Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles)

by Robert Brady

  And there it was – laid out like a business deal. I don’t know if she realized it, but she’d told me a lot more than she thought she had.

  Because that woman knew a lot more about me and what I liked than any normal person, and even most of my friends would have.

  Also, someone should have put in an appearance by now, because this was the longest time that I as monarch had been allowed to my own devices, even if I might be chatting up some honey for a little extra-slavery affair.

  “That is an exceptionally generous offer,” I informed her.

  Coming from the Bounty Hunters’ Guild, I added in my head. Nothing else made sense. I had quite cleverly put myself alone with her, and if I wasn’t mistaken they’d already diverted or removed any Wolf Soldier guards who might be protecting me.

  Crap.

  “In all honesty,” she informed me, “there is a selfish aspect.” She stepped up to me again and, just as Genna had before, put her fingernails on the front of my white cotton shirt.

  “You are an attractive man,” she continued, her eyes cast shyly down, “and there are worse unions than to a king.”

  Trying not to look like I was looking, I searched the stables for some sign of anyone else being there. Stalls, lofts, spare wagons and a few empty saddle stands – nothing. No Uman, Men or Dwarves, not another living soul in sight, and that was plain strange because the stables were one of the most popular places in the palace.

  I only took a second or two to look, then returned my attention to Shellene, just in time to catch her looking back up at me. I needed an escape plan, and I needed it not to look like an escape plan, and I needed it about ten minutes ago.

  “This is interesting to me,” I informed her. I forced a little smile and made myself look over her head, toward the palace walls, as if I were imagining what she offered. “I’d be a liar if I were to say I’m not attracted to you.”

  The fact that I didn’t burst into flames told me that Shela wasn’t within earshot.

  She kept tracing the front of my shirt. “And your slave girl?” she asked me. “I have no desire to be cleaned up with a dust pan.”

  Definitely a spy, I thought to myself, and not a very good one, unless she was specifically trying to light off my radar. Why dump so much information? Anyone would bite at that.

  “How do you know about that?” I asked her, looking into her eyes. Her choice to cover up or to reveal herself; mine to pursue it or to accept what she said.

  She didn’t even blink. “Ceberro meets regularly with Rennin,” she informed me, meeting my eyes, reading me. “Rennin tells that tale as well as others. Ceberro confides everything to my sister.”

  “Who shares with you what you need to know,” I added.

  “And so,” she informed me, with a smile.

  “Your parents did an excellent job with you two,” I said with a smile. “Imagine, a Queen of intelligence, beauty and breeding.”

  She smiled back. “For now,” she said, “just imagine the breeding.”

  I laughed. I had an exit now. “I’ve been long from the party,” I informed her. “You’ve robbed me of the ride I wanted to take.”

  She smiled, turned sideways to me, and put her dainty white hands on the upper rail of the paddock’s steel gate. “I beg forgiveness, your Majesty,” she said, and batted her eyes up at me, opening them up wide.

  Arching her back, she said, “I’m yours to discipline.”

  Yeah – that verified two things: she’d done her homework, and Shela was nowhere near here.

  I turned as if to go, my left arm swinging naturally forward, and without warning, with my body at three quarters to hers, swung my open hand down and gave her pert backside a resounding smack. She yelped appreciatively. I continued walking, turned my head to my left and said, without missing a step, “There will be games tomorrow – I’d be disappointed if Ceberro didn’t bring you to attend me.”

  I heard her say, “Your Majesty,” but didn’t slow down until I found my way back out of the stables and into a corridor in the palace that I knew for a fact was safe.

  From there I marched myself to my personal chambers, where I found Shela in her rocker with tear-stained cheeks, holding Lee. She just watched me as I fished the chamber pot out from under the bed and blew my lunch into it.

  That was pretty much as scared as I’d been since I got here.

  “Five dead,” J’her informed me, sitting at the round table in my personal chambers with Shela, every member of the Free Legion and Duke Hectar. Nina had Lee and they were scouting out a wing of the palace which had been a nursery once when Glennen’s kids were young.

  The two of them and fifty Wolf Soldier guards to watch over them.

  After puking and letting Shela know what had happened, she’d contacted D’gattis and he’d rounded up the Free Legion with Karel’s help. I was leaning pretty heavily on Karel right now because I had no clue how to handle this.

  “Plan on there being five more,” Karel informed him, “who’ve been mixed in with the Wolf Soldier guard.”

  “I think the consequences of doing that are pretty well known,” I informed Karel.

  The Scitai shook his head, Ancenon and D’gattis with him. “What you did was clever once, but lucky as well, and they’ll be better able to resist you. Keep in mind, as well, that your Wolf Soldiers are many more than they used to be. Even with the Green One’s and D’gattis’ help, Shela could not check them all at the same time.”

  Dilvesh had been calling himself, “The Green One,” or someone else had and he’d decided that he liked it, but that was his go-by these days.

  J’her shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that now,” he informed us. “After that day, I set up a system where squads have codes and check in more regularly with commanders who know them. If they’ve mixed in five, we’ll have them before the day is out.”

  “Don’t count on your regular Wolf Soldiers to be able to handle trained Bounty Hunters,” Arath – Earl Arath - informed him.

  “I do not, your Excellence,” J’her said. “There is a whole protocol in place – trust that we have our means.”

  “A real problem is that we don’t have enough magic to meet our needs,” I said, scowling. “And don’t have the means to get it.”

  “A real problem is that one of your Dukes would like very much to kill you,” Ancenon countered.

  D’gattis sniffed and, sitting next to Ancenon, he informed us, “The real problem, which all of you are aloof of, is that our good King Rancor is alive.”

  I shook my head – this was supposed to be past us.

  Karel nodded. “He’s right,” the Scitai said, sitting across the table from D’gattis. “That’s been bothering me, too.”

  “Perhaps I shall settle that for the two of you right now,” Shela informed them. She’d not liked listening to the encounter with Shellene and wasn’t in the best mood to begin with. She took threats against me pretty seriously.

  Dilvesh – the Green One – reached across the table and touched the back of Shela’s hand. “You misunderstand, in your duress, my friend,” he said. “Surely, the Bounty Hunters must realize what we’d find out.”

  D’gattis gave us one of his rare smiles. “As your owner points out,” he said, “the spy was not clever, yet the trap a success. If the Bounty Hunters had managed to have the King alone, and clearly seek his demise, then why allow him to depart the stables?”

  “Indeed,” Ancenon said. “If he were correct, then what better time and place to remove him.”

  “There is a clear path from the stables out of the city,” Thorn said, sitting back. “That is a much better plan than their actual assassination plot.”

  “So what are you saying here?” I demanded. This made no sense to me at all.

  It was Hectar who said, “There’s a huge celebration going on, Black Lupus. There was no one at the stables because the entire staff has been pressed into other services. You didn’t know anything about tha
t because you’re a King now and it’s beneath you how your palace is run. In fact, I’d be surprised if you even know who’s responsible for running it.”

  I shrugged. “I thought you were,” I informed him. That got a general laugh.

  “I run the city,” he said. “I don’t even know who manages the palace staff. In fact, I suspected that it might be the Lady Shela.”

  All eyes turned to her. She shook her head. “There’s an Uman named O’spiree,” she said. “I didn’t even think to check with him, but I remember him complaining that he had more guests than servants for the first time since he’d come here.”

  “So… I’m worried about nothing?” I asked them.

  That got a few heads down, thinking. I looked from face-to-face.

  Nantar finally said, “I think that Bounty Hunters are planning some new way to get into your Wolf Soldier guard. I think they might even have been in the process of trying something when you ran from the stables.

  “I also believe that someone spoke to Shellene, and prepared her with enough information to entice you. She might actually have confessed the truth to you – that her intelligence comes to her from her sister, who gets it from Ceberro.”

  “Ceberro asks more questions about you and your origins than I’m comfortable answering,” Hectaro admitted. “He’s a fellow Duke – a peer and a friend, but he loved Glennen and if he’s forgotten the beating you laid on him to win your position, then that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen him release a debt.”

  “Ceberro may be a whole other issue for you,” Dilvesh said, “and the incident in the stables, and your own paranoia, may have conveniently revealed a new plot by the Bounty Hunters.”

  “So all we know is that there are plots out there,” I said. “We really don’t know that much about them.”

  D’gattis stood, and in all seriousness said, “Today, I believe, you become a member of the nobility.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dating

  To the east of Eldador the Port, on a wide, flat field where armies could muster or fairs be set up or all sorts of other useful things, a bandstand had been erected and a field laid out for a competition at arms. Theran Lancers jousted; there were foot races and trials at arms, feats of strength as well as jugglers and acrobats and a play in the hottest part of the day which, considering this was the month of Order and a fall month, wasn’t really that hot. To our north the port stayed busy with ship after ship entering and leaving with goods from and for the harvest. To the south, wagons rolled into the city as farmers brought their goods to market.

  I sat in a huge wooden throne that a bunch of porters had lugged out here, and Shela sat on a skin at my feet, Nina behind her. The little Aschire had made it through the night on her own, this time with Lee in her room in a bassinet. I’d doubled the guard and, of course, we’d caught four of the five Bounty Hunters Karel had suspected, and just driven off the fifth.

  I’d confirmed that O’spiree, a fat Uman man over one hundred years of age with long, white hair down past his shoulders and a nose like a beak, had taken the entire stable staff for the previous day’s party, and I told him to stop doing that. I explained to him the practice of ‘temp labor’, and he’d considered it a revolutionary idea and immediately recruited fifty unemployed peasants from the city streets and put them to work in the palace.

  Shela had needed to check them all, which had exhausted her, and she spent half of the day sleeping with her cheek on my calf, which was just as well.

  Magic might be useful, but it wasn’t to be relied on, I’d decided.

  In a place of honor, much as there was one, in a smaller throne next to me, padded in red velvet, sat Lady Shellene, magnificent with an open-front gown in baby-blue with white-lace trim and tiny jewels sparkling throughout its fabric. She’d styled her hair loose and wild around her shoulders with baby’s breath and some kind of tiny yellow flowers woven into it, and her hand continuously strayed to the top of mine.

  Shellene would, in fact, make a very good queen of Eldador, I had to admit. She just looked like one. The commons seemed to love her – she’d spent the early morning hours in the city with a retinue (and a Wolf Soldier squad) administering to the poor, not because it was a tradition here but because it seemed to be what she liked to do. My wildly-popular edict of ‘be good to each other now that Glennen’s dead’ had brought no less than 1,000 beggars into the city and our employing fifty of them hadn’t made life any easier for the rest. Nobles and wealthy commons were dispensing what food they could afford but a lot of this was falling on the city, and that meant that some of them were not, if fact, getting fed.

  One of my number one fears was that I was really going to suck at being a king, and Shellene seemed to know something about how to do it. It would be a relief to have that sort of council.

  And I liked her. Not with the emotion I felt toward Shela, but I appreciated her company and her intelligence, and I knew from past experience that this was a precursor for me, on its way to a relationship.

  The crowd cheered and it drew me from my musings. Lee pointed a chubby finger out at the field where one warrior had just dealt a devastating blow with a wooden sword to another, knocking him flat on his back. I’d set the prize for victory as one hundred gold Tabaars, and that had the combatants really going at it.

  Karel suspected that the winner would be a reverse-Robin Hood, a Bounty Hunter who would use the victory to get within striking distance of me – so in fact Hectar was scheduled to deliver the prize.

  “You’re pensive, your Majesty,” Shellene commented.

  “Weight of the crown,” I informed her.

  She looked at the top of my head. They didn’t use crowns here, and in the local language I’d just told her that the top of my head was heavy. I smiled and added, “Heavy thoughts.”

  She smiled. “How very clever a turn of phrase,” she said.

  “One tries to amuse a lady,” I said, smiling back.

  Her whole face lit up in an even greater smile. That had to be some kind of amazing compliment that I wasn’t aware of, or she was showing off her looks again.

  The warrior on the field raised his wooden sword in victory as the other slapped the ground, counting himself out. Shellene took one of the roses laid out before me and, without asking but with a significant glance at Shela, cast it out over the heads of the persons seated in honor spots below but before me, out onto the field. The warrior made a great show of bowing to me, then went to the rose, picked it up, smelled it as if to say, “Victory’s smell is sweet,” and departed the field. Two Uman porters in the green house livery ran out to help the fallen warrior to his feet. Technically they should be in my grey, but it took time and a lot of money to change them all, and we were all kind of still stuck on Glennen.

  Two more warriors stepped out onto the field, bowed to me, and were commanded by Hectar to fight.

  Shellene settled back down beside me. In the chairs behind me were the Volkhydran, Andaran and Confluni daughters who were her competition. I could almost feel the heat of their gazes on my arm when she took my hand again.

  I had an appointment with Henekh Dragorson after two more bouts, and then with Kills with a Glance after that. I had a feeling that the topic of fair access might be on their mind. The Confluni was either thanking her lucky stars or favorite goddess or something that I wasn’t interested, or she had her own plans.

  I’d heard practically nothing from the Toorians. That had me kind of worried, too.

  Shela snored softly and I gave a little chuckle. The poor girl worked her behind off around here. She didn’t give me a lot of opportunity to forget to whom I owed my success and loyalty, not that I needed one.

  Wooden swords cracked together. The crowd cheered and my blood-thirsty daughter gave a squeal of delight.

  “No doubt the child’s parentage,” Shellene commented.

  “None at all,” I said. I noted that Lee’s bebe was folded over the crook of her arm, and that s
he checked it once in a while, to make sure either that it was there, or that she had its attention.

  No, I thought, that’s my girl.

  “Are you aware of the trend she’s started?” Shellene asked me.

  I turned my attention to her. Behind us, the four daughters leaned forward. “No,” I said, “I am not.”

  “Bebe daughters,” the Confluni princess intruded, drawing my attention. She wore the gossamer wrap I’d come to associate with her, her hair hanging loose, as with the rest of the prospects. Apparently they’d decided that’s what I liked.

  Sings Softly, the Andaran from the Wet Belly tribe, said, “They’re the newest prize for wealthy daughters in your city.”

  “Not just your city,” Neveratta added, not missing an opportunity to one-up the Andarans. “Potters are working through the night to export the first five score to my own nation. I’ve invested heavily in such futures.”

  That drew looks from all of the other girls. Women didn’t usually get involved in business here, and ‘invest in futures’ wasn’t a term I’d heard here before. I repeated it to Neveratta.

  She smiled. “I’m giving six coppers now for dolls yet to be made, that they’ll be consigned to me once produced. I expect that I shall sell them for between one and two silvers.”

  A pretty profit for a toy, I thought. But then, men complimented each other on how they indulged their daughters, not on the deals they got.

  “That,” I said, and paused to draw out their attention, as I’d seen Groff do, “impresses me.”

  Neveratta beamed. The rest frowned, especially Shellene. She’d started this conversation for her own benefit.

  “I’m informed that you’re meeting with my uncle, Henekh, in a short time,” she informed me.