by Robert Brady
I also didn’t realize that, if the king stabled his own horse, then that immediately became the thing to do, and they would all try it. The Free Legion had no problem, neither did the real equestrians like Rennin and Ceberro. Groff’s son ended up in a pile of dung with his saddle on top of him, and the stable hands were run ragged answering questions. One stallion got loose and reared at Blizzard, and my stallion sent him packing with a bloody shoulder before I could get him under control.
From here I led the procession to the throne room. Shela and twenty Wolf Soldier guards went to the royal chambers to change Lee. I found myself surrounded by Uman-Chi before I realized it.
“Can you repeat what you said before?” D’gattis asked me, in broken Cheyak.
All languages sounded the same to me, if they were spoken properly. The same if I read them, once I could. If I heard someone who hadn’t mastered a language, then I could hear the actual words, and I could recognize them for what they were. So when a Man spoke poor Uman, I heard Uman.
If D’gattis spoke in Cheyak to a Man, any Man, then this conversation needed to be kept so secret that no one could be trusted to hear it.
“There is nothing more powerful than a thought,” I said. “Is that what you mean?”
The three Uman-Chi looked at each other, then at me.
“What?” I asked.
“Did you know that every Uman-Chi spell caster comes to that conclusion, on their own, to signal their readiness to cast spells?” Avek asked me.
“And that it can take centuries for them to come to it, if they ever do at all?” Ancenon added.
“If I knew that then I wouldn’t run around shouting it,” I said. “I would have some respect for your tradition.”
“It isn’t that,” Avek said. “Those words were believed to be beyond the ken of Men and Uman. In fact, it was believed until moments ago that only Uman-Chi and the most solemn Dwarves might realize their truth.”
“And you come from a nation – we assume of Men – that embraces it as a fundamental belief,” D’gattis said.
“But – there are Men who are Wizards, who cast spells,” I said. “Shela – “
D’gattis shook his head. “Let me speak in these allegories that you love,” he said. “Imagine that you were born a swordsman, but had only ever learned the dagger.”
Click – I got it. I nodded and held up my hand.
“You see?” Avek said to Ancenon, who nodded.
“What?” I demanded.
“Your reasoning,” Ancenon said. “We have all remarked on it. Past the ken of simple Men.”
We were nearing the back entrance to the palace. Rennin and Ceberro were walking together and watching us. Jaheff had run ahead – I didn’t know for what reason.
“Well, it was obvious,” I said. How could I explain a renaissance to them – a revolution that had totally changed human thinking?
“To you,” Avek said. “Just as your prior statement was obvious – to you. Yet we speak of no simple truth, but of the truth, Your Majesty.”
“We speak of certain aspects of our faith,” D’gattis said. “We speak of the building blocks of what we believe.”
Faith, I thought. I think a lot about faith.
“Do you know what faith really is?” I asked them.
They looked at each other, then at me.
I sighed. There were Wolf Soldiers running between the procession and the palace – my palace. That left me a lot to accept. My palace – I’d become the one responsible for this nation, for these lives. No more Heir, no more putting things off on Glennen’s failings. The buck really did stop here now.
“Faith is the color gray,” I told them.
They smirked as one. Simple Man thinking, yes?
“If evil is black, and good is white, then faith is that area of ‘what if,’” I told them. “Faith is where you ask yourself, ‘Am I allowed to do this?’
“Because if you knew – if you knew what your god wanted of you…” I left my voice trail off.
“You would be a monster,” Ancenon said.
We all regarded him. I wanted to hear this, but I had lived in fear of it since the moment that my mind first went down this road.
“If I follow your new allegory,” Ancenon said, “then evil is not the presence of opportunity, but the possibility of absolutes.”
D’gattis nodded. “If I follow Adriam, then I will not kill the innocent,” he said. “But who is innocent? If I know, for example, that the Dorkans are innocent of nothing, then I can kill Dorkans with impunity, and terribly.”
“And if I know that all Andarans are innocent,” Avek continued for him, “then I am helpless before them. No matter what they do, I cannot kill them.”
“Such an existence would be hell,” Ancenon said. “The one who lived without faith, with absolutes, would commit the most unspeakable evil, perhaps to lay down his head at the chopping block at the end of it all.”
“My people believe in a savior,” I told them. “He died for our sins. In a world of faith, then couldn’t that mean that he died for those who killed the innocent for mistaken reasons of faith – for the sins a man couldn’t know he committed, because he could not know the will of his god?”
They were all silent at that. Here, they called a demi-god called ‘Steel,’ the savior, but they didn’t know why.
“Black Lupus,” D’gattis said, “the Uman-Chi have watched you with wonder since we returned from Conflu, and you were reported to the King by Ancenon as a formidable Man. You improved on those feelings with your expertise as a military man. You turned that wonder to awe and anger when you sacked Outpost IX. You turned those feelings to a grudging respect by becoming the king of this nation and totally changing it in a short span of months.”
“And I will confess to you now,” Avek said, “that I am sent here by Angron himself to negotiate a peace with you at all costs, because there are Uman-Chi who believe that you will soon be unstoppable.”
“After he did everything he could to kill me first, of course,” I said. I looked from him, to Ancenon and to D’gattis. I knew they had to have some knowledge of the King’s plans. Ancenon had once been his heir, after all. They must have danced on a fine edge between the oath and their loyalty.
Avek nodded. “Even when I entered the service of the Wolf Soldiers,” he said, “I knew that Angron considered you a threat to the Silent Isle and, as someone who knows his people, I felt certain that he would try to dispose of you.
“And as someone who has known you, and has an understanding of you,” Avek continued, coming dangerously close to confessing our agreement, “I am obliged to tell you that, if I or these two Uman-Chi repeated this conversation to the King’s council, you would terrify a man with the wisdom of one thousand years, and that there are Uman-Chi who would stop at nothing to find this home you claim to come from.”
“And that only because every attempt to eradicate you has failed,” D’gattis said.
I walked past my old suite of rooms while we spoke in heated Cheyak. It would remain empty until I named another heir. I had a whole tower now. I let Glennen’s kids keep their old rooms, only because I had no other use for them.
“There is nothing more powerful than a thought,” I said. “And your fear is that I think the most powerful thoughts of all.”
They nodded.
It hit me like a slap in the face.
I understood what War wanted from me, and why.
Karel let me know that Tartan had been approached by the Confluni and the Trenboni, but had turned both down flat.
“Whether this was because he knew he might be tested, or because he honestly holds his commitment to you close to his heart, is your guess,” the Scitai said.
Karel, Shela and I were in my personal chambers with Lee, who seemed to be having a frank discussion with her ‘bebe’, wagging her finger at it and making nonsense sounds.
“And the rest of the peerage?” I asked him.
He smile
d, leaning back on his pillow on our divan. “Dorkans are leaning pretty heavily on your Tren Bay coastal towns,” he said. “They want to be able to build towers on your coast.”
“And install teleportals,” Shela scowled. “Who gave them permission?”
“The Baron of Britt,” Karel said. Britt referred to the peninsula west of Eldador the Port. “His name is Jahon, and he complained non-stop that he can’t make a living on his land.”
“His land is a stretch of rock covered in salt spray – I would be surprised if things were otherwise with him,” I said.
Karel frowned and nodded.
“The baron of Tonkin didn’t give a firm, ‘No,’ either,” Karel said. “I would give him a few days before confronting him – he might want to report this to you and see what you want done.”
In fact, Genden had requested an audience with me for the next day. It was getting late, and court would be hard to make in the morning if I didn’t get some sleep.
“I appreciate your doing this,” I said to Karel. I still didn’t like him, but I had plenty of use for him. That was good enough.
He nodded and left. Shela deposited Lee in her bassinet, quickly becoming too small for her. Now that we had Nina, we were preparing to transition Lee to her own room in order to get some privacy. Nina had wanted to join us here as well, and had reconciled herself to an adjoining room.
“Planning on conquering me tonight, your majesty?” Shela asked me, her eyebrow raised.
I laughed and took her in my arms. “I’ve conquered you a lot lately,” I informed her. “Your territory must be getting sore.”
She laid her head on my shoulder. She didn’t want to admit to me how she had been affected by the attack at my inauguration, but I knew. She’d been hinting that she wanted another child – this might be coming to a head now that my life had been threatened.
“You live your life at such a pace,” she told me, “no wonder Blizzard loves you – you travel faster than he does. I worry that if I blink too long or sleep too deeply, I will miss you.”
I smelled her hair, all evergreen and straw. She was my dark spring, I thought to myself right then.
An Earth mother who could turn into a hurricane on a dime.
I spontaneously shoved her into our bed, flipped her onto her stomach and took a fist full of her hair. She whimpered as I bent her neck back, then threw the back of her dress up to expose her.
“Your majesty,” she gasped, a smile on her lips.
I slapped her behind and drew another whimper.
The least I could do for such a woman was to conquer her occasionally.
Sleep that night was interrupted by a strange noise. It wasn’t singing or wailing, but a mixture of both, like the old style of Spanish crooning I’d learned in grade school.
Shela lay snuggled down into the comforters, Lee held her bebe in her bassinet. I rose quietly and set my feet to the cold, wood floor. Some people preferred carpet, but I’d rather that the cold hurt my feet and wake me up.
I padded out of the royal bedroom into a parlor we kept, which led to it. Here we had a table, couches, chairs and book cases with nothing in them. Glennen hadn’t been an avid reader but had loved hunting, so there were all manner of mounted animal heads which I personally found repulsive.
The parlor had an exit to the outer hall where a squad of Wolf Soldiers would be standing guard, as well as a break off to an informal dining room I didn’t even know existed before today, and a couple other rooms which were likely for servants or such. One of these we’d outfitted for Nina, and the wailing came from there.
My first thought: if the Bounty Hunters came at me through that sweet girl, I didn’t care what it took, they were over.
I opened the door and found the purple-haired girl in the center of the room, on a thick-pile carpet, her knees tucked up under her chin and tears streaming from her eyes, looking up at me like the loneliest and most lost soul in the world.
“I – I’m sorry,” she informed me, in Aschire. “I tried to be brave, but the walls are stone.”
She’d lived every day of her life in the Aschire forest. She’d slept in the boughs of trees surrounded by her tribe, by animals that she considered a part of her, all these living things.
And here she sat in what she must have considered a tomb. My heart melted. I sat down next to the poor girl, and she immediately found her way into my lap.
Her head tucked under my chin, her fingers interlaced mine. The girl couldn’t have weighed as much as my saddle. She pressed her ear to my chest, her tears soaking into the cotton shirt I wore, and she sighed.
“I’m sorry,” she told me.
I hugged her with my free arm. “Don’t be sorry for trying,” I informed her. She shifted to snuggle closer. “Don’t you worry at all.”
She chatted to me about missing her dad, about being scared of the dark, about never having seen a bed or looked into a mirror before. All things I take for granted. She told me that the bed didn’t smell right but the floor did.
For everything I’d been through in the last two weeks, in the last two months, since getting here, it was kind of nice just to sit on a floor and to comfort a homesick little girl. It was more than an hour before I realized that she’d fallen asleep, and another before I was willing to put her into her bed. I tucked her in, then padded quietly out of the room without closing the door.
I crossed the parlor and opened the door. The Wolf Soldier guards snapped to attention. I recognized the sergeant.
“Send two men to the Lady’s garden,” I ordered him. “There are a couple of potted trees, one on other side of the door. Bring them. Be quiet about it.”
In another half of an hour I had a sapling at either end of her bed. As I set down the second one, she roused, looked up and saw the tree leaves over her head, reached out and stroked them, then looked at me, smiled and went back to sleep. I waited for a while, then slipped back into my own room, into my own warm bed with my slave girl.
She slipped into my arms, telling me she hadn’t been asleep, or at least not very asleep. I didn’t see her checking in on us but that didn’t mean much.
At least I wasn’t a monster, or at least not much of a monster yet.
Chapter Thirteen
Party People
I wish I could have gotten away with one day of feasting and celebration for the inauguration. People who traveled for days or more to get here didn’t want to show up for a few hours and go home, especially when they could find so many useful things to do now that we’d all come together, and I’d made myself a captive audience.
The palace had a gigantic ballroom with blue-veined marble floors and white, fluted pillars reaching up to the arched ceiling fifty feet above us. Huge bay windows opened up onto the bay, paned in real glass. Buffet tables lined the walls and a troupe of musicians played. The next day there would be dancing, and the day after that the players from the Theatre au Thera would be performing.
“Slave,” the Confluni princess said, a flick of her wrist indicating the direction of the kitchens, “fetch us chilled wine, would you?”
Shela’s eyes widened. The Confluni princess made an exquisite creature, barely five feet tall with straight, jet-black hair and a willowy body. She dressed in long white silken robes with a red silk sash that trailed behind her. Three girls stood in her attendance, images of her, and ensured that no one stepped on her clothes.
“Um, we have servants who’ll bring you what you want,” I informed her. “Shela attends me.”
She stepped in close to me, parking her body under my nose, making sure I got a good whiff of her perfume. She looked up into my eyes; hers warm and brown like some vulnerable predator.
“Perhaps I could attend you for now,” she offered, “and we can give the slave a break.”
The storm that crossed Shela’s face was a terrifying thing to see.
“I admire you so for bringing back the institution,” the princess informed me, her hand casually
touching the front of my tunic. “Some are simply born to serve.”
I couldn’t help thinking that this chic would be dead in five minutes and then I would have hell to pay in a war between Conflu and Eldador.
But what to do? Shela was a slave, not a free woman. Lee as my daughter wouldn’t succeed me – in fact, a son had no guarantee of that, either. That made me, in fact, the single King of Eldador, and what did I expect other nations to do but ply me with their daughters?
This wasn’t the first one, either. A Volkhydran warlord had sent me a woman who spent an hour fascinated with my description of economics. Not to be exceeded, two Andaran warlords had sent their daughters on mares for me to deflower in exchange for Blizzard’s services.
I couldn’t help thinking that going after the horse was pretty low – but it had worked in the past.
“Shela, attend your father,” I ordered her.
“Your majesty?” she asked me. It was a comment on her resolve that she was able to sputter that out.
“Now,” I informed her. The princess would piss her off because she could, and something bad would surely happen. Shela was no shrinking violet. She wouldn’t put up with that forever, slave or not.
“By your leave,” she informed me with a nod, her eyes as cold as ice. The princess watched her leave, looking over her shoulder in order to ensure that her breasts remained pointed at me, shooting an, “It is good to discipline them,” after the unfortunate Andaran while she remained in earshot.
Sparks dripped from Shela’s clenched fist, down at her side. I put my back to my angry slave girl and shifted the princess on the other side of me. I didn’t know if I could protect her that way, but it provided the only chance she had, and in fact she didn’t burst into flame.
The reception dragged on. When I managed to excuse myself from one of these women, another found me. Once the foreigners finished with me, the locals started. Groff had a niece, Hectar a sister (seems his father had felt some surge of energy just before death) and the Lady Jameen of Angador a twin. She, an equestrian like Shela, sported a shocking head of red hair and a gigantic rack that she seemed very proud of. She wore a dress cut down half way to her navel and if they hadn’t invented glue then the thing held onto her with either magic or pure faith. Tartan saw her and actually walked into a pillar.
