Singer from the Sea (31 page)

“S
O HE SAID
YOU
COULD MARRY HER,” SAID THE MARSHAL
, over his soup. “If he didn’t care who married her, why was he thinking of doing it himself?”

“I can’t say, sir.”

“Whatever he was thinking, it doesn’t change what I think! I do care who marries her!”

Aufors took a deep breath. “The Prince said that in view of his permission, you would probably be kind enough not to object.”

The Marshal fumed. They’d gutted him! Usurped his prerogatives! If the Prince permitted it, that meant the Lord Paramount permitted it, and what the Lord Paramount permitted, the Marshal was not accustomed to question.

He snarled, “You’ll be going off to find her, then.”

“Yes, sir. I’m taking tonight’s packet down the Reusel.”

“You think she went to Langmarsh?”

Aufors did not intend that the Duchess be brought into the conversation. He equivocated. “Langmarsh is a good place to start looking.”

“I suppose. I suppose.” The Marshal buttered a bit of bread and chewed it, calming himself. “I don’t understand it. I confess that to you, Aufors. It’s just … like this business of being at court! The Lord Paramount asked me to come to court as a kind of balance to some of the new
ministers. They seem to be a bit liberal, commonish, you know what I mean.”

“I myself am commonish, sir, so I suppose I do.”

“Didn’t mean it as a slur, Colonel. Simply meant it to express ideas that go against the covenants. Haven was set up as an aristocracy. Our covenants reflected our culture, either as it had once been or as we wished it to be. You other sorts were invited to come along, and the ones who chose to did come along, no slavery or coercion about it. So, now, a few generations later—”

Aufors interrupted, “Well, sir, it’s actually been around twelve hundred years or so. Given as few as three generations a century, that would still amount to thirty-six generations, scarcely a few.”

“The number doesn’t matter. The fact is the people agreed to live under an aristocracy. They agreed to do without high technology, so our cuitare could be preserved. Our women agreed to a certain role in that culture. Now some commons are agitating to share rights that belong to the nobility—or even the royals!—and the Lord Paramount doesn’t like it.”

Aufors accepted a plate of vegetables and rare beef and picked up knife and fork. “So you were invited to court as a counterbalance: a solid weight of aristocratic disapproval from one with a great reputation as a warrior.”

The Marshal cut a large bite of beef. “Pah, the kind of opposition these people could make doesn’t need a warrior. The least conflict, they’d run screaming. No, these are the kind who talk and talk and talk, scream and scream, march up and down with placards, but they do nothing.”

“What is it these ‘commonish’ people want, Lord Marshal?”

“I asked Prince Thumsort that! He says the men want to marry their daughters to whomever they choose. Well, no one interferes with their doing so now except one time in a hundred! Some particularly pretty girl may fit a baron’s idea of a proper upstairs maid, so her wedding gets delayed a few years and she has a child or two more than she’d thought of, but in the end she goes back to her lover, if he’s still about, richer than when she began. They want
freedom to engage in whatever trade they like. Well, mostly they can and do, unless it removes them from traditional work. They want freedom to innovate, so the traditional work will be easier! Innovation leads to technology, we’ve told them that, over and over. Man gets tired digging ditches by hand, and he goes and invents a mechanical digger. Does he care that it’ll destroy our way of life? Not in the deepsea he doesn’t.

“They want higher pay for those who work for the noble houses, they want funds set aside for women who are noticed by nobility! It’s impossible. Any woman picked out by a noble should be damned proud of it, and those who work for the noble houses should be honored to be there!”

Aufors smiled.

“What?” the Marshal demanded.

“I’ve heard it claimed that women themselves should do the choosing of their mates since anything else is tantamount to slavery and rape.”

The Marshal scowled. “I won’t argue the merits of our customs with you, Colonel. It’s not something I’d ordinarily discuss except with my own class. The thing I started out to say was, why am I here in Havenor? Since I’ve been here, there hasn’t been a single meeting of the ministers! Not one! There hasn’t been an occasion when I could be useful as a counterweight to anything! So. Why am I here?”

Aufors took a deep breath and said, probingly: “I have been struck by all the attention paid to Genevieve.”

“Well, yes, but I thought that was because of Delganor.”

“I think not. If he had been set on her, would he have treated me as he did?”

“He was magnanimous.”

“Prince Delganor has no reputation for magnanimity.”

“Perhaps he is more generous than he is said to be,” the Marshal replied, in a grumpy voice.

Aufors merely nodded. Though he thought it unlikely the Prince was better than said to be, he could not deny the Prince had behaved well. Better than the Marshal, and with less justification. But then, the Prince did not have
the habit of rage, as the Marshal did. Whatever he felt was kept hidden. That, in itself, might be a cause for concern.

Though Aufors left Havenor a full day and a half behind the Duchess, his use of the river packet put him in Reusel-on-mere in a day and a half, well before she arrived there. Reusel-on-mere was a small place with several good inns, its existence justified by the confluence of the Reusal with a number of small streams which together formed the mirror smooth blue of the Mere. Below this sizeable lake, the river was wide and slow, running between the farms of Dania and the fens of Southmarsh, a route for both cargo and passenger ships that traveled to and from Poolwich on Havenpool.

Aufors felt the Duchess’s arrival would take some time, for her carriage was large, the road was not at its best during this season, and no doubt she would pause for meals and rest. To catch her whenever she arrived, Aufors took a room in the same inn from which Enkors had been married, one with a good view of all roads into or out of the town, and he offered a good tip to the inn servants to keep a lookout should she arrive while he was away.

It did not take him long to find out that someone had been asking a good many questions about himself and Enkors and about the woman who had come down on the packet the day Genevieve disappeared.

“What were they like, these men?” Aufors asked a garrulous tavern keeper.

“Oh, you know the sort, sir. Sneaky men. Eyes never still, always back and forth, like a caged follet. Not there one moment, there the next, gone the one after.”

Aufors heard the same said several times, put two and two together and added it up to the men known to be employed by the Prince. In which case Yugh Delganor’s ignorance of Genevieve’s departure had been bogus. He had pretended not to know, but he had known, and he cared about it enough to put men upon her trail.

Had he thought he loved her then? Or, at least, been attracted enough to care about her welfare? Perhaps the latter. Perhaps he had felt obliged to do something since it was he who had frightened her. It could not have been
more than that, or he would not have accepted Aufors’s declaration in such good part. But if it had been only that, why tie Aufors to a promise of service? Well, because, Aufors told himself soberly, any such promise from an honorable man is like money in the pocket. A note that can be called at need. The prospect increased his discomfort.

The Duchess turned up about noon the following day. When Aufors greeted her as she dismounted from the carriage, she had all she could do to greet him politely.

“I did not expect to see you, Aufors. I advised you to stay where you were.”

“I did expect to see you, Your Grace, but much has happened you do not know of.”

She shook her head wearily. “What has happened that I should know? No. don’t tell me. I can’t hear anything until I’ve had a bath and a few hours’ rest. The inn in Sabique gets worse by the decade. I stayed there last ten years ago, and I believe they have not turned the mattresses since, much less invested in new ones. The dust in the corners dates from before the Inundation, and it would not surprise me to learn that the bread I was served dates from that same era.”

“Was the night before no better, Your Grace?”

“Worse, if anything.” She turned to her coachman, who was unloading luggage from the boot. “What was the name of the place, Yarnson?”

“Wohsack, Your Grace.”

“Wohsack. Indeed. And woe I had there. Well, I know this place, and it is far better. I am too tired to talk to you now, Aufors. Join me for dinner, about sunset, and we will enlighten one another.”

As they did, in the Duchess’s rooms, at a table laid before the fire, where, said the Duchess, it was most likely safe to talk for she had refused the first room the innkeeper had offered and picked one out for herself. She heard Aufors’s tale while she ate, shaking her head gravely when he had finished.

“And he actually told you to marry the girl.”

“I’ve said so three times, Your Grace.”

“Call me Alicia, Aufors. When we are alone, you can do that without offending the gentry.”

“As Your Grace wishes, Alicia. Not that I mind offending the gentry. I have mightily offended a couple of them lately.”

She leaned forward and began striking her glass with a spoon, making a tinkling sound as she whispered into his ear:

“And now you want me to tell you where she is?”

“Why else would I be here?” he whispered in return.

“Why, to help me, as I have helped Genevieve.”

He dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter. “Help … I’m sorry Your—Alicia. I didn’t know you needed help.”

She wiped her lips delicately, saying in an ironic tone, even as she put a finger before her lips, “Oh, but the Marshal must have told you my daughter has disappeared.”

“He did not! Nor did anyone at your house, when I went looking for you four days ago!”

The Duchess smiled bleakly. “Well, she has disappeared. I am on my way to Ruckward County, where my son-in-law lives. To fetch my granddaughter.” Now she shushed him in earnest, leaning to his ear once again.

“But surely … surely you will want someone to search for your daughter,” he murmured softly.

“Yes,” she murmured softly. “And no.”

He regarded her closely for a long, silent moment. “You know where she is,” he said with his lips alone.

She read his lips, then stared past him, out the window, where the sky above the mountains shone purple with evening. She rose, drew him to his feet. “Let us wander out onto the terrace and watch the stars coming out.”

One of the windows opened upon the terrace, and once there, they leaned upon the balustrade as she said softly, “I say to you that I know where a former servant of mine, a girl named Bessany Blodden, is staying. She has a new baby with her, and I would much like Bessany to be escorted from where she is currently to Merdune, far, far east of here.”

“She has left her husband?” Aufors murmured. “She is … afraid?”

“Oh, one could say that, certainly.”

“Your Grace … Alicia, I would volunteer for this duty in a moment if it were not for Genevieve. But she … she is my first concern.”

The Duchess smiled, genuinely amused. “Well, Aufors, my young friend, if you will consent to escort Bessany Blodden where she is going, you will find the one you seek, and I cannot think of any other way you will do so.”

Aufors said, “You want this … Bessany taken where Genevieve is.”

“How perceptive! Yes, I want Bessany and her baby taken where
Imogene
is.”

“And you don’t want to do it yourself?”

“I am too much observed. As you are, but you are better equipped to elude the ones following you, Colonel. There are at least three of them. Meantime, I have no objections to my pursuers following me to County Ruckward. They will find nothing of interest there.”

Aufors nodded. “Well then, how do we do this thing?”

“You do it,” she whispered, leaning toward him, and pushing a tightly folded little paper into his hand. “And do not cavil at the hoops you must leap through, Aufors. They are there for Genevieve’s protection. And my own. And yours.”

“But Alicia, why did …”

“Hush! Ask me no whys. It is better if you remain ignorant of whys. Just go, and do not let this note fall into anyone else’s possession.”

He read the paper when he returned to his own room. It did not tell him where Genevieve was. It did tell him where Bessany Blodden and her baby were. Also, it gave him the name of an inn along the Potcherwater that he and Bessany should visit, along with the name of the cook at that inn. Presumably, the cook knew something that would assist them.

Gravely, Aufors memorized what was on the paper before he burned it.

S
HORTLY AFTER
A
UFORS
’
S DEPARTURE, A ROYAL MESSEN
ger called upon the Marshal. The man bore a large red envelope heavy with seals and a dangling superfluity of gold ribbons. It contained the notice of a ministerial meeting, the agenda of that meeting, and background information on the issues. Two important matters were to be considered: Firstly, the need to increase P’naki imports from Mahahm; secondly, the question of changing the age at which noble young women would be expected to marry.

Also included in the packet was a letter from the Lord Paramount telling the Marshal what position he was expected to support. The Lord Paramount approved the lowering of the official marriage age for young women, inasmuch as the actual marriage age was much closer to twenty-two than thirty. His Majesty also approved of the attempt to increase the supply of P’Naki.

The Marshal read through the material he had been given and found it lacking in basic data. He went to the archives and dug out many facts which supported the Lord Paramount’s position, which made the Marshal feel both proud and useful. He readied himself for the meeting with considerable care, as he might have done for a strategy session with his officers in time of battle, though his naive belief that this preparation was warranted was supported
only by his total ignorance concerning the Council of Ministers.