The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

20

  “GWYDION!” PROSPERO CALLED TO ME FROM one of the catwalks above me.

  “Hullo,” I said, looking up.

  He lifted his eyebrows with an And? expression.

  After a moment’s guilty anxiety, I recalled that I hadn’t spoken to him or Walter since returning, and that they had no idea what I might have found out lately about Gemnamnon. And I kicked myself covertly. Distracted by the immediate, I’d forgotten, once again, to ask Freia if she knew anything about him. Indeed, I could have asked Dewar for tips on dealing with the damned beast, if I’d kept my wits about me. I wasn’t keeping my mind on my official job.

  Prospero was coming down toward me, though, and Dewar might not even be in the Catacombs any longer, and I couldn’t think of an excuse to run down there again after obviously having just climbed up. In point of fact, I couldn’t think of much of an excuse for being down there anyway.

  To buy time, I met him at the second floor, saying, “Let’s go somewhere less public.”

  “In all Argylle be few places more public,” he replied, looking up and down. He was in a good mood, it seemed. “Come with me; I’ve undertaken to exercise droit du seigneur ’pon our pantry. Partake of the expedition and the spoils, if you’ve stomach for it.”

  “Sounds like a fine plan to me.” I suddenly realized that I was famished. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten. All that sorcery takes it out of you, too.

  So I followed Prospero down to the kitchen and we irritated the staff there considerably by getting underfoot while they were trying to work. Bearing off a large, heavily-loaded tray (I just kept adding things that looked good) and a bottle of young wine, we made our retreat from there (pursued by concerned cluckings from the principal chef Iviarre, who thought I looked underfed and thus ought to take a custard-tart too) to Prospero’s study, which is a congenial place for loafing.

  He pulled back the curtains, looked out, and closed them again. “Ugh. More snow. This winter shall we see more of’t than ever in my memory.”

  “Ugh.” I opened the wine bottle.

  “What were you about in the Catacombs?” he asked abruptly, as he lit a three-globed oil lamp and brought it over to the table where the tray waited.

  My gaze by chance fell upon the corkscrew. I was inspired. “Utrachet has been bothering me about the wine cellar problem,” I lied glibly. “It occurred to me that if I could work out a way of protecting the area where the Spring is, I might be able to safely allow storage down there …”

  Prospero grunted.

  “… I think it’s innately too unstable though,” I concluded, pouring. An uneasy feeling crept over me. My face felt warm. The false answer sat like lead on my tongue, tasted like lead too, and I reminded myself that I was obeying my mother’s wishes. Though she had said, “Poor Papa,” she and Dewar had concurred that all should be kept secret.

  “Indeed; ’tis no more for public consumption than our wine. Next thing ’twould be some damn-fool tippling butler toppling in the blessed Spring.” He clicked his tongue. “A touch too acid, this.”

  I checked the label, covering my guilty discomfort at his mention of the Spring. “Candobel,” I said.

  “Hm. How much have we?”

  “Kind of a lot, I think. He had an unusually large production, didn’t he?” I recalled figures, possibly inaccurate.

  “Time’s come, perhaps, for one of those endearing diplomatic gestures which do so much to foster goodwill ’twixt kings and kin.” Prospero grinned sardonically.

  I laughed, biting my lower lip. Argylle had, in the past, more or less dumped slightly inferior wines on our Landuc relatives, who rarely tasted Argylle’s best. So far they hadn’t caught on.

  “We could certainly put something better in the space,” I said.

  “Were someone to consult the Ephemeris and see what anniversaries approach which would be fittingly commemorated with crisp autumn wine …” Prospero lifted an eyebrow, still smiling.

  “I’ll check, or have Anselm check. You’re devious, Prospero.” It wasn’t really a cheat. Landuc would never know the difference, and the wine was still better than most of what they drank there.

  “I’ve outlived many fools,” he said. “Hm. ’Tis better taken with food.”

  We pulled up a couple of leather-covered easy chairs and ate and drank without talking for a while. I consumed most of a smoked pheasant, a lot of other miscellaneous food, and a loaf of bread. Prospero watched me eat without comment after he finished his own more modest meal.

  “Now, how fared you with Ulrike?” he asked, when I had slowed down and settled back with a glass of the wine.

  “It was not pleasant.”

  “I’d imagine. Care to pass on the dragon’s tale?”

  “I’ll gladly pass on the whole damned dragon, Prospero.”

  He looked at me, pained.

  “Sorry. All right. I’m sure Walter tells it better than I do.”

  “Walter has fed me no more than the bare bones because, he said, you gave scant meat, being tongue-tied and scatter-wit with fresh fright.”

  “I was not. Was I? I guess I might have been.” I stared into the fire, remembered fear quickening my breathing. “We had climbed to a pass on the Argylle side of the Border …”

  I did not gloss that we’d have been dead in our tracks but for the mysterious Gryphon which had championed us.

  “You’re certain it spoke?”

  “Prospero, I would not invent something like that, not even to make a good story better.”

  “No,” he said, “indeed, you would not. Hm. ’Tis a great curiosity.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a talking gryphon.”

  “Nor I. They screech, scream, squall, and squawk; betimes they hiss …” He shook his head.

  “Maybe I hallucinated. I never asked Ulrike if she heard it too.”

  “It were a neat puzzle, if one did and t’other not, to say which heard phantom nothings. If phantom it was.”

  “I don’t like dei ex machina,” I said. “I want to know where that Gryphon came from, where the dragon is now, where he’s going to be.”

  “I agree with all my heart. Why then did you make such haste homeward?”

  I blinked. “I thought he’d come here next.”

  Leaning back in his easy chair, Prospero regarded me, one eyebrow slightly arched. He stroked his neat spade beard with two fingers, waiting.

  “I rode along the swath of destruction he left in the Valley,” I said, “and they hadn’t seen him since about then …”

  Prospero lowered his head a millimeter, still gazing at me, still waiting.

  “Should I have done more?” I asked, after a moment.

  “You are the Lord of Argylle,” he pointed out.

  “My place is here when my realm is threatened.”

  “And when your realm is not threatened …” he said.

  I felt a blush blossom slowly over my cheeks. I looked away from his unrelenting eyes. The fire popped in the stove.

  “I suppose I could have … found out more …” I said after half an uncomfortable minute. “I …”

  Ruthlessly, unforgivingly, I examined my own actions. I couldn’t tell him about the Kavellron business, about Dewar and Freia, but all that was incidental—my course of action was set before any of that arose.

  “I’m really afraid of that beast, Prospero,” I said then. “He has it in for me. If that Gryphon didn’t kill him, and I don’t think it did, he’s looking for me now.”

  Prospero shifted slightly, tipping his head back now. The lamplight touched the silver embroidery on his dark-blue doublet as he moved. He took a sip of wine and looked through his glass in the light.

  “A man who’d conceal anything must first conceal nothing from himself,” he said quietly after a moment. “I’d not grill you, Gwydion, nor scold you nor shame your fear—Gods, I fear him myself, to the soles of my feet, only a wittol would not. But you must not hide your fear and paint it over with goo
d intentions to yourself. It cannot be reasoned away, only faced and outfaced. That’s all.”

  My parents had told me similar things at various times. So had my tutor. I licked my lips and nodded, then had a swallow of wine.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d forgotten that. Thanks.”

  He caught my eye and leaned forward suddenly, picking up the wine bottle and topping off our glasses with the last of it. “Just doing my job,” he said with a slender smile.

  “What job is that?”

  “I know’t when I see it,” Prospero smiled more widely and we touched our glasses together and drank. His smile faded as he leaned back again. “This dragon has been most all my thought,” he said slowly.

  “Mine too. Tell me what you think.”

  Prospero snorted. “I think he’ll be difficult to be rid of as Madanese pox.”

  I cleared my throat. “There are two methods: sorcery or weaponry of the conventional sort. The first has been more successful than the second. I don’t know how much more sorcery I can pull out, though, Prospero. There isn’t much that’s more powerful than what I’ve thrown at him already.”

  He nodded.

  “I’m not quite at my wit’s end over it,” I said. “There are hugely dangerous spells that would probably do him in. The difficulty is they’d probably have wide-ranging and completely unforeseeable side effects on the Dominion at large.”

  “I know the spells you speak of. I’d liever keep the world and kill the dragon, not banish both.”

  I nodded. “So that leaves conventional weaponry.”

  “So ’twould seem. Explosives …” he narrowed his eyes and looked at the glass-fronted stove where orange flames nodded.

  “I don’t know that much about them. Gaston would know about bombs and the like. I haven’t worked with them firsthand.”

  “Ah.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I delegate you to think about explosives that would give Gemnamnon the bellyache to end all bellyaching.”

  “Hah, I’ve already done’t. Those incendiaries and disrupters I deem sufficient to split him crop-to-crupper would linger also, a vaporous miasma, and befoul the wider realm.”

  “Oh. Rather like sorcery.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “There’s always diplomacy,” I said, slumping in my chair.

  “Be of good cheer. I’ve expansive knowledge of explosives, and you’ve conned your sorcery well, but neither knows all his art.”

  “I’d not flatter myself so, certainly not.”

  “Nor I. ’Tis not unimaginable that the measure we need is known, and is but out of reach to us.”

  I understood. “I could dig around a bit …”

  “You could, yes.” He smiled. “Throw out a well-baited line and see what odd fish takes the hook.”

  “Dragons are more common in Phesaotois. Someone there might know something that wasn’t in my books.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  I felt myself reddening again. I had hightailed it home because I was afraid of Gemnamnon. Now my error in doing so was staring me in the face, as was the inappropriateness of my bargain with Virgil. I should have done more legwork while I was away. I could have gone into Landuc itself, called on Oriana and buttered her up for information, could have ridden to Morven even …

  “Gwydion,” Prospero was saying.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re granted a grace period. Use it wisely; its term is unknown and its end is near-certain. Cast your will to the wind and follow it, or think swift and fast—but act.”

  I nodded. The clock chimed.

  “Ah. I,” he said, rising suddenly to his feet, “have an engagement at the theatre. If you’ll excuse me …”

  “Of course,” said I, and stood too.

  I envied Prospero. He went off to the theatre with Zhuéra Pellean, who was staying with a friend in the City, and I went off to my office to brood over my problems.

  On the other hand, I mused, doodling gryphons, they were his problems too. Prospero had been careful not to give even the smallest bits of advice until this business had come up, though he’d not hesitated to point major things out to me when he thought I was missing them. He was letting me run the show, as he saw it, I supposed. But it was his Argylle, his home at risk here, and if I screwed this up the place he loved could be severely damaged.

  If worse came to worst, he might boot me out of the Black Chair and take command until the crisis was past.

  I didn’t want it to come to that. If I were so incompetent as that, I’d deserve to be hanged. I didn’t want this job, but, by the Spring, now that it was mine I had to do it.

  Still, I envied him his theatre date and his lover and his nights of physical pleasure and relatively peaceful sleep. I had neglected my own connections in the past few months; I hadn’t pursued Evianne hotly enough at New Year’s; and lately word seemed to have gotten around that I wasn’t available, because nobody had made me any offers lately.

  I growled and wrecked the pen nib, splaying it out. I picked up another one.

  Work hard, play hard, I thought. When I was through with this dragon, when his hide was being preserved and stuffed for my gloating pleasure, I would indulge every impulse I had.

  I hoped I’d have a few good ones left by then.

  Alexander had disparaged Walter’s settled, snug pairing with Shaoll, but his own bed-hopping was the same thing, inverted and distributed. I wondered if Alex ever was too busy to hunt down a lover. If only I had someone around, I wouldn’t be; it was the time-consuming business of getting started that I couldn’t quite manage. It would be nice to have that refuge available. Someone who would work my body over and leave my brain refreshed, or even better someone like Shaoll who would deftly relieve me of a few of my duties into the bargain. And maybe a knack for sorcery … Wishful thinking.

  How in the world had my mother, filling the Black Chair more competently than I was doing and with less help, ever found time for the even harder work of building and maintaining her rock-solid and marrow-deep love affair with Gaston? The job could not have changed much, but it took every minute of my waking time and many from my sleep. I supposed I could advertise that I was in the market for a full-time on-call lover. In Argylle that would be a joke, and it would lead to a lot more jokes, all at my expense. No thanks. All I had to do to get what I wanted was spend time looking for it. Almost nobody here, where procrastination and scenic detours and slow living were the rule, would believe that I didn’t have time to visit Evianne Perran for a few months of courtship and play before consummating the affair. Everybody had time for sex. Even if they had no time to fill out their tax forms, they had time for sex. It was knit into the fabric of life as thoroughly as eating. Mother had shaped that into Argylle on purpose—and she had had Gaston.

  I didn’t even have time to think about sex. With another growl, I wrecked the new pen’s nib too and then tossed it aside. My desk blotter was a mess of blots and splats. Anselm would replace it tomorrow morning. I went to my workroom and started pulling books off the shelves, and I sat down and stayed up until midnight and after, compiling a list of sorcerers in Pheyarcet and Phesaotois who might know a way of beating a dragon.

  In the morning I took a sadistically cold shower-bath, because I had realized sometime as I slept that none of those people would so much as give me the time of day without gleefully charging me a heavy load of service or worse for it. I couldn’t just ask for help and get it, not unless the person I asked owed me already. That was how the sorcery system worked everywhere but with Dewar and me. I wasn’t owed any favors just now, either; our sorcerous colleagues tended to avoid my tutor and me, not trusting us because he was different and had made me that way.

  I muttered obscenities, dried off and dressed, glared at Prospero’s door on my way to breakfast where I drank half a pot of coffee all by myself. I learned from the kitchen lassie who brought my food that Prospero hadn’t come in last night. The
n I went up to my office and met with Anselm and took care of a few things Walter hadn’t wanted to proceed with in my absence.

  “There are four petitions to the Black Chair,” Anselm said.

  By Hell’s iron bells, as Prospero would say. “I just cannot sit today, nor tomorrow in all likelihood,” I said. “I must study the dragon problem. Who knows I’m back, anyway?”

  “The Citadel staff, of course—”

  “I’m not back. As far as anybody’s concerned I am not here, I’m away, and I cannot be distracted. If any of the petitions are urgent, ask Walter to take the Chair on my behalf. He does it well enough.” Prospero disliked taking the Chair, and I did not want to stir him up by requesting he do so when he was clearly preoccupied.

  Anselm swallowed. “Very well, my Lord. Shall I so inform him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there … will you require me further today, my Lord?”

  “I might. Why?”

  “If I can be of assistance, I will gladly … do anything, my Lord,” he said.

  Anything? I wondered, and shook my head. “I just have to think. Run interference for me.”

  “Yes, sir.” Anselm collected his papers blandly and left.

  The unsigned note, written in tiny, anonymous printing, was crumpled. Virgil’s claws had torn it, too. He had offered it to me apologetically; it had been attached to a powder-grey pigeon he had killed, hunting in the courtyard. The dove’s blood-beaded corpse lay on my workbench.

  Gwydion,

  What is needed is found

  I looked at it again and then dropped the shred of paper in the flame of a fat candle and watched it burn up.

  “Thanks heaps,” I said to it. “Summon me, can’t you?”

  It became black ashes suspended in clear melted wax in the ivory well where the flame was cradled.

  I threw myself into my chair and drummed my fingers on the arm. Virgil picked up the dove and took it off to eat it in privacy, his duty done. I would have liked more information. Such as, where did he find it? And what were they going to do now? And why had he not Summoned me to tell me? Why the blackout on communications?

  I considered another Great Summoning, but I didn’t want to come across as a whingeing, incompetent kid who couldn’t do anything on his own. Dewar wouldn’t have left me holding anything I couldn’t handle …