The Fox

by Sherwood Smith

  “And you said?”

  “To go home.”

  The mage sighed. “You did not see Ramis again?”

  “No.”

  “So you left Ghost Island and sailed down the strait?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looking for information about the Venn? About Prince Rajnir, say?”

  “Anything I could find, though mostly I wanted charts—”

  “Did you get any information, or charts, when you stopped in Bren?”

  “No. They had nothing. Their charts of the northern side of the strait are as blank as ours.” Inda’s voice was a mumble by now. “So I wanted to come here and chart the north coast myself. Count Venn ships. See them maneuver, and—”

  The mage said, “So the storm drove you through The Fangs and you came here to spy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you spying on the Venn?”

  “To gather information. Chart the co—”

  “For what purpose?”

  “So I can free the strait for southern trade.”

  Another intake of breath.

  Inda’s mind had drifted into the kinthus dream state that left emotion behind. So he watched with detachment as the mage glanced at the Venn, then—longer—at the guard in yellow. And said, “I believe we are done.”

  The officer dressed in yellow got to his feet, drew his knife, and in a swift move gripped the surprised Venn officer with a forearm under the chin; the man was off balance for the heartbeat it took for the other to rip a knife across his throat from ear to ear. The man jerked—slumped as blood flowed—the mage motioned to the ground in front of Inda.

  The two yellow-clad guards at the door sprang forward and helped the officer bring the Venn around the desk. They dropped him at Inda’s feet, where he flopped, blood pooling on the stone floor.

  “Get the other,” the mage ordered.

  The door guards left. The mage stooped, drawing his blue robe carefully aside, and checked the dead Venn. Then he moved to the officer’s table. He tidied the papers scattered there, and began to read.

  Time measured itself by the quiet hiss of papers being turned over as the mage read through them all.

  Presently he said, “Get your pen. Rewrite this last page. I want the same handwriting, the same sense of his words, but under the that list of his three most dangerous enemies you will say that at Ghost Island Ramis commanded him to assassinate Rajnir.”

  The scratching of the guard’s pen was the only sound, and then he looked up. “Do you think that’s true, about Ramis dying?”

  The mage shrugged briefly, more of a twitch. “The only safe observation is that nothing Ramis ever says or does is what it seems. Even death. That much we can surmise from the very little we’ve learned about him. But for our purposes, this will do.”

  He took the sheet of paper with Inda’s real words, folded it neatly, and slid it into his robes.

  Inda’s body had gradually sagged forward, his muscles unstrung as in deep sleep, but his mind observed in helpless horror when the guards reappeared, dragging a young man roughly Inda’s size and age. Inda never saw his face, just his unprotected neck and dangling brown queue as they lugged his dead weight around Inda’s chair and, at a gesture from the mage, dropped him near the Venn. He’d been stabbed several times; the blood was slick and dark.

  The officer in yellow pressed the bloody knife into the young sailor’s lifeless fingers. He pulled off Inda’s medal, hung it around the neck of the young sailor, whose medal was removed and pocketed. The mage pulled his blue robe aside again, knelt carefully, and arranged the limbs of the murdered victims. When he was satisfied he rose and stepped back.

  Then at last he flicked his fingers toward Inda.

  “Take him.”

  One of them hauled Inda to his feet, another swathed him in one of their own cloaks.

  Inda was carried out. Muffled voices spoke in Sartoran, then two in Venn. “Attacked . . . had to kill him . . . one of our men severely wounded, clear the way!”

  Inda was bundled into some kind of conveyance. Heavy men in jingling chain mail sat on either side of him, forcing him upright. From outside came a sharp command, the clop of horse hooves. The conveyance jiggled and jerked.

  He’d drifted into a troubled, pain-limned sleep when he was abruptly woken by hands gripping him roughly by the arms.

  Once again they hauled him out, and as his feet fumbled for purchase on the ground, someone said, “Up in the stone room.”

  Inda was dragged up stone steps. The stair edges hit the top of his feet, scraping them. He felt it; the kinthus was wearing off, though his legs wouldn’t move properly. Zings of red lightning shot up his arms.

  But then he was flung facedown onto a bed, and a warm tenor voice exclaimed with breathy excitement, “Oh, well done! Well done! I never believed he’d actually be here. How very expedient, how fitting! Promotion for you all, I promise. But take the ropes off him. He needs to sleep. I will have him fresh and ready to work.”

  As Inda’s numb hands were loosed, the voice laughed softly. Then all the footsteps clattered out.

  Inda was left alone, lying facedown on a bed.

  The door closed, the locked clicked.

  Chapter Eighteen

  HADAND was thinking about beauty, art, Joret, and the Adranis after a long succession of days, each one much like the one before.

  And again she said nothing about the matter when Joret joined her in her chamber. It was noon; they generally had the mornings to themselves, for apparently most of the court slept until then.

  Joret was reading a record written by one of Wisthia’s ancestors. She sat there on a hassock, one leg tucked under her, dressed in a blue silk gown which Wisthia had herself picked out, trimmed simply in white lace with tiny golden ivy leaves embroidered at the edges of the lace; Joret did not like what she considered fuss. Her gleaming black hair was pulled high with a small wreath of silk flowers braided in. She hated the great concoctions of wire and lace and ribbon that were the fashion. To her own eyes she was simply but adequately dressed. To Hadand, who admired the clean, graceful line of her neck, the shape of her head artfully enhanced by that single arc of white silk blossoms, Joret looked like someone from another time, another place. “Taste” was a new concept to the Marlovans: the ability to discern what is aesthetically pleasing. It was a fascinating concept to Hadand. Even more fascinating was the realization that Joret’s discriminating taste seemed to be innate, though she described it merely as perceiving balance in colors, shapes, and lines.

  A sharp pinch in her ribs recalled Hadand’s attention, and she gave Tesar a glance of reproach. “Why did you pull those bodice strings so tight?”

  Tesar pointed at Hadand’s back. “Because the ends do not meet. We’ll have to remake the dress.”

  Hadand sighed. “Am I putting on extra flesh, then?”

  Joret looked up. “I know I am. At least my arms feel like those squashy arms I see around us.” She ran her hand over her fitted sleeve. Hadand frowned at her own arms. Had the familiar curve of muscle diminished to the soft line she disliked seeing in others? She gripped her silk-covered arm, was reassured by the muscle she found there. That was another strange thing about beauty, or at least, its perception in different people: she and Joret did not like the shapeless arms on the women here, but the women just as clearly thought their own muscular arms unpleasing distortions.

  As one particular lady spared no effort to let them know.

  Joret went on. “I picked up my knife again this morning, and I was out of breath in a trice.” She pursed her lips. “We can’t possibly be getting old, can we?” She made a comical face.

  “If we are old in our mid-twenties, I hate to think what we will call ourselves at forty—or eighty.”

  “We won’t talk about age at all, but about the past.” Joret’s cheeks dimpled as they only did when she was being ironic.

  “In any case, it’s the result of a month without drill,” Hada
nd said. “That and all those butter-potatoes with every dish, and cream in every pastry. This food tastes wonderful, but it sits heavily in the stomach in a way that our rice and cabbage doesn’t. Twice, now, I’ve had to drink steeped ginger-leaf before I could sleep.”

  “So have I,” Joret said, with her sudden chuckle.

  “Well I now resolve: no more cream cakes, delightful as they are. At least, only one. And tomorrow, no matter how late I get to bed, you must not let me sleep late, Tesar. It is time to resume dawn drill.”

  Joret turned her thumb up. “I’ll meet you. Gdand told me days ago she found a place to work in an empty chamber off the lower baths. No room to practice the bow, though.” She wrinkled her nose, and glanced out the window at the garden. “How fun it would be to organize a defense here.”

  Hadand laughed. “With whom? I suspect some of these women who are even younger than we are would fall down if you asked them to run five steps. Not that the men are much better. Their arms have little more shape than the women’s, under all that silk. And the way they mince about, as if more than ten or twelve steps requires a carriage to bear them!” She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. And frowned. Were those shadows at the corners of her chin, or was she putting flesh on there, too?

  She felt a pang of sympathy for the queen. Had it been swift or gradual, the taste for cream cakes that led to one extra, then two extra, until now at least six was an expected part of a meal? Did rank do that to you, or was it this strange life, with nothing to do all day but sit about in fancy dress and watch one another for signs of presumption, and maybe dance in a slow, gliding step to the constant music? Imposing the queen certainly was, beautiful, too, but it took the strong arms of two footmen to help her from her throne, and she walked with the same slow effort that Hadand herself would use if she were carrying a pair of laden saddle bags over each shoulder.

  Joret’s face appeared above Hadand’s in the mirror. “Why the frown?”

  “If I carried as much extra flesh as the queen, I could never have defended the throne last year. But then such a notion of defense seems to have never occurred to anyone here.”

  Joret laughed. “They think their smooth necks and shoulders charming. As perhaps they are. At least, that Lady Fansara has dropped several comments about the utter lack of charm of laborers’ arms, and the stalk of dockside sailors.”

  Fansara—the blonde who had stood out from the very beginning for the utter lack of warmth in her welcome.

  Though a very pretty woman, and one their own age, she obviously did not like foreigners. Or at least did not like Joret, Hadand reflected. Fansara paid Hadand the courtesy due a queen in a smooth, sweet voice that reminded Hadand very much of Starand Ola-Vayir at her worst.

  “My portion of Fansara’s style of compliments have all made some sort of reference to barbarians,” Hadand said wryly. “Though nothing direct enough for me to be able to think of an adequate response. Do they really consider Iascans to be barbaric? Sartor doesn’t have these fashions either—everyone keeps mentioning the austerity of their court—so is it just me looking for insult?”

  “If you mean Fansara, she’s cruel every time she opens her mouth,” Joret said. “She’s far worse than Dannor Tya-Vayir, even.”

  “It was Honeytongue that I was thinking of, that spun-sugar voice. Before Fansara began about laborers’ arms and barbarians.”

  Joret put her head to one side. “Why is it, do you think? I remember distinctly the first day Dannor arrived at the queen’s barracks and discovered that a future Jarlan hadn’t automatic precedence. How angry she was! But Fansara hasn’t that problem. She’s First Lady. And her brother is the most powerful duke!”

  Hadand had studied the map. Bantas was one of the biggest duchies over on the Anaeran side of the great river. She said, “Precedence is never enough for some.” She yawned. “In one of Wisthia’s records I discovered that the origin of their primacy was in the granting of a thumping great tax on the porcelain profits that come from that region. So they’re not the oldest family, nor do they hold their titles longest.”

  “Why should that make a difference?” Joret asked.

  “I cannot begin to understand. It’s plain to see that Fansara craves power the way the queen craves pastries.”

  “She was considered the first beauty of the Adrani court. Until we came.” Tesar gave Joret a wintry smile in the mirror.

  Joret’s gaze lowered. She loathed that kind of talk.

  “Well, that explains at least a part of it,” Hadand said, trying to be practical. “If you regard your face as a counter in a competition, then a better face is going to debase your counter in your own eyes, will it not?”

  “Why think that way at all?” Joret whispered, and moved to the window to stare out.

  Tesar rolled her eyes at Hadand, who opened her hands. They knew Joret—she wasn’t going to change.

  Tesar shifted the hairbrush in her grip. “What’s said downstairs is that Lady Fansara and her bother’s wife, the Duchess of Bantas, fight from cockcrow to sundown. Lady Fansara won’t marry any of her suitors; she has her eye on Prince Valdon. And the king and queen want her as crown princess—has to do with that same porcelain tax.”

  Hadand pursed her lips. “Everyone talks about Prince Valdon. What he does, what he likes, what he says. Whom he’s courting. But isn’t that some princess up around Colend, or thereabouts? That’s what I heard someone saying yesterday, when complaining about how boring it is waiting for him to come back.”

  “My nephew arrives back in a week.”

  The voice came from behind. Hadand and Joret turned. Gdand, on guard outside the door, had opened it, and Wisthia entered, elegant in a draped mauve gown. “I suspect we shall see some changes.”

  “I hope so. That’s another thing that worries me,” Hadand admitted. “It’s the waiting, for no one has said anything to me at all about the treaty. They give me precedence, at least in all the court ritual, but where is the real work done?”

  “True,” Joret said, expression pensive. “We see the king and queen reigning all day, but when do they rule?”

  Hadand sighed. “I’ve listened to the whispers of those courtiers who line the way from the dining chamber to the anterooms, waiting to ask for favors, but those appear to be personal business. Otherwise never a word spoken about anything beyond food, music, dancing, and pleasure. Is it possible the king and queen don’t really rule, that everything revolves around this Prince Valdon, like the planets in the sky around the sun?”

  Hadand thought of the locket on its golden chain between her breasts, and her nightly ritual, when alone, writing to Evred on tiny squares of paper. It all had a peculiar intimacy, despite them being so far apart—despite her having to write, in essence, No news yet.

  Wisthia considered Hadand’s distant gaze and Joret’s interested one. “Some of the real work of government seems to have gone to my nephew. My brother presides over final decisions, but most of the work leading to those is done by Valdon. So our protracted wait is not aimed at you—every-one murmurs in private to me about it.”

  How strange, Hadand thought. A king who merely wants to look like a king, but not do the work of one. Why be a king at all? She could not imagine Evred in a similar position.

  Wisthia smiled. “You should see some changes within a day or two after Valdon returns.”

  As Tesar brushed out Hadand’s long brown hair, Hadand and Joret exchanged unself-conscious comments about how heavy it seemed, to wear one’s hair on one’s head, but it did look rather pretty, didn’t it? Wisthia laughed inside, a buoyant laugh, as she admired the blue-black sheen of Joret’s hair.

  At noon, Valdon Shagal, Crown Prince of Anaeran-Adrani, reached the eastern border mountains and rolled into a royal posting inn to change his horses. There he found his cousin Randon waiting inside the very best private parlor that his outriders had arranged for him earlier that morning. They sat down in comfortable chairs before a bow window that l
ooked onto a broad square made of patterned brick, into which the main road emptied.

  “How goes the chase?” asked Lord Randon, pouring a glass of the waiting ale. “Rotten, I take it from your lack of cheer. Good!”

  Valdon looked askance at that grin. “What now?”

  “One word.” Randon lifted his ale in toast. “Joret.”

  “Joret! I’ve had five golders already, all mentioning this ‘Joret.’ ” Valdon tapped the discreet waistcoat pocket that housed the fabulously expensive golden case wherein chosen friends—with expensive cases of their own—could send letters by instant magic transfer. “Let me tell you, I’ve had it with beauties. The royal palace in Alsayas was full of ’em. Lael did what he promised to do, soon’s he got his throne: he surrounded himself with every beautiful woman in Colend. And don’t they just know it!” Valdon whistled.

  Randon laughed. “I’ve heard about Lael’s garden of roses.”

  “You know the real reason they’re called roses? Thorns, every one. Each thinks she will be empress. And though he’s as much as said he will never marry, they each think they’ll change his mind.” Valdon shook his head. “Anyway, if you want the truth, I was through there as an excuse— Mama being what she is, only a journey to Colend would silence her about this marriage business.”

  Lord Randon kissed his fingers and flicked them out in an airy gesture. The queen had insisted that if her son didn’t marry Lady Fansara, then only a woman of impeccable lineage would do, preferably a Colendi or Sartoran.

  How about a family that had married among both? He shook with laughter and anticipation as Valdon said morosely, “I rode all the way to Mearsia to try to talk Dascin into marrying me—figured, since she’s a princess, she might be almost as acceptable as a Colendi duke’s sister in Mama’s eyes—but she won’t have me. Or rather, she won’t have Mama, Papa, our court, and all the rest.”

  “Wise woman. I like her already.”

  Valdon grinned. “Then go court her! I told her I’d send some likely candidates for consort. You can furnish the example of worst choice.”

  They laughed. Randon heard his own turning to gloat, and turned his head aside to scrutinize that brick square out the window.