Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) (28 page)

     “You see?” Avek said to Ancenon, who nodded.

     “What?” I demanded.

     “Your reasoning,” Ancenon said.  “We have all remarked on it.  Past the ken of simple Men.”    

     We were nearing the back entrance to the palace.  Rennin and Ceberro were walking together and watching us.  Jaheff had run ahead – I didn’t know for what reason.

     “Well, it was obvious,” I said.  How could I explain a renaissance to them – a revolution that had totally changed human thinking?

     “To you,” Avek said.  “Just as your prior statement was obvious – to
you
.  Yet we speak of no simple truth, but of
the
truth, Your Majesty.”

     “We speak of certain aspects of our faith,” D’gattis said.  “We speak of the building blocks of what we believe.”

     Faith, I thought.  I think a lot about faith. 

     “Do you know what faith really is?” I asked them.

     They looked at each other, then at me. 

     I sighed.  There were Wolf Soldiers running between the procession and the palace – my palace.  That left me a lot to accept.  My palace – I’d become the one responsible for this nation, for these lives.  No more
Heir, no more putting things off on Glennen’s failings.  The buck really
did
stop here now.

     “Faith is the color gray,” I told them.

     They smirked as one.  Simple Man thinking, yes?

     “If evil is black, and good is white, then faith is that area of ‘what if,’” I told them.  “Faith is where you ask yourself, ‘Am I allowed to do this?’

     “Because if you knew – if you
knew
what your god wanted of you…” I left my voice trail off.

     “You would be a monster,” Ancenon said.

     We all regarded him.  I wanted to hear this, but I had lived in fear of it since the moment that my mind first went down this road.

     “If I follow your new allegory,” Ancenon said, “then evil is not the presence of opportunity, but the possibility of absolutes.”

     D’gattis nodded.  “If I follow Adriam, then I will not kill the innocent,” he said.  “But who is innocent?  If I know, for example, that the Dorkans are innocent of nothing, then I can kill Dorkans with impunity, and terribly.”

     “And if I know that all Andarans are innocent,” Avek continued for him, “then I am helpless before them.  No matter what they do, I cannot kill them.”

     “Such an existence would be hell,” Ancenon said.  “The one who lived without faith, with absolutes, would commit the most unspeakable evil, perhaps to lay down his head at the chopping block at the end of it all.”

     “My people believe in a savior,” I told them.  “He died for our sins.  In a world of faith, then couldn’t that mean that he died for those who killed the innocent for mistaken reasons of faith – for the sins a man couldn’t know he committed, because he could not know the will of his god?”

     They were all silent at that.  Here, they called a demi-god called ‘Steel,’ the savior, but they didn’t know why.

     “Black Lupus,” D’gattis said, “the Uman-Chi have watched you with wonder since we returned from Conflu, and you were reported to the King by Ancenon as a formidable Man.  You improved on those feelings with your expertise as a military man.  You turned that wonder to awe and anger when you sacked Outpost IX.  You turned those feelings to a grudging respect by becoming the king of this nation and totally changing it in a short span of months.”

     “And I will confess to you now,” Avek said, “that I am sent here by Angron himself to negotiate a peace with you at all costs, because there are Uman-Chi who believe that you will soon be unstoppable.”

     “After he did everything he could to kill me first, of course,” I said.  I looked from him, to Ancenon and to D’gattis.  I knew they had to have some knowledge of the King’s plans.  Ancenon had once been his heir, after all.  They must have danced on a fine edge between the oath and their loyalty.

     Avek nodded.  “Even when I entered the service of the Wolf Soldiers,” he said, “I knew that Angron considered you a threat to the Silent Isle and, as someone who knows his people, I felt certain that he would try to dispose of you.

     “And as someone who has known you, and has an understanding of you,” Avek continued, coming dangerously close to confessing our agreement, “I am obliged to tell you that, if I or these two Uman-Chi repeated this conversation to the King’s council, you would terrify a man with the wisdom of one thousand years, and that there are Uman-Chi who would stop at nothing to find this home you claim to come from.”

     “And that only because every attempt to eradicate you has failed,” D’gattis said.

     I walked past my old suite of rooms while we spoke in heated Cheyak.  It would remain empty until I named another heir.  I had a
whole tower now.  I let Glennen’s kids keep their old rooms, only because I had no other use for them.

     “There is nothing more powerful than a thought,” I said.  “And your fear is that I think the most powerful thoughts of all.”

     They nodded.

     It hit me like a slap in the face.

     I understood what War wanted from me, and why.

     Karel let me know that Tartan had been approached by the Confluni
and
the Trenboni, but had turned both down flat.  

     “Whether this was because he knew he might be tested, or because he honestly holds his commitment to you close to his heart, is your guess,” the Scitai said.

     Karel, Shela and I were in my personal chambers with Lee, who seemed to be having a frank discussion with her ‘bebe’, wagging her finger at it and making nonsense sounds.

     “And the rest of the peerage?” I asked him.

     He smiled, leaning back on his pillow on our divan.  “Dorkans are leaning pretty heavily on your Tren Bay coastal towns,” he said.  “They want to be able to build towers on your coast.”

     “And install teleportals,” Shela scowled.  “Who gave them permission?”

     “The Baron of Britt,” Karel said.  Britt referred to the peninsula west of Eldador the Port.  “His name is Jahon, and he complained non-stop that he can’t make a living on his land.”

     “His land is a stretch of rock covered in salt spray – I would be surprised if things were otherwise with him,” I said.

     Karel frowned and nodded.

     “The baron of Tonkin didn’t give a firm, ‘No,’ either,” Karel said.  “I would give him a few days before confronting him – he might want to report this to you and see what you want done.”

     In fact, Genden had requested an audience with me for the next day.  It was getting late, and court would be hard to make in the morning if I didn’t get some sleep.

     “I appreciate your doing this,” I said to Karel.  I still didn’t like him, but I had plenty of use for him.  That was good enough.

     He nodded and left.  Shela deposited Lee in her bassinet, quickly becoming too small for her.  Now that we had Nina, we were preparing to transition Lee to her own room in order to get some privacy.  Nina had wanted to join us here as well, and had reconciled herself to an adjoining room.

     “Planning on conquering me tonight, your majesty?” Shela asked me, her eyebrow raised.

     I laughed and took her in my arms.  “I’ve conquered you a lot lately,” I informed her.  “Your territory must be getting sore.”

     She
laid her head on my shoulder.  She didn’t want to admit to me how she had been affected by the attack at my inauguration, but I knew.  She’d been hinting that she wanted another child – this might be coming to a head now that my life had been threatened.

     “You live your life at such a pace,” she told me, “no wonder Blizzard loves you – you travel faster than he does.  I worry that if I blink too long or sleep too deeply, I will miss you.”

     I smelled her hair, all evergreen and straw.  She was my dark spring, I thought to myself right then.

     An Earth mother who could turn into a hurricane on a dime.

     I spontaneously shoved her into our bed, flipped her onto her stomach and took a fist full of her hair.  She whimpered as I bent her neck back, then threw the back of her dress up to expose her.

     “Your
majesty
,” she gasped, a smile on her lips.

     I slapped her behind and drew another whimper.

     The least I could do for such a woman was to conquer her occasionally.

     Sleep that night was interrupted by a strange noise.  It wasn’t singing or wailing, but a mixture of both, like the old style of Spanish crooning I’d learned in grade school.

     Shela lay snuggled down into the comforters, Lee held her bebe in her bassinet.  I rose quietly and set my feet to the cold,
wood floor.  Some people preferred carpet, but I’d rather that the cold hurt my feet and wake me up.

     I padded out of the royal bedroom into a parlor we kept, which led to it.  Here we had a table, couches, chairs and book cases with nothing in the
m.  Glennen hadn’t been an avid reader but had loved hunting, so there were all manner of mounted animal heads which I personally found repulsive.

     The parlor had an exit to the outer hall where a squad of Wolf Soldiers would be standing guard, as well as a break off to an informal dining room I didn’t even know existed before today, and a couple other rooms which were likely for servants or such.   One of these we’d outfitted for Nina, and the wailing came from there.

     My first thought: if the Bounty Hunters came at me through that sweet girl, I didn’t care what it took, they were over.

     I opened the door and found the purple-haired girl in the center of the room, on a thick-pile carpet, her knees tucked up under her chin and tears streaming from her eyes, looking up at me like the loneliest and most lost soul in the world.

     “I – I’m sorry,” she informed me, in Aschire.  “I tried to be brave, but the walls are stone.”

     She’d lived every day of her life in the Aschire forest.  She’d slept in the boughs of trees surrounded by her tribe, by animals that she considered a part of her, all these living things.

     And here she sat in what she must have considered a tomb.  My heart melted.  I sat down next to the poor girl, and she immediately found her way into my lap.

     Her head tucked under my chin,
her fingers interlaced mine.  The girl couldn’t have weighed as much as my saddle.  She pressed her ear to my chest, her tears soaking into the cotton shirt I wore, and she sighed.

     “I’m sorry,” she told me.

     I hugged her with my free arm.  “Don’t be sorry for trying,” I informed her.  She shifted to snuggle closer.  “Don’t you worry at all.”

     She chatted to me about missing her dad, about being scared of the dark, about never having seen a bed or looked into a mirror before.  All things I take for granted.  She told me that the bed didn’t smell right but the floor did. 

     For everything I’d been through in the last two weeks, in the last two months, since getting here, it was kind of nice just to sit on a floor and to comfort a homesick little girl.  It was more than an hour before I realized that she’d fallen asleep, and another before I was willing to put her into her bed.  I tucked her in, then padded quietly out of the room without closing the door.

     I crossed the parlor and
opened the door.  The Wolf Soldier guards snapped to attention.  I recognized the sergeant.

     “Send two men to the Lady’s garden,” I ordered him.  “There are a couple of potted trees, one on other side of the door.  Bring them.  Be quiet about it.”

     In another half of an hour I had a sapling at either end of her bed.  As I set down the second one, she roused, looked up and saw the tree leaves over her head, reached out and stroked them, then looked at me, smiled and went back to sleep.  I waited for a while, then slipped back into my own room, into my own warm bed with my slave girl.

     She slipped into my arms, telling me she hadn’t been asleep, or at least not very asleep.  I didn’t see her checking in on us but that didn’t mean much.

     At least I wasn’t a monster, or at least not much of a monster yet.

Chapter Thirteen

Party People

     I
wish
I could have gotten away with one day of feasting and celebration for the inauguration.  People who traveled for days or more to get here didn’t want to show up for a few hours and go home, especially when they could find so many useful things to do now that we’d all come together, and I’d made myself a captive audience.

     The palace had a gigantic ballroom with blue-veined marble floors and white, fluted pillars reaching up to the arched ceiling fifty feet above us.  Huge bay windows opened up onto the bay, paned in real glass.  Buffet tables lined the walls and a troupe of musicians played.  The next day there would be dancing, and the day after that the players from the Theatre au Thera would be performing.

     “Slave,” the Confluni princess said, a flick of her wrist indicating the direction of the kitchens, “fetch us chilled wine, would you?”

     Shela’s eyes widened.  The Confluni princess made an exquisite creature, barely five feet tall with straight, jet-black hair and a willowy body.  She dressed in long white silken robes with a red silk sash that trailed behind her.  Three girls stood in her attendance, images of her, and ensured that no one stepped on her clothes.

     “Um, we have servants who’ll bring you what you want,” I informed her.  “Shela attends me.”

     She stepped in close to me, parking her body under my nose, making sure I got a good whiff of her perfume.  She looked up into my eyes; hers warm and brown like some vulnerable predator.

     “Perhaps I could attend you for now,” she offered, “and we can give the slave a break.”

     The storm that crossed Shela’s face was a terrifying thing to see.

     “I admire you so for bringing back the institution,” the princess informed me, her hand casually touching the front of my tunic.  “Some are simply born to serve.”

     I couldn’t help thinking that this chic would be dead in five minutes and then I would have hell to pay in a war between Conflu and Eldador.

     But what to do?   Shela
was
a slave, not a free woman.  Lee as my daughter wouldn’t succeed me – in fact, a son had no guarantee of that, either.  That made me, in fact, the
single
King of Eldador, and what did I expect other nations to do
but
ply me with their daughters?

     This wasn’t the first one, either.  A Volkhydran warlord had sent me a woman who spent an hour fascinated with my description of economics.  Not to be exceeded, two Andaran
warlords had sent their daughters on mares for me to deflower in exchange for Blizzard’s services.

     I couldn’t help thinking that going after the horse was pretty low – but it
had
worked in the past.

     “Shela, attend your father,” I ordered her.

     “Your majesty?” she asked me.  It was a comment on her resolve that she was able to sputter that out.

     “Now,” I informed her.  The princess would piss her off because she could, and something bad would surely happen.  Shela was no shrinking violet.  She wouldn’t put up with that forever, slave or not.

     “By your leave,” she informed me with a nod, her eyes as cold as ice.  The princess watched her leave, looking over her shoulder in order to ensure that her breasts remained pointed at me, shooting an, “It is good to discipline them,” after the unfortunate Andaran while she remained in earshot.

    
Sparks dripped from Shela’s clenched fist, down at her side.  I put my back to my angry slave girl and shifted the princess on the other side of me.  I didn’t know if I could protect her that way, but it provided the only chance she had, and in fact she didn’t burst into flame.

     The
reception dragged on.  When I managed to excuse myself from one of these women, another found me.  Once the foreigners finished with me, the locals started.  Groff had a niece, Hectar a sister (seems his father had felt some surge of energy just before death) and the Lady Jameen of Angador a twin.  She, an equestrian like Shela, sported a shocking head of red hair and a gigantic rack that she seemed very proud of.  She wore a dress cut down half way to her navel and if they hadn’t invented glue then the thing held onto her with either magic or pure faith.  Tartan saw her and actually walked into a pillar.

     “Your majesty,” Rennin addressed me
during a lull, Ceberro and Hectar in tow with him, Nantar and his wife right behind.

     I pasted on a smile and took a drink from my bowl of mead.  I felt bloated, halfway drunk, my feet ached and my head hurt.  “Your Graces,” I said, inclining my head.

     I saw the two Andaran girls sizing me up for another pass – they’d parked themselves by the buffet tables.  If I could get the Dukes to get me to the door, I could make a run for it and hide in my rooms.

     “Enjoying yourself?” Ceberro asked me.  The smirk on his face told me that he knew the answer.
  His lips and eyes weren’t puffy anymore but there were purple marks.  He’d been quite the topic of conversation – apparently it turned out to be a real honor for me to put your lights out.

     “Tell me that one of our cities is under attack,” I ordered him.

     “All peaceful,” Hectar informed me.  His wife had sparked up a polite conversation with the Confluni princess when I had stupidly strayed into a corner.  If she hadn’t, I would probably still be there, getting felt up.

     “Who would attack the Conqueror?” Rennin asked me.  “You’re invincible, you know.”

    “No, I’m not, I swear,” I said.  “Get the word out.”

     Nantar laughed his laugh.  I don’t know what it is about him, but you can’t be too upset with Nantar there.

     “Glennen used to hate this, too,” Ceberro informed me.  “One of the reasons he loved Alekanna so much I think is that she rescued him from the daughters, the sisters and hangers-on.”

     “And that happened when Eldador was a backwater,” Hectar said.  He swept the grand ballroom with a predator gaze, his eyes picking targets.

     “Eldador is a major force of Fovea now,” Nantar noted.  “It’s worth a daughter to make it hard for you to attack someone.”

     “Seems that the Andarans feel this way,” Ceberro said, indicating the two girls with his chin.

     Kills With a Glance joined us.  I looked for Shela and she had left him.  For a panicked moment, I couldn’t find the Confluni princess.

     “Your majesty,” he said, inclining his head.  “You were wise to send my daughter to me.”

     “Oh, oh,” Nantar’s wife, Lanette, said.  “Oh, she must be furious.”

     “She has no place to be,” Kills informed them.  “She is a slave, fairly tra
ded.  She had to know that someday there would be other women.”

     “Thorn’s father has three wives,” Nantar added.  “And a concubine as well.  The concubine is Thorn’s mother.”

     “A wise man,” Kills noted. 

     Rennin grinned to himself.  “Why can’t I imagine Shela serving another wife?”

     “Just think about the most violent thing you ever saw,” Nantar said, “and then multiply it by… the next most violent thing you ever saw.”

     “Ha!” I told him.  “Maybe to start.”

     “No,” Kills informed us.  “My daughter will follow her man as I raised her.  She might not like it, but she knows full well who she is.”

     Thing is, Shela
did
know full well who she was, and that made her the love of my life, and I didn’t
want
anyone else.

     “There is no way to just… marry her?” I asked Kills.

     He regarded me, then shook his head.

     “It speaks well of you that you consider her,” he informed me, “but you can’t.  Andarans marry only Andarans, and to do other
wise would shame her tribe.”

     “And I don’t see you taking a few years off to be accepted by an Andaran tribe,” Rennin told me, flatly.  “I know something of the rituals.”

     “Seems to me that kings get to decree stuff like this,” I said.  “I mean – why be a king if I don’t get to just change the laws at will?”

     “You aren’t the king of Andoran,” Kills told me, and I could see him becoming irritated.  “Andoran has no king.  If you aren’t an Andaran and you aren’t accepted as an Andaran by one of its tribes, then no matter her love for you, she won’t marry you and, if she tried, it would shame all of us.”

     I sighed.  This was intolerable.  It was also distracting, unfortunately, and it hadn’t occurred to me that talking to Kills for this long was a perfect invitation to the two Andaran girls to swoop in, and of course they took advantage of it.

     “Your Majesty,” one said.  She was
‘Sings Softly’ of the Wet Belly tribe – a large, southern tribe from the south of Andoran.  Like Shela, her hair ran black down past her shoulders, olive skinned with big, brown eyes.  She’d dressed out in a simple ball gown compared to the intricate, colorful outfits some of the other women were wearing.  Her friend, from another southern tribe called the Drifters, was called ‘Little Bird,’ and other than being a couple inches shorter than Sings Softly with a rounder face and wider eyes, they could have been sisters.

     Both were built like Shela.  I guess the Andarans had decided what I liked.

     I inclined my head to them.  “My Ladies,” I answered them.

     Ceberro and Rennin exchanged a look, both smirking.  Kills regarded both girls, clearly lingering on their breasts.  The dresses didn’t show much cleavage but both clearly were designed with cleavage in mind.

     “We wanted to admire your command of our Andaran language,” Little Bird said, her voice so soft that I really had to pay close attention in order to hear her.  I think that might have been her goal.

     “And we wondered,” Sings Softly added, “if you shared an interest in our oral tradition.”

     Nantar rolled his eyes.  Well… Thorn was his good friend, so I’m sure there was some joke or innuendo here I’d missed.

     “Shela shares it with me all the time,” I informed them.  “I really enjoy it.”

     Kills shook his head and took his brow between his thumb and forefinger.

     “I was admiring your mares,” Rennin informed them, stepping in for me.  “Those from the south or Andoran aren’t like those from the north, are they?”

     “No, your Grace,” Sings Softly answered him, her eyes flickering between he and I, clearly wanting to  be sure that I didn’t escape while he occupied her.  “The south is more prone to rain, the southern horses are wider of hoof, heavier.”

     “Slower,” Ceberro chipped in.

     “Little advantage to speed in the mud,” Nantar said, “if your horse is mired or slipping.”

     All of the other men nodded.  Yeah – no one’s hunting you guys!

     I felt a stroke on my arm and turned to see the Volkhydran woman had circled in from the left and flanked me.  This one also had dark hair past her shoulders and a heaving bosom, on display in some kind of wrap-around, red thing which didn’t reveal much skin, but looked like it revealed a
lot
of skin.

     Rather than long and straight, this daughter of Volkhydro kept her hair kinky and wild – untamed like her people, I couldn’t help but thinking.  Aileen’s had been blonde but wild like that, too.  It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of Aileen in a long time.

     She turned her head up to me with big, doe eyes and asked, “Are you discussing horses, your Majesty?”

     Oh, sweet baby Jesus.  Of course, I don’t know that thinking that meant anything here.

     “We are discussing the history of the Andarans,” Sings Softly informed her,
just
stiff enough so that the rest of us caught it.  “I don’t suppose you’ve been educated?”

     “Not in that,”
the Volkhydran girl – Neveratta, I believe, of Ulef, Kark’s daughter – informed us all.  “What – what would be the point?”

     The Volkhydrans bristled, Nantar barked a laugh.

     What a nightmare!

    
The two Andarans squared off on the Volkhydran girl.  I faded back, cut behind Ceberro and made a beeline for the exit.  Wolf Soldiers may or may not have cut off anyone coming after me – I didn’t know and I didn’t care.  If Shela was as upset as I thought she’d be, then she’d go to the stables, and that’s where I beat a hasty retreat to.

     The best part about the stables was that
the palace offered about a dozen ways to get there, all of them different.  I swept through the halls, my hard-soled boots banging on the stone floors, past Uman servants who either bowed or curtsied in surprise, not expecting me to be in the back ways of the palace, especially not without a Wolf Soldier entourage.

     I emerged through a side entrance that cut past the Heir’s rooms, now vacant, and emerged from a little-known entrance where the stables cozied up against the palace walls.  I stepped past an over-full hay cart, two wheeled and its tongue braced against the ground with the harness still attached.