by Sharon Shinn
Ellynor made another curtsey, but Amalie drew her forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I think you’re brave to marry a Rider,” the princess said. “They’re very fierce.”
“Justin isn’t always fierce,” Ellynor replied, and then she blushed again.
Baryn was trying not to laugh. “And let me present Valri, my wife and my queen.”
Ellynor’s curtsey to Valri was a little more shallow and she did not drop her eyes as she had when she met the other two. Valri’s own eyes coolly assessed this new arrival. It struck Cammon now—as it should have struck him before, except he always wasted so little attention on people’s outward appearances—that there was a definite similarity between the two women. Not so much their coloring, though they both had black hair, but their essences. They were both watchful and still, secretive and serene. They both looked as if they had been blessed, or burdened, with complex knowledge that was difficult to handle but too sacred to share.
They knew each other. Despite being unable to read either one of them, Cammon could tell that as soon as their eyes met. He picked up a sense of disquiet from Justin, though the Rider kept his face completely impassive. So Justin, too, realized that these women were not strangers to each other. Ellynor had perhaps confided in him something of Valri’s history. Which Cammon would dearly love to know—he had no information beyond the fact that Valri was Lirren and bahta-lo.
“Ellynor. It is good to see you again,” Valri said calmly.
“Yes, and very good to see you, too,” Ellynor replied. “You have traveled far from home, but you seem to have prospered.”
“Though I miss that home, and all my kin,” Valri said. “You shall have to spend an hour with me someday and tell me tales of the land across the mountains.”
“So is the secret to be revealed, then?” Baryn asked his queen in a gentle voice. “No more pretense? I know how much you have missed your family and your friends, and to have another Lirren girl nearby—well. I would imagine you would greatly enjoy a chance to make her your friend.”
Valri gazed over at him with her bright green eyes. The rest of them stayed absolutely motionless, too surprised to speak. “It is up to you,” she said quietly. “Whatever you think is best.”
“We have so little reason to continue any fiction about what your background might be,” Baryn said. “It seems we will have enemies no matter how carefully you are presented. So let us tell the world you are Lirren-born, and let us see what they make of that.”
The permission did not seem to make Valri relax any, Cammon thought. “They will find a way to use the information against you,” she said.
“They’ll call her a mystic, too,” Cammon said, entering the conversation between royals without permission. Justin gave him a minatory look, but Baryn did not seem offended.
Nor did Valri. “They say it already,” the queen replied.
“People in Gillengaria don’t understand the Lirrenfolk or their powers,” Ellynor said. “If some of us have magic, it is not a kind of magic they can grasp. They might call you a mystic but unless you are commanding fire or changing shapes, they will have no idea what exactly you can do. And that may keep you safe.”
“That is very good reasoning,” Baryn said in an approving voice. “Justin, I like this girl already. Plus, of course, I have to commend your good taste in choosing someone from the Lirrens.”
Justin gave the king another deep bow, his right fist pressed to his opposite shoulder. “Sire, I loved her before I knew her heritage.”
Some of the habitual darkness left Valri’s face as she smiled at the newlywed couple. “So tell us the story of your wooing,” she said. “And the happy ending! Such a rare thing for a Lirren girl who looks to take a groom from across the Lireth Mountains.”
This was a signal to bring in more chairs and call for refreshments, and soon Justin and Ellynor were vying with each other to repeat the details of their romance. Amalie loved the tale, Cammon could tell, though she was horrified by Justin’s very near brush with death. Cammon was more interested in the account of their trip across the mountains for Justin to meet Ellynor’s family—particularly her quarrelsome brothers.
Justin was laughing. “Luckily, I had healed up well enough by then, because a couple of times a day someone was challenging me to a duel, or a footrace, or a wrestling match. Ellynor had told me I had to beat everyone at every contest—”
“I didn’t say you had to win every time.”
“So I did, but, let me tell you, I’ve had workouts with other Riders that weren’t as punishing over the course of a week.”
Valri, who had seemed to thoroughly enjoy the tale so far, now grew suddenly tense again, or so it seemed to Cammon. “And your family?” she asked Ellynor in a tight voice. “They are all well?”
Cammon noticed that Ellynor met her eyes straightly, seeming to acknowledge some unspoken question. “All of them—my brothers, my cousins, my parents—all the ones you know, all of them healthy and unchanged.”
Valri took a quick breath and then folded her lips together as if to keep from speaking. Cammon saw Justin’s eyes narrow and thought, He knows something. Baryn and Amalie did not seem to notice. The king said, “So you arrived a week or so ago, I believe. Did the Riders welcome you and treat you kindly?”
Justin laughed at that. “Most kindly,” he said with a grin. “Quite a welcome.”
Baryn smiled. “I suspect a story there,” he said.
“None worth telling,” Justin replied, still grinning.
The king asked Ellynor, “And what do you make of Ghosenhall?”
“I haven’t seen much of the city yet, but I think it’s beautiful.”
There was a knock on the door and Milo entered, bowed, and gave the king a significant glance. Baryn nodded and rose to his feet. “I have another appointment and I must go. Ellynor, my dear, I am so glad you have joined our family. Justin, of course you realize that officially I am devastated that you have chosen to take a wife, but in private may I say you seem to have made a magnificent choice. Stop by and see Milo before you leave. He will have something to give you—a small gift from me to start you in your wedded life.” He kissed Amalie on top of her head, Valri on the cheek. “My dears. I will see you later.” And he left the room behind Milo.
Justin was instantly on his feet. “And I must get back to the training yard. I’m still recovering some of the skills I lost on the road. Ellynor—”
“Perhaps she will stay and visit with me awhile,” Valri said.
“Gladly.”
Even Amalie could tell that the two countrywomen wanted to speak in private. “Cammon,” said the princess, “I have something to show you in my study. Why don’t you come with me for a moment?”
He did.
And so, for the first time since he had known Amalie, Cammon was alone with the princess.
“WHAT’S in your study?” Cammon asked as they stepped into the room.
“My cloak,” Amalie said. “It’s cold out and I want to take a walk.”
“Without Valri? She won’t like that.”
Amalie gave him a look that was pure mischief. One of the rare occasions when she looked as young as she really was.
“She will be too delighted to talk to Ellynor to even notice that I’m not in the room. By the time she remembers, I’ll be back here, sitting demurely before the fire and confessing to a day of boredom.”
Cammon was hardly one to urge anyone to more proper behavior. “Well, let me grab my own coat and we can sneak out the kitchen.”
“Meet me back here as quickly as you can.”
He did, and found Amalie transformed. She had covered her bright hair with a dull woolen scarf, and her cloak was so plain it could have been borrowed from a maid who possessed neither money nor fashion sense. She had also donned what looked like a pair of her father’s spectacles, but she allowed them to perch on the end of her nose so she could peer over the tops of the lenses.
“What do y
ou think?” she asked. “A good disguise?”
He felt his first twinge of unease. “Are you planning to go onto the streets of Ghosenhall? Because I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“I wish I could! But, no, I’ll stay safe within the palace walls. I just want to—walk around the grounds a bit without anyone knowing who I am.”
“Then let’s go.”
It was relatively easy for Cammon to get them out of the building unseen. He didn’t have Ellynor’s trick of concealment, of course, but he had no trouble sensing when the rooms and hallways ahead of them were clear of people and safe to traverse. More than once he had to whisk them into an unoccupied room to avoid a contingent of servants, and on these occasions he and Amalie plastered themselves against the wall and tried to keep from laughing.
Finally they had ducked through a side door to avoid all the cooks in the kitchen and found themselves outside in the cold afternoon sun. “Where to?” Cammon asked.
“The training yard,” she answered without hesitation. “I want to watch the Riders working out.”
She wasn’t the only one. A dozen or so spectators gathered around the fence rails surrounding the yard, watching in fascination as the Riders practiced their swings and blows. The rest of them looked like tourists in the royal city for a special visit—wealthy merchants and their well-dressed wives, their envious sons, their teenage daughters who sighed and giggled over the Riders’ splendid physiques. None of them paid any attention to Amalie.
She climbed up the bottom rung of the fence and hung over the top, absorbed in the mock combat. “Tell me who is who,” she commanded, so Cammon stepped up beside her and gave a running commentary.
“That’s Tir, the oldest of the Riders. Tayse’s father. See how he wields the sword? He’s not as powerful as he used to be, but he’s tricky. Almost no one can beat him. Over there is Wen. She’s small and she’s not as strong as some of the men, but she’s fast. And she can outshoot any of them with a bow. She’s fighting with Justin, so she’s going to go down in about a minute.”
“Does Justin always win?”
“Just about.”
“Who’s the best? Of all the Riders?”
“Tayse,” he answered without hesitation.
“And nobody can beat him?”
“Oh, sure. Now and then someone brings him down—usually Tir or Coeval, and sometimes Justin. But not very often. And never twice in a row.”
For a moment she stood in silence, watching over the rims of her spectacles. “I’m supposed to know them all,” she said. “My father does. He knows their names and their stories and whether they’re married and whether they’ve been injured and—and—what they’re like. Who they are. I only know a few of them, especially those who were with us last summer—Tayse and Justin and Coeval and Hammond. And Senneth.”
“Well,” Cammon said, “Senneth isn’t exactly a Rider.”
Amalie pointed to where Senneth was trading blows with Hammond. “She’s training with them.”
“I’ve trained with the Riders, too, and that doesn’t make me one of them.”
She gave him a quick appraising glance out of those lively brown eyes. “Are you any good?”
He laughed. “Not really. But Tayse says I’m getting better.”
She returned her attention to the field. “I should get to know them all.”
“I’m sure they’d welcome that. I’ll ask Tayse to arrange it.”
She nodded and then lapsed into silence again. Cammon could feel her intense interest in the activities on the field. Her mind swooped with the swing of a sword blade, dove to the wrestlers in the mud, lifted with the arrows being shot at targets on the other edge of the yard. She was pleased and excited and absorbed and impressed; she saw the activity before her as a combination of poetry and practicality. She missed neither the sheer beauty of the physical motion nor the deadly necessity behind the exercise.
For a moment Cammon’s hands tightened on the top rail of the fence. He could sense Amalie. He could read her. Valri’s cloaking magic had been lifted and Amalie was like a sunlit golden room he could simply stroll inside. He stood at the open doorway, dazzled by what he could glimpse from the threshold. Bright intelligence, swift comprehension, limitless fascination with the world around her. Her mind was like a darting bird too delighted with the bounty before it to want to settle. He could see it, flashing from window to window inside the illuminated chamber of her skull.
He closed his eyes and willed himself to walk away.
This was what Valri was protecting Amalie from, nasty intrusive strangers who would stomp all over those unmarred golden vistas, who would peer inside her and try to read her or try to rearrange her. Valri was protecting Amalie from him, from people like him, anyway, readers or, no—people who wanted to invade or dismantle that alluring, untouched space. Amalie was too open, too impressionable, and Valri knew it, and that was why Valri had been so afraid when Amalie could hear the words that Cammon sent her way. What other influences would Amalie succumb to, how could she ever be safe?
Cammon turned his head and put walls up around his own mind and felt himself hunker down behind their shadows.
Amalie touched his arm. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her face was creased with concern.
He made himself smile and shake his head. “Nothing. I’m just hoping Tayse doesn’t see me, or he’ll want to drag me over the fence and make me practice swordplay. He thinks I don’t work out nearly as often as I should.”
She smiled, but a trace of worry lingered, as if she knew he was lying. “If that happens, I’ll have to throw off my disguise and play the haughty princess. ‘I have commanded this man to wait on me, Rider, and you will not drag him from my side.’”
“Oh, yes, that tone of voice would make even Tayse back down.”
When she had had her fill of watching warfare, they promenaded through a few of the gardens. Despite the sunshine, the cold had chased everyone else inside; they had every path and enclosure to themselves. All the flowers were dead, of course, but some of the hedges retained their color, and the naked trees offered a variety of fantastical shapes with their trailing limbs and supplicating, upraised branches. Cammon and Amalie wandered through the sculpture park, where past kings and queens of Gillengaria struck marble poses and gazed down with forbidding, displeased expressions.
“If I ever have my statue done, it’s going to show me smiling,” Amalie said. She paused beside a representation of some former queen, whose face could hardly have been more grim, and stretched her arms wide in a welcome gesture. She had taken off her father’s glasses so her face was completely bare, completely open, covered only with a smile. “I’m going to be bending down a little, like I’m getting ready to kiss a child on the cheek. I’m going to look happy. People will want to come visit my statue, and maybe leave offerings for birds and squirrels at my feet.”
Cammon couldn’t help smiling at that. He was recovering some of his usual insouciance, though he was still being careful to keep his curious mind in check. “Maybe by the time you’re old, and you’ve been ruling for fifty years, you’ll be feeling a little more grumpy.”
She laughed. “So maybe I should commission my statue now.”
Before the war comes, he thought. While there is still a hope that you will take the throne.
“I will,” she said calmly. “The Riders and the mystics will keep me safe.”
He stared at her, completely nonplussed, for it was not a thought he had intended her to overhear. “Majesty—” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She placed her fingertips against the smooth bole of a skinny birch, as if feeling for a pulse in its narrow trunk. “Sorry for what? For worrying that war might snatch the crown from my family? You’re hardly the only one.”
“I shouldn’t—I didn’t mean—I’m sorry that I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself.”
She flattened her palm against the tree and looked at him over her shoulder. The wool scarf had
slipped a little, and her red-gold hair made a halo around her shrouded face. “But before. When the Nocklyn lord was talking to me. You sent me thoughts on purpose.”
“I did that time. I haven’t tried to do it since! I’m not sure it’s a good thing that you can hear me when I don’t want to be overheard. Let me see if I can shield my thoughts from you now when I’m really trying.”
He shut his mind down, staring at her in concentration. I wonder what Senneth will make of this conversation, he thought, willing the words to stay locked inside his own head. She will not like it any more than Valri would, but I’m certainly not telling the queen.
Amalie tilted her head as if listening, but looked disappointed. “No. Nothing.”
He smiled. “Well, that’s a relief.”
“Not to me,” she said. “I like to hear you thinking. It makes me feel like—like—there is someone else in the world.”
He was troubled, and that was a rare state for Cammon. “Majesty, I’m pretty sure the queen would say you should be looking to other people to keep you company.”
She tilted her head to one side, considering that. “Valri likes you.”
“I think so. But that doesn’t mean she thinks I’m suitable to be your friend.”
Amalie shrugged, dropped her hand, and started kicking her way down the leaf-strewn path. Cammon fell in step beside her. “But you want to be my friend,” she said.
He couldn’t help himself. He smiled at that. “Oh, I do. But scruffy mystics with no family connections don’t get to pick princesses as their friends.”
Amalie smiled, too. “But, you see, I am the princess. I get to order people to do what I say. And I say, ‘Cammon, I want you to be my companion.’ What can you do about it? Nothing. You have to obey.”
He gave up. He didn’t particularly want to keep his distance anyway. “Well, good. And if Valri and Milo tell me I have to stay away, I won’t listen to them. Only if you tell me.”
“So I want you to entertain me at dinner,” she said.
