“Yes. Everyone knew that.”
“But things fell out otherwise for me, and so be it. There are other pleasures in life beyond sitting on a throne and issuing decrees, and I hope now to indulge in them.”
His gaze rested on her face in a disconcerting way. Once again, as had happened in the Labyrinth, she found herself stirred unexpectedly by desire for him.
That had infuriated and appalled her then; but then Prestimion had been the enemy, the rival. That was all behind them now. Even if she discounted two-thirds of what he had been telling her here, it still seemed to her that he had come gracefully to terms with his displacement. And she saw distinct signs that he was attracted to her as well. She found herself wondering what use she might be able to make out of that in her own struggle with Korsibar.
But even as she was thinking these things he rose and gathered his books under his arm again. “Well,” he said. “You’ve put my mind at ease. I would never want there to be unfriendliness between us, Thismet.”
“No,” she said, looking toward him as he left the cubicle. “By all means, let there be no unfriendliness between us.”
* * *
The majordomo said, “The Lady Roxivail your mother is here, Lord Korsibar.”
She was a startling sight. Delicate of build, small and dark and preternaturally beautiful, Roxivail was so much like Thismet that it might almost have been thought that she, and not her son Korsibar, was Thismet’s true twin. Her black curling hair had that same rich glossy sheen, her eyes the same diabolical sparkle. She entered Korsibar’s office clad in a short clinging robe of shining black satin subtly worked with purple figures, all ruffles and lace and beaded filigree-work, and a bodice cut down so deep that her breasts stood forth from it all but bare, high and round and firm like a girl’s. The sweet thick aroma of attar-of-funisar came from the hollow of her throat. She was tanned a deep rich color wherever her skin could be seen, as if she went naked half the day on her sunny isle of Shambettirantil.
Korsibar looked at her in astonishment.
“You should cover yourself before me, Mother.”
“Why? Am I so ugly?”
“You are my mother.”
“And must I dress in some particular fashion on that account? I’m not accustomed to dressing like an old woman, nor do I see any reason for matronly modesty before you. We are strangers to each other, Korsibar. You were a baby when I left this place. I feel very little like anyone’s mother.”
“Nevertheless, my mother is what you are. Cover yourself.”
“The sight of my body disturbs you? Forgive me, then,” she said with a coquettish smile. She knew she had unsettled him, and she was enjoying it.
Korsibar could see now why Lord Confalume had not greatly regretted her leaving of him.
He continued to stare coldly. The smile turned to an impish grin, and she drew a fold of satin down over her bosom. “I’ve come to say goodbye,” she said. “In two days’ time I leave to begin my journey to the Isle of the Lady. Where an ugly struggle awaits me, I think, with your aunt the Lady Kunigarda.”
“A struggle? For the Ladyship?”
“No messages of welcome have come from her. No emissaries from her staff offering to accompany me to the Isle. No mention of the instruction that must be given me if I am to perform the Lady’s functions. No indication of any sort that she recognizes you as Coronal, or that she intends to stand down from her post.”
“Ah,” said Korsibar. He had learned that already, the value to a king of that noncommittal ah.
“Of course, she’ll have to stand down, like it or not, once I’m there. You’re king and I’m your mother and the rules are the rules: the mother of the Coronal becomes Lady of the Isle, and that’s that. Still, I think there’ll be trouble first. She’s tough and stringy and hard, is Kunigarda, and gives nothing up easily. I remember her well from the old days.”
“If she refuses to yield to you,” said Korsibar, “I’ll send orders for her to give over.”
Roxivail laughed. It was a sharp-edged brittle laugh that grated on him like a file. “It is precisely because she doesn’t regard you as a legitimate Coronal that she’s not likely to turn the Ladyship over to me. Why, then, would an order from you make one twig’s bit of difference to her? But leave her to me, Korsibar. I’ll bring matters around to where they ought to be.”
“You actually want to be Lady of the Isle, then, Mother?”
She seemed taken by surprise by that. A moment went by before she said, “Yes! Of course I do! Why would you ask such a thing?”
He said, nonplussed, “You much preferred the comforts of your island in the Gulf, is what I had heard. Your lavish palace, your soft warm breezes and bright sunlight, your good life of luxury and idleness.”
“A palace and breezes and sunlight I can also have on the Isle of Dreams, and luxury too, if I want it. As for idleness, I’ve had enough of that for one lifetime.”
“Ah,” he said again.
“I never expected to be Lady of the Isle, you understand, or anything else, ever, but myself. Lord Confalume’s estranged wife is who I was. But what kind of identity is that? Known to the world only by the name of the man I once was married to? When I lived at the Castle I had nothing to do from dawn to dark, and little enough after that. And so it’s been for me in Shambettirantil too. Well, then, Korsibar, somehow you made yourself Coronal, and that makes me Lady of the Isle, for which I’m eternally grateful to you. At last I have a role to play in the world. Oh, I’m looking forward to the Ladyship, all right. Make no mistake on that, my son.”
“I see,” he said.
She was just like Thismet in spirit as well as body, then. A beautiful idle woman, too intelligent for her own good, hungry for power. Not that he had ever had any doubt of it, but plainly Roxivail was her daughter’s mother.
She said offhandedly, “How has Confalume taken all of this, by the way?”
“All of what?”
“This. You snatching the crown out of his hands and putting it on your own head when Prankipin died. That’s what you did, isn’t it? That’s what they’re saying, at any rate. We spoke, Confalume and I, just for a few minutes the other day: the first words that have passed between us in twenty years, I think. He seemed altogether changed. He’s like a shadow of the man I knew. All the stuffing’s gone from him. Is he sick, do you think?”
“His health is fine, as far as I know.”
“But he let you make yourself Coronal? He didn’t object at all? Prestimion was supposed to get it, from what I heard. Why didn’t Confalume speak out right then and there to prevent you from doing what you did?”
“It was already done,” said Korsibar. “There was a feeling among us—Thismet, Farquanor, some others, and I—that Prestimion wasn’t right for the throne, that he was too proud a man, too full of himself. And in some way not truly regal: he doesn’t hold himself apart from others, as I think a king must do. He mingles too readily with too many. And so I acted. And it happened so swiftly that Father could not or would not stop it. He let it be; and here we are.”
“ ‘Proud and full of himself.’ That’s how I’d describe your father too. I never liked Confalume, you know. I’m not talking about love, boy. I never even liked him. Stiff and pompous, so terribly conscious of what a great Coronal he was. Sleeping with him was like sleeping with the Stiamot Monument. So I woke up one morning not long after you and your sister were born, and I said to myself that there was no longer any reason to stay here, that I had little interest in rearing babies and even less in being the Coronal’s consort, and so I left.—But it astonishes me, all the same, that Confalume would have let you pull that trick of crowning yourself Coronal. He must be getting old.”
“He is not young,” said Korsibar solemnly. He glanced in a hopeful way toward the door, wishing someone would knock and interrupt this. But he had no appointments scheduled for the rest of the day. “Well, Mother—” he said.
“Don’t be afraid, I
’ll be gone soon enough. I have just a few little words of motherly advice for you first.”
Korsibar smiled for the first time since she had entered the room. “Better late than never, is that it?”
“Perhaps motherly advice is the wrong term. Counsel of state might be more accurate. We are both Powers of the Realm now. This is political advice.”
“Very well.”
“First. Marry Thismet off as fast as you can. Give her to one of your good-looking young lords—that Navigorn, for example. Or your friend Mandrykarn, the one from Stee. Someone robust enough to satisfy her, and loyal enough to you that he won’t start intriguing against you the moment he’s married to the Coronal’s sister. You can’t let her stay single. Beautiful single women are restless creatures, and restless women make trouble. I should know, Korsibar.”
“Thismet’s restlessness has already begun to show,” Korsibar said. “I’ll take your advice under consideration, and I thank you for it.”
’Two,” she said. “Get rid of Prestimion.”
His head jerked about in surprise. “Get rid—”
“Absolutely. Don’t just banish him. See to it that he disappears permanently. There’s someone on your staff who’ll know how to do that, I assume.”
“Farquanor, I would think. Or Sanibak-Thastimoon. But Prestimion’s no danger! He seems to have accepted the loss of the crown very well indeed.”
“Has he?”
“Oh, he’s hurt, no question about that. But he’s a practical man, a realist. I’m king and I have the army behind me, and what can he do about it? He’s a decent clean-souled man. I’ve always thought of him as a friend.”
“A friend,” Roxivail repeated scornfully.
“Yes, a friend! What do you know, Mother? All these people are just names to you, but I’ve lived with them all my life. Surely Prestimion thinks he would have made the better Coronal: how could he not? But it’s over and done with. The throne has passed from Father to me, and Prestimion knows that that can’t be undone. I wouldn’t harm him, not for anything. I intend to offer him a high place in the government, in fact, to pacify him, to ease whatever resentments he’s still carrying around.”
“Get rid of him,” Roxivail said once more. “You can’t buy a man like that with a Council seat. He’s another proud one, another who’s swollen with himself. I knew his father: a proud man too, as bad as Confalume that way. Prestimion’s the same. If he’s been friendly to you lately, it’s only because he’s biding his time, waiting to make his move. I tell you, Korsibar, he won’t rest until he’s standing on top of your dead body trying your crown on for size. Have him killed.”
Korsibar shook his head. “I took the bad advice of the magus Sanibak-Thastimoon and we made an attempt at killing Prestimion’s friend Gialaurys on the jousting field. It couldn’t have worked out worse for us. I’m done with killing, Mother. Prestimion means me no harm; and I’ll do no harm to him.”
“Do as you please, then,” she said with a gesture of indifference. “But test him in some way, I would suggest, to see if he’s as benevolently inclined toward you as you imagine. And do it soon.”
“I’ll give that some thought.” He kneaded his knuckles together and wished her ten thousand miles away. “Do you have any further advice forme?”
“This is enough, I think. Come: get up from that desk, boy. Give your mother a farewell kiss.” Her eyes sparkled maliciously. She pressed herself tight against him as they embraced, wriggling a little, flattening her breasts against his chest. Her kiss was not a motherly one. He released her quickly; and quickly she was gone.
* * *
Prestimion said, “Another summons from Korsibar. This time to a private audience in the Confalume throne-room.”
“Concerning what?” asked Svor. He stood against the great outcurv-ing window of Prestimion’s suite in the Castle, a comfortable apartment in the building of white brick known as Munnerak Tower on the Castle’s eastern face, that was set aside for the residences of princes of Prestimion’s rank. It was mid-morning. Shafts of golden-green light streamed through the faceted glass behind him.
“Concerning the place he means to offer me in the government,” Prestimion replied. “This following on the discussion I had with him our last day in the Labyrinth, when he said I’d eventually be invited to hold a high place in his reign.”
“Be careful,” said Septach Melayn. “Favors from your enemy often have poison at their centers.”
“By which you mean what?” Prestimion asked.
“His goal is to compromise you, I suspect, by making you complicit in his capture of the crown. When you’ve been sitting there at his right hand in the Council-chamber for a time, giving your assent to his laws and decrees and appointments, and then one morning you rise up against him and call for his overthrow, you’ll look merely ungrateful and treasonous, an overly ambitious underling spitefully attacking his master.”
“Whereas if I continue to hold myself aloof from him, neither openly rebelling nor accepting any post from him, I maintain my distance from a regime that I intend in time to brand as unlawful. Yes. I see that. And what if he doesn’t permit me to maintain that distance?”
“How would he do that?” asked Septach Melayn.
“By taking the position,” said Svor before Prestimion could reply, “that anyone who isn’t with him is against him. Surely Farquanor will have put that idea in Korsibar’s head already: try to buy Prestimion’s loyalty by pulling him close with some important role in the government, and if Prestimion should refuse, interpreting that as a sign that Prestimion means sooner or later to make trouble. That’s the advice I would give Prestimion if the situations were reversed.”
“Yes,” said Septach Melayn, drawing the word out slowly. He held his dress-sword across his knee and was polishing its bright steel lightly with a strip of chamois. “Two peas of a pod, you and Count Farquanor. Put your beard on his face and I don’t see how we could tell the two of you apart.”
Gialaurys, who had been silent a long while, said to Prestimion now, “When is this audience with Korsibar to happen?”
’Today. An hour from now.”
“Just the two of you, you and he?”
“So far as I know.”
’Take a dagger, then,” said Gialaurys. “Stand there next to him, and listen close to all he tells you, and smile and nod and give him no cause for distress, and then when everything is warm and friendly between you, pull out the dagger and put it in his heart, and put the crown on your head and announce yourself to be Coronal.”
“Bravo, Gialaurys!” cried Septach Melayn. “You must have been taking lessons in treacherousness and perfidy from our beloved Duke Svor! And you are an apt pupil, it seems.”
“The treacherousness,” said Gialaurys coldly, “is all Korsibar’s, for stealing the crown. This would only put matters to rights again. Where’s the shame in that?”
“Do you think Korsibar will have no guards nearby?” Prestimion said. His voice was very mild; he was more amused than angered by Gialaurys’s suggestion, outrageous though it was. “I cut him down, and the next moment my body lies next to his on the throne-room floor. It will have been a very short reign for me. But I know you mean this as loving counsel, Gialaurys. You want me to be Coronal, I think, even more than I want it myself.”
“What will you do, then, when you come before Korsibar?” asked Svor.
Prestimion said, frowning, “I have no clear plan yet. What would you suggest for me, any of you, short of hiding daggers in my bosom?”
“Best not to go at all,” said Septach Melayn. “Failing that, to do much listening and little speaking, and when he makes you the offer, to say that you need time to consider it, that you must speak with your mother the Lady Therissa first, and see if you are needed more urgently at your Muldemar estate than here.”
“Good. That buys me a little time, but only a little.”
“I wish I had some shrewder thing devised for you,” Septach
Melayn said.
“As do I.”
“This audience, you say, is in the throne-room?” Svor asked. “Not the Coronal’s office?”
“The throne-room, yes,” Prestimion said.
Svor’s expression darkened. He turned a little, so that he was staring out the window instead of looking at Prestimion. “I see trouble in this. He fears you; the royal office, grand as it is, evidently isn’t grand enough for him for this meeting; he wants all the majesty of the throne-room surrounding him when he addresses you. Which is a sign of weakness in his soul. An enemy whose soul is weak but who nevertheless has great power at his command is more deadly than a strong one. He’ll strike out of fear, like a cornered snake. Take care, Prestimion.”
“Yes. That I surely will.” He threw open the door of his great wardrobe closet and studied the array of garments within. “The next great problem, gentlemen: shall I dress in something rich and grand, as befits a high prince summoned before a Coronal? Or will it trouble him if I do, and shall I dress more modestly, like the humble vassal he no doubt would like me to be, which will put him at his ease?” Prestimion laughed. “And yet I don’t want him to take me too lightly. Perhaps the middle range is best, in this as in all other things.”
He chose, in the end, simple but costly clothing, a white silken tunic that looked more like cotton, and gray hose of the same deceptive material, and an ordinary red cape cunningly worked around its borders—but only there—with figures in cloth of gold, and plain leather buskins. At the last moment he drew forth the green stone amulet of Thalnap Zelifor, the corymbor on the golden chain, and slipped it around his neck.
Gialaurys and Septach Melayn accompanied him as far as the Inner Castle, leaving him at the entrance to the throne-room precinct itself. Duke Svor, having a prior meeting with a lady of Duke Kanteverel’s following—for that was a great thing with Svor, the attention he paid to ladies, and they to him—did not go with them.
Korsibar was esconced most magnificently atop the Confalume Throne when Prestimion entered. He wore a grand robe of rich scarlet velvet over his Coronal’s colors of green and white, and the starburst crown gleamed on his brow with the brilliance of the new star in the heavens that had signaled his advent, and he held himself sternly upright in his seat to accentuate the grandeur of his powerful form. About his throat was the Vildivar Necklace, its golden links ablaze with sapphire and ruby and topaz, and his belt of black serpent-skin was studded with tourmalines and blue quartz, and on his finger was the massive fiery ring that had been Lord Moazlimon’s, a great diamond set round with jasper and onyx. It was exactly as Svor had said it would be, Prestimion thought: Korsibar, uncertain of himself within that kingly exterior of his, had opted for the full theatricality of his position in some fevered hope of maintaining an advantage over him thereby.
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