The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (27 page)

“Mom’s always worn that hat,” John said.

“Mom made the office something different, with the accent on the
Protector
instead of the
Lord
. The commons up here in the north-realm love her for it, too, the way Nonni Sandra and then Mom reined in the nobility without ripping the place up.”

“And she’ll be Lady Protector for the rest of her life,” John said, a little more cheerfully, evidently trying to look on the bright side. “Since she holds it in her own right of birth and I won’t inherit while she’s here. Mary Mother willing, I’ll be the age she is now before I have to take it on, or older.”

“Sure, and you can just slide into it as her apprentice, so to speak. She’ll have more than enough work, being High Queen without Da until I come of Throne age, and Lady Protector to boot, so you can take some of that off her and then run in harness with her when I take the throne.”

“Oh, Christ,” he said mournfully, wincing. “Years and years working under Mom’s supervision . . . you know the way
she
works, as if wading through documents and listening to bureaucrats and negotiating with backwoods barons were just one long course of cherry pie and brandied apricot ice cream with cittern accompaniment. I’ll be an old man in twelve months! Or endowed with an enormous case of Bureaucrat’s Bottom.”

“Don’t look at me with puppy-eyes as if you’ve been condemned to the squirrel cage,” she replied dryly. “And if the lard gets out of control, you can always go down and do a volunteer stint.”

The elevators in Todenangst were run by convict-manned treadmills
in the dungeons; for some reason
squirrel cage
was what they were called, though they actually looked like an endless set of steps on chain loops. When the elevator wasn’t in use the same treadmills pumped water from the deep tube wells to the cisterns high above, supplementing the windmills on the points of the witches-hat roofs of the towers.

It wasn’t a sentence of death, not like the bad old days when men had just vanished into the lower reaches and never come out again except as pallid emaciated corpses. But it wasn’t a pleasant way to spend a sentence of, say ten years, either. Even compared to making big rocks into little ones for the roads or digging drainage ditches or cutting timber and picking oakum for the Navy.

“You’ve got years and years—hopefully decades and decades—before you actually have to assume it fully,” she went on.

“Christ and His Mother grant it, but don’t I get at least a few years of being a carefree young lord kicking up his heels?”

“No, you don’t, Johnnie, except what you can fit into your spare time: we’re the Royal kin.”

He sighed and rolled his eyes, but without real anger and nodded as she continued:

“Just be glad you don’t have to do the whole thing now. But we need to get you
declared
, officially the heir. With some sort of ceremony, in that nice orthodox Cathedral with the Cardinal-Archbishop or someone like that presiding. There was a point to keeping it ambiguous while . . . while Da was here . . . but now . . . Look, Johnnie, face it: you’re male, you’re Catholic—”

“Mom is Lady Protector and they’ve accepted that.”

“She’s
also
Catholic,
and
she has you,
and
you’re the son of the legitimate daughter of Norman and Sandra Arminger. I’m female and I’m of the Old Faith and my father was a pagan Mackenzie.”

“He was my father too!” her brother said, sounding genuinely offended this time.

She made a soothing gesture. “Of course he was, Johnnie. Sorry I am, and I shouldn’t have put it like that—but it’s more obvious to outsiders with me, you know what I’m after saying? When was the last time you put on a kilt?”

He shrugged, the easy smile coming back. “You look better in skirts, Sis.”

“It’s the legs . . .”

“All right, I admit it, I’m an Associate in my heart,” he said.

“Which is the point. Seriously, the Associates were pretty good about putting up with Da, considering that he was the son of Juniper Mackenzie and Mike Havel, and considerin’ how many of their grandfathers stopped the pointy end of Mackenzie arrows and Bearkiller lances during the wars against the Association . . . not to mention that Da’s father killed Norman Arminger—”

“Who’s our other grandfather, yours as much as mine. And considering that Father founded the High Kingdom
and
won the Prophet’s War . . .”

She nodded. “True. But
I
didn’t do either of those things, the great fame and amazement of the world, eh? There is absolutely no way half or better of the baronage will tolerate a pagan High Queen Regnant who’s
also
Lady Protector. Not to mention, say, Count Stavarov, can you imagine it?”

“I can imagine his head over Traitor’s Gate,” John said a little grimly.

“If Nonni Sandra could never manage that safely, do you think
you
could? Or me, for that matter?”

“Point,” he said; he hadn’t known her as well as Órlaith, being younger, but her reputation was yet green. Probably that reputation was what made him continue thoughtfully:

“Or he could just . . . have an accident, like so many of the people who got in Nonni’s way did. Because he would just
love
to be Lord Protector, and to hell with Montival.”

“We don’t do that sort of thing so very much anymore, to be sure we don’t,” she pointed out.

Though
not so much
isn’t at all the same as
absolutely never
, and if he ever tries to set me up with his repulsive son Yuri again . . . who he would just
love
to see as Consort to the High Queen, and his grandson’s fundament on the Raven Throne.

House Stavarov was one of her maternal grandfather’s bigger mistakes, in her opinion. He’d used their manpower in the early days, and
while from all the tales he hadn’t trusted
anyone
very much except perhaps Nonni Sandra, he also thought he could keep them inconsequential by putting their estates in the Chehalis lowlands, where the climate was too damp for really first-rate farmland.

That meant the ruins of Seattle lay in House Stavarov’s fief of County Chehalis, and Nonni Sandra had had to confirm it as a House Stavarov demesne as the price of their support in the chaos after the Protector’s War. It was one of the rare but always painful occasions when Norman Arminger’s area of historical scholarship had played him false; in the early-medieval Norman kingdoms where his heart and mind had dwelt since his youth, salvage wasn’t a crucial economic factor. Here and now after the Change it most certainly
was
. Seattle was the largest of the dead cities within easy reach, and even with the Crown Third taken off the top it produced a huge and influential revenue stream each and every year, capable of buying everything from knights to newspaper editors.

Odd that a man born before the Change had that blind spot. He would have done better to let them have the Skagit Valley baronies and kept Seattle in Crown demesne instead. Water under the bridge, and it isn’t the most important thing right now. Da was right, a ruler has to be a six-armed juggler and just ignore the odd itch.

Resolutely she went on: “We’ll just give him and the others absolutely no grounds to complain in the House of Peers. And by the Protectorate law of succession you
should
get it, so they’d have right on their side if you didn’t. The Great Charter doesn’t mention anything about who gets the Lord Protector’s office, and local law always has precedence where there’s no specific provision in the Charter to the contrary. None of the Associate peerage is going to quarrel with an uncontestable hereditary succession by primogeniture in fee tail; they have too much invested in the principle. But if we put it aside . . . sure, and it would be in the nature of a
free-for-all tale
.”

He frowned, winced when the feudal pun struck, and took a sip of his coffee, which he preferred black. She’d always found that just a little odd; austerity wasn’t generally his style, but even brothers had their complexities. After a moment he said thoughtfully:

“I could do you public homage for it—I mean, as heir to the Lord
Protector’s office. Heir to heir, as it were, since you aren’t going to take the throne for years anyway. That way, by the time Mom passes, God and the Virgin grant it be a long, long time”—he crossed himself again; he was devout, though no fanatic—“most people still around will have spent plenty of time accepting that the Lord Protector is the High King’s, or High Queen’s, hereditary vassal and always will be. That it’s not just a personal union because of Mom’s marriage to Dad. Nobody who’s got vassals of their own is going to publicly disrespect that, either.”

“Right.”

Johnnie’s plenty bright, just a little lazy about using it sometimes,
she thought, and continued aloud:

“It would be totally awkward to have Mom swear homage to me—even after I succeed to the throne.”

He winced. “Yes, it would, wouldn’t it? I mean . . . I just can’t imagine it.”

She nodded. “But this will handle that neatly, you see? Separating the lines of the High Kingdom and the Protectorate.”

“I can
absolutely
imagine doing homage to you,” he agreed, smiling a little. “Or Mom, for that matter.”

His face went stark as his thoughts turned elsewhere, and she remembered descriptions of men sweating in fear when their grandfather gave them a glance.

“And I can absolutely imagine leading Protectorate levies when we find out who killed our father. Find out in detail. Whoever they are, I want to see them
burn
. Not just their soldiers. Their lords. I want blood.”

She nodded; he generally wasn’t a violent man, but now . . .

“That plate won’t be stinted, Johnnie, I promise you. But you know the old saying.”

“It’s a dish best served cold, yeah. We can’t go off with the crossbows half-spanned, we need more intel.”

“Speaking of which, I ought to introduce you to the
Jotei
, to Reiko. Obviously that’s going to affect how we deal with this. Absolutely not her fault, the Three Spinners wove it in the deeps of time, but the quarrel did follow them across the ocean, so to say.”

He grinned at her, chewing a mouthful of roll, swallowed, and put a purring smoothness in his tone—exaggerating for effect.

“You want me to charm her? Got a dynastic marriage in mind, Sis? I hear she’s cute. Exotic foreign princess . . .”

“Sweet Mother-of-All, no!” Órlaith said, sitting bolt upright. “Look, Johnnie, seriously, none of your tricks the now! She’s a
Queen
. Empress, actually. I know you think you’re Lady Flidais’ own sweet special gift to women, but we have to be
very careful
with these people! Promise? Otherwise I’ll damned well forbid you her presence and get Mom to back me up.”

He made a little abbreviated court bow in his seat. “Of course, Orrey, my solemn oath. I was just tying your boot-laces together to see you trip. You’re a bit solemn at times. I’m not stupid, you know.”

“No, but you’re a male and you’re nineteen.”

“
That
makes me stupid?”

“No, it makes you an engorged penis. With feet, but no brain except the Little Head half the time,” she said bluntly, and was glad to see him laugh. She went on:

“And we do need to find out the full story. This isn’t just normal politics, Johnnie. Not even a normal war. Things like the House of Peers or some Count’s ambitions or who does homage to who for what . . . we can’t neglect them, but for that an ordinary sword forged out of an old leaf spring would do.”

She had the Sword of the Lady across the back of the chair. He looked at it and nodded as she said:

“The Powers are at work here.”

He touched his crucifix again; the conversation was tending into a region that prompted that. “You think these guests of ours are on the side of the Angels?”

Most Christians in Montival believed that the Beings who’d aided her father on the Quest were just that—Angels, or possibly Saints, which he’d regrettably misconstrued as pagan deities. And that the Lady who’d gifted him with the Sword was their blue-mantled Queen of Heaven and Mother of God. Father Ignatius
had
had a visitation from Her in the
mountain snows on that great journey, in which she’d called the warrior Benedictine to be Her knight.

I don’t disagree,
she thought.
Only with the names the other way ’round, so to speak.

She nodded. “Or at least the
Nihonjin
are on the side of humankind. I don’t think they’re stainless, but they’re good and bad on a human level according to our natures as They made us, which is to say as apes with a touch of wolf. That evil our parents fought and beat here in Montival is of the Powers too, Johnnie. That isn’t going away and it isn’t limited to the High Kingdom, it just takes different forms in different places.”

He nodded. His Church recognized the constant power of their Adversary. In some ways it was an easier concept for him than for someone of the Old Faith.

She frowned a little: “But . . . the Nihonjin weren’t lying to me, understand . . .

“But?” he said.

“They
were
leaving bits out, starting with what they were doing here in the first place. They didn’t arrive here by accident, or simply because they were chased, though they were. And they didn’t come here to talk to us, either, though they are eager to get our help now; they didn’t know we existed any more than we knew that they were there. I also get the feeling that there are internal tensions involved in their group.”

“Never a Court without faction,” John said confidently. “And by your report, that’s their court in miniature your new friend has along with her.”

“A couple of their high officers of State, at least. The heliograph messages from Herry say they’re relaxing a bit the now.”

“She’d know, even with the language problems,” John said with a smile. “Probably she’s part of the reason—our Herry’s a hell of a lot more perceptive about people than your average knight. Her mother’s a wonder at setting people at their ease, too . . . the mother that wasn’t an assassin and former Grand Constable and Marshal of the High Kingdom and whatnot.”