Stranger to the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  More cheering followed, this time spontaneous and natural-sounding, and Elspeth felt she might float away on it. It didn’t mean the end of her challenges, but at least for now, she had the support of a nation.

  She descended the dais and walked at a slightly faster pace back to the antechamber. When the doors were safely shut behind her, she looked at herself in the mirror. The Crown looked smaller than it felt. She gingerly reached up and removed it, holding it in both hands and examining the silver for smudges. Not a scratch. Dane would have nothing to complain of.

  The outer door, the one leading to the ancient hallway, opened. “Congratulations, your Majesty,” Dane said.

  “Thank you. It feels so odd, all that planning and work for something I wear for a minute.”

  “It is a minute that will go down in history,” Dane said with a smile. He held out his hand. “I’ll return this to the treasury—and may it be many a year before it’s needed again.”

  Elspeth handed the Crown over. “Isn’t it used for other times than coronations?”

  “A few. Certain state functions. Formal recognition of other heads of state. I suppose you’ll wear it on your wedding day, to symbolize that your spouse is also your Consort.”

  Elspeth shuddered. “I don’t want to think about that today. The reception is bad enough.” She might not mind being stared at, but having to make polite conversation for hours filled her with dread.

  “Don’t put it off too long,” Dane warned. “A strong monarch needs a strong Consort as his, or her, support. And a marriage bond is a blessing to anyone, Queen or no.” He nodded and carried the Crown away.

  Elspeth ran her fingers over her head. She could still feel the Crown pressing into her skull. That wasn’t going away any time soon.

  The grand ballroom, with its murals and low-hanging chandeliers, was warmer than the coronation hall and more brightly lit, but Elspeth found herself wishing to be back in the drafty chamber. She drifted through the ballroom, greeting strangers Lord Harrington introduced to her. The head of Foreign Affairs knew everyone, and was good at guiding Elspeth toward people she might enjoy speaking to even if she wasn’t the newly-crowned Queen. It felt like drifting through a sea filled with floating corks that spoke, a mad comparison, but it had been a long day and Elspeth felt oddly giddy. She wasn’t sure how long she had to stay, but surely she could get away before midnight?

  Someone put a hand on her waist, an intimate gesture that startled her. The brief thought No one’s touched me for almost two weeks shot through her, and then the knowledge that she was the Queen and nobody had better dare touch her without her permission stopped her in her tracks and spun her around. “How dare—”

  The tall, handsome man standing behind her grinned down at her. “Playing dress-up, Elspeth?” he said in Veriboldan.

  Elspeth gasped. “Mihn,” she gasped, and flung herself at him, not caring what it looked like. “Sweet heaven, it’s so good to see you!”

  “And you, best of friends,” Mihn replied. He held her at arm’s length and said, “You look good dressed in your native clothes. I wish Daoine could see you. She’d be incandescent with jealousy.”

  “Past time for that. I was always jealous of the way she fit into formal robes.” Elspeth looked around. The circle of guests immediately surrounding them didn’t even pretend not to be watching this reunion. Elspeth willed herself not to blush and said, in Tremontanese, “Welcome to Tremontane, Bakarne of the Arhainen. Is your respected father here?”

  “He is here somewhere,” Mihn said. His Tremontanese was stilted, but not heavily accented, but then he’d practiced with Elspeth for twenty years. “He will be most pleased to meet you in your new role.”

  “Lord Harrington, do you know where the Proxy is? I would like to greet him,” Elspeth said.

  Harrington’s face was carefully blank, and it made Elspeth nervous. She’d completely forgotten herself in her joy at seeing her best friend, and how terrible must that have looked to her guests? You’re the Queen, they won’t dare criticize, she told herself, and held her head high as Harrington led her across the ballroom to a spot along the wall some twenty feet from the foot of the stairs.

  Several ornate chairs padded with red velvet stood there, at careful distances from one another. Two of them were occupied. One of the men sitting there was the Ruskalder chief whose name Elspeth had already forgotten despite having been introduced to him only half an hour earlier. He was the Ruskalder ambassador to Tremontane and had made no secret of the fact that he felt the position was beneath him. Elspeth was just as happy to forget who he was.

  The other man sat erect in his chair as if it were a throne. He wore a rose-colored silk robe embroidered with leaping golden fish over black silk trousers and shirt, and his toes, the nails lacquered bronze, peeped out from beneath his trouser hems. His shaved head gleamed in the bright light of the chandeliers, which turned his dark skin a warm brown. Elspeth, who knew he shaved his head because he was going bald, was not overwhelmed by his magnificence.

  “My lord Elizdo, welcome to Tremontane,” she said, bowing.

  Harrington sucked in a breath. Instantly Elspeth knew her mistake. She’d bowed to Elizdo the way she always had when she encountered him in Veribold, showing respect to him as patriarch of the Arhainen family. But what was common courtesy in Elspeth North was a serious breach of protocol in the Queen of Tremontane. She’d just implied she owed Elizdo something. And nobody was going to overlook that.

  There was only one thing to do: brazen it out. “It’s good to see you,” she said cheerfully. “Lord Harrington, is one of these chairs mine? I’d like to have a few moments with my father’s old friend.”

  Elizdo’s face tightened minutely. Describing him as her father’s friend wasn’t so much an exaggeration as a flat-out lie, given that Sebastian North thought Elizdo was a leech on society and Elizdo thought Sebastian was a useless, extraneous royal prince. But he wouldn’t call her on it in public.

  Harrington, for his part, behaved like the perfect political animal he was. “You are welcome to sit here, your Majesty,” he said. “Feel free to mingle as you choose. I have others I must speak to.”

  Elspeth hoped that was code for I am going to clean up your mess and nodded politely as he turned away. “Elizdo, how do you like Tremontane? You’ve been here for two years, yes?”

  “Two years, three months, thirteen days.” Elizdo glowered at her. “A Queen should not bow to anyone. Even a foolish girl like you should know that.”

  “I forgot myself in the joy of seeing you and Bakarne. And I can either be a foolish girl, or I can be Queen, as far as how you address me. You and I both know which of those it’s to be.”

  Elizdo’s glare could have stripped the paint from the walls. “I will not have you influencing my son. He is already too fond of Tremontane as it is.”

  Mihn, at Elspeth’s left elbow, said, “Father, liking Tremontane does not make me less Veriboldan, and you know that. Besides, Elspeth can’t show me favoritism, so you don’t need to worry about her influencing me. It’s not as if we’re getting married.”

  Elspeth surreptitiously jabbed Mihn with her elbow. They’d never been anything but best friends, but Elizdo persisted in believing Elspeth intended to entrap his son even after Mihn had announced his betrothal to someone else. That didn’t stop Mihn from teasing his father, something that usually meant trouble not for Mihn, but for Elspeth.

  Elizdo’s dark face grew darker. “Impudent boy! Come. It is past time we left.”

  “Oh!” Elspeth exclaimed, her heart sinking. “But I’ve only just seen you!”

  “Another time,” Elizdo said with a smirk. “Bakarne. Now.”

  Mihn shot Elspeth a meaningful look. “I will see you later, El,” he said, squeezing her hand so quickly Elspeth didn’t think anyone noticed. She smiled and waved, but aside from that one look, Mihn didn’t look back.

  She sagged into her chair and sighed. All her earlier pleasure evaporated
. So being Queen meant she had to conceal or discard her oldest friendship, just because it would look bad for her to be too friendly with the Veriboldan ambassador’s son. Heaven certainly was playing a cruel joke on her.

  She glared at the Ruskalder ambassador, who turned away as if she’d slapped him. Good. She was in a bad mood, and she intended to spread it around.

  She watched the crowds. Nobody seemed inclined to visit her, which was fortunate. There was Lady Serena d’Arden, laughing over something one of the Eskandelic ambassador’s harem wives had said. Elspeth couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed so unrestrainedly. One more thing the Queen was deprived of, casual jokes. Casual jokes, a friendly touch, the ability to do what she liked without her every move being scrutinized—

  “Your Majesty.”

  Elspeth managed not to groan. Faraday again. How the man managed to intrude on her at her lowest moments was a mystery. Or maybe his intrusion turned every moment into her lowest one. “Yes, Mister Faraday?”

  “There are things I need to discuss with you tomorrow. Is three o’clock acceptable?”

  Elspeth sighed. “Mister Faraday, you know better than I do that I have no control over my schedule. See Miss Simkins if you want a moment of my time.”

  She wasn’t looking at him, but she heard him take a deep breath as if summoning patience. “I thought,” he said in a level voice that said an eruption was around the corner, “you wanted to control your own life. Do you want Miss Simkins constantly telling you what to do?”

  Stung, Elspeth sat upright and glared at him. His familiar scowl annoyed and reassured her, and that feeling of reassurance made her angry. She had no intention of taking comfort from him, even inadvertent comfort. “I thought you wanted to control my life. Tell me what to do, what to say, what to think. At this point I don’t really give a damn which of you does it. Just pick a puppet master and leave me in peace.”

  “That’s fine language for a priestess. Did they teach you that at the temple?”

  She sucked in a startled breath. His insult was so unexpected, so perfectly aimed at a spot she hadn’t thought to defend, that tears came to her eyes. “You have no idea what it means to be a priestess of the Irantzen Temple,” she whispered. “Get out of my sight immediately.”

  Faraday’s jaw clenched. “Your Majesty,” he said, and withdrew. He didn’t bow.

  Elspeth stared straight ahead at a spot on the wall, just below the ceiling mural, until her eyes stopped stinging. Then she rose from her chair and made her way through the crowds, smiling and nodding but not engaging in conversation. Nobody tried to stop her leaving. She was all the way to the east wing doors before she realized she’d found the path herself. It felt like hollow victory.

  Honey helped her take off her gown, which except for all the buttons down her spine she might have removed herself. Elspeth put on her nightdress and let Honey unbraid her hair, which rippled around her face in neat waves that would be frizzy by morning. She declined the offer of hot chocolate and climbed into bed, turning off the light and curling into a warm ball around one of her pillows. In the darkness, she counted to herself, one, two, three, and made it all the way to seventeen before crying overcame her, and she wept herself to sleep.

  10

  Elspeth wasn’t last to the Council chamber this time, knowing in advance what day the meeting was and guessing it would be at the same time as the last one. The few councilors there ahead of her sat in the same places they had before. Assigned seating. Was that by habit, by tradition, or something Francis or Landon had insisted on? Whatever the reason, it helped Elspeth remember their names.

  She’d had supper with Lady Beaumont and Caxton the night before her coronation, and with Lady Wilde and General Beckett last night. The meal with Lady Beaumont and Caxton had been extremely uncomfortable, with neither of her guests being willing to speak and Elspeth having no idea what to say to them. She’d finally hit on the fortunate topic of horses, and Lady Beaumont had taken that line of conversation and run away with it. Since she was the sort of person who delighted in showing off her knowledge at the expense of her listeners, it only made the evening louder, not better.

  Lady Wilde and General Beckett had been better dining companions, though Beckett started out as taciturn as Caxton had been. Lady Wilde, on the other hand, was clever and amusing, a wellspring of humorous stories, and Elspeth had laughed for the first time in…it couldn’t have been forever, but it certainly felt like it. Lady Wilde’s easy good manners had broken through Beckett’s reserve, and he’d turned out to know some excellent stories himself. Elspeth had shared a few stories of being an aspirant at the Temple, and had ended the evening feeling that someday Lady Wilde and Beckett might become her friends.

  Today, though, their reserve was back, and both greeted Elspeth formally as if the evening hadn’t happened. Elspeth concealed her disappointment and sat in her not-a-throne, half-listening to the conversations around her and running over what she intended to say. It would almost certainly cause an uproar, but she was in the right, and this was something she not only wanted, but felt confident was the best decision for the Council.

  She ignored Faraday when he entered and took his seat beyond the Countess of Waxwold. Lady Quinn wasn’t big enough to block Elspeth’s view of her nemesis, but she provided enough of a barrier that not looking at Faraday was easy. They hadn’t spoken since the night of the coronation; Elspeth had declined his request for an audience twice, and he hadn’t asked a third time. She felt a little guilty about this, because he was the head of Internal Affairs and no doubt had important business, but she couldn’t forget what he’d said to her, those horrible, smug, dismissive words denigrating her most sacred experiences. The likelihood of her being able to speak to him without screaming felt vanishingly small. She would eventually be able to bear it, but not now. She refused to consider that she was acting like a petulant child instead of a Queen.

  She realized Julius Caxton had sat down beside her and realized further he’d been the last arrival. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming,” she said. “Today we have a number of items of business, including a vote on some financial matters. However, the first thing I’d like to address is naming a new head of Transportation.”

  Everyone was listening politely. She had a feeling that wouldn’t last.

  “Miss Hardison presented me with a list of candidates, and I interviewed each. They were all well qualified to take responsibility for managing the Crown’s transportation, maintaining the roads, et cetera. However, none of them struck me as well suited to serve on this Council. They all lacked the insight and flexibility of thought I believe a councilor needs.”

  They’d started murmuring midway through that speech, glancing at each other with the expressions of people who’d been tossed overboard and weren’t sure they could swim. “Your Majesty,” Lady Wilde said, “are you saying you’ve rejected all the candidates?”

  “All the proposed candidates, yes,” Elspeth said. “But I wouldn’t come before you without an alternative solution. The new head of Transportation is Master Martin Keswick. He is a graduate of the Scholia, currently assistant librarian in the Royal Library, and he has extensive experience with the post runner routes. I believe he will serve admirably.”

  The muttering grew louder. “Your Majesty,” Faraday said, “the Council has to approve new councilors. You have to put your…candidate…forward for ratification.”

  Elspeth’s heart beat faster, and she managed not to smile, because it would surely come off as smug. “Actually, I don’t,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve been reading the laws pertaining to my responsibilities as Queen, things I have to do and things that are only tradition. It seems the idea of the Council ratifying the monarch’s choices for Council members is a relatively recent one that my Uncle Landon instituted, or agreed to—I don’t know if it was his idea or someone else’s. It was never made into law. It’s a nice idea, but I believe it overly complicates what should be a s
imple matter. So—Master Keswick it is. I hope you will all make him feel welcome when he joins us next week.”

  Faraday stood. “Your Majesty,” he said, “the policy of voting on new Council members is sound practice maintained by most of the Guilds. I think—”

  “We’re not a Guild, Mister Faraday, we are the ruling monarch and her Council.” Elspeth found the sight of his scowling face even more cheering. “But I can understand your reluctance to let go of the policy. Let me reassure you I have given this great thought, and I’m convinced I’ve made the right decision.” She wanted to stick her tongue out at him and say Tough luck losing some of your power, but she wasn’t juvenile.

  “I asked each candidate a question,” she went on, not giving Faraday room to override her. “I asked them to tell me the best way to send a message from one city to another. A simple question, and all of them were factually correct in their answers, but none of them understood what I was really asking. Master Keswick, on the other hand, saw immediately that the real point was not the details of travel between places, but the purpose of making the journey. Some messages are a matter of life and death. Some aren’t worth the bother of sending. But it isn’t until we ask ourselves why we are doing a thing that we truly know what it will cost us.”

  Everyone was silent. “You members of the Council who are responsible for the departments need a knowledge of the field you’re responsible for,” Elspeth said. “But you also are given a measure of power in being allowed to determine government policies and counsel your Queen. I could find a dozen men and women capable of monitoring the post horses. There are far fewer with the insight and understanding this position demands. And as the one who ultimately takes responsibility for the decisions we make, I think it’s not unreasonable that I take full responsibility for choosing the individuals who will help make those decisions.” She fixed her gaze on Faraday, who was still standing. “If anyone would like to contest that, I’m willing to listen to your arguments. But they had better be good ones.”