One Good Knight

by Mercedes Lackey

  She grimaced. “Yes, but—”

  “I wish to ask you some questions, please,” Peri continued. “I keep a detailed chronicle of the information I receive when I negotiate our trades with the Wyrding Folk. I went back over it today, looking for some clues. Now, how familiar are you with the arrangements between the traders and the Crown?”

  “Fairly,” she replied, nonplussed. What could that have to do with anything they’d been discussing?

  He nodded with evident satisfaction. “The Wyrding Folk seem to be under the impression that most of the wealth of your Crown comes from fees and taxes on those traders who use your port, which is the only safe anchorage for quite some ways up and down the coastline.” He peered keenly down his long nose at her.

  “That’s quite accurate, to a point,” she replied thoughtfully. “Though, there is another source of income that no one really likes to talk about, and that is the income from wrecks. The Queen gets one-third of everything that is gleaned off the shoreline after a wreck. Unless, of course, it’s shoreline belonging to the Crown—then she gets all of it.”

  Peri blinked. His eyes held a furtive greenish light 288

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  in their depths. Or was that only the effect of the sun? “Now that,” he said, “is interesting. So. If, say, the weather along the shores of Acadia began to worsen, the Queen would benefit no matter what.

  Those traders seeking to avoid the port and the taxes and fees by landing somewhere and smuggling their goods in would suddenly find they were losing ships to storms. The Queen would profit by what washed ashore, and profit again when these traders elected to stop trying to avoid the taxes. True?”

  “Well,” Andie replied. “Yes.”

  She was beginning to feel sick again. She did not like where this was going. Not at all. Because—

  Because it was beginning to look as if either Solon had gotten complete control over everything her mother said and did, like a puppeteer, or—

  —her mother was complicit in the whole dragon business.

  Including trying to kill her own daughter.

  Because Solon himself did not have nearly as much to do with the trade negotiations as Cassiopeia did. They bored him, for one thing, or so he said. For another, the Queen liked to have them firmly and completely under her control. And hers alone.

  “The Wyrding Folk tell me that the weather has, in fact, worsened significantly. So much so that the current storms outmatch anything in their memories and records.”

  Since this seemed to be a statement and not a question, Andie simply nodded.

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  “So, can you tell me if the Queen has been renegotiating her arrangements with the traders of late?”

  Andie’s mouth dropped open at that question.

  Suddenly she was putting together a great many answers in her own mind that were making her even sicker at heart than she had been before this.

  No, she moaned in her mind. Oh no, please not…

  But her teacher in logic had been ruthless, and if there was one thing he had taught her it was that a question or a train of thought must be pursued to its likeliest conclusion, no matter how unpleasant.

  Except that the word unpleasant was not nearly strong enough.

  “Yes…she’s raising the port fees. But—” she shook her head “—there’s more, far more to it than that.

  This bad weather is doing some awful things to the fisherfolk,” she continued, feeling more ill with every word. “And to the farmers and herdsmen along the coastline. The fishermen are not able to go out as often, and people are losing crops and livestock.”

  “But the profit to the Queen from her agrarian folk and fisherfolk is minimal, compared to that from the traders, is it not so?” Peri said in veiled triumph. His head was up, and his cheek-frills fanned.

  Andie bit her lip. She was seeing more than she wanted to see. “Much less.”

  “And if the Queen is aware that her Adviser is a Magician—”

  “Oh, she knows,” the fox piped up, from where he was curled, quite comfortably, in Cleo’s lap. “She 290

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  counts on it. He does things to people that she wants to give way to her. I don’t know what else he does, but I know he does that. I’ve listened to her give the orders, and I’ve even seen her watch while he does the magic.”

  “Did you ever see him work weather magic?” Peri asked with great care, clearly enunciating every word.

  “Weather magic?” The fox’s ears flattened a moment as he concentrated, then his ears came up again. “Yes. Yes, at least once.”

  Peri’s eyes blazed. “One of the most common magical workings is weather magic,” he said with a certain grim elation. “Clearly he knows how to do it.

  If he is manipulating the weather along the coast—”

  “At her orders,” Andie said, feeling dizzy, because she knew in her heart that Solon must be doing just that. Too many pieces were falling into place now for her to be able to pretend that the Queen was Solon’s puppet. All the reports she had written. Line after line that had proved to her mother that her own daughter was too dangerous and too intelligent—

  “And now I think I know why she wanted to be rid of me. I—I pointed this out to her. Told her how the weather was worsening and how the farmers and fishermen were suffering because of it. And I saw the records of the gleanings from the wrecks—they’ve easily doubled in the past decade. Easily.”

  And she felt horrible. Because while things were hard for the farmers, herders, and fishermen, no one on shore had died. But men had died in those wrecks.

  Many men. And her mother knew that.

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  With a growing sense of horror she recalled the look on her mother’s face whenever the tallies from wrecks were brought in.

  Satisfaction.

  Andie had dismissed that then, although it had made her uneasy. She could not dismiss it now. It had been bad enough to think that her mother felt satisfaction over something that had cost the deaths of innocent sailors and traders, but the Queen could perhaps be excused for not thinking of that at the time, and seeing only the revenue. They were not, after all, her sailors. She would not see the roster of the lost. No widows would petition her for some form of pension.

  But thinking— knowing—that the Queen had willfully allowed the storms to be summoned that sank those ships, and had only smiled when the fruits of that crime were brought to her doorstep—that was a different matter.

  That was murder. Cold-blooded murder.

  And that was something terrible to contemplate. So terrible that it was all she could do to sit there and let the debate go on around her as her mind went over the pattern of deception and nightmare that Cassiopeia had woven into the tapestry that was Acadia.

  The Queen of Acadia had plotted the deaths of innocents whose only crime was that they were following the orders of others who were attempting to evade onerous taxes. And in fact—since Cassiopeia had the sailing schedules for all the ships coming into and out of the harbor…

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  Well, it was entirely possible she had even plotted the destruction of complete innocents—those who had paid their duties and taxes, and who just happened to have valuable cargo aboard that would float. What next?

  Anyone and anything that gets in her way. Like me.

  Andie sat there in a daze. Once in a while Peri would ask her a question and she would reply with something—it hardly mattered what, since he seemed satisfied with whatever answer he got. It was just so hard to think that all this time, the Queen had been—

  “Very well,” Adam boomed, startling her. “I don’t think any of us have to debate this any longer. The Queen of Acadia is unfit to rule. Her Adviser may or may not be the cause of her current behavior—the fox says not, and I am inclined to believe the beast—but there is no doubt that she has abando
ned the responsibility of a monarch to care for her people first, last and always.”

  Reluctantly Andie looked up and nodded. Peri sighed gustily.

  Adam glanced at him and snorted. “You know very well where this is going.”

  “Yes,” Peri said with resignation. “I do.”

  Adam stood up to his full height and fanned his wings. “It is our duty as the descendants of the line of Sardonyx and Jasper, the first Dragons of the Light, to combat injustice and tyranny where we find it. Ladies, our course is clear. We must remove the Queen of Acadia from her throne.”

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  Gina grinned. But Andie felt as if she had just turned to stone.

  “We are going to war. Who goes with us?”

  Adam demanded.

  There was stunned silence. “You and what army?”

  asked Cleo, the first to break it.

  Adam, surprisingly, laughed. “Peri and I are an army,” he pointed out. “But I have been flying over the capital quite a bit now, and I have to say that it would not really take an ‘army’ as such to get into the Palace. We don’t need to lay siege to the city. In fact, we don’t really want to. What we need is to get into the Palace and take the Queen and Solon. That doesn’t require a very large force. In fact, with Peri and myself flying people in, it could be done with as few as a dozen, maybe two.”

  Gina had taken out a knife and was studiously sharpening it. At that, she looked up and directly into Adam’s eyes. “I’m a Champion,” she said shortly. “This is something no Champion could turn his or her back on. You have me.”

  “Ha!” he said, and that is when Thalia stood up.

  “This is our land,” she said. “And if that isn’t enough, we’ve been made victims, too. I don’t know if you can turn me into a real fighter quickly enough, but you have me.”

  “And me!” exclaimed Helena, jumping to her feet, shortly followed by all the rest.

  That left only Andie, who felt herself flush and looked at her feet as all eyes came to rest on her. The 294

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  silence grew heavier and more uncomfortable with every passing moment. It was Gina who broke it.

  “Princess, we understand, she’s your mother.

  You—”

  “Actually,” Andie said, looking up, her mouth twisted in a grimace, “you don’t understand. Not at all.”

  “We probably don’t,” said Peri.

  “This—this is—horrible,” she managed to choke out. “What she’s done, the innocent lives she’s taken the—I can’t even begin—” She faltered to a stop. She stared at her feet. The silence was thick enough to cut. I have to do something. This is my bloodline they’re talking about. I have a responsibility, too….

  There was just one rather large problem.

  “Without these—” she took the lenses off and flourished them, bitterly “—I’m blind. Even if you could actually train me to do some kind of fighting, which I frankly doubt, the first person that breaks these things turns me from an asset into a liability. A hostage. I’d like to help you, but I’m useless to you.”

  She had no idea until the words were out of her mouth how much she meant them—nor how badly they hurt. But they did. Once again, she was useless. She had spent her entire life being useless, it seemed. Nothing she was good at made any real difference to anyone.

  “But, Andromeda—” Peri exclaimed. “You are the most important person in this scheme!”

  “I—what?” she said. “You must be joking.”

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  Peri shook his massive head. “On the contrary.

  You are the only person here who has actually been inside the Palace. You know everything there is to know about it. Without that, we can’t even begin to mount an attack, now, can we?”

  “At least not the kind of attack we can manage with as few people as we have, and as untrained or half trained,” Adam agreed. “You are the key to our plan.”

  Of all the things she had heard today this was the most astonishing. She was important. She was vital.

  She who had never been anything to anyone—

  “Besides,” Gina said with a grin, “I can teach you to use something that you won’t have to get in close to use. A sling. Believe me, I’ve seen a good sling-man take down seasoned fighters many a time.”

  Andie raised her chin and looked into Peri’s eyes.

  “Then you have me,” she said, but could not help adding, “for what it’s worth.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next day, she went to work with Peri in the

  “library,” which was nothing more than the big, dry room—probably a former barracks room—where he kept his book hoard. There were no shelves; books were stacked atop one another in piles around the walls, by category, and scrolls were stuck into the necks of wide-mouthed jars. Light came from slit-windows—which had probably been arrow-slits—and candles and lamps placed carefully away from the piles of books and jars of scrolls. Now she discovered just how Peri was able to write things.

  He spoke.

  He lay on the floor of the room with an open, blank book in front of him. She watched in fascination as he talked and words appeared on the pages.

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  she had ever seen, or at least, magic that looked like magic. He couldn’t correct so much as a single word after it was written, though, so he had to be very careful about how he phrased things.

  She, however, was having to use an old-fashioned quill and ink that she’d made herself. Squid and octo-pus ink was what she’d used at home, but they were far from the coast and the Wyrding Folk that Peri traded with were not literate. After consulting with one of the books in his hoard, Peri gave her a recipe involving soot, water and the white of an egg and sent her off to concoct it. It seemed to work well enough for now, and Gina went out and brought down a goose for quills.

  The exterior of the Palace was easy enough to conjure up in her mind’s eye, and she had help.

  Adamant had flown over it many times, and she had stood on the lookout cliff above at least once every few days for most of her life. Between the two of them, they soon had virtually every stone, bush and entrance plotted well enough to have reconstructed the Palace on the spot.

  At least from the outside. Now came the hard part.

  She had to pummel her memory to reconstruct as much of the inside as she could remember. And of course, there were places, like Solon’s quarters, that she had never been inside. She could guess what they might look like, but she didn’t know.

  Nor did she know how many more secret passageways there might be aside from the one that the fox knew about. She’d never actually measured the 298

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  rooms; it had never occurred to her to do so.

  Frustratingly, there was more that she didn’t know than that she did know. She took a break at midday only long enough to eat and wash the dishes before continuing until she had a headache from concentrating so hard.

  “Enough,” Peri said, looking at her with concern.

  “You’re thinking too hard. You are never going to remember details now if you don’t relax.”

  “I know but—”

  “We do not need this map tomorrow. We will not even need it in the next week. Or even month. You have time.” He brought his head down close to hers, and his eyes, quite literally as large as plates, really did have a soft, green glow at the bottom of them.

  “You have time,” he repeated quietly.

  “I know but—” She laughed weakly as she realized that all the arguments that she was going to use were ones she herself would reject. She knew he was right. She knew her emotions were clouding her judgment. She knew all that, and her emotions were still clouding her judgment.

  “This is horrible,” she said with a sigh, carefully sealing the tiny vial of ink
with a ball of wax, cleaning the quill and putting the map aside to dry thoroughly.

  “Then take your mind off it, for just a little while,”

  Peri coaxed. “Trust me, this will be a good thing.

  You’ll be able to think much more clearly. The memories will drift to the top of your mind instead of staying stubbornly at the bottom.”

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  “All right.” She looked at him and asked the first thing that popped into her head. “Who are Jasper and Sardonyx?”

  He chuckled, the sound deep in his chest. “Trust Adam to invoke them! He is very proud that they are in our lineage. Jasper and Sardonyx were a mated pair of dragons that aided a Godmother—a true ‘Fairy’ Godmother, actually—and decided that they so enjoyed the feeling of making things happen for good that they would keep doing so. They became the progenitors of the line known as the Dragons of the Light, although I can assure you that they did not name themselves that. It is one of the Draconic Warrior lines. Our mother, Serpentine, is half Bookwyrm and half Warrior, and takes largely after the Warrior side. Last I heard from her, she had attached herself to a kind of Champion-Chapter on the other side of the ocean.”

  He sighed wistfully. “Dragons need a lot of territory, you see. She and father were only mated for a season, just to have offspring. Once Adam and I reached adulthood there was no reason for her to remain on this continent any longer.”

  “Is that what all dragons do?” she asked. It would make sense, given what he said about needing a lot of territory.

  “Not all. Some take mates for life. But it’s rare to find a mate that shares your interests that isn’t also in your bloodline.” He chuckled. “You think humans have trouble! There are fewer of us than you by far, 300

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  and we live longer than you. Not as long as the Fair Folk, but longer than you. So if you’re going to take a mate for life you really want it to be someone you can talk to who isn’t also your cousin, a child, or more suited to your grandfather, and that’s pretty rare.”