Exile's Valor v(-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  And in public, at least, he was as devoted as she could ever have wished.

  In public, he was also playing the tragic figure of the mourning son and rejected brother. When a new Ambassador came from Rethwellan to replace the old one, he showed a very chilly face to the man, who was, in his turn, no better than icily polite.

  Which meant nothing to Alberich, until Talamir enlightened him, one late summer evening.

  “Oh, do think about this for a moment,” Talamir told him, with unusual impatience. “The Prince was not told of his father’s death until Faramentha was firmly on the throne. And he was not recalled. What does that tell you?”

  “Ah.” Alberich shook his head. “I was thinking too much of our own side of this, and not beyond our Borders. Faramentha does not trust his brother. And the Prince holds Faramentha in enmity.”

  “So—?”

  “So—whether or not the old King was privy to Karathanelan’s plans, the new one is not, probably.”

  Talamir nodded. “And unless I miss my guess,” he added shrewdly, “the Prince’s grief is not all sham. Not that he is brokenhearted over being rejected by his brother, nor mourning terribly for his father—”

  “If he is,” Alberich was moved to point out, “The ladies of the Horn have not noticed.”

  “Precisely. But if there is one thing the Prince cares about, it’s his own well-being. And with his father dead and his brother, who despises him, on the throne?”

  “He has nowhere to go if he fails here—” Alberich felt cold. “I do not like this.”

  “Neither,” Talamir said delicately, “do I.”

  But there was not much either of them could do about it. Karath had too many good cards in his hand, and Selenay’s own condition was aiding him; by summer’s end, as the first leaves began to turn, Selenay was deep in work, and when she wasn’t working, she was generally asleep, or at least, resting. Her pregnancy was hard on her, not so much that it was difficult, but that she was finding it exhausting, according to Crathach, who made no secret that he disapproved of her getting with child so quickly. This left ample opportunity for the Prince to comport himself as if he was a bachelor.

  But he went about it so discreetly that most of the Court had no idea.

  Unfortunately, one of the things that was wearing Selenay out was that he still had not given up the notion of being crowned. Even though he was not fighting with her about it, using less aggressive means to get his point across, roughly once a fortnight, he would find some other reason to bring the tired old plaint back up, or some new scheme to get around the law. This, Alberich heard from Talamir, usually when Alberich came up to the Collegium to report on whatever new information he might have gathered on his prowls in Haven. The city was quiet of late, as the season passed from summer into autumn; even the criminal element was up to no more than the usual trouble. There seemed nothing that required Alberich’s intervention. Stalking Devlin to try and find the identity of the “patron” was proving to be fruitless; where Devlin went, none of Alberich’s personae was welcome. As for Norris, the actor was so busy with his new theater that even he was beginning to look a little frayed about the edges.

  “He’s come up with another one today,” Talamir said, lowering himself wearily down into a chair by the hearth. He looked ancient tonight, and very transparent; Alberich wondered what he had been doing to wear himself so thin.

  He wants to be gone, came the unbidden thought. He’s faced with things he can’t do anything about, and he just wants to be gone—from problems, from life. And he wants it with all of his heart.

  He might want it—but he wasn’t pursuing it, at least. Duty held him here at Selenay’s side, however poorly suited he thought himself to the task.

  At that moment, Alberich pitied the Queen’s Own.

  “This time, what?” Alberich asked, knowing that the “he” could only be the Prince, and that the “another one” was yet another ploy to pressure Selenay into somehow getting him a crown.

  “That she’s shaming him in front of his family—or so he says,” Talamir said wearily. “According to him, that she hasn’t made him King means that she thinks he is unworthy of a crown, and now he says that this is why his own brother has rejected him and kept him from his father’s side when the King was dying.”

  “Ah. So now he attempts guilt?” Alberich replied.

  “I would guess,” said Talamir, and shook his head. “At least she came to me with this, looking for reassurance. And I planted another seed.”

  “Perhaps you can use the papers soon?” Alberich hazarded. They finally had a translation of them; it took long enough to break the code. When they had, as Alberich had suspected, they proved to be instructions on what to do and say to Selenay to win her, with some very intimate details. Some were things that Alberich blinked at; things that one would have thought were the sort of confession that Selenay would not have given to anyone—girlish daydreams, actually, about the sort of man she was looking for, and the loneliness of being who she was, the despair that she would never have the kind of marriage her father had enjoyed.

  Where had all of that come from? Even Talamir had been surprised at the bitterness and anguish of some of it.

  But maybe Selenay had been pouring her woes into the ears of one of her servants. Alberich would have thought they were trustworthy, and probably they were, but he supposed there was no reason why they shouldn’t tell others what Selenay had told them.

  Some of what had been written were intimate glimpses into Selenay personally, and what to say to her to play to her sympathies, but others—well, Alberich had found himself blushing at the step-by-step instructions for seduction; they did not merely border on the pornographic, they were pornographic. And Alberich was no longer surprised that Norris was so popular with the ladies, nor that Selenay was so deeply infatuated with the Prince. How could she not be, if the Prince was following these instructions, meant to make Selenay believe that here, past all her hopes, was not only her soulmate but a lover who could guarantee the satisfaction of a female partner, closely and with all his attention? Part of him wanted to burn the wretched papers, but they were useful, very useful. If ever Selenay’s attachment began to fade, at the right moment, showing her these things could turn her fading infatuation to distaste. Only she could know how closely the Prince followed his “scripts”—but the more closely he had, the more obvious it would be that he was following a script, and that there never had been any real feeling behind his act.

  “Not until after the child is born,” Talamir sighed. “Crathach says that he doesn’t want any more stress on her right now; between matters of state and the Prince’s continuous pressure, she’s got more than enough on her. He’s playing the ’bereft orphan’ very convincingly, and of all of the acts he could contrive, that’s the one that will make her excuse him nearly anything.”

  Alberich counted up the months in his mind. “Spring, then,” he said with a sigh. “But the Prince himself will, perhaps, overstep before then?”

  But Talamir shook his head. “No, I think that this ’patron,’ whoever he is, has found a way to clamp controls down over the Prince. More than just Norris, I mean, or even young Devlin. Devlin can’t be more than a messenger. It astonishes me. And I wish I knew how real the threat to Selenay is.”

  Alberich nodded. There was the real question, truth be told. There were actually a number of interpretations that could be placed on what Norris had said to his control.

  First, it could be all bluster. It was one thing to say that the Queen was dispensable; it was quite another to actually act on those words. Norris was, when it all came down to cases, a commoner. Whatever he knew about life at Court he could only learn from brief glimpses and the rather unrealistic views of life among the highborn that he got from his plays, or just perhaps by whatever his patron told him—assuming the patron told him anything at all about life at Court. Selenay was surrounded night and day by Guards that Alberich himself had trained a
nd could vouch for, and by the Heralds as well. To actually assassinate her, someone would have to get past them and Selenay’s own impressive self-defense abilities, and it was guaranteed that whoever tried would not survive the attempt. So the enemy would have to find someone highly skilled, clever, and suicidal—not an easy task. Poison was out of the question; Healers checked everything that she ate and drank, and even if someone managed to slip poison past them, there were no “instantaneous” poisons other than some rare snakebites; Healers would almost certainly be able to save her. Norris (and, presumably, his “patron”) might simply be counting on the hazards of childbearing to remove Selenay. To Alberich’s mind, that was as foolish a hope as finding an assassin; Selenay was in excellent health and by no means delicate. Women gave birth without complications every day without the small army of Healers to attend them that Selenay had.

  “I wish I could hazard a guess,” Talamir replied. “It seems a preposterous idea on the face of it. The ForeSeers are no real help either.”

  Alberich knew what that meant. Too many future possibilities to sort out. That, or so he had been told, was why he never got any visions inspired by Foresight that extended into the future by more than a candlemark. His Gift evidently operated in the same fashion as he did—if there were too many choices, his Gift elected not to show any of them, so that he could concentrate without distractions pulling him in a dozen directions at once. It only showed him things he could actually act on.

  “It is that I think, sometimes, our Gifts are more hindrance than help,” he said sourly.

  “Some of them, at any rate,” Talamir agreed. He looked broodingly off over Alberich’s left shoulder for a long moment, staring at nothing, but doing it in a way that tended to raise the hackles on the back of Alberich’s neck. What was he looking at, so intently, with that expression of focused detachment? Alberich was used to that “listening” look that Heralds got when they were conversing with their Companions, and this wasn’t that expression. It also wasn’t the absentminded look most people got when they were engrossed in their own thoughts. The closest analogy that Alberich could come to was that odd look that cats sometimes got, when they stared intently at something that apparently wasn’t there. It was a Karsite tradition that when they did that, they were looking at spirits. Talamir’s look was very like that.

  But if the Queen’s Own was seeing ghosts, he hadn’t said anything about it to anyone.

  Alberich repressed a shiver and coughed quietly to bring Talamir’s attention back to the present.

  Talamir blinked, and picked up the conversation where it had left off.

  “I have to think at this point that your actor’s conversation was a deliberate attempt on his part to remind his control and his patron that he knows where all the skeletons are,” Talamir said. “I think he was trying to extract more money from them to buy his silence in case anything did happen to the Queen.”

  Alberich thought that over. It was plausible. More plausible than any of his own theories. Norris might stay bought, but when you did that, there was less incentive for your “employers” to try to keep you in their pocket once they had what they initially wanted.

  And theaters were more expensive to maintain than a stable full of racehorses.

  “A dangerous ploy, that one,” Alberich observed. “He could be removed before a danger he becomes.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” Talamir admitted. “But that is the best fit for what you overheard.”

  Alberich nodded his agreement, but not without a sense of relief. If that was all it was . . . !

  They finished their business, and Alberich made his way back to the salle through the dark. Not alone, of course; the moment he crossed over the fence into Companion’s Field, Kantor joined him.

  :You’re still troubled,: his Companion observed.

  :I don’t like it, for some reason,: Alberich admitted. :Unfortunately, I don’t know why.:

  :Well, what can you do about it?:

  He pondered that for a moment, trying to think of all of the times Selenay could be vulnerable. Not when holding Court, not at Council meetings. Probably not in the gardens or in her own quarters, or at meals or entertainments—unless the harpists suddenly produced arrows and used their instruments as bows.

  Not very likely.

  But before the arrival of the Prince, Selenay had occasionally donned the working Whites of a common Herald, and gone off for a long ride, down to the Home Farms, outside the walls of Haven, usually accompanied only by Talamir and sometimes not even him. And then, if ever—

  :You know, I believe I am going to start attending the Hurlee practices,: he said slowly. :I believe I will begin working with the Hurlee players. She might object to an escort; she won’t object to a crowd of cheerful youngsters nattering about sport. In fact, she might even enjoy their company. But it will not take much to turn them from gamesmen to melee-experts.:

  :Hurlee is cursed like a melee already,: Kantor observed.

  :And that is the point,: Alberich replied. :Furthermore, unless she is really craving privacy, Selenay won’t think anything of a Hurlee team riding along with her. They’re only Trainees, not Guards.:

  :So she won’t object?:

  He smiled. :I believe she will welcome them.: Then he sobered. :The hard part will be in training them to be weapons at her side, without any of them realizing that is what I am doing.:

  :If anyone can,: Kantor said firmly, :you can.:

  He sighed, and hoped his Companion was right.

  20

  A harsh, cold wind blew across the Hurlee ground, rattling the last of the sere, brown leaves still clinging to the trees. A helm and neck-brace weren’t much help in protecting from the cold; the wind ripped gleefully down the Weaponsmaster’s collar and the sudden chill brought back memories of long patrols in the lonely hills of Karse in weather worse than this, when he would wake cold, patrol until he and his men were warm only where their bodies were in contact with their horses’ hides, then gather around smoking fires where you warmed little bits of yourself, while the rest stayed achingly cold. Now—well, he had come from a warm salle, and he would be going back to it; this was just minor discomfort, inconsequential.

  Alberich gravely surveyed the twelve best Hurlee players in the Collegium now gathered before him; in their turn they gazed fearlessly back at him. They were all superior athletes, all either in their last or next-to-last years, and all were old enough to give Alberich respect untempered with fear. They were past that half-fearful, half-awestruck stage, past thinking him an unreasonable taskmaster. They knew him now, knew what he was about, knew why he did what he did with them. There were those that were this lot’s yearmates that still had not grasped those truths; that was why he had picked his candidates so carefully.

  And if they suspected what he was about with them now was going to be something more than turning them into vicious Hurlee players—well, he reckoned they only thought to the moment when they were to get their Whites, and assumed that he was fitting them better to be Heralds in some of the more dangerous sectors. And it was true enough that this training would serve that end, so they were not entirely wrong.

  The real purpose was a secret held by him, Talamir, Kantor and Rolan—and the Companions of these dozen young Grays. After careful consultation with Kantor, he and Talamir had elected to include the Companions, but not the Trainees, because of the risk that someone would let something slip. No secret was ever safer, and he and Kantor felt that to get the best result, he needed the informed cooperation of the Companions. Other than that, no one else had been told. Not even Myste knew, though of course, he would tell her eventually for the sake of the Chronicles. Just not now; later when the danger was past, and his fears were proved false—or true.

  The twelve sat shivering in their saddles, waiting for him to speak. They wore more than the usual Hurlee protections; shin, knee, and calf-guards, kidney-belts, elbow-guards, arm-guards, neck-braces. And they were finding, as he alread
y knew, that none of these protections helped against the teeth of the wind.

  There were no observers today. No one wanted to sit in the cold, in the open, with no shelter on a day like this. Not even to watch the best Hurlee players in Haven. It seemed an especial irony that rather than being overcast, the sun shone down among swiftly-moving scuds of cloud in a mostly-blue sky. It gave no help against the cold.

  “Two teams of six for now,” he said, and pointed. “Harrow. You sit out, throw in the ball, referee. I will play this third and the next.”

  When Hurlee had first been turned into a game and not a form of exercise, it had started with as many players as could be crowded onto the field, but now the official tally was twenty-four on the field, twelve to each side. Two of the twelve were goaltenders, two played close to the goals, and another two were “rovers” outside the scrum, on the alert for a miss-hit ball or a pass from one of their own side. Alberich was paring the teams down again to two goaltenders and four others; four roaming players, one on the home goal, one on the shared goal.