Volle (20 page)

To their right, through the archway, a six-person table had been set with silver place settings, two candlesticks, and linen napkins. A formally dressed raccoon stood at attention to one side, where a tray of platters rested. He pulled the chairs out for the ladies and arranged their napkins, and then poured a glass of wine for everyone.

“Thank you, Alcis,” Tish said, and raised his goblet. “To our friends. Your very good health.”

“And yours,” Volle replied as he took a drink. The wine was excellent, full and smooth, with a rich taste that lingered on his tongue even after he swallowed. He caught Ilyana looking at him, and she smiled as she lowered her own goblet.

“So, Ilyana, why don’t you tell Volle about your upbringing?” Tika prompted.

The vixen’s ears swiveled demurely downward. “I was raised in lower Divalia by my parents, who are former nobility. I’m the youngest of five children, and I was schooled by a private tutor. My brothers and sister all have cubs already.” She flicked her ears and smiled. “I’ve been studying with Madame Duschene for the last year, but I could leave whenever I need to. She says I’m ready to enter society.”

“Madame Duschene is a friend of mine,” Tika interjected. “She says Ilyana is head and shoulders above anyone else in her finishing school. She’s planning to have a cotillion just as soon as her family can raise the money. Oh, I’m sorry, dear.”

Ilyana waved a paw courteously, but her ears had folded back at the mention of money. They came back up quickly, so quickly that if Volle hadn’t been watching her, he wouldn’t have seen the motion. “And what about you, Lord Vinton?”

Volle was getting tired of reciting his childhood history, but he did it nonetheless. If he hadn’t known it before, he certainly did now, and the biggest challenge was refraining from embellishing the story. It had to remain consistent, not only in case people he told it to talked between themselves, but also so that he wouldn’t have to keep track of what details he’d told to whom.

Ilyana looked genuinely thrilled at the story. “Imagine!” she said. “A farmboy who discovers he’s nobility! Oh, it’s like a fairy tale.”

“I suppose so,” Volle said. “I really hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s not like I’m king or anything.”

Tish and his wife chuckled, and Ilyana lowered her eyes with a smile. “It’s still wonderful. You must be so thrilled.”

“It’s certainly been a wonderful experience so far,” Volle said sincerely as Alcis served the appetizers.

Ilyana seemed to take the comment personally, and smiled more widely. She ate delicately, as did Tika, while Tish was less graceful. Volle wasn’t sure whether to emulate the more graceful ladies or the other male, and in the end he struck a middle ground, taking small bites but using his paws as Tish was doing.

Tika took over the conversation during the meal, talking about the palace gossip, which mostly consisted of who was sleeping with whom. Tish met most of the tidbits with a chuckle, or a short comment like “didn’t know old Villutian still had that much energy.”

Volle merely listened, fascinated that this much fooling around went on, even in a palace of this size with fifty or sixty nobles and their families under its roof. The nobility’s focus on procreation was evident in Tika’s stories; most of them were inter-species relationships that were considered ‘dalliances’ and weren’t serious. Volle gathered that they might even take place with the blessing, or at least knowledge, of the other spouse in some cases.

Adultery with a member of the same species, however, was much more serious, and the one example Tika had was revealed last, over dessert, and in hushed tones. “Lady Barclaw told me that he saw Lady Oncit coming out of Lord Deverin’s quarters, and he said that her fur bushed up when she saw him, and she went very quickly in the other direction.” Volle was confused momentarily by the pronouns until he remembered that ‘Lady’ Barclaw was the male mate of Lord Barclaw.

Tish grunted, losing his good humor. “Deverin better watch himself. Oncit’s only got one cub. He could mess up the family line.”

“I know, that’s what I told Farris when he told me, and he said that
he
heard that Lord Oncit hasn’t exactly been trying lately, if you know what I mean.”

Volle glanced at Ilyana, but he couldn’t tell whether she was really listening. Her ears were down and she appeared to be concentrating on her plate, smiling very slightly. Perhaps it wasn’t proper for her to listen to or comment on this sort of thing. “Lord Oncit’s on the tribunal with me,” he said.

“Oh?” Tish looked up at him. “Talk to him much?”

Volle shook his head. “Lord Creane kept me busy. I tried to talk to Lord Oncit at lunch, but he didn’t seem very talkative.”

“He isn’t, but he’s a good wolf. Wonder if something’s bothering him.” Tish tapped the table thoughtfully.

“Well, anyway,” Tika said, “are we all finished?” Seeing the nods, she rose first, signaling Ilyana to rise with her, and Tish and Volle followed them through the archway into the sitting room. The females went into the parlor, but Tish waved Volle to a seat while he went to the cabinet in the back. He returned with two small glasses of a light amber-colored liquid.

“Finest port in Tistunish,” he said, handing a glass to Volle.

Volle eyed the liquid dubiously. He hadn’t had port since his first year in the Academy, but he remembered the sweet taste that he’d quickly tired of. He sniffed its strong sweet scent and coughed.

“Don’t stick your nose in it, boy! Just sip it.” Tish sat down and sipped at his own. “So what did you think of Ilyana?”

Volle shrugged. “She seems okay. I didn’t talk to her much.”

“You’ll get to talk more when you take her home.”

“What?”

“It’s late. It’s the gentlemanly thing to do. You don’t expect her to ride home alone, do you?”

“Never really thought of it.” Volle took a sip of his port and swallowed. It burned his tongue and nostrils, but only slightly, and the sweetness complimented the flavor rather than overwhelming it. Perhaps he should have invested in better port at the Academy.

“Well, that’s why Tika and I set this up.” He chuckled. “You’re still bound to be a bit rough around the edges, but Ilyana’s no farm girl, you know. She’s a genteel vixen of good breeding, and she’s accustomed to courtesy and decorum. Speaking of which, if you do take a fancy to her, it would be nice to offer to sponsor her cotillion.”

Volle looked narrowly at the wolf. “How much would that cost?”

“Oh, don’t worry about the cost, boy. A few dozen gold, and Tika and I will chip in, of course. But it would be a nice gesture and it would ensure that you get her undivided attention all night.”

“Can I bring a date?” Volle asked wryly.

Tish laughed. “This is all business, my dear fox. Appearances. If you like her, we’ll do another dinner again in a couple weeks, and then you can start seeing her on your own. Oh, come now,” he said, seeing Volle’s expression. “She’s pretty, and she likes you.”

“How can you tell?”

“She kept looking at you all night, and if you’d looked at her, you would have noticed it too.” He sighed and chuckled. “Can’t see how you can ignore a pretty chest—er, muzzle—like that.”

Volle laughed. “Depends what you’re looking for, I suppose.” He suddenly wondered if the ladies could hear them in the other room. He swiveled an ear, but couldn’t hear anything, and upon turning, he discovered that the door had been closed.

Tish followed his look. “They’re chatting on their own and leaving us to do the same. We’re supposed to be talking about politics and they’re supposed to be talking about us.”

“Speaking of which, I saw Lord Ikinna in the dining hall, but didn’t talk to him. Ryshko was with him, but I couldn’t tell which he is.”

“Wolf. And Whassel’s a beaver. He’s easy to pick out; there are only two of them, and he’s the one with gold-plated teeth. Keeps to himself a lot of the time, though, so I doubt you’ll see him in the dining halls.”

Volle nodded. “Can I ask you something?” Tish nodded. “You said something about the later kings using Bucher’s gold. What did you mean?”

The wolf settled back in his chair and took a sip of port. “Let me see if I can explain it better. From what I told you about Bucher, and what you know, you might regard him as evil. And you might regard Halloran as good. Barris I think you don’t know enough about yet. Nor do many of us.” He brushed his whiskers with a finger. “At any rate. The gold that Bucher collected was not collected by beating peasants or raising taxes or killing rich nobles and appropriating their holdings. It was collected as the natural result of a time when the kingdom was larger and more prosperous than ever before. As time passes, more and more people remember that prosperity as a golden age—never mind that it was built on the blood of our neighbors and our children.

“Similarly, there is nothing good or graceful about his prison. It was adorned with reliefs of his victories, but I believe I told you that those are gone. It is a horrible place of pain and despair, and why do you think it is still standing?” Volle shook his head. “It is still standing because no matter how good the king, there are still people he wants to lock up, criminals or traitors or dissidents, and Bucher’s prison is a convenient place for people to be locked up.

“His shadow is fading, but it still stretches over the land. Some remember him as an evil tyrant; some remember him as a near-holy leader. Admittedly there are fewer of the latter. But he was neither. He was only a fox, a creature of Gaia as surely as the rest of us, and so are all the kings. And I believe that the good that came of his reign—the gold and prosperity—is intertwined with the bad—the prison—and the succeeding kings realized this. Perhaps not consciously, but they knew that everything he left would be of use, and it comes to the same thing.

“Now, I am not trying to defend the things Bucher did, because some of them were truly horrible, and a violation of the contract between a king and his people. Was Halloran a better king than Bucher? By most standards, yes. But he also had good advisors. About Barris, I am not so sure. And my point, I think, was this: that in every king there exists the potential to be good or bad, peaceful or warlike. He is influenced not only by the temperament his ancestors bestowed upon him, but also by the advisors around him and also to a degree by the wishes of the people.”

“So what can we do?” Volle asked. “I mean, I’m not one of his advisors.”

“We can suggest and advise. I am close to Alacris, the king’s closest advisor, and I can give him some ideas, but not all my ideas are popular. I would like to see us at peace. Some would like to see us at war. The king, predictably for a bear, is riding the middle course, unwilling to commit to a war, but also afraid to back down completely to peace. But lately, lately…” He sighed. “If I didn’t know there was a group devoted to bringing us back to war, I would have guessed it. And some of the things Alacris has told me he’s heard from the king indicate that they are as active as we are, if not more. But we don’t know who all of them are, nor who their conduit to the king is.”

“There can’t be that many with close access to the king,” Volle said.

Tish shrugged and counted on his paw. “Barclaw, Villutian, Quirn, and Wallen among the landholders, Fardew, Alister, and Prewitt among the landless. It would help us to know whom, but there’s another matter. They’ve been quiet lately, at least given what Alacris tells me, and Lord Dewanne is worried about that. He thinks that they may have given up on convincing the king to go to war and are trying to bring it about themselves. But as he’s back from vacation now, I’ll let him talk to you about that.”

“Dewanne.” Volle tried to remember where he’d heard the name.

“He’s the other fox in the peerage. And he’s the one who found you, by the way.”

The door creaked open then, and Tika poked her muzzle through. “Are you boys done? Ilyana needs to be home before ten, and it’s a half hour ride back.”

Tish waved to her. “Yes, just wrapping up.”

“How did he find me?” Volle said as they got up.

Tish looked at him with some surprise. “He’s the one who hired Derrik. Dewanne wanted to restore a fox noble to the peerage, so he sent a couple mercenaries out to Vinton and Merinland and a couple other places the last Lord Vinton had been, to see if he could find any children the Lord might have left behind. And Derrik found you in Merinland.”

“Oh, right. Derrik. Um, he just mentioned he’d been hired, but didn’t say by whom. I thought it was you since you wrote the letter.”

“No, no. Dewanne is just attaining mid-ranking in the peerage. He needed a letter from someone higher up so there wouldn’t be lots of questions. Derrik told us about your loyalties and I wrote the letter based on that.” The wolf’s eyes met his, bushy eyebrows lowered. “And don’t think I haven’t been double-checking his work.”

Volle’s ears flicked. “I hope I passed.”

Tish clapped him on the back. “I’m reserving judgment on that, but I certainly approve of your character, m’boy.”

“Thanks.” Volle’s tail was wagging slowly as they entered the parlor.

Ilyana stood next to Tika by the door, talking in low tones. They looked up and smiled, Tika broadly, Ilyana demurely. They didn’t say anything, and neither did Volle until Tish elbowed him, hard.

“Ow. Oh. Ilyana, might I have the pleasure of escorting you home?”