by Gwynn White
Mother. He had to escape before she arrived from the great hall.
He tied his tie neatly by himself while his nurse laced his shoes, and then he took off. The rain had stopped, which might mean they would be having fireworks, after all. On his way into the pavilion, he’d seen Guy talking with the master firework-maker at the far end of the paddock.
He found Guy at the edge of the throng around the fountain-that-flowed-with-wine, a plastic and glass sculpture of swans vomiting wine from their beaks. Ran wouldn’t have drunk from it himself, having watched green slime being cleaned out of the tubes yesterday. Guy had a glass of something stronger in his hand. “You ought to be mingling, Ran.”
“I can’t mingle. I always end up saying hello to people when they have their mouths full.”
“Ask them about their families.”
Ran changed the subject. “Are the fireworks on or off?”
“On,” Guy said after squinting at the sky, where the clouds had thinned enough for the evening star to twinkle out.
“I wish they weren’t going to let them off so close to the mews. The dragons will be scared.”
“Teach them to keep their heads under fire,” Guy said brutally.
Ran stared past him. He’d just seen Sir Brant Yates-Briggs, the knight who’d almost killed Guy.
Sir Yates-Briggs wore a black suit as if he were in mourning, which was against the etiquette of the evening. He had the tremendous thews of a heavyweight tilter. His wine glass looked awkward in that great paw.
Ran mustered his courage and marched up to him. “What are you doing here, knave? You’ve got a bloody nerve!”
Sir Yates-Briggs looked around for somewhere to put his glass down, stooped and set it on the ground, then went to one knee on the wet grass. He seized Ran’s hand and pressed it to his forehead. “My lord, I have come to pay my respects. That is all. I wish you a long life and much prosperity, and I pray we may not be enemies henceforth.”
Ran snatched his hand back. “You killed my brother!”
Sir Yates-Briggs sighed and stood up, with one knee of his trousers wet. “The king’s executioner did that, my lord.”
“Didn’t,” Guy said. “Stony Stannie did it himself.”
Stony Stannie was the new nickname the tabloids had pinned on the king.
“Your brother—I’m sorry—he was guilty of treason, my lord. But with his death, the crime is expunged, and I hope there need be no lingering animosity. I was only the tool of justice.”
Guy eased Ran aside. “I believe that in the Royal Order of Coenobitic Knights, there is much talk of chivalry,” he drawled. “Yet you, sir, serve a king who knows nothing of chivalry … nor justice. How do you make that reckoning with yourself?” Guy let out a fake-sounding laugh. He looked magnificent in his green overtunic and snow-white necker, with his hairknot full of emeralds. His hand was on the hilt of his sword and it was a real sword, Ran knew, not a toy like the one he himself was wearing. “Of course, you are not truly a knight but only a soldier. And as we all know, soldier’s justice is whatever the brass says it is. It must be pleasant never to have to think!”
Ran found himself in the middle of a knot of Guy’s friends, Overwhelm officers and tourney knights, all pressing close to support Guy. Sir Yates-Briggs had no friends with him. Plenty of non-Sauvage knights and nobles had come, but no one from the Wessex conglomerate.
“I do not wish to quarrel with you, Sir Guy.”
“Oh?” Guy took an aggressive step forwards. His shiny high boot came down on the wineglass Sir Yates-Briggs had left on the ground, smashing it. “Then perhaps you should not have spared me!” His voice held a raw, wounded note Ran had never heard before. “Was that chivalrous?”
Sir Yates-Briggs looked past Guy at the other Sauvage knights. “Is there no one here who knows what chivalry really is? Or has the creed of power corrupted all of you, and made you forget that the soul of knighthood is mercy?”
Colin Argent said loudly, “I know not what you speak of. I know only that you did most grievously dishonor my cousin—and not for love of mercy, but that he might drink to the full of the cup of bitterness your king has poured out for the House of Sauvage!”
“Perhaps no one knows pure chivalry these days.” Sir Yates-Briggs said. “Perhaps all of us are corrupt. But I’ll wager I know more of what corrupts a man—and of the pity that may move him when he least looks for it—than any knight whose weapon of choice is blunted, and who fights for atteints, not the lives of his comrades! Oh, I know whereof I speak—I was a tourney knight, too. I gave it up to become a true knight! I joined the ROCK to fight terror and defend the Crown. I have skirmished more than once on Sauvage concessions in Khmeria, protecting your bondsmen—”
“From natives armed with bows and arrows,” someone jeered. “What glory!”
“What century do you think we are living in? Those ‘natives’ have rifles now, and they know how to use them. I went to Khmeria for glory, and I found a war. It changes you. Sir Guy, perhaps you should try it.”
Guy was pale. Through his teeth, he said, “Perhaps I will.”
Ran saw it all in a horrible split second. His pride challenged by Sir Yates-Briggs’sinsults, Guy would join the ROCK, too, and go away to fight in Khmeria or Africa or somewhere, and get killed. And then Ran would have no brothers left at all.
“Guy! Guy!”
“What?”
“Why would you go abroad to find enemies, when we have plenty of them right here in Britain?”
The knights laughed, but some of them also whooped approvingly. “There speaks our Lord Protector!”
Encouraged, Ran forged on. “The king killed Piers and it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t just. It was murder. We have to declare war on House Wessex!”
There was silence for a moment, and then another ripple of laughter. Even Sir Yates-Briggs smiled.
Guy was biting his lips. “Ran, I think we all understand how you feel … but …” He shook his head and stalked off.
22
Vivienne
At The Same Time
A local band played in the pavilion, alternating jigs and reels with popular standards, mixing in a few tunes from Vivienne’s youth. They sounded dated now. But then I am dated, she thought. Nothing ages you like the death of your eldest child.
She’d ordered them not to play anything too dirgey. This was a wake for Piers, no matter what anyone said, but she wanted to keep the official focus on Ran. They had to look to the future.
The dancing spilled out into the paddock. Vivienne circled in the stiff arms of Duncan, Lord Stuart.
“I need money,” she said crisply. “Are you interested either in purchasing a minority stake in our heavy tanker fleet, or investing in our Spanish agriculture operations?”
Stuart must have been eighty by now, but he was still spry, his mind as sharp as the creases in his dress uniform. “I’d take a stake in the North Sea oilfields. Your grandfather pinched the exploration rights off us to start with.”
“No. Either of the above.”
“Weregilt?”
Vivienne nodded heavily. Tristan had hit her with a lawsuit for the staggering sum of £5.2 billion, the estimated loss inflicted on House Wessex by the death of the Crown Prince. Now that Piers had been found guilty of Harry’s murder and executed for it, House Sauvage was responsible for paying Harry’s weregilt. They couldn’t dodge that the way they had dodged the bullet of attaint, by transferring Piers’s assets to Ran. Not Piers’s personal estate but his survivors were liable for the payment. It was a foul law much abused by great Houses in the past, now largely fallen into abeyance. Trust Tristan to resurrect it.
“He has the High Court under his thumb,” she said.
“Shocking. Well, I can’t afford to buy your tankers or your orange groves. But I don’t see why you want to sell them in the first place.”
Vivienne laughed bleakly. “We’re not that rich.”
“Then tell him to bugger off.”
“I have two sons left, my lord. My first care is their safety, and my second care is Randolph’s inheritance. If I must sacrifice a part to safeguard the whole, so be it.”
“Give Tristan your hand and he’ll take your arm off.”
“I know,” she said. “But what else can I do? It is the law.”
“And just you wait and see what other laws his pettifoggers come up with. I’ve been having a squint at the inheritance-law books myself. Right of angary, hamesuchen … they could legally bankrupt you, my lady, and not a judge in London with the courage to show them the door.” Stuart snorted. “I was all for taking judicial appointments away from the Church, but lately it strikes me as a sight worse to have them in the hands of the temporal authorities.”
“Meaning Oswald Day,” she said bitterly. “That knave is at the back of this vendetta.” She believed no such thing. But Day was always a convenient scapegoat. His low birth and his accumulation of power at National Chivalry gave everyone reason enough to suspect him of the dirtiest maneuvers.
“Too much ambition for his own good, that one,” Stuart said dispassionately.
The tune came to an end. Vivienne accompanied Stuart back to the pavilion. The skin drum thundered, the clackers snick-snacked, and the electric fiddle sang the regimental tune of the Overwhelm. An eightsome of knights stamped and whirled in the middle of the pavilion, all of them jacketless, some of them shirtless too, steaming like horses.
“I’m not as young as I was,” Stuart said. No one could hear them over the band. “But I’ll be damned if I spend my last years watching Tristan pervert the law and undermine the Comity of Lords. Stuarts were kings once, you know. So were Sauvages.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’ve already suggested to Tristan that he ought to call Parliament. He won’t hear of it, and quite right too. He knows it’d be the end of him.”
“Then … what?”
“Best solution is always the short and sweet one. Learned that in the War.”
The medals on his breast were a frieze of jewels and gold; they included the Chain of the Realm’s Defense and the Cross of Chivalry.
“I won’t have any more violence done for my sake,” Vivienne said.
“As the Kaiser said to his ministers. Next day the Russians overran his eastern frontier.”
“That’s a slippery argument, my lord. We are not dealing with an existential threat to civilization.”
“Aren’t we?”
Vivienne stalled for time by lighting a cigarette. Stuart raised an eyebrow at her, his quizzical regard measuring her nerve to the milli-inch, damn him.
Well, they could not do anything without her. They would need her cause as a banner to rally the public. The English always sided with an underdog, and they would side with a bereaved mother’s quest for justice. They would be less likely to tolerate a cabal of wily old ministers (for it was a certainty, not a guess, that Stuart was not alone in this) circumventing law and tradition to replace the king with their own choice of …
… queen. That’s what he was asking of her. It could not be anything else. House Stuart’s claim was much older, forgotten by everyone except the Stuarts themselves. And could Duncan Stuart really think to claim the throne at his age? Too absurd. It would have to be her.
Great Britain had not had a queen in four centuries, but that, too, was just a matter of tradition, which could easily be overturned.
Well, it’s flattering, she thought bleakly.
… but oh, it’s probably no more than old men grumbling over the newspapers in the Army & Navy Club.
And yet.
She couldn’t stop thinking about how alone Piers must have felt as he died.
I should have gone to him. I should have gone—
But if she had gone to London, she wouldn’t be here today. Ran and Guy would be motherless. Tristan would have arrested her on some pretext, hoping to wring out of her the location of the Worldcracker, information she didn’t have.
At least the loss of the Worldcracker had one benefit: it leveled the playing field.
“It strikes me that we need each other, my lord.” She kept her tone playful.
Stuart seemed to be losing interest in the conversation, glaring at the swan fountain, at the townsfolk sitting on the wet grass and playing a drinking game. “You’ll be issuing new bonds to cover the weregilt, I suppose?”
“Yes. I’ve already scheduled an offering of my own bonds.” And she would need all the capital they could bring in, just to buy back Piers’s outstanding bonds. One counted on revenue from relics—hospital fees or else an outright sale—to cover the liabilities that came due upon a heavily collateralized person’s death. Well and good, if they had all of Piers’s relics. Tristan had hung onto his head. Give it another week, then she’d formally sue for its return …
“What about your little heir? You must have had his credit assessed already.”
Vivienne wanted to tear her hair. Did he not know that Ran was incurable? Many factors could damage a credit rating, but incurability put you out of the game. “He’s only nine, darling. We hardly expected he would so soon have to take his brother’s place.”
“Quite right. Can’t expect a boy his age to take up executive responsibilities—absurd. You’ll be keeping him at his books awhile yet?”
“Of course.”
“Then send him to me. Send him to me, and I’ll take a few of your bonds along with him—name your price.”
Vivienne hesitated. She’d considered long and hard where Ran might safely continue his education. The practice of dispatching noble children as hostages to cement alliances had ended, but it lived on in the kinder, gentler disguise of the semester system, where highborn children went to study for periods of six months to a year at the castles of their parents’ allies. Vivienne, distrustful as she was, would be the first to acknowledge that society needed the system. There could be no disputes too severe among lords and knights when they had each other’s children in their care. And on a more practical level, it was important for children to go away from home to make the friendships that would benefit them in later life.
Most highborn children were not incurable. But she and Wills had agreed they would not treat Ran as different. They would give him the same sort of childhood his peers had, for as long as possible. Was it not even more important now to keep up that pretense of normality?
This was the way to avoid war. Perhaps the only way.
An explosion crumped through the paddock. Overhead, wheels of fire expanded, overlapping, burning, fading.
“Send us Phyllicia,” she shouted to Thom. “Send us Phyllicia and you shall have Ran for the next six months.”
“My favorite granddaughter! She’s only six.”
“I’ll care for her as if she were my own.” A granddaughter for a son and heir, it’s a more than fair bargain, she thought. And the whole country will see the publicity shots of Ran studying and sporting with your grandsons, and will know that we are closely allied. Yes, the arrangement would suit both their Houses.
She had to let her baby boy go.
“A year,” Thom said.
“Six months.”
“Done. Who’ll you send with him? His brother? We’d be honored to host the great Sir Guy for the spring season.”
Vivienne’s lips tightened. “My son Guy,” she said, “has retired from tourney.”
Golden rain dripped from the night sky like napalm.
23
Ran
At The Same Time
As soon as the first fireworks went off, Ran dashed to the mews to make sure the dragons weren’t too frightened.
Just as he’d feared, he found them all wide awake, rigid on their perches with their tails lashing.
Dragons liked heights, and so the Dublin Castle mews had a ceiling as high as a church. It was not divided into stalls, as in most mews; instead the space was filled by a wooden structure like a jungle gym that went all the way
to the ceiling. When Ran had been younger, he used to climb up to the topmost perches himself.
He padded into the middle of the mews, avoiding clumps of fewmets. The dragons’ fright gave a sharp edge to the hot, musthy, metallic smell. “Honor! Honor! It’s all right. There’s nothing to be scared of,” he called. His dragon’s comb—the frill of skin that ran from her elegant, greyhound-like head to her withers—stood up, quivering. “It’s only silly people having their fun. You’re too brave to be scared of a few old bangs and booms, aren’t you, my straker?”
She hopped off her perch, half-opening her wings to break her fall, and landed awkwardly by his side. She was eighteen months old, not even half-grown. He laid his cheek against her dark grey neck. She vibrated like a silent engine—that was normal, not a sign of fear. Despite being reptiles, dragons could keep themselves warm by motitation, a clever trick of fidgeting their core muscles. The downside of using so much energy to stay warm was that they needed to eat their own weight in meat.
Come on, my straker. You wouldn’t say no to a midnight snack, would you? This time Ran spoke to the dragon without using his mouth. She did not answer back, but then she never did. She just gave him her feeling of hunger and anticipation. Dragons were simpler than people. He wished he could be one, quietly motitating on his perch while the world flashed and banged and boomed around him.
He led Honor through to the stores and surgical area. Sir Beatty, the Sauvage dragon maester, sat on an overturned feed bucket by the gas fire, massaging the belly of the orange female Topaz, an adult dragon five times Honor’s length and weight.
Ran tiptoed towards the cold store, careful not to break Sir Beatty’s concentration. But Honor nipped at Topaz’s rump, and Ran had to dash back and drag her away from the pregnant cow. “Sorry, sir!”
Sir Beatty shook his head. “The damage is already done, I fear. All our good work for naught.”