by Dave Duncan
Spirits, could they stop the madness and suffering at
last? It had all begun with a wedding. Perhaps
another could end it. "As I recall, King
Ambrose has one son and one daughter?"
"Crown Prince Ambrose is a very loud and
still-damp-at-times heir apparent. Princess
Malinda is almost seventeen now--not a legendary
beauty, but attractive enough to speed any man's
heartbeat. She is, um ..." Durendal
cleared his throat. "Were I not being a
diplomat at the moment, I should describe her
as a strapping wench. No weakling, certainly. His
Majesty has just announced his betrothal
to Princess Dierda of Gevily."
"And expects to produce several more children? Is
he capable?"
The Lord Chancellor of Chivial shrugged.
"His current mistress says he is.
Fifty-one is not really old."
"Still fat?"
"Fatter."
If Malinda was seventeen the match was not
unreasonable. Radgar had recently turned
thirty. Negotiations would have to be set in motion
quickly, for he needed another wife to secure the
succession. Which explained Durendal's flying
visit. There were always Baelish ships in port
willing to whisk Waeps Thegn back to the Fire
Lands. ... He was about due for another trip there
anyway. Could Radgar be persuaded that the hand of
Ambrose's daughter was the only apology
anyone would ever wring out of the man, and that the rest of
Eurania would see it as confession and surrender?
"Will it work?" Durendal asked quietly.
"I have no idea," Wasp confessed. "I have
known Radgar since we were children, yet he
can still astonish me. He owes much of his success
to being completely unpredictable--as Chivial
well knows. I have seen him be gentle, ruthless,
generous, and implacable inside an hour. The
only thing predictable about Radgar is that he
always gets what he wants."
"That is a habit of kings," Durendal said with
feeling.
"Quite! But the prize is noble and worth pursuing
at any odds. I will convey your proposal
to him."
Wasp rose and went to the escritoire.
Needing several trips, he returned with paper,
ink, and a handful of quills. From the cabinet he
brought two glasses and a decanter of schnapps,
but what he was really after was a few minutes
to regain control of himself, because he kept imagining
the astonishment on Radgar's face when he heard
the news. To burst out laughing at this stage in the
negotiations would not be good diplomacy.
He sat down again and proposed a toast
to fruitful negotiations.
Durendal concurred. His eyes opened very wide
as the schnapps kicked him on the palate. He
coughed.
"What other terms are you offering, my lord?"
Wasp put pen to paper. His guest did the
same, so they could produce identical memos.
"Heads of Agreement, This Seventh Day of
Sixthmoon, 368. King Radgar to marry
Princess Malinda. All conditions of the
Treaty of Twigeport to be reaffirmed and
reinstated. And in addition ..."
Inevitably, rumors of the proposed match were
soon tip-toeing through the courts and capitals of
Eurania. King Ambrose had already set
tongues wagging by contracting marriage with a
princess a month younger than his own daughter. It
was no surprise that he should plan to rid himself of the
daughter, because wise monarchs avoid exposure
to ridicule, yet no one really believed that he
would be so cruel as to send her off to dwell among
savages on barren ocean rocks. By fall the
story was confirmed. Commissioners from Chivial and
Baelmark, meeting secretly in Drachveld,
had signed a treaty to end the long war, and the
betrothal was part of it.
Then the scandal thickened. Ambrose, it was
said, had sent his Lord Chancellor to inform
Princess Malinda of the arrangement. That being the
first she had heard of it, the aforesaid Princess
struck the aforesaid Chancellor so hard that her rings
cut his face open. There was known to be no love
lost between those two. She had then--if one believed
the more outrageous versions--stormed into a formal
state reception and shouted abuse at her royal
father in front of the entire court and diplomatic
corps. The enraged King had ordered his renowned
Blades to remove the Princess, but the
Blades had ignored the command. Malinda had
gone on to accuse her father of abusing all three of
his previous wives and of selling her to a gang of
slavers to escape from a war he was incapable of
fighting. At that, the King had either knocked her to the
floor or stormed out of the hall--or both.
Courtiers all over the continent sniggered loudly
and waited eagerly for more.
There was more, although little of it was ever confirmed. The
Princess swore she would not speak the marriage
vows; the King threatened to lock her up in the
Bastion; only when jailers came for her with
manacles did she lose her nerve and submit.
She wrote to her royal fianc`e, swearing that
she was overjoyed at the match and entering into it
voluntarily--but at the formal betrothal
ceremony she seemed close to tears. The
families of all the Princess's
ladies-in-waiting raced up to court and snatched
away their respective womenfolk--daughters,
sisters, aunts, or dowager mothers--before they could be
loaded into pirate longships. The King's own
marriage had been postponed until spring.
Long Night was not a happy festival in the
Chivian court that year.
Some things were certain. Although news of the treaty
had been greeted with jubilation throughout the land, the
prospect of the second in line to the throne being
married to a foreign pirate was wildly
unpopular. The King called Parliament
into session so he could bask in its praises. He
prorogued it very quickly when it began debating the
succession. His ability--or inability--to father more
sons was none of its business.
Winter could not last forever. On a morose,
drizzly day in Thirdmoon, 369, Princess
Malinda married King Radgar of
Baelmark in the palace of Wetshore, a
league or so downstream from Grandon. Everything had
gone quite well until then.
Arrangements for the wedding had been organized
by the Princess herself and the Thergian ambassador
on behalf of the Baels. The ambassador was
reliably quoted as saying that King Ambrose,
who normally meddled in everything, was so engrossed in
organizing sumptuous month-long celebrations of
his own forthcoming marriage that he had not noticed
what his daughter was doing. He became
memorably enraged when he discovered she had
omitted everything that normally defined a royal
occasion--balls, banquets, parades,
masques, fireworks, and extravagant pomp.
Royal weddings were invariably held in
Greymere Palace in the capital. She had
chosen instead a ramshackle edifice,
impossibly inadequate, and scheduled for
demolition. The guest list omitted, and thus
insulted, three-quarters of the nobility and
diplomatic corps who were entitled to invitations.
By the time the King learned all this, it was too late
to make other arrangements. His daughter would be
married like a fishwife's daughter, he bellowed
--small beer, sausages on sticks, and
straight into bed.
The gossips sniggered that this must be the whole
idea. The young lady was letting the silence speak
for her, showing what she thought of the match. No one
believed her protestations that she had moved the
event out of Grandon only because the populace would
riot in protest, and she did not want anyone
hurt or killed for her sake. Worse, although the
Baels had offered to provide a caravel
to transport the bride to her new home, she had
requested that they send a dragon ship instead. That
was, she explained, a tradition in the family.
At that point Sir Bandit, Commander of the Royal
Guard, stepped between the King and his daughter. ...
Only two attendants would accompany the
Princess into exile, Lady Ruby and Lady
Dove. They were about her own age, but she hardly
knew them. They had accepted the honor that
nobody wanted--so it was said--because Ruby had no
backbone and Dove no brains. Their
respective families had pressured them into it
because the King had bribed or coerced them, and if he
had settled for only two, he must have had to pay
dearly--large estates had changed
hands.
The Thergian ambassador certainly passed
all this scandal along to his royal masters, who
in turn informed their Baelish friends.
It was too late to make changes. The wedding
proceeded as planned.
The groom was not present in person, of
course. Monarchs never visited other realms
except in the ways of war, and in this case King
Radgar was so feared and detested in Chivial that
he would have been torn to shreds had he set foot
in it.
A former minister and longtime advisor, Thegn
Leofric, had been called out of retirement to be
his proxy. Although he was too polite to mention the
fact while he was there, this was not his first visit
to Chivial. He and the King's father, Aeled, had
shed blood there side by side on their first
foering, almost forty years ago. Later he
had lost his eye in a bloody sea battle off
Brimiarde, and of course there had been the
Candlefen caper. He had even seen Wetshore
a couple of times from afar. The Chivians'
greatest dread had always been that Baels would sack
their capital, so Radgar and his father before him had
feinted at the mouth of the Gran often enough to make
Ambrose keep his forces concentrated there, leaving
the rest of the coast more vulnerable. The palace itself
had never been molested, because the shores of the estuary
were flanked by tidal mud flats--deadly terrain
on which to beach dragon ships. With peace now
restored, the royal architects presented plans
for a grandiose ornamental pier to commemorate the
happy occasion. The Princess specified a
simple, temporary, wooden jetty.
Here, on a very wet morning, Leofric
disembarked from Woeternoedre. Her escorts,
Woel and Wracu, stood offshore--and all
alone, because the sight of three dragon ships had
been enough to empty the mouth of the Gran of other
shipping. He was greeted by Sir Dreadnought,
Deputy Commander of the Royal Guard, backed
by a flurry of multicolored heralds. The thegn
confirmed that his werod would remain aboard, as had
been agreed. The war was still too recent for either
side to trust the other. He was then conducted off
to the palace and a tense audience with His Majesty.
Woeternoedre loaded six chests of the
bride's luggage and withdrew to drop
anchor beside her sister ships.
The wedding took place the following morning.
Like all state occasions, even that meager
ceremony ran late. Nevertheless, tides would not
wait for royalty, and at the agreed hour of
noon, Wracu was rowed in. As she approached
the jetty, her werod could hear bugles being
blown up on the meadow, which was probably a
signal to speed up the final farewells.
A spiteful wind stirred the dismal drizzle.
River and clouds were leaden; leafless trees on the
bank equally colorless. Doubtless the courtiers
were all bedecked in dazzling splendor, but the
Baels down on the water could see nothing of the
ceremony, only the bank itself--which was admittedly
a brilliant grass-green--and the steps leading
up from the jetty, which were fresh plank color. From
farther out they had glimpsed the tops of gaudy
canopies and striped awnings.
A dozen or so Blades in the blue livery
of the Royal Guard appeared and lined up along the
top of the bank. If they were intended as a warning
to the visitors, they failed to intimidate
anyone. There would be a lot more where they came from,
though, and probably a regiment of cavalry just out
of sight.
The rowers sat in patient silence, huddled under
leather cloaks and never taking their eyes off their
leader. They were all veterans of many foerings
during the long war, and every man of them must be
remembering similar occasions when the signal they
awaited had been a call to battle. This was
supposed to be a peaceful and festive outing, but
they would not relax their vigilance. Marriage or
mayhem, their smiles conveyed the same eagerness
for action.
The ship lord waited a few minutes for the wedding
party to appear, or at least a herald to bring an
apology and explanation. When neither happened, he
waved an arm and the werod threw off coverings and
sprang into action. In seconds they were up on the
jetty. The Blades on the bank displayed
excitement. There was shouting, running back and forth,
and more bugle blowing. Another dozen Blades
arrived as reinforcements.
Commander Bandit himself in his silver baldric
came to see what was happening. Nothing was
happening. There was no reason to worry. The other
two dragon ships were still at anchor far out, almost
at the limit of visibility in the misty rain.
Seventy-two bare-chested pirates had lined up
along the jetty, thirty-six on one side with
&nb
sp; drawn swords and thirty-six on the other with
axes, a narrow aisle between them. No doubt the
Chivians saw naked savages, brutal
predators, but by Baelish standards they were an
honor guard in formal dress. What if it had
been agreed that no Bael would come ashore? What
if their formal dress was skimpy to the brink of
indecency? From boots to steel helmet every man
flashed and glittered with a fortune in battle
honors--golden necklaces, rings on arms and
fingers, elaborately jeweled and enameled
belts, buckles, and baldrics. Rain made
their bronzed skin shine also, but none of them looked
in the least cold. Most of them were grinning widely
at the effect they were producing.
The only Bael who might be classed as
decently dressed by Chivian standards, and the only
one lacking flashy gold and jewels, was the ship
lord himself, who had remained on board. Nobody
was looking at him. He was watching the Blades,
though. There were Blades up there who had known a
certain Candidate Raider twelve years ago
--Bandit himself, for one, although he had been a very
new soprano when Raider disappeared. They
might never have equated the lost Raider with the
monster Radgar but they ought to recognize
faces. Oak, Huntley, Burdon, Denvers
... It was Foulweather who suddenly screamed in
astonishment and pointed at the ship lord.
Radgar waved back.
Of course it was only a few minutes before
Ambrose was informed and arrived at the top of the
steps, swaddled within a living hedge of Blades.
Radgar waved again.
The King of Chivial did not look pleased.
Nay, His Grace seemed close to having an
apoplectic fit. Down there--his longtime
foe, the murderous pirate king, the monster to whom
he had been forced to sacrifice his only daughter
... and there was nothing he could do! He did not
return Radgar's wave. Obviously he
slammed the door on any prolongation of the wedding
ceremony, though. In moments the bride appeared
on Leofric's arm and began her
descent of the steps.
Radgar watched her approach with a strange
inner turmoil. All his life he had been able
to make up his mind quickly. At times, as when he
lost his temper, he made it up much too quickly.
Conversely, when there was no urgent need for a
decision, he could always set problems aside. But
