Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  With such unpleasant thoughts in his mind, he was almost embarrassed when Selatre came out of the great hall and walked over to him. “Why so grim-faced?” she asked. “The monsters are—wherever Mavrix sent them. They’re not here, anyway. Ikos is risen again, I suppose with a new Sibyl. Adiatunnus is lying low, at least for now. You should be happy.”

  “Oh, I am,” he said, “but not for any of those reasons.”

  She frowned, looking for the meaning behind his words. When she found it, she looked down at the ground for a moment; sometimes a compliment could make her as nervous as being touched once had. Then she said, “If you are so happy, why haven’t you told your face about it?”

  He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I was trying to look into the future, and I don’t have a god to guide my sight.”

  “Biton didn’t guide me,” Selatre said. “He just spoke through me, and I had no memory of what he would say. What did you see that troubled you so?”

  Gerin wondered if he should have kept his mouth shut But no: Selatre prized truth, partly from her own nature and perhaps partly also because so much raw truth had washed through her as the god’s conduit. So, hesitantly, he explained.

  “Yes, those are troubling thoughts,” she said when he was done. “Much will depend on what sort of man Duren becomes, and on any other children who may appear.” She glanced over to him, her head cocked to one side. “So you aim to wed me, do you? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  He coughed and sputtered; his ears got hot. “I did intend to ask you formally,” he said; hearing how lame his voice sounded only made his ears hotter. “But yes, it has been in my mind, and it just—slipped out now. What say you to that?”

  “Oh, I say yes, without a doubt,” Selatre answered. He hugged her, glad past words that he hadn’t been too clumsy for her to bear. But she still had that—measuring—look on her face. She said, “As long as you are looking into the future, what makes you bold enough to think I won’t want to run off with a horseleech someday, as Elise did?”

  “Oof!” he said, the air rushing out of him; she couldn’t have deflated him any more thoroughly if she’d kicked him in the belly. “And we men like to think we’re the cool and calculating sex.” But he saw she wanted a serious answer, and did his best to give her one: “I’ve learned some things since I wed her, or I hope I have, anyhow. I know better than to take a wife for granted just because we’ve given each other pledges. Marriage is like, hmm, the palisade around this keep: if I don’t keep checking to make sure the timber stays sound, it’ll fall to pieces one day. That’s most important. The other thing is, you suit me better than she did in a lot of different ways. I don’t think the two of us will rub each other raw. And if we start to, I hope I’m wise enough now to try to make sure that doesn’t get too bad. And I hope you are, too.” He waited to see what she’d say to that.

  Once more to his vast relief, she nodded. “Those are good reasons,” she said. “If you’d given me something like, ‘Because I think you’re lovelier than the stars in the sky,’ then I’d have worried.”

  “I do,” Gerin said. “Think you’re lovelier than the stars in the sky, I mean.”

  Selatre glanced away. “I’m glad you do,” she answered quietly. “But while that’s a fine reason to want to bed someone, it really isn’t reason enough to wed. One fine day, you’d likely see someone else you think is lovelier than the stars in the sky—and then, what point in having married?”

  “The one and only good thing about growing older that I’ve found is that I don’t think with my crotch as much as I used to,” he said.

  “As much, eh?” Selatre stuck out her tongue at him. “I will put up with a certain amount of that, I suppose … depending on whom you’re thinking about.”

  He slipped an arm around her waist, drew her to him. Not very long before, even trying that would have got him killed by the temple guards at Ikos. Even more recently, she’d have pulled away in horror, still thinking a man’s touch a defilement. Now she molded herself to him.

  As if to prove he hadn’t been thinking entirely with his crotch, he said, “Duren tells me you’re starting to teach him his letters.”

  “Do you mind?” Her voice was anxious. “I didn’t think I had to tell you; you’ve always been one to want people to be able to read. And he’s a good boy, your son. I like him. If he has an early start on his letters, they’ll come easier for him. Learning them once I was all grown up, I sometimes thought my head would burst.”

  “Did you?” Gerin said. “If you did, you hid it very well. And you learned them Very well, too—better than most of the people I’ve taught when they were younger. No, I don’t mind. You’re right—I’m glad he has a start on them. And I’m glad you like him.”

  Maybe he gave that some slight extra emphasis, or maybe Selatre was getting better at fathoming the way his mind worked. She said, “Aye, I can see how you might be.”

  She made a face. “I don’t intend to act like a wicked stepmother in a tale, I promise you that.” She paused for a moment, her expression thoughtful. “I wonder what the stepmothers in those tales intended. Is anyone ever wicked in her own eyes?”

  “Do you know,” Gerin said slowly, “there’s a question that would keep the sages down in the City of Elabon arguing for days. When I first opened my mouth, I would have said of course some people seem wicked, even to themselves. But when I try to see through their eyes, I wonder. Balamung the Trokmê wizard set the northlands on their ear a few years ago, but he thought he was taking just revenge for slights he’d got And Wolfar of the Axe—” He broke off and scowled; remembering Wolfar made him remember Elise, too. “Wolfar was out for his own gain, and didn’t see one bloody thing wrong with that You may be right.”

  “They probably saw you as wicked for trying to stop them,” Selatre said.

  “So they did,” Gerin said. “Which didn’t mean I didn’t judge them wicked, or that they didn’t need stopping.”

  “And you stopped them,” Selatre said, nodding. “Did I rightly hear that you slew Wolfar in the library?” She gave him a different sort of sidelong look this time, as if to say that was not the proper use to which to put a chamber dedicated to preserving books.

  “If I hadn’t killed him there, he certainly would have killed me,” Gerin answered. “That he didn’t wasn’t for lack of trying.” His neck throbbed at the memory; Wolfar had come within an eyelash of strangling him. But he had strangled Wolfar, and in so doing won what passed for Schild’s loyalty.

  Selatre said, “If you hadn’t slain him then, I probably wouldn’t be alive today—the monsters would have caught me the day of the earthquake.” Her laugh came shaky. “Strange to think your own being depends on something that had happened years ago to someone you didn’t know then.”

  “Aye, that is a curious thought,” Gerin agreed. “Some Trokmê—or maybe more than one of the woodsrunners; I’ve never known for certain—twisted my life out of the path I’d planned for it when he—they—killed my father and my brother and left me baron of Fox Keep. If you dwell on the might-have-beens, it’s like wandering through a maze.”

  “Might-have-beens strain even the powers of the gods,” Selatre said. “Remember how Biton had to strain to see what might come from my going back to Ikos and my staying here with you?”

  “I’m not likely to forget it,” Gerin said with feeling. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”

  “Biton was kindly, perhaps in memory of how I’d served him before,” Selatre answered. “But even if he hadn’t been, how could you hope to set your will against a god’s?”

  “I couldn’t,” Gerin said, and let it go at that. The god’s will had not been his principal concern; Selatre’s had. With a lifetime devoted to Biton and bare days to him, she was only too likely to have chosen to return to what she’d always known. That she hadn’t left made him grateful every time he looked at her. Most seriously, he said, “I’ll do my best to make sure you’re never s
orry about your choice.”

  “You needn’t worry about that,” Selatre said. “The farseeing one will have made his own selection by now; with the temple at Ikos restored, he would not leave it without a Sibyl. I’m here because I wanted to be, and not because I have no other choice open to me.”

  Again Gerin kept part of his thoughts to himself. There was always another choice: the one Elise had taken. What he had to do now—what he had to do forever—was to make sure Selatre was too content at Fox Keep ever to want to leave it.

  He hugged her again, but didn’t think, as he had a little while before, of taking her up to his chamber and barring the door. Simple affection had its place, too. Maybe after all he could say some of what he’d thought: “If we work at it, it will turn out all right.”

  “Are you making prophecies now?” Selatre asked. “Perhaps I should have worried about whether Biton would take you back to Ikos and set you on the throne of pearl.”

  “Thank you, no,” Gerin said. “I’m right where I belong, not doing what I’d hoped to be doing, maybe, but doing something that needs doing—and I’m just happy you think you belong here, too.”

  “That I do,” Selatre agreed. “And now, if you’re not going to drag me upstairs, I’ll go up by myself and wade through that scroll on Kizzuwatnan hepatomancy I was trying to make sense of the other day.”

  “That one doesn’t make much sense to me, either,” Gerin said. “My guess is that it either didn’t make much sense to the Sithonian who wrote it in the first place or to the Elabonian who put it into our language. I’ve tried foretelling a few times from livers of cows or sheep we’ve slaughtered, but what I divined had nothing to do with what ended up happening. Something’s been lost somewhere, I think.”

  “Maybe it will come clear if I keep studying it,” Selatre said, and headed back into the great hall.

  Gerin smiled as he watched her go. Though she didn’t put it the way he had, she also believed in working at something till you got it right. Even without hepatomancy, he knew a good omen when he saw one.

  The way she’d teased him about dragging her upstairs he took for a good omen, too. With Elise, anything involving the bedchamber had been a deadly serious business. With Fand, he’d never known whether he was in for a grand time or a fight Making love with someone neither earnest nor inflammatory was new to him, but he liked it.

  Drifting after Selatre, he walked into the great hall himself. Van sat at one of the tables there, a roast chicken—mostly bones now—in front of him, a pitcher of ale within easy reach. He nodded to the Fox and said, “Grab yourself a jack, Captain, and help me get to the bottom of this.”

  “I don’t mind if I do.” Gerin sat down across from the outlander, who poured him a full jack.

  Van raised his own and said, “To the Prince of the North—maybe one day to the King of the North!” He poured the ale down his throat, then stared sharply at Gerin. “You’d better drink to that.”

  “So I should,” Gerin said, and obediently drank. He smacked his lips, partly tasting the ale, partly Van’s words. King of the North? “If I’m lucky, my grandson may wear that title.”

  Van plucked at his beard. “I don’t know, Fox. All’s topsyturvy here, and you’re a young man yet. If you live, you may do it.”

  Gerin shifted uncomfortably on the bench, as if he’d got a splinter in his backside. “I don’t know that I want to do it. A title like that … It’d be an open invitation to all the other lords in the northlands to gang together and pull me down.”

  “I don’t know,” Van repeated. “Me, I don’t think Aragis would lift a finger against you, for fear you’d call down the gods and turn him into a lump of cheese, or some such. Same with Adiatunnus. And without them, who’d raise a proper fight?”

  “They’re wary of me now, aye,” Gerin said, “but that’ll fade by the time the first snow falls. I can’t make myself king before then; I’m too weak. And taking the title when I haven’t the strength to back it up—” He shook his head. “Aragis wants to be king. I think he’d fight for pride’s sake if I went and put on a crown.”

  “Have it your way—you generally do,” Van said. “From where I sit, looks like you could bring it off.” He poured the last of the ale into his jack, drained it, got up, and headed for the stairs.

  He’d left one of the wings on the roast fowl uneaten. Gerin pulled it off the carcass, gnawed on it thoughtfully. He shook his head after a little while, still convinced he was right. All the same, he sent a resentful look toward the stairway: Van had kindled his ambition, and he’d known just what he was doing, too.

  “Not yet,” Gerin said. His lands had suffered too much from the monsters, and from the fights with Adiatunnus. He wanted time to wed Selatre and to enjoy life with her (though the calculating part of his mind said being married to the former Sibyl of an Ikos now miraculously restored would also foster his prestige among his neighbors). No, not yet.

  But who could say? The time might come.

  About the Author

  Harry Turtledove is an American novelist of science fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy. Publishers Weekly has called him the “master of alternate history,” and he is best known for his work in that genre. Some of his most popular titles include The Guns of the South, the novels of the Worldwar series, and the books in the Great War trilogy. In addition to many other honors and nominations, Turtledove has received the Hugo Award, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and the Prometheus Award. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a PhD in Byzantine history. Turtledove is married to mystery writer Laura Frankos, and together they have three daughters. The family lives in Southern California.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Harry Turtledove

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-0947-8

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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