by Hilari Bell
Your Highness. He did know who Edoran was. He’d known who Master Giles was too, and he sounded as if he’d been looking for the lodge.
“Who are you?” Edoran demanded.
CHAPTER 6
The Star: holiness. Aspiration to the divine. All gods.
“My name’s Sandeman,” said the stranger. “And I’m the man who’ll be taking you back to the palace.”
“I can’t go,” said Edoran. “Not yet. Not until Weasel can come too. And if you know Weasel, you know that he’s worth several of me. Three at least!”
The stranger laughed. “I don’t disagree about young Weasel’s worth. Perhaps. But lad, you’re worth every bit as much, just for yourself. And even leaving aside your personal worth, we can’t afford to lose the heir to Deorthas’ throne—to the Falcon, or in any other way. She may have convinced herself that she can let you live, but as long as any king of the true line remains, she’ll face rebellion after rebellion. Sooner or later she’ll be forced to kill you. And even that won’t end it. If one person can seize the throne by force of arms, so can another. You may not be ready to… ah, take up the burden of kingship, but you’re the only alternative to endless war between the two religious and economic factions in the realm. Weasel is important, that I grant you. But your own safety is absolutely vital. Which is why you’re going straight back to the palace. I’m sorry,” he added. “But there it is.”
Edoran already knew all of that, but… “How do you know so much about Weasel? Are you a friend of Justice Holis’?” The man was plainly, almost roughly, dressed, but his speech was educated, with only a trace of a country accent.
“No, I’ve never met the justice,” said Sandeman. “And I only met your young friend once. Though I have to say, it was memorable.”
He didn’t know Holis, but he’d met Weasel. Met him just once, under memorable circumstances. And most people thought of the tension between the townsmen and the country folk of Deorthas as being only economic. Many people weren’t even aware that there were—or had once been—two religions.
“You’re the leader of the Hidden faith, aren’t you?” Edoran asked. “The one who had Weasel kidnapped that night, and wore a mask and cloak when you talked with him.”
Weasel had discussed that meeting with Edoran several times. “The calm-voiced man” was how he’d identified his chief captor.
Sandeman’s voice wasn’t calm now. “How in Dialan’s name…?” He took a deep breath, and then another. “I’ve heard rumors that you weren’t very bright. Which certainly confirms my doubts about listening to rumors! How did you figure that out?”
“Weasel described you pretty well,” Edoran told him.
“Weasel never saw me! He had more sense than to try.”
The Hidden faith had been illegal in Deorthas for the past three centuries. Could he use the fact that Sandeman was a Hidden priest to force the man to let him go? He could. If you take me back, I’ll turn you in. It would be that simple, but there was something about this man that made him hesitate.
“Smart lad,” said Sandeman. “I’d have tied you up in a shed somewhere, told the town guard where to find you, and then run.”
“How did you know what I was thinking?”
“It was an obvious possibility, once you knew who I was. But even if I let you go, every guardsman in the realm is looking for you. And far too many people know about the reward. You’d never make it, lad.”
“But I don’t look like a prince,” Edoran objected.
A soft laugh shook the man in front of him. “You certainly don’t! But the moment you open your mouth, that accent… It’s not just city, it’s high-noble city. If you could purchase food and shelter without speaking to anyone, you might have a chance. But they might be suspicious of a mute boy who answered the description of the missing prince, don’t you think?”
“Wonderful,” Edoran muttered. If he couldn’t travel on his own, or make Sandeman help him, how could he find the Falcon and Weasel? If he could catch up with Arisa, she could do the talking—and tell some lie that would keep people from suspecting him too. But he had no clue how to find Arisa. In fact…
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“I was… consulting with a friend,” Sandeman told him. “And we happened to catch sight of Master Giles, who was in the midst of an intense conversation with one of the palace servants. Holis had already clapped your loose-tongued valet into a cell, but my friend knew Giles’ history. She found it surprising that anyone from the palace would be talking to him. She said Justice Holis had ordered all your old tutors out of the city, and she found his mere presence there suspicious.”
“It wasn’t an order,” said Edoran. “But it was a pretty strong hint. Almost a threat. So you followed him?”
“To make a long story short, yes.”
Edoran frowned. “What were you doing in the city in the first place? Weasel met you in some town to the west of the city. And how did you find out about Giles and my other tutors? That’s not common knowledge.”
“I have ways,” Sandeman said calmly. “You should be grateful—”
It all fell into place then.
“You have a spy in the palace!” Edoran exclaimed. “You’re the Hidden leader—you heard I was missing, or she sent word to you, and you came to the city to talk to your palace spy about it.”
Sandeman sighed. “I’ll never believe any rumor, ever again. I swear it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Edoran told him. “I think every servant in the palace is somebody’s spy. You said she…. Hmm. I bet it’s that seamstress who got Arisa and me out of the closet. I should have wondered about that at the time.”
“I’m not going to name my friend,” said Sandeman. “Nor confirm that she works in the palace. She wouldn’t have to, you know. All she’d need is a connection with someone who does work there and would pass on gossip. It’s dangerous for a Hidden teacher to live in the city, let alone in the palace itself.”
That was true. The townsmen, led by the church of the One God, believed that the followers of the Hidden faith sacrificed children. One of the Hidden had been stoned to death by a mob when Edoran was young. He hadn’t heard about it at the time, but his father had written about the incident in his journals. The king had added that there was no evidence that the followers of the Hidden faith had ever sacrificed anyone except King Deor. That was more than a thousand years ago, and Deor’s sacrifice had been voluntary, according to the legend. But with the church of the One God preaching against the Hidden, that seamstress was taking an appalling risk.
“Why do you keep a spy in the palace?” Edoran asked. “What good does it do you?”
“Our lives depend on the king not deciding to actively persecute our faith,” Sandeman told him. “The years when King Regalis and his minions hanged all our teachers weren’t so very long ago.”
“They were hanged because they raised rebellion against the king,” said Edoran. “Not because of their faith.” At least, that was what his father had written.
“But it was their faith that revealed to them how disastrous the king’s policy would be,” said Sandeman. “So it comes down to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
Edoran thought this over. “I don’t think so. Not exactly. And no king has tried to get rid of you since then, whatever the One God’s priests may have done. So it seems to me that putting a spy into the palace is a big risk for very little gain… unless… Oh, rot. It’s the earthquakes, isn’t it? You think those earthquakes that happened when I was born were a portent, just like all the One God priests. Just like every senile hag with a deck of cards.”
“We have good reason to want to know what the government is planning,” Sandeman told him.
Edoran snorted. “Did you spy on my father?”
“Well… no.”
“That’s what I thought. So, do you think those quakes mean I’m going to save the realm or destroy it? Or some other weird thing?”
S
aving or destroying the realm were the most popular theories, but Edoran had heard others. That he would be able to sense gold in the depths of the earth, like a diviner could sense water, was one of his favorites.
Sandeman sighed. “We hope it’s a portent that you’ll be the king we’ve been waiting for. But I’m afraid all three of you still have a long way to go.”
All three of him? “You’re even crazier than the hags with cards.”
“Why do you hate the arcanara cards so much?” Sandeman asked.
“What, your spy didn’t tell you?” Edoran was tired of being spied on. Tired of all of it. Weasel was the only person he’d really been able to trust. If he couldn’t get him back… Edoran shivered.
“She never found out,” Sandeman admitted.
“It doesn’t matter,” Edoran said wearily. “No one paid any attention to my order not to use them, anyway.”
Just like every other order he’d ever given.
They rode on in silence.
It was still several hours short of dawn when Sandeman decided to make camp. “Master Giles will probably sleep late, considering what he drank. And since he has no way of knowing how you escaped or where you went afterward, we might as well get some sleep ourselves.”
Edoran, climbing stiffly down from the horse, was ready for a rest. It was harder to find dry wood in the dark, but he finally returned to camp with a decent armload, and Sandeman made a fire.
“Your last cold night, Your Highness. If we get an early start, we should reach the palace tomorrow afternoon.”
Edoran sighed. “It took me four days to walk this far.”
“That’s why men ride horses.”
Edoran had been thinking. “You’ve got a deck of arcanara cards, right?”
It had worked with Arisa, after all.
“I’m the old gods’ spokesman on this earth,” Sandeman said comfortably. “The cards are how they communicate with people who have the withe to channel their power. Of course I have a deck.”
“So if you laid out the cards, and they told you not to take me back, you’d have to do it? Being the old gods’ servant, and all that.”
“I’m their spokesman, not their slave,” said Sandeman dryly. “But if they warned me that taking you back was a bad idea, I’d certainly think twice.”
“Then do it,” said Edoran. “Ask if you should take me back and lay out the cards. And if disaster threatens, and there’s nothing to rely on, then will you help me go on? And find Weasel, and get him out of the Falcon’s hands alive?”
Sandeman eyed him thoughtfully. “I’m not going to promise anything, no matter what the cards say. But I’ll lay them out on one condition—you tell me why you hate them.”
He settled back to wait, with the air of a man who had all the time in the world.
It was embarrassing, but why not? He didn’t have to tell Sandeman all of it, anyway.
“The fool always shows up as my significator,” Edoran said. “Everyone laughs at me.”
Sandeman waited, but he said nothing more. The fact that chaos and the tower always followed the fool, and the terror those cards had evoked in him, before he even understood what they signified, were things he’d never confided to anyone—and he saw no reason to start now.
The Hidden priest sighed. “I can understand why you’d feel that way, especially with all your tutors working to make you look stupid. But if that’s really your answer, then you’re not the king we need, whatever the portents might say. Oh, all right.”
He didn’t have to dig into his saddlebags for the deck—he kept it in his pocket.
Edoran bit back a smile. When the question of taking Edoran back was answered with the worst threat imaginable, this man would listen to his gods.
Sandeman spread a blanket on the ground, shuffled the deck three times, and handed it to Edoran. “This is about your life more than mine. Ask the question that’s in your heart.”
As he shuffled, Edoran tried to will the cards to keep him from the palace, but he wasn’t really concerned. No matter what he was thinking about, the fool, chaos, and the tower always came up.
He handed the deck back to Sandeman, who turned the top card and looked at it. His brows rose.
“This card represents you.”
He laid the lord on the blanket between them. Edoran stared at the richly dressed man, who stood with one hand holding a staff and the other resting on a globe.
“That’s not me. I’m always the fool.”
“The fool isn’t a fool, you know,” said Sandeman gently. “He represents wisdom of the heart. As people change, their significators change too. Someone who started as the fool might well grow into this card, for this represents a man of intelligence, good judgment, and peace.”
Edoran gasped. “That’s my father!”
Sandeman sat up straighter. “Was that your question? You wanted to know if he was murdered?”
Edoran hadn’t been thinking of anything in particular, but that question had been in his heart since the day of his father’s death. So much so that Sandeman’s palace spy had reported it to him, Edoran noted.
“Go on.”
Sandeman frowned. “Are you certain you want—”
Edoran clutched the man’s wrist. “Go on!”
Sandeman sighed. “I suppose you have a right to know, even now.”
Edoran didn’t release his grip. The question in his heart wasn’t whether his father had been murdered, or even who killed him—he’d known both those things from the moment his nurse had come, weeping, into his playroom.
All he needed to know was how it had been done. How it had been done so cleverly that even honest investigators said the king’s death was an accident, and Edoran had never been able to convince anyone otherwise.
“Lay the next card,” he commanded.
Sandeman did so. “This supports you. Or rather, this supported the king.”
Cloaked in black, the traitor looked over the smoldering ruin he had created. The man on the card looked nothing like Pettibone, but the aura, the presence of his old regent, filled Edoran’s memory when he looked at it. He shivered.
Sandeman was watching him, concerned. “It’s Regent Pettibone, isn’t it? Just as you claimed.”
Edoran had burst into tears as a five-year-old when he tried to explain to the people around him that that man had killed his father. He’d usually been screaming by the end of the tale, hysterical, because no one ever listened and he knew it was true. It hadn’t helped that he couldn’t explain how he knew. It also hadn’t increased his credibility that he’d been under the impression that the master of the household, who commanded the footmen and other servants, outranked the lord commander of the army. And neither of them had believed him.
“Lay the threat,” he told Sandeman.
“In its turn.” Sandeman sighed. “This inspires the king.”
He set the six of stars above the lord.
“Trust,” Sandeman murmured. “Faith in the basic goodness of mankind.”
Tears pricked Edoran’s eyes. “He had that.”
“And this threatens him,” Sandeman went on.
The nine of fires, untimely death, fell to the lord’s far left, but Edoran hardly saw the coffin pictured on the card. A flashing vision filled his mind, the vision of a horse’s hooves pounding the earth, lifting for a jump. He gasped and let go of Sandeman’s wrist. The vision vanished.
The Hidden priest had paled. “Your father died in a riding accident, didn’t he?”
“It was no accident,” Edoran said fiercely. And for the first time in his life, to this man who believed in his cards, he might be able to prove it. “Go on.”
As Sandeman reached for the deck, Edoran touched his wrist once more. The priest frowned at him, but he didn’t shake off Edoran’s hand.
“This might have protected him,” he said softly.
The fish. He’d had some opportunity, Edoran realized, and missed it. A man’s voice, a stranger’s,
murmured in the back of his mind, I don’t trust that man, Highness. You should investigate….
Edoran recognized his father’s laugh.
It was such a small slip of thought that he might have taken it for some long-forgotten memory… but judging by his grim expression, Sandeman had heard it too. Did Sandeman always have visions when he laid the cards, and Edoran was somehow sharing them? Or was this coming to Edoran because it was his question? Nothing like this had ever happened before.
He tightened his grip on the priest’s wrist. “What next?”
“This misled him,” Sandeman said. The eight of waters fell to the lord’s far right. “Solitude,” the priest murmured. “A time of aloneness, and need for aid.”
Edoran did remember his father coming to tuck him in after his mother had died, the sense of aching grief he’d felt when his father touched him. It was an unusually vivid memory, but it was something he’d known.
Could Sandeman somehow remember it too?
“This guides you true.” The priest laid down the final card, the two of waters. The card was discovery, but the vision that filled Edoran’s mind was of a hoe, churning clay and water into mud, and then raking a layer of sod back over the top of the puddle. His hand clenched Sandeman’s wrist so hard the man winced. Edoran let him go. He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to stop shaking.
Sandeman was frowning. “I knew the king died in a riding accident. I never heard that anyone questioned it. Not even a rumor of suspicion.”
“I always knew,” said Edoran. “I knew Pettibone had him killed. They examined the horse’s tack, and its hooves, and even tested its feed for poison. They never thought to examine the mud it slipped in. I knew. But I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t even figure out how.”
Now he knew that as well. The shivers were abating. He still couldn’t prove it. Did he need to? Pettibone was already dead. The king was dead, and proving he’d been murdered wouldn’t bring him back. Still…
