By Heresies Distressed (89 page)

“As always, your mother is a mistress of understatement,” Green Mountain said dryly. “On the plus side, I expect that any of your nobles who may have been feeling restive again about the keenly felt injustice of finding themselves saddled with a mere queen have rethought their positions. Meeting Emperor Cayleb face-to-face would probably have produced much of that effect, anyway, of course. While he may not have struck them as a ‘delicious young man,' I rather doubt that any of them would like to find him angry at
them
. And even if they were prepared to risk that, the Kingdom's reaction to the attempt on your life should have been sufficient warning for anyone but a complete idiot. Your people haven't forgotten what happened to your father, you know, Your Majesty.”

“Neither have I,” Sharleyan said darkly.

“No, of course you haven't,” Alahnah said, and her own eyes were hard. “I'm rather looking forward to paying our debt to Hektor Daykyn. In full, with all deferred interest.”

“As we all are, Mother,” Sharleyan replied, reminding herself that word of Hektor's assassination hadn't yet reached Chisholm. Or, rather, it hadn't reached anyone
else
in Chisholm. That was going to change almost momentarily, of course, but she was beginning to fully appreciate the enormous advantage Merlin Athrawes' “visions” and the ability to communicate information over vast distances almost instantly truly conferred.

Not to mention the pain in the posterior Cayleb must have found it when he couldn't share that sort of information with
me.

“The most important thing, aside from the fact that you're still alive, is how well you succeeded in communicating who was truly behind it to everyone here in Chisholm,” Green Mountain said. She looked at him, and he smiled at her approvingly. “Your mother's right about your decision to come home. No message from you could have been as convincing as actually seeing you here, on Chisholmian soil, and it's a very good thing that you arrived so close on the heels of the news itself. Whatever anyone else may say now, for the first five-day or so there was an enormous amount of suspicion. Halcom's plan to drive a wedge between Chisholm and Charis almost worked. In fact, if he'd managed to kill you after all, it
would
have worked.”

“I know. I was afraid of that from the very beginning,” Sharleyan admitted. “That's why I waited long enough for Baron Wave Thunder's investigation to confirm at least some of the details. I needed to be able to tell people here who really planned the attack, and why.”

“And the price your Charisian guardsmen paid to keep it from succeeding,” her mother said softly. “I'll never forget what those men did for you, dear.”

“Neither will I.”

Sharleyan felt her eyes burn once more and made herself draw another deep breath.

“Neither will I,” she repeated. “But since they did manage to keep me alive, I suppose it's time the three of us got down to work.”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” Green Mountain said rather more formally, and she smiled at him.

“First, Mahrak,” she said, “I'd like to discuss your view of the way Uncle Byrtrym's allies on the Council are most likely to react to all of this. Then I'd like your personal impressions—and yours, Mother—on how our own Temple Loyalists are likely to respond. After that, there are a couple of treasury issues I promised Baron Ironhill I'd look into. It's past time Cayleb and I got a common imperial currency established, and now that we have the Imperial Parliament just about fully organized, we can start thinking about other things. So—”

Her mother and her first councilor sat back, their expressions intent, as Sharleyan set briskly to work.

Sharleyan looked up as Edwyrd Seahamper opened the door and cleared his throat politely.

“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, but a courier has just arrived from the Emperor.”

“He has?” The empress's eyebrows arched, and Seahamper nodded gravely. Without, she reflected, so much of a flicker of expression to betray the fact that he and Sharleyan had already known the man was on his way. She smiled mentally at the thought.

At least there's
one
person I can discuss things like this with without worrying
, she told herself.
Cayleb may have Merlin, but
I've
got Edwyrd, and that's almost as good
.

“He says his dispatches are urgent, Your Majesty,” her personal armsman added, and she nodded crisply.

“In that case, by all means, admit him at once.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Seahamper withdrew briefly, and Sharleyan looked around at her mother's and her first councilor's faces. She was a little surprised by how much they'd managed to accomplish since lunch. There was still far more
to
accomplish, of course. It could scarcely have been any other way, after her long absence, but they'd made a sizable dent in the backlog. It was fortunate that so much of it consisted simply of approving and confirming decisions they'd already made.

And the best of it is that, for all intents and purposes, Mother has been ruling Chisholm in my stead, and there hasn't been even a hiccup. Not on the secular side, at least. Maybe I've actually managed to convince the Kingdom that a monarch doesn't have to be male?

Of course, there was always the religious side. The good news there was that between them Archbishop Pawal, Green Mountain, Sir Ahlber Zhustyn, Chisholm's equivalent of Baron Wave Thunder, and Earl White Crag, the Kingdom's Lord Justice, had managed to keep their feet firmly on the neck of any Temple Loyalist temptation towards some sort of active re sis tance. The fact that it had been Temple Loyalists in Charis who had attempted to murder their queen—and the fashion in which the rest of the Kingdom had reacted to that news—had undoubtedly strengthened the inclination for Chisholm's Temple Loyalists to keep their heads down.

Unfortunately, that didn't mean they'd decided to accept Sharleyan's “heretical defiance of Mother Church.” Thanks to Merlin and his SNARCs, Sharleyan was probably better aware of that even than Zhustyn or Green Mountain, neither of whom cherished any illusions in that respect. In fact, Sharleyan knew that at least three members of her own council were currently in communication with the deposed Bishop Executor Wu-shai.

At the moment, she and Merlin were both convinced they'd identified the “major players,” as Merlin described them, but that, too, had its drawbacks. Knowing who to watch was a priceless advantage; fighting down the temptation to have them arrested for what she knew they were doing but would find difficult to prove in open court wasn't easy. In fact, she'd found herself sorely tempted to manufacture the evidence she needed. Fortunately, she'd decided long ago that policies like that were what got kings and queens overthrown by their own nobles. The fact that she'd always been scrupulously just in her treatment even of her enemies among the Chisholmian nobility was a major factor in the readiness with which the majority of her nobles accepted the justice she handed down when she had clear and compelling evidence of wrongdoing by one of their own number.

Well, eventually you're going to
give
me that evidence, My Lords—or, at least, show me where one of my merely mortal agents can “discover” it. And when that day comes . . 
.

The council chamber door opened once more as Seahamper returned with Cayleb's courier.

“Your Majesty,” the courier—a Chisholmian, Sharleyan noted—said, bowing profoundly.

“Your name?” she asked.

“Commander Traivyr Gowyn, Your Majesty.” Gowyn smiled, obviously pleased that she'd cared enough to ask. “I have the honor to command the armed schooner
Sentinel
.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling back at him, then sat back in her chair. “Sergeant Seahamper says your dispatches are urgent, Commander Gowyn?”

“I fear they are, Your Majesty.” Gowyn's smile had disappeared into a sober expression.

“In that case, Commander, may we have them?”

“Of course, Your Majesty.” Gowyn opened his dispatch case and extracted a thick envelope, sealed with Cayleb's personal seal and addressed to Sharleyan in Clyfyrd Laimhyn's clear, strong script. He laid it in her extended hand with another bow.

“Thank you,” she said once more, weighing it in her palm. “Does your vessel require supplies or service, Commander?”

“I would prefer to take on fresh water before returning to sea, Your Majesty. With that proviso,
Sentinel
could sail within the hour.”

“I don't believe we'll need to pack you back off quite that quickly, Commander Gowyn,” Sharleyan said with a smile. “I'm pleased to hear that we could if we had to, but I expect you'll have time for at least a fresh salad and a shore-cooked meal before we send you back to Corisande.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Gowyn replied, bowing once more as he recognized his dismissal. Seahamper escorted him back out of the council chamber, and Sharleyan turned to Green Mountain and her mother.

“And now,” she said whimsically, her smile crooked as her slender fingers broke the heavy wax seals, “let's see what fresh bad news Corisande has seen fit to provide us with.”

“. . . so I'm none too sure they believe you.”

If any of Empress Sharleyan's subjects, aside from her personal armsman, had happened to glance into her bedchamber they might have had significant reservations about their monarch's stability. She sat in one of the huge, over-stuffed chairs, with her feet tucked up under her, speaking to apparently empty air. It was very late, and she'd sent Sairah Hahlmyn off to bed hours ago. Mairah Lywkys was still recovering from the injury she'd suffered when Byrtrym Waistyn had “arranged” her riding fall to keep her safely out of the way at Saint Agtha's, and getting her to turn in reasonably early hadn't been difficult, either. Now Sharleyan sat in the candlelit bedchamber, watching the silver orb of Langhorne, Safehold's single moon, climbing steadily higher beyond her window, and cocked her head to one side while she listened.

“I wish I could say I was surprised to hear that,” Cayleb's voice said in her right ear. “Unfortunately, if I were they, I might very well have thought I'd done it, too.”

“I think they'll come around to accepting the truth eventually,” Sharleyan assured her far distant husband. “Mahrak is already more than three-quarters of the way to acknowledging just how remarkably stupid it would've been for you to have Hektor killed at this particular time. At the moment, he seems to be torn between admiration for your apparently ruthless pragmatism, wondering just how you could have been dumb enough to do it, and concern over what it says about your character in long-range terms.”

“And your mother?”

“Well, Mother already thought you were a ‘delicious young man,' ” Sharleyan chuckled. “I think she's been both pleased and surprised by how much she likes you, and to be honest, the thought that you might have had Hektor murdered after what happened to Father only makes her like you even more. Frankly, I think she's going to be disappointed when she finally realizes you really, really didn't do it.”

“I suppose that's better than having her running in horror from the cold-blooded murderer who could do such a thing,” Cayleb said dryly.

“Trust me, Cayleb. The only thing that could have made Mother love you more than the notion that you'd collected Hektor's head would be the birth of her first grandchild. Which, by the way, she mentioned rather pointedly to me this afternoon. She seems to be of the opinion that having you in Corisande and me in Charis or Chisholm isn't very likely to provide for the succession. A thought which has also occurred to
me
, if not for such purely pragmatic reasons.”

“You're not the only two people it's occurred to,” Cayleb said with feeling. “And, as you say, not necessarily for purely pragmatic reasons.”