A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  “That certainly widens the field, then. He would allow her to relinquish the throne, you mean?”

  Her sister-in-law hesitated again. “It may not be hers to relinquish, dear.”

  Silence was the best lubricant for confidences …

  Kade frowned, as if she had not meant to go so far. “In the Impire you have had several imperesses.”

  “Mostly very competent!”

  “History is not my strong point.” Kadolan was still watching as Inos drew closer in the intricacies of the dance. “But in Nordland there is no doubt—only men can rule. Krasnegar has no precedents in the matter.”

  “So who makes the decision?” Ekka asked, nodding to some passing ladies.

  “He does,” Kade said confidently. “He will name his heir.”

  Ekka waited for more, then prompted. “But can he make it stick after his death?”

  Kade smiled unwillingly. “Time has not blunted you, dear. That will depend on a lot of things. Will the people accept her? Will Nordland? Will the Impire?”

  Mmm … obviously something more topical was bothering her. Something had provoked this confidence, or it would have come out months ago.

  “And his decision, and all the others’ decisions, will depend on her choice of husband?”

  Kade nodded absently, acknowledging friends whirling past. “Very much so, I think. Certainly Nordland’s.” More silence and then she said, “And the timing.”

  Ah! “Timing, dear?”

  Inos came dancing by. She noticed her aunt and smiled radiantly, then was swept away into the pattern. She was almost the only woman in the room who could wear a green like that. It set off her eyes beautifully—and almost as much as her golden hair, it let Kade pick her out in the crowd.

  “Holindarn can train a successor,” Kade said, “whether Inos herself or her husband. Ruling a kingdom, even a single-bed-size kingdom like Krasnegar, does take a certain knack.”

  This time silence was not enough lubrication. “He is a relatively young man yet,” Ekka suggested.

  “Of course.”

  But there had been a hesitation. Travel between Krasnegar and Kinvale was not impossible in winter. Trappers and other rough men could do it. Such men would do it for money. If Kade had been concerned about her brother’s health, then she would certainly have arranged for someone in the palace hierarchy to keep her informed—she was not nearly as scatterbrained as she pretended.

  “You have had no word lately, have you? No news is good news.”

  “So they say,” Kade agreed, with a tranquility that did not deceive the dowager duchess for a moment.

  For if Holindarn did not want his sister to hear, then he was quite capable of learning whom she had recruited and then derecruiting them. Had any message arrived at Kinvale, Ekka would surely have heard of it. No news, then, was bad news, and that was what was rankling.

  And if Inos did not succeed, who was next in line?

  “So the hussar we send back to his horse,” Ekka said, “or we may aim him elsewhere—the Astlio girl, perhaps … Have any of his predecessors dropped sparks on the tinder?”

  “Yes indeed. I wanted to ask you about him. You built a blaze with your first attempt, dear, and left no fuel for the others.”

  Ekka was surprised. “That merchant youth? What was his name? The one from Jini Fanda?”

  “Good Gods, no!” Kade spluttered in a very unusual display of emotion. “Even I couldn’t stand him. No, the Andor boy.”

  “Andor? Oh, that one! Still?” Ekka frowned. “He wasn’t one of mine, Kade. You gave me no warning, remember. It took a little time to call them in from the pasture. Angilki invited that one.” At that moment she noticed her son, dancing with the Yyloringy woman, his face as blank as a well-polished table.

  “Perhaps a fortunate chance, then,” Kade remarked sanguinely.

  “Perhaps.”

  This time it was Kadolan who detected the hesitation. She turned to her hostess with an inquiring glance.

  “It is his house, after all,” Ekka said. “I can hardly stop him from inviting his own friends to stay.”

  “Of course not, my dear.”

  But this would not be the first time Angilki had unwittingly thrown complications into his mother’s plans. She had told him more than once that he could invite anyone he liked except men—or women. The joke had escaped him. Jokes usually did. “Well, Sir Andor undoubtedly had character,” Kade said, “or at least charm. If diplomacy is a requirement for ruling Krasnegar—and it certainly is—then he would qualify on that. What else do we know about him?” Inos was coming around again.

  A very good question! Ekka did not think her memory was failing her yet. She was rather proud of her memory. But on the spur of the moment, she could recall nothing at all about that Andor boy. She had engaged him in conversation several times, of course. She had begun a careful probing. Curiously, though, it seemed that the subject of Sir Andor’s background had always slipped out of play. All she could remember was laughing very hard at some of his jests.

  “Why don’t we check the files in the morning?” she suggested. “He brought letters, of course … and my notes. Just look at that wretched Ithinoy girl! How could her grandmother ever dream of allowing her to wear puce, with her coloring?”

  “Ekka?” Kadolan said sharply.

  Ekka sighed. “You should have suggested him sooner. We could have invited him to the ball.”

  “He is probably not available. He told Inos that he was leaving on some romantic mission of honor and danger. He has not written. She does not write to him.”

  The two ladies exchanged puzzled glances.

  “But why leave?” Ekka said. “If that’s what he was? If that was what he wanted?”

  “If that was what he wanted, then he succeeded. She has not looked seriously at anyone else.”

  “He did not …” Ekka paused. Even with a very old friend, there are some questions …

  “No! I’m quite sure. One can always tell. But he certainly could have done, had he wanted. She was very innocent, remember. Now she is perhaps a little wiser, but he knew every trick in the box. I fancy I know most of them, but that young man could have sidestepped me with no trouble, had he wished.”

  From Kade that was an astonishing confession. In her years at Kinvale, even before their respective husbands had died, she had been Ekka’s pupil and partner in matrimonial machinations. Anything the Princess Kadolan did not know about chaperoning and the wiles of swains should not be worth knowing.

  Still, Ekka was relieved. Three juvenile domestics had been dismissed soon after Sir Andor’s departure, and probably several others had been more fortunate in their follies.

  “So what was he after, I wonder? The crown?”

  “Then why leave?” It was very unlike Kade to let worry show on her face. “What business could possibly be more important?”

  “Perhaps he went off to take a look at Krasnegar?”

  That remark provoked loud, unladylike guffaws from both of them.

  The gallopade had ended. Angilki went by, leading the Yyloringy woman, breathing much too heavily and still half asleep with boredom.

  “Well,” Kade said cheerfully. “There would seem to be no use worrying about the Andor man. Inos does not know where he is, and if she doesn’t, then I assume that no one does. We’ll just have to keep the parade going and hope that she takes to someone else.”

  “Or until he chooses to return?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And if he brings a proposal?”

  “Oh, Inos would accept with her next breath. He bewitched her. And I have my orders. Unless I have very—very—good reasons, she is to be allowed to make her own choice.” She sighed wistfully. “I can’t blame her, He certainly did sparkle. Grim old Krasnegar would be a merrier place with him around.”

  But . . ,

  Ekka nodded as the music began again for the gavotte. If Inosolan did not succeed, who would? How soon was Holindarn go
ing to die? She had been thinking in terms of years, and now it sounded like perhaps months. There was a title involved. There was a kingdom. More than that, there was almost certainly a word, part of the Inisso inheritance.

  Ekka decided to keep her own options open. She would summon Angilki and inform him that he need not propose to the Yyloringy woman this evening after all.

  2

  Two days before Winterfest, a fencing lesson ended when Andor’s wooden sword thunked across Rap’s armored abdomen hard enough to split the leather, spill the peatmoss padding, and force an agonized “Ooofl” out of the victim.

  “That will do for today, I fancy.” Andor’s amusement was evident even in a voice muffled by a fencing mask.

  “Not fair!” Rap protested, straightening up with difficulty. “You said—”

  Andor pulled off his mask and laughed. “I said that the point was almost always better than the edge, yes. But I did not say that one should never use the edge, my friend. That’s why swords have edges! And you left yourself wide open for that one. Let’s go and have a drink.”

  Ruefully Rap noticed that Andor’s hair was barely ruffled after almost two hours’ vigorous exercise.

  They put away the protective garments, the masks, and foils; they washed themselves at the communal trough; they prepared to depart. There were no other fencers in the garrison’s gym. Krasnegar was preparing for Winterfest.

  “A beer at the Beached Whale would soften the tissues pleasantly,” Andor suggested, expertly snuffing candles. He was carrying a large and unexplained bundle of furs, which Rap was trying not to worry about.

  “I’ll keep you company for a while.” Rap thought glumly of the lonely attic to which he must return, the long hours until the evening meal, and the longer hours after that until he could expect to sleep. Foronod’s affairs were shut down now for Winterfest, so Rap would have nothing to do for days. Yet he had no great longing to linger in the crowded, ill-lighted Beached Whale with its thick fug of beery odor and oil fumes and reek of unwashed bodies. The gaming would stop as soon as a seer entered; sometimes women would ostentatiously depart. For Andor’s sake he would be tolerated—briefly—but he was not the most popular of customers. He never stayed for long.

  “On second thought,” said Andor, who always seemed to know what a man was thinking, “let’s go straight to your place. I have something private to discuss.”

  They stepped out into one of the covered stairways of the palace and picked their way carefully down toward the light of a distant torch sizzling in its sconce.

  “How’m I doing, Andor?” Rap asked. “In fencing?”

  Andor frowned in the darkness … Rap thought he frowned. “Well, you’re still growing like a sorcerer’s sunflowers, and that throws a man’s coordination off. You’ll soon be over that, which will help. Otherwise—you’re average. Thosolin would be happy enough to take you on now. The Tenth Legion would not.”

  After a moment of echoing footsteps he added, “It’s a pity you only have farsight and not some foresight as well; they often go together. Foresight makes deadly swordsmen, unbeatable. Even so, you should have known that carpet-beater was coming just now. It was not exactly a subtle stroke.”

  Rap snarled. “Damn farsight! I still won’t believe it! I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s a name, that’s all. And a precious gift. Stop fighting it!”

  They went through a door and crossed a courtyard between high snowbanks, spectral in the starlight. The sky was a black crystal bowl, clear and bitter and infinitely deep. Soon the moon would come to dull the stars, but the sun was a brief visitor to Krasnegar at Winterfest. The air was deadly as steel. It could kill a man in minutes.

  Then came more ill-lighted stairs and corridors. Starlight glimmered but faintly on the windows, yet Rap led the way without hesitation, his companion following closely. The final stair was black as a closed grave, but Rap hurried up it to his room. He went to the flint and candle on the shelf. He struck a spark and light danced over the floor. “There!”

  “Most people keep their candles by the door,” Andor said dryly.

  Rap swore under his breath. He went out again and hurried along to the drivers’ office to borrow a couple of chairs. There was no light at all, but he put his hands on them without hesitation. He told himself that he was doing nothing out of the ordinary—he had put the chairs back there after Andor left the last time, and no one came near that office for six months at a stretch, so he had known exactly where they would be. But as he carried them to his room, he knew that Andor’s comment was valid—he did wander around in the dark. He had nothing to trip over in his little attic, only his bed and one small box, but he could always put his hand on anything he wanted. The thought troubled him. He was slipping, starting to make use of an ability that he refused to recognize or accept.

  By the time he arrived with the seats, Andor had extracted the wine bottle from his mysterious bundle and was standing under the candle on its high shelf, fiddling with the seal. The bundle lay on the bed, a cushion shape of obviously fine-quality white fur, bound with a ribbon. Rap looked away from it quickly and told himself that it was not what he feared it was.

  It was, though.

  Andor glanced around for goblets, shrugged, and held out the bottle. “You first! Merry Winterfest!” He grinned.

  “Merry Winterfest,” Rap echoed obediently. He did not care much for wine on principle, but he took the bottle and swallowed a mouthful. He did not like the taste much, even. He tried to return the bottle, but it was refused.

  “You are not your father. You have a word! People who know words of power do not have nasty accidents like he did.”

  Andor did not usually discuss such personal matters, and Rap was surprised that he knew the story. He took a long swig and collapsed into coughing and gagging.

  “A man of taste and discernment, I see?” Andor sat down and sipped small mouthfuls for a while in silence.

  Neither man had removed his parka. The wine would freeze if they took very long to drink it, but that was not unusual in Krasnegar. Only the rich could afford peat. Rap’s garret did not even possess a stove, although it did gain some warmth from the horses that lived below. Andor was probably comfortable, for his parka and fur pants were thick and down-lined. Rap’s were neither, and had he been alone he would have crawled into bed.

  For the thousandth time he wondered why? He looked at the coarse plank walls, the low, canted ceiling, the equally rough floor. Every nailhead in that ceiling was highlighted by a small cap of ice. The tiny window was a shine of starlight through frost, a square eye of cold silver. Why would a man who could afford such clothes, a man who could enter almost any chamber in the city—with or without a beautiful hostess waiting—why would such a man spend hours in a place like this? Rap had not forgotten the king’s warning, yet Andor seemed like a true friend, improbable though that was. He had never suggested any wrongdoing, he did not pry. And he was the only friend Rap had. For a man who had once fancied himself as popular, that was a galling reflection.

  Andor offered the bottle again. “Drink up! I want you good and drunk.”

  “Why?”

  Andor’s teeth flashed in his irresistible grin. “You’ll find out! I need your help on something.”

  “You can have my help sober, for anything.” Rap took another swig.

  He meant that. Andor was lavish with his time. By day he would often accompany Rap on his errands for Foronod, expertly checking the addition on a tally, carrying burdens like a common porter, throwing in a rapier question or two when a memory stumbled. Many evenings he had spent in this bare box, patiently explaining the mysteries of the alphabet and the arcane ways of numbers. He had pretended to enjoy being introduced to Rap’s other friends, the horses.

  Why?

  Andor had been everywhere. As Rap knew Krasnegar, Andor knew the Imperial capital of Hub, the city of five hills. He had described its avenues and palaces, its fountains and gardens, in
words enchanting to a son of the barren north. Silver gates and golden domes, lords and fine ladies, crystal coaches, orchestras and zoological collections—he had paraded them all through this dingy attic under the protection of glittering Imperial cohorts with bands playing and bright banners waving.

  And not only Hub. Andor had visited great cities uncounted. He had traveled the far south and seen devastation wrought by dragons. For so young a man, he had visited an incredible list of places. He had been to Faerie itself, bathing on its golden beaches, paying a silver penny for a ride on a hippogryff. He had met gnomes and dwarves and elves. He had haggled for tapestries in crowded bazaars and edged along walls in sinister alleyways; he had watched beautiful slave girls dance before their masters in opulent courts. He had sailed the Summer Sea in barques with silken sails curved by the scented winds. He had wept at the baleful song of merfolk lamenting a dying moon.

  He had also sat long hours in this rough wooden attic and talked of cannibal islands and castles of glass, of unicorns, of elven trees that touched the clouds and of the jeweled cities nestling on their boughs, of enormous animals with noses long enough to wrap around a man and pick him up, of floating sea monsters so huge that men built houses on their backs and cultivated gardens there, of volcanoes in eruption and hot springs in which the locals boiled whole oxen for feastings and the guests afterward for entertainment. He had described the lairs of trolls and ancient ruins half digested by desert sands. Talking statues and mirror pools that showed the future were familiar to him, and he knew many tales of wonders greater yet.

  Why?

  Only once had Rap even dared to ask why? Why was Andor his friend? Why did Andor help him, keep him company, tell him of the wonders of the world, and even assist in his education?

  What, he had inquired diffidently, was in it for Andor?

  Andor had laughed. “For friendship! The others are only acquaintances. And because I admire courage more than anything in the world.”