we do that again?” he asked.
“Why, whenever you want to, Your Majesty.” Marila batted her eyelashes. “How could I say no to the king?”
“Nobody else in the palace seems to have any trouble,” Lanius answered.
This time, she definitely blinked. It wasn’t coquettish, only surprised. “But you’re the king!” she exclaimed.
“Sort of. After a fashion. In a manner of speaking,” Lanius said. “I can do whatever I want, all right, as long as it’s someone else’s idea.” Too late, he realized that lying down with Marila had been her idea, not his. He didn’t want her to think he hadn’t liked it. Oh, no—he didn’t want her to think that at all! He tried to make amends. “That’s the best idea anybody’s ever had.”
“I’m glad, Your Majes
ty. Maybe you’ll… think of me again, a little later.” Marila kissed him on the cheek, then slipped out of the archives.
“Now what did she mean by that?” Lanius asked himself. He was tempted to shuffle through parchments till he found the answer. A sated laziness he’d never known before fought against his wits but he didn’t need long before he found his answer. “She wants a present,” he murmured. Half the treasury seemed about right. But that would cause talk. A trinket of silver or gold would probably do the job.
He left the archives, too. As he closed the door behind him, he stopped as though frozen. If Marila had given herself to him, might other serving women—Prinia, say—do the same? “I’ll have to find out,” he whispered. “I really will.”
And then he suddenly started laughing again. A few years earlier, Arch-Hallow Bucco had said that when he became a man, he might find Princess Romilda of Thervingia more interesting and attractive than he thought. He’d mocked the notion. The marriage wouldn’t happen now. Even so, Lanius shook his head in slow, understanding wonder. “Gods curse you, Bucco,” he said. “Gods curse you, but you were right.”
CHAPTER NINE
The green-robed priest held out the torch to Grus. “As the flames and smoke rise to the sky, so may his soul ascend to the heavens,” he said as Grus took the torch and walked toward the pyre.
“So may it be.” Grus blinked back tears. Atop the pyre lay his father. Crex, to look at him, might have been asleep. An embalming spell had kept his body fresh while Grus came up from the south. From what Turnix had said while they watched the Thervings, such spells differed little from those the well-to-do used to keep their meat fresh longer than nature usually allowed. That was a bit of lore Grus could have done without.
Crex had been dead for almost a month. Grus had known his father was dead for half that time. He’d had to leave the fleet on the Tuola to come home. He should have been hardened to the knowledge by now—or so he kept telling himself. But his hand shook as he thrust the torch at the pyre.
He died easy, he told himself. You should be so lucky. He was sitting in that tavern with his disreputable friends, and he slumped over, and that was the end of it. Some of Crex’s disreputable friends—retired royal bodyguards, most of them—stood with his family to do Grus’ father honor.
“Have a drink up there for me, you old bastard,” one of them called to Crex. “And pinch the barmaid’s bottom after she fetches it for you.”
“You have to pinch ’em afterward,” another graybeard added. “Otherwise, they’re liable to spill the wine in your lap— accidentally on purpose, you know.”
In spite of himself, Grus smiled at that. He touched the torch to the oil-soaked wood. It caught at once, with a blast of heat that made him step back in a hurry. He held a hand up in front of his face. When he took it down, he couldn’t see his father’s body anymore. The flames had swallowed it.
He and his family had given the old man the best send-off they could afford. The pyre was of cedar and cypress and sandalwood, the oil scented with cinnamon, so even the smoke was sweet. “Good-bye, Father,” Grus whispered. “Gods keep you joyous forever—and I hope you do pinch that heavenly barmaid’s bottom.”
Estrilda came up to him. He put his arm around his wife. “He was a good man,” she said, and a tear slid down her cheek. “He was like my own father to me—he was nicer to me than my own father, if you want to know the truth. I’ll miss him.”
Sosia came up, too, and put her arms around Grus. His daughter was taller than his wife now, and starting to be shaped like a woman. That astonished him. Neither had been true the last time he saw her, half a year earlier. Sosia was a sweet-natured girl. She had to take after Estrilda there, he thought, for she surely didn’t take after him.
He glanced over at Ortalis. His son was well on the way to becoming a man, and a handsome man at that. At the moment, he was avidly watching the pyre. Grus’ mouth tightened. If I know him, he’s trying to see the body burn, he thought unhappily. That he’d gotten a vicious son surprised him as much as having a sweet daughter, and distressed him far more.
“If you will excuse me, Commodore, I must return to my sanctuary,” the priest said. “I shall pray to the gods to sustain you in the wake of your loss, and also to guard and honor your father’s spirit.”
Grus bowed. “Thank you for all you’ve done, Your Reverence. I’m grateful, and so is my family… Yes?” That last was aimed at a pair of newcomers. They were both solidly made men, with hard, watchful eyes, and a weathered look that came from spending a lot of time outdoors. Swords hung from their belts. Soldiers, Grus thought.
“You’re Commodore Grus?” one of them asked.
“That’s right.”
“You need to come with us right away,” the fellow said.
“Come with you where?” Grus asked in more than a little irritation. “I’ve just burned my father’s body. I’m off to his memorial feast. It isn’t something that can wait.”
The two soldiers looked at each other. The one who hadn’t spoken before said, “To the royal palace. Queen Certhia’s orders.” The other one nodded, relieved that his companion had come up with an answer.
He looked so relieved, in fact, he made Grus’ suspicions flare. “I’ll come as soon as the feast is done,” he said, as mildly as he could. He wasn’t carrying a sword. He hadn’t thought he would need one at his father’s farewell. How bad a mistake would that turn out to be?
“That’s not so good, Commodore,” one of the strangers said. “That’s not so good at all. Her Royal Highness won’t be happy with you, not even a little she won’t. Why don’t you just come along now, like you’re supposed to?”
“I’ll apologize when I get to the palace,” Grus said. “It’ll be on my head, not yours.” He wanted to keep wearing his head awhile longer. What do I do if they draw sword on me? One knife against two longer blades made fearful odds.
And then, from behind him, someone said, “These lugs bothering you?” Grus cautiously looked over his shoulder. Four or five of Crex’s old soldier friends had drifted up to stand at his back. They wore swords; he would have bet they wore them everywhere except to bed. As Crex had been, they were nearer seventy than sixty, but they weren’t soft and they weren’t feeble. Two of them against the pair of ruffians wouldn’t have made an even fight. The lot of them together? That was a different story.
Ortalis came up behind Grus, too. He didn’t have a sword and he wasn’t quite a man yet, but he did have a look on his face that said he’d jump right into a fight and do something nasty to the losers if he won.
The men who’d asked Grus to come with them looked to be weighing their chances. One of them made shooing motions at the retired soldiers. “Shove off, old-timers,” he said. “This here is none of your business.”
Grus could have told him that was a mistake. The graybeard who’d spoken before said, “It is if we make it our business. And if you don’t like it, you can bend over and stick it right there.” The other veterans nodded. A couple of them had already let their hands fall to the hilts of their swords.
“I’ll go to the palace right after the feast,” Grus said. “We can sort everything out then. I’ll see you there, won’t I?”
He didn’t think he would ever see these fellows again. He just hoped they wouldn’t try to murder him now that they hadn’t managed to spirit him away. When one of them said, “Queen Certhia won’t like this,” and started to walk off, he allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief—they hadn’t been paid to risk their lives, then. More reluctantly, the second soldier followed the first. They argued as they went.
“Who are those men?” Estrilda asked quietly.
“My first guess would be, Count Corax’s soldiers,” Grus answered. “He owes me one—or thinks he does.”
“I’m glad you don’t believe they came from Queen Certhia,” his wife said. “What would they have done with you?”
“Nothing good. He must have tried this on the sp
ur of the moment, when he found out I was in the city. Otherwise, he would have managed something better.” Queen Certhia would have managed something better, too, if she’d really wanted my head, Grus thought uneasily. He remembered tossing that letter summoning him to the city of Avornis into the Tuola. Sometimes things like that came home to roost, though he hadn’t worried about it then.
One of Crex’s friends tapped him on the shoulder. “You want us to go home with you, Commodore? Never can tell where you’ll find more buggers like that pair prowling around.”
“Thanks, but—” Grus stopped. The graybeard was right. Being polite here might get him killed. Grus shook his head. “No buts. Thanks. I’ll take you up on that.”
“Smart lad,” the veteran said, just as Grus’ father might have. “Let’s go, then.”
“Yes.” Grus turned away from the pyre. “Let’s.”
* * *
King Lanius’ tutor clucked reproachfully. “Your Majesty, you’re not paying attention,” he said. “I don’t even bother bringing my switch with me anymore, but maybe I should start again. What has been the matter with you lately?”
“I’m sorry.” Lanius knew exactly why he’d had trouble thinking about geometry. He’d been thinking about Prinia instead. She’d taught him a couple of things the day before that he hadn’t learned from Marila. He wondered what the archives had to say about things a man did with a woman. He’d never tried to find out, not till now. The archives said something about almost everything. What they had to say about that might prove very interesting.
“‘Sorry is not enough,” his tutor declared. “You’ll need to show more effort—and more success—or I’m going to have to speak to your mother.” He sighed. “I haven’t had to warn you like that for a long time, either.”
Before Lanius could answer, a bodyguard stuck his head into the little room where he had his lessons. “What’s this, Rallus?” Lanius asked in surprise. No one bothered him during lessons. He’d decreed that a long time ago, and in that his word was law—not least because the decree was so inconsequential.
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