Indomitus Vivat (The Fovean Chronicles) (30 page)

     She smiled back.  “For now,” she said, “just imagine the breeding.”

     I laughed.  I had an exit now.  “I’ve been long from the party,” I informed her.  “You’ve robbed me of the ride I wanted to take.”

     She smiled, turned sideways to me, and put her dainty white hands on the upper rail of the paddock’s steel gate.  “I beg forgiveness, your Majesty,” she said, and batted her eyes up at me, opening them up wide.

     Arching her back, she said, “I’m yours to discipline.”

     Yeah – that verified two things: she’d done her homework, and Shela was nowhere near here.

     I turned as if to go, my left arm swinging naturally forward, and without warning, with my body at three quarters to hers, swung my open hand down and gave her pert backside a resounding
smack
.  She yelped appreciatively.  I continued walking, turned my head to my left and said, without missing a step, “There will be games tomorrow – I’d be disappointed if Ceberro didn’t bring you to attend me.”

     I heard her say, “Your Majesty,” but didn’t slow down until I found my way back out of the stables and into a corridor in the palace that I knew for a fact was safe.

     From there I marched myself to my personal chambers, where I found Shela in her rocker with tear-stained cheeks, holding Lee.  She just watched me as I fished the chamber pot out from under the bed and blew my lunch into it.

     That was pretty much as scared as I’d been since I got here.

    
“Five dead,” J’her informed me, sitting at the round table in my personal chambers with Shela, every member of the Free Legion and Duke Hectar.  Nina had Lee and they were scouting out a wing of the palace which had been a nursery once when Glennen’s kids were young. 

     The two of them and fifty Wolf Soldier guards
to watch over them.

     After puking and letting Shela know what had happened, she’d contacted D’gattis and he’d rounded up the Free Legion with Karel’s help.  I was leaning pretty heavily on Karel right now because I had no clue how to handle this.

     “Plan on there being five more,” Karel informed him, “who’ve been mixed in with the Wolf Soldier guard.”

     “I think the consequences of doing that are pretty well known,” I informed Karel.

     The Scitai shook his head, Ancenon and D’gattis with him.  “What you did was clever once, but lucky as well, and they’ll be better able to resist you.  Keep in mind, as well, that your Wolf Soldiers are many more than they used to be.  Even with the Green One’s and D’gattis’ help, Shela could not check them all at the same time.”

     Dilvesh had been calling himself, “The Green One,” or someone else had and he’d decided that he liked it, but that was his go-by these days.

     J’her shook his head.  “It’s more complicated than that now,” he informed us.  “After that day, I set up a system where squads have codes and check in more regularly with commanders who know them.  If they’ve mixed in five, we’ll have them before the day is out.”

     “Don’t count on your regular Wolf Soldiers to be able to handle trained Bounty Hunters,” Arath – Earl Arath - informed him.

     “I do not, your Excellence,” J’her said.  “There is a whole protocol in place – trust that we have our means.”

     “A real problem is that we don’t have enough magic to meet our needs,” I said, scowling.  “And
don’t have the means to get it.”

     “A real problem is that one of your Dukes would like very much to kill you,” Ancenon countered.

    D’gattis sniffed and, sitting next to Ancenon, he informed us, “The
real
problem, which all of you are aloof of, is that our good King Rancor is alive.”

     I shook my head – this was supposed to be past us.

     Karel nodded.  “He’s right,” the Scitai said, sitting across the table from D’gattis.  “That’s been bothering me, too.”

     “Perhaps I shall settle that for the two of you right now,” Shela informed them.  She’d not liked listening to the encounter with Shellene and wasn’t in the best mood to begin with. 
She took threats against me pretty seriously.

     Dilvesh – the Green One – reached across the table and touched the back of Shela’s hand.  “You misunderstand, in your duress, my friend,” he said.  “Surely, the Bounty Hunters must realize what we’d find out.”

     D’gattis gave us one of his rare smiles.  “As your owner points out,” he said, “the spy was not clever, yet the trap a success.  If the Bounty Hunters had managed to have the King alone, and clearly seek his demise, then why allow him to depart the stables?”

     “Indeed,” Ancenon said.  “If he were correct, then what better time and place to remove him.”

     “There
is
a clear path from the stables out of the city,” Thorn said, sitting back.  “That is a much better plan than their actual assassination plot.”

     “So what are you saying here?” I demanded.  This made no sense to me at all.

     It was Hectar who said, “There’s a huge celebration going on, Black Lupus.  There was no one at the stables because the entire staff has been pressed into other services.  You didn’t know anything about that because you’re a King now and it’s beneath you how your palace is run.  In fact, I’d be surprised if you even know who’s responsible for running it.”

     I shrugged.  “I thought you were,” I informed him.  That got a general laugh.

     “I run the city,” he said.  “I don’t even know who manages the palace staff.  In fact, I suspected that it might be the Lady Shela.”

     All eyes turned to her.  She shook her head.  “There’s an Uman named O’spiree,” she said.  “I didn’t even think to check with him, but I remember him complaining that he had more guests than servants for the first time since he’d come here.”

     “So… I’m worried about nothing?” I asked them.

     That got a few heads down, thinking.  I looked from face-to-face. 

     Nantar finally said, “I think that Bounty Hunters are planning some new way to get into your Wolf Soldier guard.  I think they might even have been in the process of trying something when you ran from the stables.

     “I also believe that someone spoke to Shellene, and prepared her with enough information to entice you.  She might actually have confessed the truth to you – that her intelligence comes to her from her sister, who gets it from Ceberro.”

     “Ceberro asks more questions about you and your origins than I’m comfortable answering,” Hectaro admitted.  “He’s a fellow Duke – a peer and a friend, but he loved Glennen and if he’s forgotten the beating you laid on him to win your position, then that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen him release a debt.”

     “Ceberro may be a whole other issue for you,” Dilvesh said, “and the incident in the stables, and your own paranoia, may have conveniently
revealed a new plot by the Bounty Hunters.”

     “So all we know is that there are plots out there,” I said.  “We really don’t know that much about them.”

     D’gattis stood, and in all seriousness said, “Today, I believe, you become a member of the nobility.”

Chapter Fourteen

             
Dating

     To the east of Eldador the Port, on a wide, flat field where armies could muster or fairs be set up or all sorts of other useful things, a bandstand had been erected and a field laid out for a competition at arms.  Theran Lancers jousted; there were foot races and trials at arms, feats of strength as well as jugglers and acrobats and a play in the hottest part of the day which, considering this was the month of Order and a fall month, wasn’t really that hot.  To our north the port stayed busy with ship after ship entering and leaving with goods from and for the harvest.  To the south, wagons rolled into the city as farmers brought their goods to market.

     I sat in a huge wooden throne that a bunch of porters had lugged out here, and Shela sat on a skin at my feet, Nina behind her.  The little Aschire had made it through the night on her own, this time with Lee in her room in a bassinet.  I’d doubled the guard and, of course, we’d caught four of the five Bounty Hunters Karel had suspected, and just driven off the fifth.

     I’d confirmed that O’spiree, a fat Uman man over one hundred years of age with long, white hair down past his shoulders and a nose like a beak, had taken the entire stable staff for the previous day’s party, and I told him to stop doing that.  I explained to him the practice of ‘temp labor’, and he’d considered it a revolutionary idea and immediately recruited fifty unemployed peasants from the city streets and put them to work in the palace.

     Shela had needed to check them all, which had exhausted her, and she spent half of the day sleeping with her cheek on my calf, which was just as well.

     Magic might be useful, but it wasn’t to be relied on, I’d decided.

    
In a place of honor, much as there was one, in a smaller throne next to me, padded in red velvet, sat Lady Shellene, magnificent with an open-front gown in baby-blue with white-lace trim and tiny jewels sparkling throughout its fabric.  She’d styled her hair loose and wild around her shoulders with baby’s breath and some kind of tiny yellow flowers woven into it, and her hand continuously strayed to the top of mine.

    Shellene would, in fact, make a very good queen of Eldador, I had to admit.  She just
looked
like one.  The commons seemed to love her – she’d spent the early morning hours in the city with a retinue (and a Wolf Soldier squad) administering to the poor, not because it was a tradition here but because it seemed to be what she liked to do.  My wildly-popular edict of ‘be good to each other now that Glennen’s dead’ had brought no less than 1,000 beggars into the city and our employing fifty of them hadn’t made life any easier for the rest.  Nobles and wealthy commons were dispensing what food they could afford but a lot of this was falling on the city, and that meant that some of them were not, if fact, getting fed.

     One of my number one fears was that I was really going to suck at being a king, and Shellene seemed to know something about how to do it.  It would be a relief to have that sort of council.

     And I liked her.  Not with the emotion I felt toward Shela, but I appreciated her company and her intelligence, and I knew from past experience that this was a precursor for me, on its way to a relationship.

     The crowd cheered and it drew me from my musings.  Lee pointed a chubby finger out at the field where one warrior had just dealt a devastating blow with a wooden sword to another
, knocking him flat on his back.  I’d set the prize for victory as one hundred gold Tabaars, and that had the combatants really going at it.

     Karel suspected that the winner would be a reverse-Robin Hood, a Bounty Hunter who would use the victory to get within striking distance of me – so in fact Hectar was scheduled to deliver the prize.

     “You’re pensive, your Majesty,” Shellene commented.

     “Weight of the crown,” I informed her.

     She looked at the top of my head.  They didn’t use crowns here, and in the local language I’d just told her that the top of my head was heavy.  I smiled and added, “Heavy thoughts.”

     She smiled.  “How very clever a turn of phrase,” she said.

     “One tries to amuse a lady,” I said, smiling back.

     Her whole face lit up in an even greater smile.  That had to be some kind of amazing compliment that I wasn’t aware of, or she was showing off her looks again.

      The warrior on the field raised his wooden sword in victory as the other slapped the ground, counting himself out.  Shellene took one of the roses laid out before me and, without asking but with a significant glance at Shela, cast it out over the heads of the persons seated in honor spots below but before me, out onto the field.  The warrior made a great show of bowing to me, then went to the rose, picked it up, smelled it as if to say, “Victory’s smell is sweet,” and departed the field.  Two Uman porters in the green house livery ran out to help the fallen warrior to his feet.  Technically they should be in my grey, but it took time and a lot of money to change them all, and we were all kind of still stuck on Glennen.

    
Two more warriors stepped out onto the field, bowed to me, and were commanded by Hectar to fight.

     Shellene settled back down beside me.  In the chairs behind me were the Volkhydran, Andaran and Confluni daughters who were her competition.  I could almost feel the heat of their gazes on my arm when she took my hand again.

     I had an appointment with Henekh Dragorson after two more bouts, and then with Kills with a Glance after that.  I had a feeling that the topic of fair access might be on their mind.  The Confluni was either thanking her lucky stars or favorite goddess or something that I wasn’t interested, or she had her own plans.

     I’d heard practically nothing from the Toorians.  That had me kind of worried, too.

     Shela snored softly and I gave a little chuckle.  The poor girl worked her behind off around here.  She didn’t give me a lot of opportunity to forget to whom I owed my success and loyalty, not that I needed one.

     Wooden swords cracked together.  The crowd cheered and my blood-thirsty daughter gave a squeal of delight.

     “No doubt the child’s parentage,” Shellene commented.

     “None at all,” I said. 
I noted that Lee’s bebe was folded over the crook of her arm, and that she checked it once in a while, to make sure either that it was there, or that she had its attention. 

     No, I thought, that’s my girl. 

     “Are you aware of the trend she’s started?” Shellene asked me.

     I turned my attention to her.  Behind us, the four daughter
s leaned forward.  “No,” I said, “I am not.”

     “Bebe daughters,” the Confluni princess intruded, drawing my attention.  She wore the gossamer wrap I’d come to associate with her, her hair hanging loose, as with the rest of the
prospects.  Apparently they’d decided that’s what I liked.

     Sings Softly, the Andaran from the Wet Belly tribe, said, “They’re the newest prize for wealthy daughters in your city.”

     “Not just your city,” Neveratta added, not missing an opportunity to one-up the Andarans.  “Potters are working through the night to export the first five score to my own nation.  I’ve invested heavily in such futures.”

     That drew looks from all of the other girls.  Women didn’t usually get involved in business here, and ‘invest in futures’ wasn’t a term I’d heard here before.  I repeated it to Neveratta.

     She smiled.  “I’m giving six coppers now for dolls yet to be made, that they’ll be consigned to me once produced.  I expect that I shall sell them for between one and two silvers.”

     A pretty profit for a toy, I thought.  But then, men complimented each other on how they indulged their daughters, not on the deals they got.

     “That,” I said, and paused to draw out their attention, as I’d seen Groff do, “impresses me.”

     Neveratta beamed.  The rest frowned, especially Shellene.  She’d started this conversation for her own benefit.

     “I’m informed that you’re meeting with my uncle, Henekh, in a short time,” she informed me.

     “I believe I am,” I answered. “I’d expect you to attend, of course.”

     “As your Majesty wishes,” she lowered her eyes demurely.

     In the back of my mind, I wondered if there’d be a fist-fight with the other girls.  In the same thought, I thought maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.  Then none of them would want to see me.

     The crowd cheered.  I turned my attention to see another warrior on his back, the victor in Volkhydran furs raising a wooden representation of a battle axe over his head and shaking it in triumph.  Lee was clapping her hands and Nina, holding her, was smiling.

     Shela bit my calf.  I didn’t yelp but it wasn’t much of a bite.  I reached down to stroke her long, black hair.  I felt her fingers on the inside of my thigh and had to smile.

     “It’s good ta be da king,” I said, to no one in particular.

     One of the towers in the palace is filled with guest rooms, and around the fifth floor a huge, wide room with balconies had clearly been intended for meetings but never used.  It contained a big, long table surrounded by chairs, a set of tapestries, one of them a map of Fovea as it had been known at the time it was woven, and an actual chalkboard, which I’d added.

     I met here with Henekh and his staff, mostly because this place had outer doors which could be opened for a cross wind, and Henekh kind of reeked.

     He was still a giant of a man, probably heavier than I, sporting thick red hair on every exposed inch of his skin with the possible exception of his eyelids, his hair braided warrior-style around his shoulders.

     His niece, Neveratta, attended with a couple non-descript Volkhydran ladies.  She’d changed to a blouse and long skirt and made sure to unbutton enough of the blouse to reveal cleavage, probably based on Shellene’s perceived success.

     She wasn’t stacked like Shellene but he had nothing to be ashamed of, either.  Dark hair and dark eyes just like Shela, not as slender but a dagger on her hip in a wide, leather belt – this was a Volkhydran daughter, no denying it.

      I’d made sure that Henekh got here before I did, so that I could make an entrance.  D’gattis had helped me out with that little pointer, the idea behind it being that this put me in the power position.  Hectar attended me with his son, along with Shela and thirty Wolf Soldiers.

     Henekh had five of his own warriors in attendance.  They eyed the Wolf Soldiers with a speculation that said they’d love it if something broke out and they could prove themselves.

     Shela pulled a chair out for me to sit in, on the side of the table opposite that which Henekh had chosen
and directly in the center, which put the sun behind him, but not directly.  This wasn’t Henekh’s first rodeo, either.  I could tell he’d moved the table to give himself this advantage but didn’t say anything.

     “How may Eldador be of service to you, Lord Henekh?” I asked him.

     He made a face and I remembered D’gattis telling me that this sort of behavior didn’t suit me.  I didn’t like it much when he was right, but it wouldn’t be smart not to listen to him, just because of that.

     “What do you need, Henekh?” I asked him, correcting myself.

     It’s not like I hadn’t been to Volkhydro, either.

     Neveratta stood and crossed behind her uncle.  While she moved, he said, “What I need is a fighting chance for my niece,” he informed me.  “That red-haired bitch has been sitting next to you all day.”

     “And from what I’m told,” Neveratta said, rounding the end of the table and progressing toward me, ignoring an almost-murderous look from Shela, “she had you all to herself yesterday, when you all but ran from the rest of us.”

     I couldn’t hold back a smile.  At least I had called this one.  “How did you know about that?” I asked.

     “We aren’t without resources,” one of Henekh’s men informed me.

     Neveratta took up a position behind me and put her hands on my shoulders.  I felt her thumbs dig into my upper back and neck muscles.
  Shela actually bared her teeth, making it sort of look like a smile after a moment.

     “You shouldn’t allow yourself to be distracted from long-term opportunities,” she informed me, leaning forward to make sure that her warm breath touched my ear, “by such short-term ones.”

     “And don’t be fooled,” Henekh informed me, “that girl is a short term opportunity.  A marriage to her brings you nothing.”

     “Does it now?” I asked him.  Shela shifted in her seat next to me, and I didn’t need to look at her to know that this was already pushing her past where she wanted to go.

     This had to be hard on her.  She didn’t want this – she had no ambitions to be the Queen of anything.  She’d be just as happy with me if I were a peasant farmer – probably happier because then I wouldn’t be chasing off suitors.