The messenger tucked the silk package back into his pouch and asked with an eloquent glance for the return of his dagger. This was given him, at a signal from Kieran, and he slipped out into the gray day, pulling up the hood of his cloak. Kieran remained in the doorway, framed by the two guards who were doing their level best to stifle irresistible but, they suspected, entirely unhealthy curiosity. Presently two shapes, as muffled in dark cloaks as the first messenger had been, were seen to make their way slowly across the courtyard. As they approached, one of them drew off a glove made of white kidskin and presented a hand bearing a heavy golden signet.
Kieran offered a small bow. “Admit them,” he said to the guards, who raised their spears to clear the way inside and tried hard to keep looking straight ahead. “This way, my lord,” Kieran said neutrally to the man with the ring. The visitor entered, drawing off the other glove as he did so. His hands were long-fingered, strong, brown from a hot southern sun; as the right hand closed over the pair of gloves, slapping them lightly against the man’s thigh, Kieran nodded slowly. “Your surgeons did a good job,” he said.
There was a chuckle from inside the hood. “I must admit to having been astonished at that particular piece of advice, especially when I found out who had offered it. In some ways you were my enemy’s enemy, Kieran Cullen, which should, according to folk wisdom, have made you my friend; but then, you have been no less of a thorn to me than you ever were to Sif. I never knew what you looked like—else I should not have been taken by surprise when your young queen turned up on my doorstep.”
“Thank you,” Kieran said, as though he had just been offered a compliment—which he had, although it took some finding in the elaborate wrapping in which it had been presented. The three of them, the two visitors still cloaked against prying eyes, had climbed a narrow side stair before gaining a broad carpeted corridor, and Kieran glanced back briefly. “My apologies for the back stairs,” he said, “but from your manner of entry I take it you did not wish to be announced at the front door. If you will step in here, I’ll have to ask you to do the same thing you once asked of me. Your weapons will be quite safe.”
“I carry only these,” his guest said, flinging back his cloak and presenting Kieran with a pair of slim daggers. Kieran bowed, accepting them, and then glanced beyond their owner at the second cowled figure, none other than the obsidian-eyed messenger who had delivered the signet.
“Your friend all but declared himself as a weapon in the guardroom.”
“He is,” Favrin Rashin said composedly. “But he is one loosed at my word, and I will not give that word, seeing as I come here under safe conduct. Still, if you will feel more comfortable, Qi’Dah can remain in here. With the other blades.”
Kieran hesitated for a moment, remembering vividly his search for a secret weapon in Favrin’s own chambers—the way he had looked at the wine flagon, expecting green fumes of poison to curl from its lip. His own analysis of Favrin: He plays straight. He squared his shoulders, reaching for trust. “That will not be necessary,” he said at length. “But if he tries anything…by all the Gods, I can be faster than any death he deals, and I will be watching him.”
Favrin crossed gazes with him as though they had been swords. “I know,” he said softly.
After a moment Kieran disengaged, turning to open the inner door of the guardroom. “His Royal Highness, Favrin Rashin, King of Tath.”
Inside the inner chamber, Anghara turned with a rustle of bruise-colored silk; it was a shade both subdued and oddly violent, appropriate for the funeral of a brother toward whom she was, even now, so dangerously ambivalent. She hadn’t had time to change before receiving this unforeseen visitor.
But she had seen him coming, in the flames; and there was not, in the end, that much surprise at his presence. Merely his timing.
“I was waiting for you,” she said calmly by way of greeting. “Though not in this guise. I didn’t expect you to walk into Miranei on your own.”
Favrin, momentarily glancing down to disengage the clasp of his cloak, looked up with a smile. “You walked into my palace. Our ancestors both wore the same crown; would you expect a prince, a king, to dare less?”
“Ah, but I had the goad of prophecy, and thought I could stop a war. What is your motivation? Simply to show me you dare even more, strolling in by day where I crept in twilight?”
“You wrong me,” he exclaimed, and his voice would have been saccharine had it not been leavened with his usual irony. “Could I not have come here simply to see you again?”
“No, Favrin,” Anghara said, looking him straight in the eye.
For a moment the eyes held, and then Favrin seemed to step out of a costume, changing from frivolity to a still and steady gravity, turning from jester prince to king before Kieran’s eyes.
He turned to Kieran now. “With your permission,” he said gravely, “I would speak with the queen alone.”
They had done so before, after all, in Algira. It had been much more dangerous there. This was Anghara’s own territory, loyal men were within earshot…Still, there was a twinge of something. Something that wasn’t entirely concerned with safety…
Kieran swept his eyelashes down, veiling his eyes for a moment until he had them under control. Then he looked up, at Anghara. She nodded, once.
“I will be in the antechamber if you require anything,” he said. “My lord.” He swept the obeisance due a king, and retired, followed by the silent dark man Favrin had called Qi’Dah…to wait, as he had waited so many times.
Inside the royal chambers, Anghara, now the hostess as Favrin had once been host, turned toward a small rosewood table. “Wine?” she asked, reaching for a decanter. “I regret I do not have that subtle southern vintage you offered me; our northern wines are much more…robust.”
Favrin came over to inspect the offering. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll find it…invigorating.”
“Will you sit?” she said, gesturing gracefully once he had relieved her of his wine goblet.
Favrin subsided into the nearest chair. He had yet to take his eyes from her face; it was as though he were steeling himself to do it at any moment, and couldn’t quite gather enough courage. He did, at length, glancing abruptly and deeply down into the wine as if he were searching for something at the bottom of the goblet.
“I was expecting you to come with an army,” Anghara said softly, breaking the silence.
“And if I had…”
“You might well be sitting on my throne,” Anghara said, brutally honest. “There was little chance we could have stood against you.”
“You defeated Sif, and his reputation was just as formidable as my own.”
“We didn’t defeat Sif,” Anghara said bleakly. “Sif defeated Sif. He learned something he couldn’t live with, and he died. That was the end of it.”
“I was at the burial,” Favrin said, an odd light in his eyes. “That was quite a gift, for a defeated enemy.”
“He was Kir Hama. He had been king,” Anghara said in swift response. “He was my brother,” she added after a pause, looking away, into the flames. “And also…I did what I did partly because of Senena.”
“The little queen?” Favrin said, honestly surprised. “She was reputed to be such a fey, shy thing…like a mountain fawn.”
“What do you know of Senena?” Anghara countered, her turn to be surprised.
Favrin offered a lopsided grin. “Enough,” he said. “Did you think my father had no spies inside the court at Miranei?”
“Do you?” Anghara said, giving him a strange look.
Favrin laughed. “If I had, it would hardly be politic to tell you, now, would it. In any event, I don’t deal in gossip. I have ears, not spies. I know Sif had ears in Algira. It was a game we were playing, his House and mine. If I had been asked, perhaps I would have changed the rules—but it was my father’s game. But then he died, and you happened. And that changed everything.”
Anghara put her wine goblet d
own. “Favrin, what are you doing here?”
“What would you say if I told you I came to ask you once again to marry me?” He grinned at her expression. “I wouldn’t believe it either. Too glib, even for me. And besides…”
His eyes strayed for an instant toward the door to the anteroom, and Anghara found herself blushing at nothing at all—at the things he hadn’t said. It was a moment of silence more eloquent than any speech, so solid and enveloping they found themselves struggling with a compulsion not to break it, to leave the balloon unpacked and its contents safely sequestered away. But then Favrin, who had never lacked courage, took control—resorting once again to his favorite subterfuge.
“Would it break your heart, young queen, to hear I am about to wed another?” he said, his voice vivid with hidden laughter.
But Anghara too had recovered. “With all those women in the royal kaiss…”
“They were my father’s,” Favrin said, dismissing a dozen exotic women with a languid hand. “Besides, they were too old—some were old enough to be my mother. One of them was my mother.” He grinned. “I retired them all. I’m starting fresh. There will be time to collect, later. I need an heir, and to get an heir I need a wedded queen. And there are women who do not scorn the prospect of ruling a royal kaiss.”
“Congratulations,” Anghara said dryly. But she couldn’t help a wide grin, and in another moment they were both laughing.
“So I got over my broken heart and found myself a lady fair…and even as we speak the succession to the throne of Tath appears to be concluded,” Favrin said lightly. “If it proves to be a boy she carries, I will wed her; and she becomes queen. If a girl—well, she will always be senior in the kaiss. Whatever happens, she will be the mother of my first-born. And there is time enough for sons, to inherit.”
Entirely unintentionally, Favrin had loosed a barb he had never meant to wound with. The matter of succession hadn’t crossed Anghara’s mind, but now it reared suddenly like a cobra, and just as poisonous. Sif had died without an heir, and her own kingdom needed a promise of tomorrow; she was the last Kir Hama.
Favrin saw the gray eyes cloud over, and pulled back. “But I didn’t come to speak of that,” he said. “I came to speak of kingdoms.”
Anghara folded her hands in her lap. “So. Your errand seems much the same as mine to you.”
“Indeed,” he said. His blue eyes met hers, squarely, steady and earnest. “I want peace between us.”
“It was never a war of Roisinan’s making,” she said, choosing her words carefully.
He rose from his chair, somewhat violently. “I didn’t come here to surrender!” he said, and his voice was sharp.
“No, not with an heir on the way.” She came to stand beside him by the hearth, where he stared at the leaping flames. “What, then?” she asked, and her voice was quiet and steady. “Believe me, I would have liked this to be at less cost to royal pride.”
“I know,” he said. They were standing very close; their eyes met and locked once again. Favrin almost reached out to cup her cheek in his palm; he had forgotten, by all the Gods, the effect this chit’s eyes had on him.
“But however you phrase it, if you give up what you covet and I hold, then it is surrender. And there is nothing I can do to soften it,” Anghara said, her voice low and intense. “I cannot offer you a title, because you already hold one almost as high as my own; I cannot offer you land, because you already hold what was part of Roisinan. I cannot offer you a sop by way of royal marriage, because…”
“Because there is only you to offer, and we have been down that road.” He found the strength somewhere for his old devil-may-care grin. “But what a pair we would have made, you and I! And yet—if I ride into your court and waive my claim to the Throne Under the Mountain, I would be vilified in my own country for yielding at a woman’s feet that which could not be won from me on the battlefield.” He paused to drag a hand through his hair in a gesture of unguarded and utter weariness. “I am so tired of wars…Even though my claim to Miranei’s throne is twice that of any of my ancestors, I am tired of trying to catch this questing beast…”
“Twice?” Anghara said.
Favrin glanced at her sharply, and then gave her a longer, more speculative look. “You really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Sit down,” he said, his eyes snapping with what was at once humor mixed with an odd touch of spite. “There’s a gap in your knowledge of your family’s history I am about to remedy.”
Anghara was hardly minded to obey such a peremptory command but somehow found herself seated nonetheless, with her wine goblet in her hand and Favrin leaning over her in a fashion that would have made Kieran instantly reach for his sword.
“You may remember my father took a northern woman to wife,” Favrin said. “Do you know where she came from? Who she was?”
“I know her name—Isel Valdarian,” Anghara said. “So much was written. What has this got to do with…”
Favrin was shaking his head. “Then it was written wrong. When Father came to Miranei to wed her, she might have been raised as the natural daughter of Ras Valdarian, onetime councillor and court lord—but that was only to save Ras Valdarian’s wife from scandal. He had accepted the child and retired from court, trying to salvage what he could—for Isel’s mother had aspired to much greater heights than Ras could ever hope to gain.”
Anghara was flooded with sudden shocked comprehension. Favrin saw her blanch and nodded. “I see you’ve made the connection. You and I are cousins, Anghara, Queen of Roisinan. My mother was half-sister to Red Dynan himself.”
“But then…if I were gone…you are the rightful heir to Roisinan,” Anghara said slowly. “You’re the closest thing to a Kir Hama king a Rashin could ever aspire to be!”
Favrin couldn’t help a shout of laughter. “That was a backhanded compliment if ever I heard one,” he said. “I should apologize; I never meant to use my mother as a weapon. I merely wished…”
“But with this…the whole war…you could have dangled your mother’s identity in Roisinan, and your father might have gained more than he ever did by…”
“My father never knew the truth,” Favrin said. “He picked the one woman who could bring him what he wanted—and never knew what he had. He married Ras Valdarian’s daughter, not King Connach Kir Hama’s. If he had known, don’t you think he would have used that knowledge ruthlessly?”
“But you know.”
Favrin shrugged. “My mother had a wooden box she had brought from home as a new bride,” he said. “After Father’s death, when she was moving to new quarters, a porter allowed a load to slip from his grasp and tumble down a flight of stairs. It smashed apart at my feet, and when I bent to pick it up I saw the coat of arms emblazoned beneath the shattered inlay. What would my mother be doing with a concealed Kir Hama trinket? And so I sent a man, and he found the truth. I have known of this only a few weeks longer than you.”
“And armed with this truth, you come to Miranei alone, and offer it to me freely?”
He hesitated, far from certain of his own motives. Hers had been an eminently reasonable question, and he found he had no answer. “I only…”
“But don’t you see?” Anghara interrupted. “You’ve just given us a way out of an impossible situation!”
“I have?” Favrin turned to look at her, his face blank.
“You’ve given yourself an honorable way to end the war,” Anghara said, clutching at his arm.
“Easy,” he murmured, covering the small hand with one of his own. “What are you thinking, witchling?”
She grinned at him. “If Dynan was Sighted, then Isel probably was—and that means you’re probably a latent witchling yourself. And watch that heir of yours.” Favrin grimaced, acknowledging a hit. “I am to be crowned soon. What if I announce by royal proclaimation, that while I remain childless, you are my appointed heir?”
His blank stare turned to complete stupefaction. “What?
”
“Don’t you want to be heir to Roisinan?”
“I’ve been an heir for too long,” Favrin answered, with unaccustomed savagery. “Besides, there will be those who advocate that, as Heir Apparent, all I have to do is get rid of you and have it all.”
“Are you content with Tath?”
“Yes, damn it!” It was wrenched from him, an admission he found hard to make—at least to her, who held by birthright a realm so much richer and greater than his own.
“Then take it. Hold it.”
“And when you get yourself another heir?”
“You’re still king in Algira,” Anghara said. Her voice was level, but she was blushing furiously. “And you remain second in line.”
Favrin grinned, a dangerous grin completely at odds with the mirth dancing in his eyes. “More people to clear away,” he quipped.
Anghara did a double take, and then laughed. “You don’t mean that—you’re strong enough to control your barons. When you sneaked into Miranei…I don’t suppose you thought to bring a robe worthy of a queen’s heir?”
19
“Sif was supposed to have had a coronation to outshine all coronations,” Anghara said conversationally. “Check.”
“He had to,” Favrin said. He bent over the game board, frowning. “He had to reinforce the idea of Dynan’s son as the conquering hero, to erase the memories of his entry into Miranei, your supposed death, and Queen Rima’s bloody end. There was a lot for people to forget. He had to provide a spectacle.” Favrin grinned wolfishly, and swept Anghara’s attacking piece off the board with a languidly graceful hand. “And check,” he said. “I believe I win again.”
Anghara scowled. “Your southern games,” she said. “They’re so devious... and it takes too long.”
“For a people so used to decisive action, you northerners certainly run in tighter circles than a cat chasing its own tail. We lazy southerners might take longer to get to somewhere, but at least we know where we’re going.”
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