The Complete Season 1

by Michael Underwood

  The docks were impossible to see from the Hill, of course. The river bent through the city like a bow, crossed by bridges connecting the older side of the city to the new. And the Everfair was lost; the papers told her that, leaving no room for hope any more. But there was a Kinwiinik Trader ship due in soon. There always was, this time of year, daring the first of the spring storms, bringing things exotic and delightful to the city’s inhabitants: bright feathers, exotic spices, colorful cloth . . . and chocolate. These things were always welcome. But this time, the duchess had a particularly urgent use for them.

  There were footsteps on the stairs. She shoved the papers under the generous folds of her skirts.

  “Diane?”

  Her husband knew she loved it up here. The servants had instructions not to trouble her when she was in her retreat—her “bower,” William romantically called it; or, sometimes, her “gentle falcon’s nest.” But he could visit when he liked.

  The little door opened. She did not turn her head. Let him find her lost in thought, gazing dreamily out the window.

  William Alexander Tielman, Duke Tremontaine, bent his long body to her. When his lips touched her neck, she arched it and smiled lazily, leaned into the warmth of his chest, then turned her lips up to his.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” he said. For a moment, they looked out over the city together. William rubbed her satin-clad arm. “It’s gotten cold,” he said gently. “Your fire is low, and you haven’t even noticed.”

  “No,” the duchess said; “I hadn’t. What a good thing you came.” She snuggled into his coat again. “So why are you here? Surely you can’t be missing me already!” They had spent the better part of the morning sporting in bed for so long that their morning chocolate had grown cold, and they had to ring for new.

  “Why should I not?” he said gallantly. “But I wouldn’t disturb you for that. I just wanted you to look over my speech for tomorrow’s Council. My man Tolliver’s drafted it according to your notes, and I’ve tweaked it here and there . . . but I’m not quite certain yet. Will you . . . ?”

  “With pleasure.” She sat up briskly, folding her hands on her lap. “Read it to me, why don’t you?”

  But he made no move to produce notes from his pockets. “And there’s something else,” he said.

  “Really?” She had to struggle to make it sound like a question. She’d known he wanted something else from the moment he’d entered.

  “It’s Honora.” The duchess waited, expressing just the right mix of politeness and disinterest. “She’s had another child.”

  “Already? It must be the country air.”

  On the subject of their married daughter, the duchess was intractable. But the duke pressed on: “It’s a boy, this time. They’ve named him David—for the old duke, of course, the King Killer. The family hero.” He risked a smile, inviting her to join him. “He’s David Alexander Tielman.”

  “. . . Campion,” the duchess finished sharply. “Don’t forget the Campion.”

  Duke William sighed. “You haven’t forgiven her, have you.”

  The duchess bit her lip, and turned to look out the window. “No,” she said, “I haven’t.”

  “But Diane . . .” He stroked her shoulder. “Honora does seem happy in her new life. If you could find your way to—”

  “I am very glad that she is happy, William. Truly.” She did not try very hard to keep the rancor out of her voice. “In time, I am sure I will get over what she did to us.”

  “I’m sure you will,” he said softly. His charm was in seeing the best in her, even when it wasn’t there.

  “Oh, William!” She threw her arms around him, allowing herself the luxury of tears. “I had such hopes! The years I spent, preparing to bring her out to make a good—a fine, an excellent—marriage! The alliances, the parties, the dresses we could ill afford—”

  He stroked her carefully arranged curls, and she let him.

  “And then, to fling it all in my face! To ruin every plan I had for repairing our fortunes! To run off with that ridiculous country nobleman, not even halfway through her first season!”

  “Raymond Campion seems a decent man. His estates, though small, are in order.”

  “I’m sure they are, my dear. As far as they go.” She lifted her head, wiped her nose, and patted her hair back into place. “It could have been worse, I suppose; she could be begging us to support her and some impecunious nobody.” She looked at her husband with sudden suspicion. “She hasn’t been asking you for money, has she?”

  “What? Oh, no, no. Not money.”

  “What, then?” the duchess asked, more sharply than she had intended.

  He sat by her side and took her hand. “Don’t you think . . . a little visit . . . just to see the children . . .”

  She did not pull away, but every part of her stiffened. “No. Absolutely not. Honora made her choice, and she must stand by it. She knew her marriage was critical to the future of Tremontaine.”

  “But surely—”

  “She did not consider us; why should we consider her? I’ve no wish to see her, or to see what Raymond Campion begot on her.”

  That was not entirely true. If he lived, this baby boy would most likely be Duke William’s heir, given Diane’s and her husband’s unsuccessful attempts to produce a male themselves. But Honora’s and that Campion fellow’s boy was bound to be a disaster. She might have to take him in hand someday.

  Diane stroked her husband’s brocade sleeve. “I’m sorry, William. Of course they must be acknowledged. People have had a glorious time gossiping about the runaway Tremontaine daughter; it wouldn’t do to have them talking about the babies, now, poor mites. Go ahead and send them something; silver, perhaps, with our swan on it. Something from the cabinets; we can’t afford new, and anyway, it will seem more important if it’s family silver, crested.”

  “Goblets?” He smiled. “Or rattles?”

  “Whatever you like,” she said warmly. “I trust to your selection.”

  Her husband squeezed her arm. “We’ll come through, my love. It wasn’t all on our daughter’s shoulders.” The duchess wisely held her tongue. He did not know about the wreck of the Everfair. Nor did he know what she had mortgaged to fund that expedition.

  “Tremontaine’s been leaking cash for years,” the duke went on blithely. “But no tradesman in this city will refuse credit to us, or to any other noble for that matter. Why, some of our friends—”

  The duchess shuddered. “You know how I feel about credit, William. I do not like to owe anyone anything. And it does not become the House.”

  “Another loan, then . . . ?”

  “And I know how you feel about loans!” She put her fine hand over his big one, gave it a squeeze. “When we put the Catullan vineyards up for security against that loan for the improvements at Highcombe, you didn’t sleep a wink until they were completed, repaid, and the vineyards out of danger.”

  He looked down at both their hands. “Not a bit!” he said softly. “I knew we’d made the right decision. Couldn’t let my father’s house go to ruin. I spent some happy years there . . .” He smiled at something she couldn’t see. “And then we got that phenomenal Catullan harvest, as you predicted—and what a laugh, to pay them back with profits from the very vineyards they were hoping to get their paws on if we failed!” He grinned at her, a boy’s grin. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t share the joke with everyone I know.”

  The duchess squeezed his hand harder. “But you know you mustn’t, don’t you? Not ever. For anyone to know we were taking out loans, much less putting up Tremontaine land for them . . .” He nodded. But she pressed on. “We can enjoy the joke together, the two of us, my darling—but that’s as far as it goes.”

  He lifted her hand and kissed it. “You keep a most careful house.”

  “Because I must, William!” The duchess smiled ruefully. “The cook and the staff all hate me, because I make them do so very much with so very little. To their credit, t
hey always come through. But the ball for Honora’s presentation was a triumph of ingenuity over penury. And how I’m going to manage our Tremontaine Ball this year, I do not know. I’ve got the musicians all hired at reasonable rates, but there’s the invitations all to be handwritten and . . .”

  “Why not have them printed? There are some fine engravers.”

  “William.” She looked at him with her clear grey eyes, a tiny frown between them. “Tremontaine does not print invitations. To anything.”

  Her husband smiled. “Sometimes I think that you are more Tremontaine than I am.”

  His duchess chuckled. “You were born to it. You didn’t care.”

  “I cared. But my father was such a dreamer. He wasn’t at all practical. I think he spent his time longing for the old kings, and the lost glories of Tremontaine.”

  His hand wandered up from her shoulder to stroke the exposed white stem of her neck. “But that was in my favor, in the end. If the old duke hadn’t been so set on the family’s glorious past, he would never have insisted that I marry the only remaining daughter of a dying branch: a very young girl, with very little fortune beyond her wit”—he kissed her ear—“her grace”—kissed her brow—“and her beauty.”

  Duke William tweaked one curl of his wife’s perfectly coiffed head, careful not to disarrange anything. “I’m sure my mother objected to that match every bit as much as you do to Honora’s. So you see? It’s a fine old family tradition.”

  “Thank you, William.” His duchess rested her head against his brocade-clad chest, despite what it did to her curls. “I am sure I do not deserve you.”

  Her husband kissed her nose. “And I am sure you deserve far more.”

  “Now,” the duchess said briskly, “let us go downstairs. I shall get my maid to tidy me up, while you read me your lovely speech.”

  It was not difficult to slip the papers in her petticoat pocket, nor—when she got to her rooms—to close them in a cabinet drawer before her maid could find them.

  • • •

  Ixkaab Balam, first daughter of a first daughter of the House of Balam of the Traders of the Kinwiinik, stood on the dock enjoying the feel of the land still moving under her like a ship on the waves. She knew it was an illusion. A Trader and a daughter of Traders, she was used to ships. She could sail one herself, if she had to; she and her cousins had grown up coaxing the nimble river ships around the Ulua’s turgid bends to their family’s home in the mountains when the elders were occupied at sea, or at war.

  She’d been at sea before, herself, though never for as long or as far as these ninety days past on the merchant ship Wasp, leaving the warm waters of Binkiinha behind for the cold north. She knew the sensation of rolling ground would pass, and figured she might as well take pleasure in the contradiction while it lasted. Ixkaab hated to be bored.

  She had tried not to be bored on the ship. She’d badly needed to be distracted on this voyage, while making sure that her particular skills did not rust. But there was very little of interest to glean on the Wasp about twenty-one gut-led Kinwiinik sailors, two Tullan outlaw runaways, a crippled old Xanamwiinik sailmaker, and a deaf-mute cook, on a cargo ship full of feathers and parrots, spices and maize flour, and a king’s daughter’s ransom in processed cacao beans—along with five Traders, each of whom she was somehow related to. Besides the obvious facts that Uncle Koxol’s sister’s son’s wife was pregnant, Mother’s Cousin Mukuy was already dyeing his hair, Father’s Cousin Chokan was sneaking twice his ration of tamales from the galley, and the captain wrote poetry to the cabin boy, what was there to learn?

  And so Kaab had wisely applied herself to studying everything she could about these North Sea people, these Xanamwiinik, amongst whom she was bound to dwell for a while, at least until her part in the disastrous affair of the Tullan Empire mission had blown over.

  It was a dismal prospect. This grey and smoky little backwater with its piddling river was hardly the broad, sunswept avenues of the Tullan capital, or even the flower-laced lanes of her sweet Binkiinha. Ixkaab set her jaw. All-knowing Chaacmul knew she’d seen uglier places—though not, so far, colder ones. As the Wasp had drawn nearer this side of the world, she had finally understood why everyone insisted she bring all her quilted clothing. “A damp cold,” Aunt Saabim used to write her mother, and now Kaab knew what she meant. Of course, there would be Local clothing to put on, better suited to the climate—she eyed the ship’s agent’s heavy wool jacket, which he wore unbuttoned in defiance of the chill. It looked scratchy. What kind of animal made wool like that? Would she be forced to wear it? Why hadn’t her people tried importing decent fabric to this place—something with some color in it . . . Spoken like a Trader, little bee, her mother’s voice said in her head. Now, think like an agent.

  An agent whose wrists are bound by one mistake, Kaab argued with her mother in her head. What else is there to find out here? Two generations of Kinwiinik Traders had surely learned everything there was to know.

  She feared that there was nothing for her to do here.

  “. . . And that, milady, up there on the right, is our Hall of Justice.”

  She carried the map of this new city already in her head. But she let the kindly ship’s agent explain it all to her anyway: “It was built in the days of the old kings, but is now the seat of our noble Council of Lords.”

  It was hard to understand his accent. Had he really said all the kings were old? She shook her head. Of course not. These people had no kings. He meant “old” as in “previously had been there but now were not.”

  Ixkaab badly needed to immerse herself in the daily speech of Xanaamdaam. She had tried on the voyage, but her relatives spoke only basic merchant Xanam, preferring to remain amongst their own kind in the strange city that so loved cacao. Her many shipboard conversations with the toothless old Xanamwiinik sailmaker had given her seven fistfuls of curse words, a profound knowledge of what a Riverside prostitute would and would not do for money, and many ways to defend herself with a canvas sail needle (including where to slip it in to kill and leave no trace, which Kaab was too polite to say she knew already). She had also spent hours in her cabin reacquainting herself with their clever system of alphabet letters to make words; and she and Cousin Chokan had practiced some dance steps that the sailmaker swore were just what decent Xanamwiinik ladies did in public—even though this involved holding hands with men who were not their relatives.

  It would come to her, she was sure. She just needed to talk with more locals. Kaab was good at languages. As a child she had learned this one from a family servant who’d worked for Aunt Saabim here. Her mother had wanted her daughter’s tongue to be as swift as one of the little chameleons that flitted across the sunny courtyard—her mother, who, Ixkaab realized now, had also been one of the great movers of the chocolate trade across the North Sea passage to this land. But her mother was gone to the houses beneath the earth. Instead, it was Ixmoe’s younger sister Ixsaabim who dwelt here with her new husband, keeping the Balam family at the forefront of the Northern chocolate trade. And here Kaab would stay, in the Balam family compound, until her father called her home.

  “The old kings were terribly corrupt,” the agent was saying.

  “So now you are ruled by the Lords of Council.”

  “The Council of Lords!” The agent laughed with the patronizing amusement of one not used to hearing his language imperfectly understood. What a hick! “But here I keep you chatting, when I’m sure you are tired and would like to go home to your family.”

  “I am not in the least tired,” Kaab said. “Pray, continue your most delicious explaining.”

  Because, in fact, Ixkaab Balam was not at all eager to arrive at Aunt Saabim and Uncle Chuleb’s before they had had time to read her father’s hastily written letter, the letter that had accompanied her on the Wasp, the letter explaining just what she was doing there, and why she had had to leave home in such a hurry.

  • • •

  “Your hair was
perfect already,” the Duke Tremontaine said, standing awkwardly against the passementerie on his lady’s boudoir wall. It was one of the things she loved about him; the way he always seemed to feel out of place, no matter where he stood, everywhere except in his leather-filled library. When Diane had traveled here almost twenty years ago, a callow girl about to be married to the young heir to Tremontaine, she had been so afraid that he would turn out to be cold, or arrogant, or even dull. Duke William was none of those things. “I don’t know why you must spend so much time on it.”

  The duchess’s maid knew better than to smile. It was her lady’s place to contradict her husband, when she chose.

  Lucinda had had cosier employers: rich, titled ladies who wanted sympathy, gossip, or even mothering from the woman who tended to their looks, their clothes, and their personal comfort. But the lady’s maid preferred to work in silence, paying perfect attention to each curl, each ribbon, each fall of lace; to the placement of each jewel on the shining bodice or tight-laced sleeve. And the duchess repaid her efforts: Diane de Tremontaine was the shining star of every social gathering. She had a certain something no one could safely imitate: a simultaneous air of fragility and confidence, of grace and poise and hesitance, the desire to please and the fullness of being pleased . . .

  The Duchess Tremontaine suited Lucinda very well. She made no demands other than to be turned out perfectly every time.

  “Now, madam,” the duke said, “since you are sitting quite still for the foreseeable future, would you be so good as to listen to the notes for my speech at this afternoon’s Council meeting? You know I dread these things like a visit to the tooth surgeon’s.”

  “I know you do.” Diane nodded her approval of the second set of enameled hairpins Lucinda set before her. “But you always perform splendidly. I wish I could come and see you in the Council of Lords. I could watch from the gallery. But I must get dressed up and attend that dreadful chocolate party at dear Lady Galing’s.” Diane frowned down at her lap. “I don’t know what I will wear; everyone’s seen all my afternoon gowns so many times already!”