Beyond

by Mercedes Lackey

  And we must, for the sake of Valdemar, give the Emperor what he wants.

  “This just seems so . . . petty,” he said aloud, but Star had left, and there was no one there to hear.

  “Petty” seemed to be what the Emperor reveled in.

  Too much inbreeding, he thought sourly. Though that was not really the answer. The Emperor was a petty, cruel tyrant, a man who was the center of his own universe—but the reasons that he was the way he was? They could be complex.

  Maybe the Emperor himself had been bullied and humiliated as a child. Maybe that was why he was the way he was. But Kordas knew well that however tragic an origin, or however brilliantly joyful, such events were only incubation organs for the person who emerged from them. Some terrible people could be redeemed if they weren’t too far gone. Some kind people could turn hate-filled and cruel. Some liars became the most honest, loyal friends possible. Or not. It really was up to them. Some saw the benefits of empathy and helpfulness, and gained the ecstasy of validation by love. Others, not so much, and just a few more weaponized their pasts. Whatever their origin story, an asshole was an asshole.

  Or maybe he’s just a stupid, miserable excuse for a pile of shit on two legs who wants to be the cancer he is. I think I like that answer the best. Anything else makes me examine him, and examine myself, and look for pity for him, and that opens up last-moment “but he can change” redemption as an idea, and that’s just stupid. Expose your heart and a viper laughs after it strikes you dead. He’s had decades to change, with every expert available to him, and he chose bloody tyranny. I don’t want to pity him. I just want to be as far away from him as I can get. Let him die.

  And then exhaustion took over and he slept again.

  * * *

  —

  Delia once again marveled at how clever her sister was. Isla had taken the Doll’s advice with a grain of salt. They both knew very well how much sixty thousand of those little slips of paper were going to weigh, and how large the satchel that held them was going to be, and Isla probably didn’t want the messenger to think about that for one moment longer than he needed to. So as soon as the scrying ended, Isla sat in thought for a long moment before standing up. “Go down to the stable, and have Grim harness up one of the ponies to a pony-cart. I’ll be right there to give him further instructions.”

  So Delia did just that, as Isla went off in another direction.

  By the time Grim had arranged for the cart and pony, and brought them around to the yard, Isla appeared at the stable. “I want your driver to watch for someone waving a red rag down there at the manor gate,” she said, pointing in the direction she meant. “I’m expecting someone to come from the Emperor, but I’m not supposed to be expecting him. So I’m leaving a lookout. He’ll be standing out of sight of the Gate, but within sight of your driver. When you see the rag, send the cart and driver. Pick someone who can do a good job of pretending to be surprised to see someone at the Gate.”

  “Oh, aye, milady,” Grim said, nodding. “I see where you’re a-going with this. We’ll have a nice little story. He’ll say he’s going to cut his errand short, on account of the Emperor’s messenger is more important than some small task, and bring him back here.”

  “Perfect,” said Isla, and quirked her finger at Delia, who followed her back into the manor.

  The sun was barely peeking above the horizon, so they had plenty of time to arrange a tasty little feast of heavily salted snacks. And for the drink, Isla herself went down into the cellar and brought back a bottle of distilled spirits, far more potent than even the strongest beer or wine.

  The sun was about two fingers above the horizon when the pony-cart came clattering back with its burden of Imperial messenger and satchels. One was the usual light messenger-case, but the other was nearly the size of a rucksack, and very heavy indeed. But Grim’s chosen driver was a lot stronger than he looked, and heaved the latter out of the back of the cart with such ease it looked as if it could be no heavier than a book or two. Without asking or commenting, he took it into the manor, while Isla thanked the messenger for coming, accepted the receipt for the tribute-horses, then exclaimed, with deep sympathy, “But you must have had quite a journey, bringing those account books with you as well! I am so sorry you were burdened with them! Let me offer you some refreshment before you go—and I’ll have the cart take you back once you have rested.”

  Oh, clever, Delia thought. It was true that account books frequently traveled between the manor and the Capital; the Emperor took nothing for granted, and often made checks on Kordas’s honesty. Or rather, the Imperial Exchequer did. Usually those did not come and go by Imperial messenger—but once in a very great while, within recent memory in fact, they had. So now the messenger had the thought lodged in his skull that the Duke of Valdemar had been singled out by the Exchequer, that he had cursed heavy account books, and the messenger was well rid of them.

  He was . . . well, not precisely drunk when he took his place on the pony-cart seat again. But he also was extremely cheerful, and stowed in the messenger’s satchel was the tightly corked bottle of distilled spirits that Isla had pressed on him.

  “You are too clever by half,” Delia told her sister, once the messenger was out of earshot. “He’ll want to come back.”

  “Well, the dear man deserved some reward, after being saddled with our accounting books,” Isla replied, giving her a sidelong glance of warning. “Now if he’s asked to bring something else here, at least he won’t be laggard about it, because he knows what will be waiting when he gets here.”

  Delia flushed, realizing she’d been careless, and followed Isla silently into the manor and into that little side room.

  “I’m putting you in charge of equipping our home-barges,” Isla told her as soon as the door was closed. “Go down to the barge-yards, pick three, and then start bringing everything down from the manor that we’ll need to make permanent living spaces out of them. I was going to do that, but if Hakkon and I are supposed to be conducting an affair, I can’t be in two places at once. There will almost certainly be eyes on us. I don’t expect scrying—” she sneered a little “—mostly because the Emperor is not going to permit anyone to enjoy their own little bit of salacious entertainment.”

  Delia didn’t object—although a few days ago she might have, because she had certainly never equipped a barge with anything before, much less equipped one for living in for who knew how long. By now, she’d already done so many things she’d never dreamed of doing before that she just nodded. Besides, she was more interested in the answer to another question. “You’re going to do it, then? Pretend to have an affair with Hakkon, I mean?”

  Isla sighed heavily. “Not precisely willingly. But this Record Keeper has already proven not only shrewd and clever, but full of good advice. And if the Emperor brought Kordas to the Capital with the notion of making him a figure of amusement, this will certainly fill that bill. Nothing is more amusing to a lot of salacious man-boys than the opportunity to mock someone for being cuckolded. The Record Keeper is probably correct. There are two of Merrin’s spies watching the manor, and if Hakkon and I can keep their eyes elsewhere, then that’s what we should do.”

  So Delia found herself once again on Sundrop, once luncheon was over, on her way to the barge-builders.

  There was a dead-end canal leading here, with a Gate on it, wide enough to allow for barges towed by horses to pass through it, and a second Gate for foot-traffic. The idea being that if you ordered a full string of empty barges, they could be put in the water here with your horses or some borrowed from the manor, and they could be Gated to a spot on another canal near or at their destination. There was no Gatekeeper here, but of course you’d need the proper talismans to use the things.

  This was where the Gates at what they were now calling “Crescent Lake” were linked—anyone buying barges now intending to take them home and fill them would have t
o bring his own horses and tow them to the next Gate in line. With what Jonaton called a “hard link,” the Gate used far less energy to send things to the refuge from here than they would if they used talismans. And it meant no one needed to have a talisman at all to come here from the refuge, which meant one less thing for the mages to do.

  Oh! And since we’ve got all those paper talismans now, that means far fewer talismans our mages need to make! Which means most of them can probably go settle at Crescent Lake now, rather than later . . .

  If they would. The mages did like their comfort, and there was more of it here than there. It wasn’t as bad out there as it had been when they’d created the Gates, but things were still a bit primitive.

  Not that she blamed the mages for preferring comfort in the least. She agreed with them, actually.

  She tied Sundrop up to a ring in the side of the huge building that housed the barge-makers and went inside. She’d been here before—and already she could see that there were far fewer barges stored here. Plenty of people had already claimed what they needed, and there would soon be far fewer. There were also a lot more barges in various states of construction than she had ever seen before. Every single workstation was full, and there were dozens of hulls in various stages of curing. She waited until one of the barge-builders noticed her, finished smoothing down the fungus-paste on the barge he was working on, washed off his hands, and came to see what she needed.

  “Lady Isla put me in charge of three home-barges,” she said, trying to project an air of someone who knew what she was about. “One for me, one for herself and Duke Kordas, and one for—” She stopped herself before she said “the children” and said instead, “four servants.” Because the boys would need an adult actually with them.

  “We’ve been expecting this request, and we put two aside just for the Duke and his Lady,” the workman said, wiping his hands on his apron. “Will you come have a look? I expect you’ll need to see them to understand what you can bring down from the manor.”

  She nodded, and he took her to the back of the enormous storage area, where there were two barges off to one side, set on a platform of rough-sawn planks to keep them off the dirt. As they approached, Delia could not help but notice that these barges were considerably more “finished” than the ones loaded with grain from the manor had been.

  Windows had been cut along one of the slanted upper sides of each of the two barges. Shutters that could be closed and locked to keep out weather had been installed on either side of the windows, and glass had been fitted into frames in the holes. It wasn’t the best glass possible—it had bubbles and a few thick ripples—but she assumed that, amidst the stepped-up schedule for the escape, they used what they had at hand at the moment. The barges had been painted in muted browns with black trim, and wooden decking was laid on the narrow walkways around the sides and at the prow and stern. Rough-cast brass cleats and rings were set at corners, and boarding planks could apparently be used to link several boats together. A stout wooden door at the prow, which faced her, gave into the interior of the barge, and the workman climbed up to the prow, helped her up, and flung the stout door open to let her inside.

  Inside, everything had been painted white, which made it look much larger than she would have thought. And there was room to stand upright, which she had not been expecting. Wooden decking had been laid down with hatches in it at intervals. “You’ll store anything that is waterproof beneath the hatches, milady,” the workman said. “She shouldn’t leak, but if she does, you won’t want to lose what’s down there. Or, you could stow wood for the fire down there, which is what I’d do, so there’s not wood in the way all the time, and so you can have as much as you’ll need for several days. The gods only know what sort of weather you’ll meet out there, and you know for yourself that we’ve had snows that kept us to the manor for days at a time. You might not be able to get out for wood, and it’ll be just you and your maidservants until people can break a trail to you.”

  A lot of work had clearly been done here already, and the boat had been divided up into rooms. The first one was almost all storage: a wardrobe with doors that latched shut, and cabinets, also with doors that latched shut, plus a very small table built into the deck, and a bit of seating with it, built into the bulkhead in a corner under the window, with shelves and hanging hooks above the window and the seating. I can have everything I absolutely need here, and everything else can go on a cargo boat, she thought. It was a pity that most of the nice things she’d absconded with from home would have to go into storage, but this was already better than she’d feared.

  Passages were narrow, but not impossible. You had to go single file, but she had imagined much worse. She had, in fact, imagined something like a cargo barge, with everything stacked everywhere, and sleeping on top of a bed of crates with the roof of the barge inches from her nose.

  The second room held a big bed, with a narrow passage along the wall with the window. The window, she saw now, was in a frame that could be slid open along the wall, and there were curtains to close out the light, gathered on round metal rods above and below the window. Above the bed were shelves and more ceiling hooks to make the maximum use of space.

  “This would be your bed, or the bed of Kordas and his lady,” said the workman diffidently, with a hint of a blush.

  The next room was small, and held a small barrel-like cast-metal stove with a stovepipe going up through the ceiling, a tiny hip-bath that could also be used to wash underthings or even larger garments, a bit of a pantry, and a bit of a sink.

  This is even better. She’d pictured herself having to wash small-clothes in the lake or river, and how she was going to do that in winter, she’d had no idea. But the flat top of the stove gave a place to heat a pot of water, so the wash water would be warm, at least. And once the clothes-washing was done, she could at least give herself a quick once-over with a wet cloth, even in the dead of winter.

  Next to that, an even tinier room with a close stool with a chamber pot, and sliding doors for privacy. And the last room, with a door at the end that led out to what she supposed must be the rear of the barge, held more storage and two narrow beds, one on each side, with shelves and hooks above the one that was on the wall that did not have windows. “Beds for servants,” the workman said. “We assumed you’d want them.”

  All the beds lifted up on hinges; there was more storage under them. Every tiny bit of space had been used.

  This is not going to be horrible, she thought with wonder. “Let me wander around in here and decide what I need to start bringing,” she said, and the workman nodded and left her alone.

  Kordas would without a doubt want all his personal magic books at hand, and since he wasn’t here to need them, she could start by bringing those. And bedclothes; in winter they would want as many as they possessed, given that the tiny stove wasn’t going to put out a lot of heat. Bedclothes were bulky, but rather than waste storage space, they could all be piled on the beds in layers, giving them storage and covers at the same time—layers of sheets and coverlets, and you could bury yourself beneath as many or as few as the weather required. She’d have the maids put their own clothing in the storage under their beds. She wandered from prow to stern and back again, envisioning things in all the places where they could be put and fixing them firmly in her mind. She could start by stripping her own quarters and sleeping in one of the guest chambers.

  In fact, I can start stripping the entire manor. Most of everything brought down from the manor could be put in storage boats. I’ll need to make sure there is an inventory on each one so we know where to find things. Her heart actually rose, as she understood—if Isla would allow it—how useful she could be.

  She left the boat and sought out one of the workmen. “There should be a lot of people who kept care of the manor that will need to be seen to. Please put aside living-barges for them; I’ll send them here to decide who will live
with whom and where. Can you outfit one whole barge as a kitchen?” she asked. I bet Isla hasn’t thought of that. But the cooks and kitchen staff can sleep on pallets on the floor there, and we’ll have a place out of the weather where we can make hot food. She didn’t think actual ovens for baking would be possible, but perhaps those ovens could be constructed outside.

  The workman scratched his head and his brows wrinkled in thought for a moment. “I don’t know why not,” he said finally. “It’d be several stoves. They’d hold about one big pot each. Then counters to work, and a place to wash pots if the weather’s bad. Reckon it can be done.”

  “Please do,” she said, taking it on her own to order it. Worst came to worst, she could cancel the order tomorrow.

  She rode Sundrop back to the manor in the late afternoon, having committed everything she needed to do on her own barge to memory.

  She caught Isla just parting from Hakkon, and ducked out of the way so she could watch them without being seen. She had not suspected either her sister or the Seneschal of being such good actors! They parted with lingering hand touches and longing looks; Hakkon headed for parts unknown, Isla for her quarters. Delia decided to play her part in this deception as well. She hurried to catch up with her sister.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed, doing her best to feign outrage.

  Isla started, and furrowed her brow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, ice in her voice.

  “I saw you and Hakkon!” Delia choked out. “Don’t try to deny it! I saw you two together!”

  Isla had to work to suppress a twinkle in her eyes as she caught on to Delia’s act. “That’s none of your affair,” she said, still with ice in her voice. “You should mind your own business. I will tend to my own.”