by David Drake
Sharina’s eyes narrowed. Garric wasn’t the sort who pretended to know all the answers, but—always, and especially since he’d become regent of the kingdom—he’d picked a path and proceeded along it. He knew that he might be wrong but he knew also that he was better off acting than dithering.
Cashel stood, taking his empty mug and Sharina’s by the rims in one hand. He walked to the serving table at the side, out of earshot of the diners. Across it was a line of Blood Eagles, and beyond them stood servants in nervous frustration at not being able to dispense the dishes and cups themselves. The guards let them reach through to the table to exchange full platters for empty ones, but Garric and his friends were serving themselves.
Sharina winced to see her lover carry the mugs that way, then smiled faintly. Cashel had taken most of his meals alone on a hillside while he watched his sheep; the rest were with his sister Ilna who cooked and washed for the pair of them. Nobody’d ever told him not to stick his fingers into the cups and bowls he was carrying.
Sharina wouldn’t have to either, because Ilna had seen the incident. She’d explain the etiquette to her brother, in private because she loved him. Nobody needed a second explanation when Ilna had provided the first one, though. Sharina’s smile widened.
To Garric she said, “Judging from the crowd in the harbor, the people here are at least as enthusiastic as those in Valles that there’s really a kingdom again. Are you worried about how the other islands will react if you’re crowned on Haft?”
“My sources say that folk on Sandrakkan and Blaise understand that because Garric’s of the old royal line of Haft, it’s appropriate for him to be crowned here,” said Liane, speaking as Garric’s spymaster rather than merely as a friend; though a friend too, of course.
She smiled broadly. When she didn’t have to be formal, Liane had a boisterous sense of humor well matched to Garric’s own. “While the Earl of Sandrakkan has his own view of his island’s proper place in the restored Kingdom of the Isles,” she continued, “I would not recommend Prince Garric be crowned in the Earl’s palace in Erdin.”
Twenty years before, the uncle of the present Earl of Sandrakkan had claimed to be King of the Isles. The royal army—the army of Ornifal—had defeated and killed him, but his heir and the Sandrakkan nobles more generally hadn’t lost the notion that they were better men than those snivelling merchants from Ornifal.
“They’re more pleased than not, the ones I’ve talked to,” said Chalcus said as he refilled his cup from the beaker he’d brought to the dining table. He, Liane, and Tenoctris were drinking wine; the others stuck to beer as they’d been raised on in Barca’s Hamlet—though here it was brewed with hops instead of the dark germander bitters of home. “They’re not the nobles, as you’d guess, but sailors and shopkeepers....”
He grinned, swigged, and went on, “Nobody minds that it’s Carcosa, so long as it isn’t Valles. You’re one of theirs, Prince Garric, not somebody who’s on the throne because an ancestor owned twenty acres of pasture on Ornifal.”
Cashel settled himself again between Sharina and Tenoctris, setting down the mugs without spilling them. He licked ale from his thumb. Sharina hugged him.
There was no formal requirement that Garric be crowned prince, here or anywhere else. King Valence the Third had publicly acknowledged ‘Prince Garric of Haft’ as his son and heir apparent; that was sufficient for legality. The government and royal army had accepted Garric as regent as well, which gave him the real authority—so far as Ornifal went.
For the past several hundred years the King of the Isles had been little more than a Duke of Ornifal to whom the rulers of other islands paid lip service. Garric was determined to reform the Isles into a real kingdom with unity and a degree of universal peace unknown since the fall of the Old Kingdom, so he’d decided to be crowned Prince of Haft in Carcosa where King Carus and his predecessors as Kings of the Isles had their coronations.
His friends, his formal advisors, and even the officers of the army led by Lord Waldron, a stiff-necked noble from northern Ornifal, had agreed with the plan. Sharina didn’t understand Garric’s apparent hesitation now.
“The problem is deciding who’ll offer me the diadem,” Garric said, still frowning into his beer. “It was always the Chief Priest of the Lady. It never crossed my mind to wonder about it.” He looked around the circle of his friends with a fierce expression. “But here in Carcosa, that’d mean I was joining a gang. And I’m not going to do that.”
The anger faded back into the previous look of troubled doubt. “If I can’t be crowned by the priest of the Lady or the priest of the Shepherd...,” he continued.
Liane turned and stared at Garric with dawning horror. Sharina had seen Liane face a demon with equanimity; her present expression was completely inexplicable.
“Then I thought, maybe the third aspect of God,” Garric said. He was barely muttering, obviously ill at ease. “I thought I could be crowned at the shrine of the Prophesying Sister. Liane says the priest is just a functionary; the temple doesn’t have any part in the politics of Carcosa.”
Now Sharina understood Liane’s look of horror. Her own face probably mirrored it.
“Garric, you can’t be crowned by the Sister,” Sharina said, controlling her voice with an effort. “If you’re worried about what people will think, they’ll think it’s disgusting!”
“The Sister rules death and the underworld,” Garric said, straightening and speaking with obvious anger. “Death isn’t evil. Death is a part of life!”
“That’s words!” Sharina said. “People don’t swear by the Sister, they curse by Her.”
Liane nodded firmly. “Sharina’s right,” she said. “It isn’t politically conceivable that you’d be crowned in a shrine of the sister. Besides, it’s a little place on the side of the High City, the old citadel. The only reason the shrine still exists is that its an oracle. I doubt there’d be room for twenty people to stand in it.”
She looked around the table. “Am I wrong?” she demanded. “What do the rest of you think? Mistress Ilna?”
Ilna looked at Liane without expression. “I don’t know,” she said, as calm as ice over a stream. No one could guess how swiftly the current might be tumbling beneath that frozen sheet. “Mistress, I don’t believe in gods and I don’t know anything about how cities are run. I just don’t know.”
Sharina glanced back at her brother, set-faced and grim. Garric was much more fiercely determined about this than she could understand.
Thinking that, Sharina looked into her own heart. She didn’t understand why she was so strongly opposed to the idea, either, but she began to shiver.
Cashel put his left arm around her. Sharina smiled. There was danger and there would always be danger; but evil would never be as strong as the good that supported her.
***
Cashel tore another chunk from the round loaf of bread with his teeth so he could sop the last of his sauce. Since he started to travel he’d learned to eat a lot of new things. He wasn’t fussy, but generally he’d rather have had the simple fare he’d been raised on. The wheat bread he got whenever he ate with rich people was a treat, though. He’d gotten used to rye and barley loaves the same way he got used to sunburn, but they weren’t things he looked forward to.
Liane wrung her hands, then laid them flat on the table and managed a laugh. “I’m sorry I’m so vehement,” she said, letting her soft smile slide across the faces of her friends. “The truth is I had a dream while I was napping this afternoon. It isn’t....”
She reached over to squeeze Garric’s hand without looking up from the empty platter in front of her. In the silence Tenoctris leaned forward slightly and said, “Did you dream of the Sister, Liane?”
“I don’t know,” Liane fiercely. The words came tumbling out as though the old wizard’s question had loosened the keystone of an arch. “I think I dreamed about the Underworld. About Hell, ice and demons and someone in the middle of it all.”
&n
bsp; She looked at Garric with a desperate expression. “It was evil,” she said. “She was evil, Garric. Not just death. I didn’t tell you about it because....”
Liane brightened, suddenly the educated, sophisticated noblewoman again. She grinned at all of them. “Because I was afraid,” she said, enunciating carefully, “that saying it would make it come true. I haven’t felt that way since I was three years old.”
Cashel chewed his bread as he listened to the others. He didn’t understand why Liane and Garric and Sharina—who still occasionally trembled—were upset. There were lots of things Cashel didn’t understand; that was all right. Eventually there’d be something for him to do, either that somebody else told him about or what he figured out for himself.
Until then he’d wait, and watch, and listen. Life in general was a lot like herding sheep.
Garric continued to hold Liane’s hand. “I had a dream too,” Garric said, “though it wasn’t a bad one.”
In a businesslike tone he added, “Tenoctris, what do you think about holding the coronation in a temple of the Sister?”
He’d stopped being worried and angry; Cashel was glad of that. Garric was back to being the man Cashel had grown up with, the fellow who figured he could do most jobs and willing to give even the impossible ones a good try.
“Like Ilna...,” Tenoctris said carefully. She held her left hand palm in front of her and touched it with her right index finger as if she was counting. “I don’t believe in the Great Gods.”
She smiled at the company. She seemed decades younger when she smiled, and she smiled often.
“I’ve never seen Gods, you see, so as a matter of faith I believe that other people haven’t seen them either.” She cleared her throat and went on, “But I do believe that places of worship can be repositories of power. And—”
Tenoctris smiled again. This time her expression held a touch of the cynicism Cashel had heard when the wizard talked about what a long life had taught her about people.
“—some of those who’ve worshipped the Sister over the years may not have thought of Her merely as the symbol of life’s natural end. Whether or not Liane’s dream was prophetic or connected in any way with the Sister—”
She nodded toward Liane; Liane nodded back.
“—I believe there could be danger.”
No one spoke for a moment. Cashel found the squabbling of finches in the cedar tree behind him familiar and soothing; it helped him think. It was funny to be up on the roof of a building and have full-sized trees growing out of planters beside you, though.
“There’s danger in everything,” Garric said mildly. He wasn’t angry and defensive any more, just saying what they all knew already. “We can’t make our plans based on what’s safest, Tenoctris.”
He grinned. “That’s not safe. Not with what’s loose in the world now.”
“Tenoctris?” Cashel said as his thought finally formed itself into the right words. “Could you tell about the temple, the Shrine of the Sister, if you were there? Tell whether it was, you know, a bad place to be?”
Tenoctris frowned thoughtfully. “I could tell... many things,” she said. “I could determine what powers are focused on it, and I think I’d be able to tell what uses they’d been put to in the past. Cashel, would you like to escort me to the Shrine of the Prophesying Sister in the morning?”
“Sure,” said Cashel. “Or right now, if you like.”
“I think I’ll be more useful after a night’s sleep,” the old woman said with a wry smile. “I’m not at my most comfortable on shipboard, and I haven’t wholly recovered yet.”
“All right,” said Garric, nodding three times for emphasis. “Cashel and Tenoctris will view the shrine tomorrow. Does anyone else want to join them? Sharina?”
Sharina shook her head without speaking. Her right arm was around Cashel’s waist; she squeezed harder.
“Liane?” Garric went on. “I could go myself if—”
“No!” Liane said. “Garric, please don’t go. Humor me in this!”
“Very good,” said Garric, his voice calm. “Tenoctris, I’ll await your report before making any decisions on the matter. And now—”
Chalcus came sauntering back from the serving table with a pitcher in either hand. He’d been standing there to remove himself from the discussion without making a fuss about it. Cashel smiled. The same as I did by filling my mouth with bread, he thought.
“And now, my friends,” Chalcus said, lifting the pitchers to call attention to them. “I think a toast to the Isles is called for, if folk will let me fill their glasses.”
Cashel joined in the laughter—but Sharina didn’t. She and Liane stared at each other across the table with identical worried expressions.
***
Ilna set her cup back at the corner of her empty platter, precisely where it had been before she raised it to drink the toast. “To the Isles!” were fine-sounding words, no doubt, but what did ‘the Isles’ mean? Not a string of islands, surely; and not the people on those islands either, with their own wishes and plans and anger. People weren’t a thing or even a thousand things: they were every one of them as different as the spools of yarn from which Ilna wove her fabrics.
She smiled coldly. Most people thought wool was all the same except for the color it might have been dyed. They were wrong. And maybe Ilna os-Kenset was wrong in not seeing the great fabric of the Isles that someone, perhaps Garric and the rest of them here at this table, were weaving out of individual people.
It wasn’t dark yet, but servants were bringing out lanterns to hang from hooked poles. Chalcus would probably suggest they hire a chair to take them to the house they were renting... and Ilna would probably agree, because she disliked the feel of cobblestones underfoot and in the dark of unfamiliar streets she might well slip in filth and turn an ankle.
Across the table Cashel, Sharina, and Tenoctris—with Cashel’s help—were rising. Ilna rose also, but as Chalcus stood he touched a hand to her elbow for attention and said, “Prince Garric, might I have a talk of a private nature with you and Mistress Ilna before we’re off about our business for the evening?”
“Yes, of course,” said Garric, his tone friendly but guarded. He didn’t have any idea what Chalcus wanted to discuss, but he knew it wasn’t a slight thing if the sailor requested privacy.
Ilna didn’t have any idea either. What she did know was that surprises were usually unpleasant.
“Though you won‘t mind,” Garric continued, making a statement rather than asking a question, “if Lady Liane stays with us to take notes.”
Garric seemed much older than he’d been when he and Ilna both left Barca’s Hamlet. He’d been a happy boy and a friendly youth; now—he was often happy and usually friendly, but he was beyond question a man.
Ilna smiled, though the expression didn’t reach her lips. She didn’t think she’d ever been young herself, but she regretted her old friend Garric’s loss of childish playfulness. No doubt ‘the Isles’, whatever they were, were better for the change.
“I have work to do with the reports, your highness,” Liane said calmly. Her eyes met Ilna’s and she made a respectful half-curtsey of acknowledgement. “Good evening, Mistress Ilna, Master Chalcus.”
She slipped into the line of guards before Garric could protest, if he’d intended to. Chalcus didn’t want her present—he would’ve worded his request another way if he had—and Liane didn’t choose to be where she was an embarrassment. Ilna could have liked the girl if circumstances had been different. Maybe she liked her anyway.
Chalcus watched Liane go with a speculative grin, then returned his attention to Garric. “So, your highness,” he said. “There’s trouble in the Strait, monsters from the air preying on shipping. Lascarg’s Commander of the Strait, who is now your Commander of the Strait, one Lusius, does nothing but count the bribe money he squeezes from the shippers. Is this old news to you?”
“I’m listening,” Garric said; and so he was, with a h
ard expression which Ilna could read no more than she could look through a block of granite. “Though if you’re bringing information, you’d do better to have offered it to Liane directly. She handles that aspect of the government.”
“Aye, the pretty Liane learns things for you,” Chalcus said. He was poised, standing on the balls of his feet. He was generally tense when he talked with Attaper or Lord Waldron; men of war who never lost the awareness that Chalcus was one of them, but was not necessarily on their side. And the new Garric was one of them as well.... “But you, I think, are the one who acts or does not act. Is that correct, your highness?”
“I make the final decisions, Master Chalcus,” Garric said evenly. “I have wise friends and good advisors; but I am the prince.”
“Then shortly, when the Northern Shippers’ Association asks you to send someone to deal with the monsters, your highness,” said Chalcus, “I suggest you send Mistress Ilna and my own self in place of some commodore or other with a squadron of wallowing great warships. That is what I would ask—if Ilna is willing, and if you can spare us from the wedding preparations which I’m sure must be absorbing much of your time just now.”
“Ah!” said Garric, understanding at last; and Ilna understood as well.
Garric’s attention had been wholly focused on Chalcus thus far during the discussion. Now he looked at Ilna and said, “Ilna? Is this what you want? Because if it is, or whatever you want...?”
He smiled at her, a boy again; the boy she’d loved for as long as she could remember.
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Ilna said. “Any of it. And as for your wedding, Garric, I expect to attend with my good wishes. Certainly I’m not looking for an excuse to be absent.”
Her face went cold. She added, “I don’t look for excuses.”
If it hadn’t been for Garric’s smile, she’d have spoken the same words in a snarl—angry at Garric, angry at Chalcus; angry at the world. She chuckled at the notion. Pretty much as always, of course, she thought.