by Robert Brady
“Your majesty,” Rennin addressed me during a lull, Ceberro and Hectar in tow with him, Nantar and his wife right behind.
I pasted on a smile and took a drink from my bowl of mead. I felt bloated, halfway drunk, my feet ached and my head hurt. “Your Graces,” I said, inclining my head.
I saw the two Andaran girls sizing me up for another pass – they’d parked themselves by the buffet tables. If I could get the Dukes to get me to the door, I could make a run for it and hide in my rooms.
“Enjoying yourself?” Ceberro asked me. The smirk on his face told me that he knew the answer. His lips and eyes weren’t puffy anymore but there were purple marks. He’d been quite the topic of conversation – apparently it turned out to be a real honor for me to put your lights out.
“Tell me that one of our cities is under attack,” I ordered him.
“All peaceful,” Hectar informed me. His wife had sparked up a polite conversation with the Confluni princess when I had stupidly strayed into a corner. If she hadn’t, I would probably still be there, getting felt up.
“Who would attack the Conqueror?” Rennin asked me. “You’re invincible, you know.”
“No, I’m not, I swear,” I said. “Get the word out.”
Nantar laughed his laugh. I don’t know what it is about him, but you can’t be too upset with Nantar there.
“Glennen used to hate this, too,” Ceberro informed me. “One of the reasons he loved Alekanna so much I think is that she rescued him from the daughters, the sisters and hangers-on.”
“And that happened when Eldador was a backwater,” Hectar said. He swept the grand ballroom with a predator gaze, his eyes picking targets.
“Eldador is a major force of Fovea now,” Nantar noted. “It’s worth a daughter to make it hard for you to attack someone.”
“Seems that the Andarans feel this way,” Ceberro said, indicating the two girls with his chin.
Kills With a Glance joined us. I looked for Shela and she had left him. For a panicked moment, I couldn’t find the Confluni princess.
“Your majesty,” he said, inclining his head. “You were wise to send my daughter to me.”
“Oh, oh,” Nantar’s wife, Lanette, said. “Oh, she must be furious.”
“She has no place to be,” Kills informed them. “She is a slave, fairly traded. She had to know that someday there would be other women.”
“Thorn’s father has three wives,” Nantar added. “And a concubine as well. The concubine is Thorn’s mother.”
“A wise man,” Kills noted.
Rennin grinned to himself. “Why can’t I imagine Shela serving another wife?”
“Just think about the most violent thing you ever saw,” Nantar said, “and then multiply it by… the next most violent thing you ever saw.”
“Ha!” I told him. “Maybe to start.”
“No,” Kills informed us. “My daughter will follow her man as I raised her. She might not like it, but she knows full well who she is.”
Thing is, Shela did know full well who she was, and that made her the love of my life, and I didn’t want anyone else.
“There is no way to just… marry her?” I asked Kills.
He regarded me, then shook his head.
“It speaks well of you that you consider her,” he informed me, “but you can’t. Andarans marry only Andarans, and to do otherwise would shame her tribe.”
“And I don’t see you taking a few years off to be accepted by an Andaran tribe,” Rennin told me, flatly. “I know something of the rituals.”
“Seems to me that kings get to decree stuff like this,” I said. “I mean – why be a king if I don’t get to just change the laws at will?”
“You aren’t the king of Andoran,” Kills told me, and I could see him becoming irritated. “Andoran has no king. If you aren’t an Andaran and you aren’t accepted as an Andaran by one of its tribes, then no matter her love for you, she won’t marry you and, if she tried, it would shame all of us.”
I sighed. This was intolerable. It was also distracting, unfortunately, and it hadn’t occurred to me that talking to Kills for this long was a perfect invitation to the two Andaran girls to swoop in, and of course they took advantage of it.
“Your Majesty,” one said. She was ‘Sings Softly’ of the Wet Belly tribe – a large, southern tribe from the south of Andoran. Like Shela, her hair ran black down past her shoulders, olive skinned with big, brown eyes. She’d dressed out in a simple ball gown compared to the intricate, colorful outfits some of the other women were wearing. Her friend, from another southern tribe called the Drifters, was called ‘Little Bird,’ and other than being a couple inches shorter than Sings Softly with a rounder face and wider eyes, they could have been sisters.
Both were built like Shela. I guess the Andarans had decided what I liked.
I inclined my head to them. “My Ladies,” I answered them.
Ceberro and Rennin exchanged a look, both smirking. Kills regarded both girls, clearly lingering on their breasts. The dresses didn’t show much cleavage but both clearly were designed with cleavage in mind.
“We wanted to admire your command of our Andaran language,” Little Bird said, her voice so soft that I really had to pay close attention in order to hear her. I think that might have been her goal.
“And we wondered,” Sings Softly added, “if you shared an interest in our oral tradition.”
Nantar rolled his eyes. Well… Thorn was his good friend, so I’m sure there was some joke or innuendo here I’d missed.
“Shela shares it with me all the time,” I informed them. “I really enjoy it.”
Kills shook his head and took his brow between his thumb and forefinger.
“I was admiring your mares,” Rennin informed them, stepping in for me. “Those from the south or Andoran aren’t like those from the north, are they?”
“No, your Grace,” Sings Softly answered him, her eyes flickering between he and I, clearly wanting to be sure that I didn’t escape while he occupied her. “The south is more prone to rain, the southern horses are wider of hoof, heavier.”
“Slower,” Ceberro chipped in.
“Little advantage to speed in the mud,” Nantar said, “if your horse is mired or slipping.”
All of the other men nodded. Yeah – no one’s hunting you guys!
I felt a stroke on my arm and turned to see the Volkhydran woman had circled in from the left and flanked me. This one also had dark hair past her shoulders and a heaving bosom, on display in some kind of wrap-around, red thing which didn’t reveal much skin, but looked like it revealed a lot of skin.
Rather than long and straight, this daughter of Volkhydro kept her hair kinky and wild – untamed like her people, I couldn’t help but thinking. Aileen’s had been blonde but wild like that, too. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of Aileen in a long time.
She turned her head up to me with big, doe eyes and asked, “Are you discussing horses, your Majesty?”
Oh, sweet baby Jesus. Of course, I don’t know that thinking that meant anything here.
“We are discussing the history of the Andarans,” Sings Softly informed her, just stiff enough so that the rest of us caught it. “I don’t suppose you’ve been educated?”
“Not in that,” the Volkhydran girl – Neveratta, I believe, of Ulef, Kark’s daughter – informed us all. “What – what would be the point?”
The Volkhydrans bristled, Nantar barked a laugh.
What a nightmare!
The two Andarans squared off on the Volkhydran girl. I faded back, cut behind Ceberro and made a beeline for the exit. Wolf Soldiers may or may not have cut off anyone coming after me – I didn’t know and I didn’t care. If Shela was as upset as I thought she’d be, then she’d go to the stables, and that’s where I beat a hasty retreat to.
The best part about the stables was that the palace offered about a dozen ways to get there, all of them different. I swept through the halls, my hard-soled boots b
anging on the stone floors, past Uman servants who either bowed or curtsied in surprise, not expecting me to be in the back ways of the palace, especially not without a Wolf Soldier entourage.
I emerged through a side entrance that cut past the Heir’s rooms, now vacant, and emerged from a little-known entrance where the stables cozied up against the palace walls. I stepped past an over-full hay cart, two wheeled and its tongue braced against the ground with the harness still attached.
I stopped next to it – that wasn’t right! Leave the leather harness attached and the weather would get at it and ruin it, or stiffen it so that the animal pulling it would be miserable.
I shook my head and smiled. Here I was, the King of friggin’ Eldador, and I was sweating the treatment of a harness that probably cost less than my boots.
“There’s a rare sight from his Majesty,” I heard from ahead of me.
I reached for my sword and then found the source of the statement, the red-haired sister of Ceberro’s lady-friend, Jameen. She’d changed her gown with the plunging neckline to skin-tight trousers, black leather riding boots and a white cotton top with a plunging neckline. She’d wrapped her hair into a thick braid woven with baby’s breath, and draped it over her left shoulder.
Her green eyes sparkled like Genna’s had, and I immediately felt the same hunted feeling that Genna had inspired in me. I had to assume she was younger than Genna, although older than Shela. Closer to my own age or maybe just turned twenty.
“I mean you no harm,” she purred, raising her hands up behind her head, of course accenting her figure. It wasn’t lost on me.
I sheathed the sword. “My apologies, my Lady Shellene,” I informed her, much as I wasn’t supposed to apologize to anyone for anything as a king.
“Mine,” she countered me, slowly lowering her hands. She moved gracefully, I had to give her that. Every motion seemed choreographed, as if we were all in some play and she was the only one who knew the lines.
I stepped past the cart to the aisle between the stalls and extended my left elbow for her to latch on to. She did so with a wide, toothy smile, making sure to rub her breast on my forearm. I couldn’t help thinking, “Wow, Shela is going to see this and kill you dead.”
We walked arm-in-arm past the stabled war horses to the paddocks where only Blizzard could be. We’d put mares around him but he shunned them. I couldn’t help but notice that those two Andaran mares were here now, one on either side of him, as I approached.
Blizzard saw me and shook his head, pawing the straw beneath him with an iron-shod hoof. I felt glad to see that a mandate of mine – that fresh carrots be left in leather bags throughout the stables – had been followed, and I reached into one and pulled him out a huge one.
“Oh, may I, your Majesty?” Shellene begged me, meeting my eyes and rubbing my forearm again. “I admire him so.”
I shrugged. “He probably won’t take it,” I warned her, handing her the carrot, “but he bites, so be careful.”
“I promise,” she said, snatching away the carrot and approaching the steel gate to Blizzard’s stall. Like any valuable horse, he was housed in a stall which had an outer, gated arena, or paddock, to let him stretch his legs while he was put up. Larger than most draft horses, Blizzard’s stall was made from two smaller ones, and his paddock measured about fifteen feet by twenty-four, which is very large.
Blizzard took one look at Shellene, then one at me, and then pawed the ground and mule-kicked the outer wall to his stall. The mares on either side of him started circling in their own, smaller paddocks with their tails raised, trying to find out what had agitated the stallion, and the boom from his hooves against the double-reinforced wall rang through the stables.
“I’d better –“ I began, not wanting her to whip him up into a frenzy and have him jump the paddock fence. He’d proven before that he was capable of it.
“A moment, if I may, your Majesty,” she begged me, and I stopped. She reached into a pouch on her wide, brown leather belt and pulled out a clear vial with some green liquid in it. I immediately recognized wintergreen oil.
I smiled. “Where did you get that?” I asked her.
“There is a brotherhood of woodsmen,” she informed me, as she dabbed a little of the oil on her pale, freckled left wrist, “who now collect this where they can find it. They are friends of your Free Legion ally, Arath, I am informed.”
I nodded. Arath had spilled the secret. Aileen had been right – I needed to watch that kind of thing.
She rubbed her wrists together and she tucked the vial back away, then she reached her hand out again to the stallion with the carrot pointed at him.
The stallion snorted and pawed, then pranced over and sniffed at her. He craned his neck as far as it would go, trying to reach the carrot.
When he almost had it, his lips reaching the last few inches, Shellene withdrew the carrot ever-so-slowly, back to herself, bringing in the stallion with it, until he was in petting distance, and she let him have the top fourth of the carrot.
He clipped the carrot; she stroked the stallion’s mane, grown out long enough again where it folded over to his left. He sought the rest of the carrot but he didn’t pull away, his nostrils flaring, taking in as much of the wintergreen oil as he could.
“Clever, clever,” I informed her.
She didn’t look away, which impressed me. A stallion is a precocious beast, and right when you think you’ve made a friend he’ll get it into his head that maybe he should kick you, or stomp you, or bite. A breeze could change and he might get a whiff of estrus, and then tear apart everything between him and the source.
He took the rest of the carrot, and then retreated across the paddock back into the shadow of his stall. Shellene watched him for a moment longer, then returned her attention to me.
I stepped up to the steel gate and whistled for him. Blizzard trotted back over and immediately batted me with his giant head, trying to get me to hold him. I held his forehead against my chest and would scratch his ears, and he seemed to love it.
“And this is the terrible white beast whose very mention terrifies the Confluni,” Shellene cajoled me.
I stroked the side of his nose. “This is the warhorse who charged ten thousand Confluni infantry with me on his back,” I informed her. “The Confluni fear him because he’s killed more of them than the most seasoned warriors you may know.”
I guess the whole thing pissed me off a little. Shellene nodded with due deference and let me have my interpretation. For all the world, Blizzard was like a big puppy right then.
“And of course you’re breeding him,” she said.
“We’re trying,” I informed her. I had no idea why I was opening up to her at all. This woman had come here with Ceberro and she clearly had her own agenda.
“He doesn’t seem interested in regular mares,” I said.
She knitted her pencil-thin eyebrows. “Interesting,” she informed me. “And yet, there was Shela’s slave price – a price that those Andaran daughters are here to collect.”
I smiled. I guess that was a pretty famous story at this point.
“That night was an exception,” I informed her.
“If I might inquire,” she pursued, stepping up closer to me, so that I could smell the wintergreen oil, “was that night your first time with your slave?”
I frowned. Her green eyes sparkled.
“I propose,” she said, “that the stallion is incentivized, if not by the act itself but then by its connection to you.”
Now, why the heck didn’t I figure that out?
I nodded. “I appreciate that,” I informed her. Even if it didn’t work that way, I’m sure Shela would have no problem after today if I took her in the stall.
“I am here but to serve my King,” Shellene informed me, and curtsied. Then she smiled, “Think of all of the work involved for poor Shela, if this turns out to be the solution.”
I laughed. “Shela won’t be bothered by that at all,” I inform
ed her.
“Fortunate girl,” she said. She stepped back from me, regarded me as she would any other horse she might be bidding on and, crossing her arms under her breasts, said, “Your love for her is the stuff of legends, and yet you realize that you’ll have to take another to wife.”
I sighed. Here it came.
“I’ve been reminded of that a lot lately,” I informed her.
“Duke Ceberro, of course, would have you find that woman in me,” she informed me. “I supposed I’m a prime woman for you – my father is an Earl in Ceberro’s fealty and, before arriving, my virginity was certified.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Was it now?” I asked her.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It had to suck sometimes to be a girl.
She nodded. “And, of course, where the first King had eyes only for his Alekanna, I’ve been warned that I’d likely have to share you with this other woman.”
“This other woman,” I repeated, and then added, “who blew the gates off of Outpost IX, and once turned two rapists to dust.”
“And is jealous,” Shellene said, pressing the issue. “One look at her as she watched you, and one knows her intent. There is actually wager on the life expectancy of Jing-Wei of Conflu.”
I grinned and nodded. “I would give her about three more days if she doesn’t watch herself.”
“I don’t see how she could watch her actual person,” Shellene said, looking down. “Perhaps with mirrors – and I don’t think this would confuse your Andaran slave girl.”
It was just too hard to keep up with the slang misinterpretations sometimes, so I didn’t correct her.
She turned her gaze back up to me, and let me have the full effect of the eyes and the cleavage and the wintergreen oil. “If you seek a woman who is understanding of your predicament, however,” she informed me, “then it is me. I would want a child, of course – what woman would not? But that mission achieved, I would accommodate the two of you as needed.”
