Crown Duel

by Sherwood Smith

  “Thank you,” I murmured, my heart drumming.

  I was glad to move aside and let Branaric take my place. I didn’t hear what he said, but he made them both laugh; then he, too, moved aside, and the prince and princess presented us to the red-haired woman, who was indeed the Marquise of Merindar. She nodded politely but did not speak, nor did she betray the slightest sign of interest in us.

  We were then introduced to the ambassadors from Denlieff, Sles Adran, and Sartor. This last one drew my interest, though I did my best to observe her covertly. A tall woman of middle age, the ambassador was polite, gracious, and utterly opaque.

  “Family party, you say?” Branaric was saying as he rubbed his hands. “Well, you’re related one way or another to half the Court, Danric, so if we’ve enough people to hand, how about some music?”

  “If you like.” Shevraeth had appeared quietly, without causing any stir. “It can be arranged.” The marquis was dressed in sober colors, his hair braided and gemmed for a formal occasion; though as tall as the flamboyantly dressed Duke of Savona, he was slender next to his cousin.

  He remained very much in the background, talking quietly with this or that person. The focus of the reception was on the prince and princess, and on Bran and me, and, in a strange way, on the ambassador from Denlieff. I sensed that something important was going on below the surface of the polite chitchat, but I couldn’t discern what—then it was time to go in to dinner.

  With a graceful bow, the prince held out his arm to me. If it hurt him to walk, he showed no sign other than our stately pace. His back was straight and his manner attentive. The princess went in with Branaric, Shevraeth with the Marquise of Merindar, Savona with the Sartoran ambassador, and Nimiar with the northern ambassador. The others trailed in order of rank.

  I managed all right with the chairs and the high table. After we were served, I stole a few glances at Shevraeth and the Marquise of Merindar. They conversed in what appeared to be amity. It was equally true of all the others. Perfectly controlled, from their fingertips to their serene brows, none of them betrayed any emotion but polite attentiveness. Only my brother stood out, his face changing as he talked, his laugh real when he dropped his fork, his shrug careless. It seemed to me that the others found him a relief, for the smiles he caused were more genuine—not that he noticed.

  Conversation during the meal was light and flowed along like water, sometimes punctuated by the quick, graceful butterfly movements of fans. Music, a comical play recently offered by a famous group of players, future entertainments, the difficulties of the winter—all passed under review. I sat mute, sipping at the exquisite bluewine, which savored of sunshine and fresh nuts, and listening to the melodic voices.

  When the meal was over, the princess invited everyone to yet another room, promising music after hot chocolate.

  Dazzled by the glint of jewels and the gleam of silk in the firelight, I moved slowly until I found myself face-to-face with Princess Elestra.

  “Has my son shown you the library yet, my child?” she asked, her gently waving fan flicking up at the angle of Confidential Invitation.

  “No,” I said, instantly ill at ease. “Ah—we arrived today, you see, and there hasn’t been time to see much of anything.”

  “Come. We will slip out a moment. No one will notice.” With a smile, she indicated the corner where Savona was telling some story, illustrating a sword trick with his forefinger amid general laughter and applause. My brother was laughing loudest of all. All the young people had circled around Savona, and the older folks had formed a loose circle around the prince.

  With the smoothest gesture, nod, and bow, she threaded through the crowd to the doorway. We stepped into a quiet hall lined by tapestries on both sides, their colors gleaming in the light of a double row of glowglobes placed in silver sconces shaped gracefully like thistle leaves.

  “I am told that you like to read,” the princess said as she led the way to an even more formal hall. Liveried servants stood at either side of the entry, and when they saw my companion, they bowed, ready for orders. With a little wave, she indicated the tall carved-wood doors between two historical tapestries dark with age. The servants sprang to open these doors.

  As we passed inside, I glanced at the nearest footman and caught a glimpse of curiosity before his face smoothed into imperviousness.

  “A problem, dear child?” Her gaze was questioning, and somehow very aware.

  So I said carefully, “I don’t want to sound critical, Your Highness, but I was thinking how horrible it must be to stand about all day waiting to open a door, even doors as pretty as those.”

  “But they don’t,” she responded with a soft laugh. “They trade places regularly. Some stand out there, some are hidden from view waiting for summonses. It is very good training in patience and discretion, for they all want to advance into something better.”

  She touched a glowglobe, and one by one, in rapid succession, an array of globes lit a long marble chamber lined with packed bookshelves.

  “The books are all arranged by year.” She swept her fan along the nearest shelves. “These on this wall concern Remalna. All those there are from other parts of the world. Some real treasures are numbered among that collection. And under the windows are plays and songs.”

  “Plays, Your Highness?” I repeated in surprise. “Do people write plays down? How can they, when the players change the play each time they do it?”

  She walked along the shelves as though looking for something in particular. “In the countryside in our part of the world, this is so, and it is common to some of the rest of the world as well. But in many of our cities plays are written first—usually based on true historical occurrence—and performed as written. It is an old art. At the Sartoran Court there is a current fashion for plays written at least four hundred years ago, with all their quaint language and custom and costume.”

  I realized again how ignorant I was. “I thought plays were about dream people. That the events had never happened—that the purpose of plays is to make people laugh.”

  “There’s a fine scholar in the south who has traveled about the world studying plays, and he maintains that, whether or not they are based on real experiences, they are the harbingers of social change,” Princess Elestra replied. “Ah! Here we are.”

  She pulled down a book, its cover fine red silk, with the title in gilt: The Queen from the Plains.

  “I know that book!” I said.

  “It is very popular,” she responded, then pulled down four books from nearby, each a different size and thickness. To my surprise, each had the same title. “We were speaking of plays, the implication being that history is static. But even it can change. Look.”

  I glanced through the histories, all of which were written in a scribe’s exquisite hand. Two of them were purported to be taken from the queen’s own private record, but a quick perusal of the first few lines showed a vast difference between them. Two of the books were written by Court-appointed historians—the heralds—like the one I’d read. One of them seemed familiar. The other had a lot fewer words and more decoration in the margins. When I flipped through it, I noticed there were conversations I didn’t remember seeing in the one I had read.

  “So some of these are lies?” I looked up, confused.

  “A few are distorted deliberately, but one has to realize that aside from those, which our best booksellers weed out, there is truth and truth,” the princess said. “What one person sees is not always what another sees. To go back to our histories of the Marloven queen, we can find a fifth one, written a century later, wherein her story is scarcely recognizable—but that one was written as a lampoon of another queen.”

  “So…the scribes will change things?” I said.

  She nodded. “Sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  She closed the books and returned them to the shelves. “Occasionally for political reasons, other times because the scribes think they have a special insight on
the truth. Or they think the subject was dull, so they enliven his or her words. Court historians are sometimes good, and sometimes foolish…and sometimes ambitious. The later histories are often the most trustworthy. Though they are not immediate, the writers can refer to memoirs of two or three contemporaries and compare versions.”

  “Going back to the memoirs, Your Highness, how does one know one is getting the words of the person whose name is in front?”

  She pulled down three more books and flipped to the backs, each showing a seal and names and dates. Below these was written: Fellowship of the Tower.

  “What is this, Your Highness, a sigil for a guild?”

  “It is more than a guild. Men and women who join give up all affiliation with their own land. There are five or six establishments throughout the world. Members of the fellowship are not merely scribes, but are sworn to stay with the written truth. If you find a copy of Queen Theraez’s memoirs with the Fellowship of the Tower’s sigil in back, you can trust that every word—every cross out—scrupulously reproduces the papers kept in the Heraldry Archive, written in the queen’s own hand. Their purpose is to spread knowledge, not to comment or to alter or improve.”

  She closed the books and replaced them, then turned to face me. “This library was a haven for many of us during the late king’s reign. He liked appearing hither and yon, but he never did come in here.” She gave me a faint smile. “Are you chilled, my dear? Shall we rejoin the others? You can warm up again by dancing.”

  “Thank you for showing me the library, Your Highness,” I said.

  “I hope you will find time for exploring in here during your stay at Athanarel,” she replied, leading the way to the doors.

  She was kind and unthreatening; and because we were alone, I took a chance. “Did you know I was using your carriage to escape that night?” I blurted. My words sounded sudden, and awkward, and my face burned.

  She sighed, looking down at her hand on the door’s latch, but she did not open the door. “It was an ill-managed thing, not a memory one wishes to return to. Those were dangerous days, and we had to act quickly.” Then she opened the door, and there were the footmen, and when she spoke again, it was about the new musicians that were to play.

  We’d reached the reception room before I realized that her answer had admitted to a conspiracy without implicating anyone but herself—and that it had also been a kind of apology. But it was equally clear that she didn’t want to return to the subject, and I remembered what Nee had told me during our first real conversation: They don’t talk of the civil war at all.

  Why? I thought, as we joined the rest of the company. The Renselaeuses won; surely such talk could no longer harm them. And it was impossible to believe that they wanted to protect those who had lost…those such as myself.

  I shook my head as I made my way to Bran and Nee. Impossible.

  oOo

  The reception room was larger now. Folding doors had been thrown back, opening two rooms into one. The second room had the customary tiers along its perimeter, with colorfully embroidered satin cushions set around low tables for those who did not want to dance. Above, in a cozy gallery, musicians played horns and drums and strings, and in the center of the room, toes pointed and arched wrists held high, eight couples moved through the complicated steps of the taltanne.

  The music was stirring and so well played I had to keep my feet from tapping. Among the Hill Folk it was also impossible to stay motionless when they played their music, yet it was very different from this. Up on the mountains the music was as wild as wind and weather, as old as the ancient trees; and the dances retold stories even older than the trees. This music was more controlled, with its artfully modulated melodies, themes, and subthemes; controlled, too, were the careful steps of the dance. Controlled, yet still beautiful. And dangerous, I thought as I watched glances exchanged over shoulders and across the precise geometric figures of the dance.

  Then the Duke of Savona appeared before me. He bowed, smiled, and held out his arm—and there was no time for thought.

  It was my very first dance in Court, and I would have liked to try it with someone I knew. But at Court one didn’t dance with one’s brother. With the Hill Folk, dance was a celebration of life, sometimes of death, and of the changing of the seasons. Here dances were a form of courtship—one that was all the more subtle, Nee had said once, because the one you danced with might not be the one you were courting.

  Savona did not speak until the very end, and then it was not the usual sort of compliment that Nee had led me to expect. Instead, he clasped my hand in his, leaned close so that I could smell his clean scent, and murmured, “Your favorite color, Meliara. What is it?”

  No titles, just that soft, intimate tone. I felt slightly dizzy and almost said Blue, but I had enough presence of mind to stop myself. Blue being the primary Renselaeus color, this might be misleading. “Lavender,” I said. My voice sounded like a bat squeak.

  The music ended. He bowed over my hand and kissed it. Then he smiled into my eyes. “Will you wear it tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Certainly. Your grace,” I managed.

  “Call me Russav.” Another bow, and he turned away.

  “Here’s Geral Keradec.” Bran led me to a tall red-haired young man. “Wants to dance with you, sister.”

  Desperately I tried to clear my thoughts and respond correctly. Geral—he also insisted on abandoning titles right away—was funny, shy, and mild voiced. Encouraging him to talk, I discovered that he liked music and poetry, and that he was the heir to an old barony.

  And so it went for the remainder of the evening. I was never still, never had time to stop or sit down—or to think. Increasingly I felt as if I had stepped down from a quiet pathway expecting to encounter firm stones, but had instead tumbled into a fast-moving river.

  Twice I noticed Savona standing against the wall, his powerful arms crossed as he watched me. When my eyes met his, he grinned. After the second time, I had to know what the Marquis of Shevraeth made of all this, and I darted a fast glance at him under my partner’s velvet-sleeved arm as we twirled.

  Shevraeth was in the dance at the other end of the room, conversing quietly with his partner. He seemed completely oblivious to everyone else.

  And the Marquise of Merindar was not there at all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Savona didn’t dance with anyone else,” Nee said.

  We were curled up in my sitting room. Outside the window the garden was a silhouette in the faint blue light of dawn.

  “We only danced that once. But then he asked me that question about my favorite color,” I said. “Ought I to wear it tonight?”

  She pursed her lips. “I’ll wager my best necklace all the decorations in that ballroom tonight will be lavender, even if he has to empty the entire city today to find them. Did he say anything else?”

  “He asked me to call him Russav.”

  Her eyes widened. “I don’t think anyone calls him that—except for Vidanric, and sometimes Tamara. I think I told you that he inherited when his parents died under mysterious circumstances, when he was very small. We all grew up calling him Savona.”

  “Well, I can’t think of him as anything but Savona.” Again that sense of rushing down a rock-strewn river engulfed me. “What does it all mean?”

  “It means you are going to be very, very popular,” Nee predicted.

  “Is that it?” I said, frowning.

  “You mean, what does it signify in personal terms?” she asked, her brows rising. “That question, my dear, you are the one to answer, not I.”

  “But I can’t answer it,” I wailed. “I feel like I’m in a whirlwind, and the wrong move will dash me on the rocks.”

  “You’ll learn how to maneuver as you steer your own course,” she said. “Everyone began with no experience.”

  I shook my head. “I think that Savona was born with experience.”

  She set her cup down. “He was always popular with the w
ilder children, the ones who liked dares and risks. He and Vidanric both. Only, Vidanric was so small and light-boned he had to work hard at it, while everything came easy to Savona, who was always bigger and faster and more coordinated than anyone else. I think it was the same when they discovered flirting—” She hesitated, then shrugged and closed her lips.

  And since the subject had come to include Shevraeth, I didn’t want to pursue it. Ever since our conversation on our arrival at Athanarel, Nee had stopped talking about him. I told myself I didn’t want to hear any more anyway.

  She drifted toward the door, her dressing gown trailing behind her. “We’d better get to sleep. We have a very long evening before us.”

  I wished her a good rest and crawled into bed, feeling a happy sense of anticipation. Not only because I had a wonderful ball to look forward to—my very first. More important was the day after, my Name Day, and the anniversary of the beginning of the long, terrible time I spent as a prisoner and a fugitive.

  That day had also been my Flower Day, and even before I got caught in the trap there was no music, no dancing, no celebration.

  I remembered Bran’s words, “Next year I promise you’ll have a Name Day celebration to be remembered forever—and it’ll be in the capital.”

  “With us as winners, right?” I’d said. Well, here we were in the capital after all, though we hadn’t won the crown. I didn’t want a party—not at Court, attended by strangers—but I looked forward to celebrating with Bran.

  I didn’t have a lavender ball gown, so Mora and her handmaids changed the ribbons on my white-and-silver one. I felt splendid when I stared my image in the mirror as Mora brushed out my hair and arranged it to fall against the back of the silver gown.

  Last was the headdress, which Mora’s deft fingers pinned securely into place. It was mainly white roses with long white ribbons and one lavender one tied in a bow. I had another new fan, which hung from my waist on a braided silken cord of white.