One Good Knight (18 page)

She laughed. “I suppose it wasn't likely you would
have gotten into trouble with the Wyrding Others. The good ones would have avoided you if you had been alone, and if any of the bad ones had attacked you, they would have deserved what they got.”

“Let us hope that they do not elect to do so,” George said with a faint smile. “We have enough on our plate as it is.”

“A Champion!” Queen Cassiopeia practically spat the word, and her eyes flashed with a dangerous show of temper. “I thought you had promised me that no Champion could pass our Border?” She glared at Solon from the lofty vantage of her throne. She was still in black, in mourning for her daughter, of course, swathed in filmy ebon veils that made her look mysterious and tragic.

In mourning for a daughter who had, most inconveniently, not died. She clutched the arms of her throne so hard her knuckles turned white.

“Will it help to say I have no idea how the Champion got into Acadia?” he asked, keeping his posture still, his expression aggrieved and puzzled. The Queen did not require a great deal to provoke her when she was in this state.

The Queen's glare was all the answer he needed. He sighed, and altered his expression a trifle so that the puzzlement won out over aggravation.

“It is entirely possible that the Champion was here all along,” he pointed out. “My informant did not get a particularly good look at him. It is well within the parameters of The Tradition to have produced an Acadian Champion from some unlikely candidate within a relatively short period of time. One tries to manipulate The Tradition, but once you set certain forces in motion, The Tradition has a way of seizing them for its own use. I pledge you, Your Majesty, I did my best to be sure there were no likely ‘hero' candidates within our borders, but obviously I couldn't search every village and hamlet for impossibly brave boys with their fathers' swords hanging on the wall.”

The Queen abandoned her throne, rising with a rustle of silk to pace the dais dramatically—Solon noted with a heavy sense of irony that she did not descend to his level for this purpose. He had to give her credit for style, however. The veils fluttered and billowed as she moved, and she managed the long train perfectly at the end of every turn. She never once, no matter how angry she became, made a single movement that was not graceful. How such beauty had produced a little nonentity like Andromeda was a mystery of nature.

She paused in her pacing to fling another question at him. “So your informant did not even see if this was an Acadian or not?”

My informant could not have told the difference between an Acadian shepherd boy with his father's rusty sword and a bucket on his head, and the Head of the Chapter of Glass Mountain.
He spread his hands wide, in a gesture of apology. “No, Majesty, I am afraid he did not. His vantage point was not the best, and obviously he would not have wanted to get too near the dragon when it moved down onto the valley floor. All he saw was that a warrior of some sort interposed himself between Andromeda and the dragon, fought it until it flew away, and released the Princess. The Princess herself accompanied him out of the valley. We can probably assume they are together. My informant is following them.”

The Queen made another two sweeps of the dais, then again turned toward him with a dramatic swish of her train, and pointed a long finger at him. “They must not leave Acadia!”

“I do not believe that is their current intention, Majesty,” he said soothingly. “The direction in which they went leads them deeper into Acadia, not to any of the roads leading to the Border. The Champion has more than a Traditional obligation to free the Princess, he has a Traditional mandate to slay the dragon, and whether he is a bumpkin-hero, an old Guardsman, or an actual Champion who somehow crossed the Border or was here before I closed it, he must fulfill that mandate. I expect that is where they are going, tracking the dragon to its lair.”

Cassiopeia crossed her black-swathed arms over
her chest and tapped her foot as she considered that. Her eyes narrowed, probably as the same solution occurred to her that he had already considered and dismissed. “I don't suppose you could arrange for them to be ambushed?”

He shrugged with every evidence of helplessness. “If I knew where they were going. I don't. I don't even know where the dragon's lair
is
except that it is within the treaty lands granted to the Wyrding Others. I do have some…contacts among the Others who would take on the task, but first my informant has to come back to tell me where they are going. There are a great many trails through the Wyrding Lands, and unless the ambush is set up on the right one, it won't catch them.”

That is the last time I use a fox. They're as bad as cats for twisting orders around to suit themselves. Trying to bind a fox or a cat to a task they don't want to do is like trying to catch an eel with your bare hands.
He had not been able to obtain a vial of dragon's blood in order to allow him to speak to all animals, so he had had to expend a great deal of time and concentration finding a wild beast that would serve as his eyes and ears in that valley and bind it to his service as a Familiar. He had thought the fox was perfect—the right size to be inconspicuous, clever, agile and intelligent. But, alas, not obedient. Even the geas he put on it was not enough to make it obedient. And the geas itself depended on the fox of its own accord thinking that the dragon was a menace to the countryside.

“And these contacts of yours—what are the odds of them succeeding if you do find a place to set an ambush?” she asked. Then she raised her eyebrow. “The priority is to silence the Princess, of course. I don't like the cost of having to summon another dragon if the Champion kills this one, but if Andromeda escapes outside Acadia and tells her story, we will have a true disaster on our hands. She was already suspicious enough on her own, and any half-competent Godmother or Sorcerer would certainly put the facts together quickly once she lays them before her—or him.”

You
will have a disaster on your hands. By the time anyone figures out I was the one who summoned the dragon in the first place, I will be on a ship halfway to the Fortunate Islands.
“You are quite correct, Majesty,” he said aloud. “So long as Andromeda is silenced, the most important issue is taken care of.” He groped for the Summoning charm just around his neck. Made of dragon scale (and how lucky he was to have found the scale from a living dragon!) it was warm to the touch. So the dragon that had lost it was still alive. “We might not in fact need to summon another dragon. The populace is sufficiently cowed, and sufficiently in sympathy with your sacrifice, that the murmurs of discontent have stilled. I believe that just on the basis of having been forced to give your own daughter to the dragon for the good of the Kingdom, the people's sympathies will remain with you no matter what else happens.”

If that damn Champion kills the dragon, I don't know how I'm going to Summon another one…although a Chimera might do. Or if I could get that fox to steal me a Hydra's tooth. Or perhaps a sea-monster?
There were a number of possibilities he had not yet explored, but on the whole, he wondered if it was worth his time looking into them. If the Champion managed to slay the dragon, unless the wretched man died in the attempt, there was still the possibility that Andromeda had already told him all she knew. Why shouldn't she? He had been her rescuer. Traditionally speaking, she should be head-over-heels in love with him now and pouring out her heart to him.

The Queen went back to pacing, and evidently came to the same rather grim conclusion. “Not if Andromeda tells him what she knows. She may be the most naive child in the Five Hundred Kingdoms, but we can't count on this Champion being that naive. Especially since we don't know anything about him. He could be another ignorant shepherd boy, but he could just as easily be a shrewd old warrior, suspicious and all too clever, especially if he was
not
once in the Acadian Guard but has actually been a mercenary instead. Those men know a trap a hundred leagues away, and can smell out anything that might threaten them. She must be silenced, and so must he!”

“First, she must be found,” he reminded her. “And trust me, Majesty, I am working on that.”

The trouble was that once they had gone into the Wyrding Lands, he was going to have the devil's own time tracing them. Much to his silent fury, he had discovered that by the time he knew of the Princess's escape, her room had been completely stripped of everything that had ever been owned by her or touched by her. Her miserable attendants had told him, with many protestations of sorrow, that they had felt it would ease the Queen's grief sooner if all reminders of her child were whisked away out of her sight. There was not so much as a hair of the Princess left to be used to find her. So far as her rooms went, she might never have existed. Nor could he find any hints of her outside her rooms. The old furniture that had once decked those rooms had been broken up, given away, or disassembled and stored with other pieces exactly like it. The reports that she had made were gone when he went to look in the archives for them. Or rather, the reports were still there, but they were scribes' copies. After the initial one that had so intrigued him, her own secretary had made the fair copies from her hasty ones, and where her originals had gone, only heaven knows.

The only things left that he knew with certainty that she had handled were books, but such ephemeral contact faded quickly and was confused with the traces of everyone else who had handled them. He had tried anyway, but it seemed that between the last time that Andromeda had touched the books and when they were put away they must have passed
through the hands of twenty different people. She could not have been more effectively erased, magically speaking, if someone with knowledge of magic had gone about trying to obscure her presence.

So he could not trace her by her personal essence, and he did not dare try a broad magical sweep in the Wyrding Lands. Too many creatures of magic existed there, and no few of them would sense such a sweep and retaliate without hesitation for something they considered an intrusion.

He had made the fundamental mistake, once the fox had reported that the Princess was rescued, of telling it to follow her, lure her into the dragon's talons if possible and report to him. In that order. He hadn't thought then that he himself would be unable to track her, and he hadn't thought that the fox would take his orders so literally as to completely fail to report back at regular intervals. Now the blasted beast was somewhere out there, and while he might be able to track the fox, he would be able to see only what the fox saw, which probably would not include the Princess and her Champion.

“Majesty, I believe I have the situation on the way to a solution,” he told the Queen mendaciously. “But I will need time and work. If I may withdraw?”

It was dangerous to make such a request at this moment. But she was clearly still in such a state of anger that it would do neither of them any good for him to remain. It was his good fortune that he had gauged his moment correctly; she was caught up in
her own thoughts, and dismissed him with an angry wave of her hand. He did not ask twice, but backed out of the Throne Room with a bow. He pitied the next person to come under her hand. Not that she would do anything overt—no, she would just find the worst possible task to assign him, or her, something that had little or no chance of success. Then, when the poor fool failed, she would, with a falsely compassionate smile, administer a cruel punishment in such a way that the wretched victim would feel he or she deserved it, and worse.

She was a past mistress of the manipulation of just about everyone around her. Even, on occasion, himself. She was good enough at it that he could even see her doing it and know what was happening, and she still managed to manipulate him. There was no question of how she had become the ruling entity here in Acadia.

He retired to his own rooms, to ponder his options.

His own suite here in the Palace was second in comfort to none, not even the Queen's, and yet that comfort was not of the visible sort. He had selected with care the craftsmen who made his furnishings, which were all deceptively plain. He did not require inlay work, nor frescoes, nor hangings of silk. But when you sat on one of his chairs and discovered yourself embraced by supple leather and plush padding, when you reached for something on a nearby table and understood that the table was at the perfect height for a man precisely of his size, and
above all, when you slipped into the silk sheets on the bed, under the blankets of lamb's wool, atop the feather bed stuffed with the finest eiderdown, the level of hidden luxury here became clear to you. What appeared to be plain leather and wood furniture, a starkly simple bed, were anything but. He maintained this illusion even in his clothing; what seemed to be simple wool was the finest of lamb's wool, and what seemed to be linen was, in fact, silk twill. Next to his skin he always wore silk, though that was as much out of need as out of a love of luxury. Silk was a magical insulator, and he had a certain need to be insulated from magic.

The foolish thought that he was superstitious, because he was hung all over with what they thought were amulets. He knew he was frequently the subject of jests for all of his “trinkets,” which ran the gamut of carved bits of bone and amber to what appeared to be simple stones with water-worn holes through them.

In fact, they were something far more potent. He had found a way to store magical power and purpose in an object. And sometimes, to keep from inadvertently activating one of his objects, he needed to be able to insulate himself from it. Using the carved carnelian amulet that summoned a Demon Lord, for instance, would be very bad. Aside from giving the game away, it would waste the amulet that had taken a year and a day to craft.

And the Demon Lord would not be particularly pleased about it, either.

One problem that most magicians had was that they were limited by their own power—or that which they could steal from others. Their own power was limited by their capacity to store it—power regenerated, but if your capacity had been filled, you did not generate any power over and above what you had. Solon had found a means to take an object (things made of metal or stone seemed the best), and store a spell and the power to make it work in that object. Releasing and targeting the power was a trivial exercise. So far as he was aware, he was the only Acadian magician to have discovered how to do this, though, of course, he could not speak for Mages outside of Acadia.