Master of the Cauldron (9 page)

The trireme that'd brought the courier was getting under way. The oarsmen were probably upset not to be given a chance to rest now that they'd reached Volita.

Sharina smiled. It could've been a
lot
worse for everybody aboard the ship if Garric weren't in charge.

“Of course, your cousin knew he was dealing with a bor-Warriman,” Garric said. “As do I.”

Garric sighed and bent deeply forward, stretching his locked hands backward and up to loosen muscles cramped by the previous hours of negotiation. He straightened.

“Lord Attaper,” he said, “have your men move people two double paces away from this marquee. I'm going to meet here with my inner cabinet, and the discussions may require privacy.”

Garric quirked a smile. “And does anybody know where Lady Tenoctris is?” he added. “Because if there's a wizard involved with this business, I want to know what she thinks about it.”

“I'll get Tenoctris,” said Sharina, squeezing her brother's shoulder as she turned to trot off to where she knew the old wizard lay in her shelter. “And I couldn't agree with you more!”

Garric sat at the makeshift conference table and for a moment rested his face on his hands, rubbing his brows and cheekbones hard.
There's too much for one man to do
, he thought in a sudden rush of despair.

“No, there's not,”
said the image of King Carus, grinning at Garric with cheerful understanding.
“Not if he's the right man, as you are, lad. Not if you do the part that
has
to be done.”

And that, of course, was the key: first things first. In a swirling battle, the spirit of Garric's warrior ancestor generally took charge. Afterward Garric was always surprised at how little he remembered—how little he'd actually
seen
while the fight was going on. Carus focused only on essentials: the shimmer of movement to the side that was the edge of an axe; the bare wrist between an opponent's mail shirt and his gauntlet; the slight lift of a creature's upper lip that meant its lionlike jaws were about to gape wide enough for the point of a thrusting sword.

The same was true in any complicated situation, and the politics of a kingdom could be more complicated than any mere battle. You had to deal
with the crucial items while the rest waited, no matter how important those lesser things might've appeared by themselves.

“And doing that was harder for me by a long sight that deciding who to put my sword through next ever was, lad,”
Carus said with a wistful smile.
“I marvel to watch you, I swear I do.”

Garric lowered his hands and smiled at the women and men around him: Liane, Sharina, and Tenoctris; Tadai, Waldron, Attaper, and Zettin. They were his close companions, many of them friends and even those who weren't friends—Lord Waldron certainly wasn't a friend—were people whom he respected and who respected him.

Cashel and Ilna weren't here. Garric wasn't surprised that they hadn't been located in time for an emergency meeting, but he regretted their absence. Cashel and Ilna weren't sophisticated, but they shared a clarity of vision that cut to the heart of problems where others tangled in the nonessential fringes.

Peasant wisdom—the part that wasn't superstition and platitudes, at least—was merely common sense. That was as valuable in high governmental circles as it was most other places.

Waldron still stood, glowering at the world at large. Garric pointed to the stool at his right, which Admiral Zettin had properly vacated for the army commander. “Sit down, milord,” he said a trifle peevishly. “I'm not going to make Lady Tenoctris stand, nor do I care to look up at you while we're trying to solve the present problem.”

Waldron glared for an instant. Before Garric had to repeat what was, after all, a royal command, he sat down. “I still say it's a family problem,” he muttered, but he wasn't really arguing.

“If your cousin were intriguing over the title to your estate, Waldron,” Garric said, “I'd agree with you. As it is—well, more than half the army comes from Ornifal.”

“And three-quarters of my officers,” added Zettin, who'd placed an upended bucket at one end of the table for his seat. “The common sailors could be from anywhere, but an officer whose home and family are under a usurper's control, well…”

Lord Attaper shrugged. “When Sandrakkan rebelled twenty years ago,” he said, “King Valence took the army to Sandrakkan and put down the rebellion. If the rebels're on Ornifal, I still think it's work for the army.”

He looked up from his hands on the table before him, to Garric, then to Waldron. Both soldiers were nobles from Northern Ornifal, but Attaper was from a minor house with less land and money than some prosperous yeomen in the west of the island. He'd joined the army from necessity and risen through skill, intelligence, and unswerving loyalty first to Valence the Third, then to Garric when Valence abdicated in all but name.

Waldron was a warrior beyond question, but he commanded because he was head of the richest and most powerful of the northern families, who traditionally provided officers and cavalry regiments for the royal army. He considered Attaper an upstart who needed to remember his place, while Attaper viewed Waldron as arrogant and narrow to the point of being a fool.

“Rivalry isn't an altogether bad thing, though,”
Carus said, musing on the problem.
“Since they're both honorable men—and bloody good soldiers too, in their ways.”

“Ornifal isn't rebelling!” Waldron snapped. “Not yet, at any rate, but that'll change in a heartbeat if this boy from Haft sails back at the head of an army.”

He turned from Attaper, across the table, to Garric beside him with an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, your highness, but that's what they'll say, you know.”

“Understood,” Garric said calmly. He wished he could feel like a boy again; though he'd thought he'd had problems when he lived in his father's inn. It was all a matter of your viewpoint, he supposed.

Admiral Zettin pursed his lips. He was in his mid-thirties, a decade younger than Attaper and only half Waldron's age. The royal fleet had had low status during most of the past millennium, but Zettin had accepted the appointment with enthusiasm. He was working to bring his command up to the standards of the Blood Eagles, where he'd served as Attaper's deputy.

“Is it possible,” he said, “that this Valgard really is the son of Valence Stronghand? I realize it's still a rebellion, but—”

“There's
no
possibility!” Waldron said. “Bolor says the fellow claims to have been born to a princess of the People whom Stronghand captured in the Battle of the Tides. Supposedly Stronghand sent him back with the mother to be fostered in her country. There weren't any women with the People! I'll swear to that, and so will anybody else who was there!”

Garric frowned. “The People?” he repeated. “Who are they? I don't…”

“Ornifal was invaded from the east in the fourth year of King Valence the Second,” Liane said.

“That's Stronghand,” Waldron said, looking glumly at his hands again. “Everybody called him Stronghand after the Battle of the Tides, but to tell the truth, he never was that again. He took a spear in the hip joint and fought another hour with it sticking out of him, the point stuck in bone. But it ruined him, it used him up.”

Liane had opened her traveling desk. She reached among the books filed in pigeonholes within, then stopped with a stricken look on her face.

“I didn't bring it,” she said in barely a whisper. “I didn't think I'd need—”

She broke off, clacked the desk shut, and resumed in a crisply businesslike tone, “That was forty-nine years ago, I believe.”

She grimaced, and returned to the snarling whisper to add, “I should have brought the
Eastern Chronicles
with me!”

Reise'd given his children an education in the classic literature of the Old Kingdom. He hadn't taught them modern history, though, the history of the age in which they lived—because he wasn't interested in the subject.

Garric didn't know who'd preceded his real mother, Countess Tera, on the throne of Haft, let alone what had been happening across the Inner Sea on Ornifal generations ago. This was one of the rare times that he felt the lack of that knowledge.

“Forty-nine years, right,” said Lord Waldron, looking up at a corner of the marquee while his mind stepped briefly into the past. “I was there, in Lord Elphic's squadron, my foster father….”

“Yes,” said Garric, hoping to cut off a digression into history that—however interesting in the abstract—had no bearing on the present problem. “We can be sure that this Valgard is an imposter, but since he's been accepted by Lord Bolor—and I assume others—already, that doesn't help us.”

“It could,” Waldron said, returning to the present with the crashing abruptness of a cavalry charge. “It
will
if I'm there to talk to Bolor and the others like him. The claim's preposterous, and they'll believe me when I tell them that to their faces.”

“Granting what you say for the sake of argument,” Lord Tadai said, touching his fingertips together in a precise pattern. “There'll be others in the conspiracy purely for the hope of gaining wealth, and very likely there are supporters of the former queen who've been hiding since we overthrew her. They know they won't be safe until we, that is Prince Garric, are put down in turn.”

“There'll be rabble,” Waldron snapped. He knew Tadai well enough to respect him, but he and the Valles merchant had so little in common that they consistently spoke past one another while trying to hold discussions. “There's always rabble. But it's the northern squadrons who're a danger to the kingdom, not bullies and footpads!”

“That may be,” Tadai said in a pointedly patient tone. “And you may be right to discount the presence of a wizard with the conspirators as well. But it appears to me that this rabble has a vested interest in not allowing you to have a manly, honorable chat with your cousin and neighbors as you seem to intend. I'm not usually an advocate of military force, but I'm afraid in this instance it seems necessary. If you go to Ornifal without the army, you'll be assassinated.”

“And while I understand your concern about my presence inflaming the situation,” Garric said, nodding to Waldron, “I don't want to give the false impression that Ornifal is less important to me than Sandrakkan. I think I need to deal with Valgard myself.”

“
Not
without the army!” said Attaper. With a pained expression he raised both hands before him to forestall the reaction his outburst merited. Apologetically he offered an edited version: “That is, I hope you won't go without the army, your highness.”

“No, I won't,” Garric said, smiling faintly. King Carus in his mind wore a rueful expression. If one of
his
officers had flared at him that way, Carus would've had his sword clear of its sheath before the statement was complete. They both knew that would've been a bad response. “While I think, I
hope,
that the presence of the army will convince Valgard's supporters to put down their arms, in the end I'm afraid Lord Attaper is correct. Rebels are rebels, wherever they are.”

“Your highness,” Waldron said, clasping his heavy belt in both hands to keep them away from the hilt of his sword. He looked down at the table for a moment before he was able to raise his eyes to meet Garric's. “Your highness, send me and one of the Ornifal regiments. Let me try. Please. For the sake of—”

He paused, then burst out, “For the sake of the kingdom!”

“Garric?” Sharina said. She was sitting across the table from him in the seat Lady Lelor had filled during the negotiations. “If Lord Waldron goes back with enough soldiers for safety—”

She quirked a smile that perfectly mirrored the one Garric felt bending his own lips. They both knew that no number of soldiers could guarantee safety.

“Anyway…,” Sharina continued. “If Waldron goes back, and I go with him—then you're neither slighting Ornifal nor antagonizing those who don't like the thought of being ruled by—”

She grinned very broadly, at Garric, then at Waldron beside him.

“—a warrior king from Haft, let's say,” she concluded.

“That would also permit your highness to conclude the present negotiations with Earl Wildulf without appearing to be under pressure,” Liane said, holding a document that seemed to have been written on a sheet of lead foil, like a curse to be buried in a graveyard. “While I don't want to seem alarmist, it's public knowledge that there's hostility toward the kingdom at all levels of Sandrakkan society, and other indications—”

Her spies, she meant. Liane appeared to have agents on every island, though for the most part she kept their operations secret even from Garric.

“—suggest that there would be a very real danger of revolt if your highness were to suddenly withdraw with the royal army at this stage.”

Garric took a deep breath. He smiled, but the expression didn't go deeper than his lips. “Doesn't anybody think I ought to go to Valles?” he asked.

The truth was,
he
didn't want to return to Ornifal, not under these circumstances. He'd never felt comfortable in the society of the Valles court. Half of Ornifal's nobles viewed him as the next thing to a usurper, and all of them to some degree resented him for being from Haft. Whatever they might say in public, they knew in their hearts that Garric's ancestors had raised the kingdom to heights it had never regained under the Dukes of Ornifal.

“Prince Garric” had been accepted because he brought the stability that'd vanished under Valence the Third; but if a strong leader from Ornifal appeared, one who claimed to be the son of the warrior king of the past generation, there'd be many who'd be glad to support him. Courtiers, bureaucrats…soldiers. Even some Blood Eagles, perhaps. It was one thing to face enemies. It was another to turn your back on a seeming
friend in the knowledge that he might be waiting for just that chance with a dagger in his sleeve….

“We don't want you to go if there's another alternative,” said Tadai, glancing around the table to a series of nods that proved he was speaking for all. “And Princess Sharina just showed that there is.”

Garric nodded. “All right,” he said. “But there's something none of us are talking about. Even you, Tenoctris.”

The old wizard sat beside Sharina, her satchel of paraphernalia placed discreetly on the ground under the table, where others wouldn't have to look at it. She gave Garric a quick grin.

“That's Hani, the wizard who's with Valgard,” Garric continued. “If Valgard came from nowhere, then it seems as likely to me that he's Hani's pawn rather than the other way around. And much as I respect your abilities, Lord Waldron, they don't include wizardry.”