One Good Knight (2 page)

“What are you doing, then?” she persisted, curious. “Why are you still watching her?”

“I'm counting sailors to see if there are too many. I'm looking at the ones on deck, seeing what they do and if any are standing idle. I'm casting my eye over the ship, looking for armor, for a place where a ram can be fixed to the prow, and counting weapons' ports,” he said. “If she's a sea-wolf in a dolphin's skin, I'll know it in a moment.”

The port was large, but not that large. A single supposed merchant ship, if loaded with pirates, could raid it and make off with every other ship and its cargo in the harbor.

She waited, quietly, while he moved the telescope in tiny increments, and peered, muttering to himself. Finally he straightened and took down the horn hanging from the roof of the shelter. She tensed as he sounded it four times, then relaxed as he didn't add the fifth note that would have signaled a possible enemy
approaching. Notes were only sounded for ships foreign to Ethanos's port. One for a small fishing boat, two for a large, three for a fast-courier, four for a merchanter, five for a “possible” enemy, and six for a ship approaching openly armed and apparently hostile.

“Simple merchanter—no armor, no ram, just enough hands to crew her and all of 'em scampering like monkeys, her captain's a fat ball of a man who'd probably pop straight to the surface if you pitched him over-side, and the mate isn't far behind him in blubber,” Thesus proclaimed with a laugh, hanging up the horn and rubbing his hands. “Now, where's that grub?”

“Here!” she said, holding out the basket and leather wineskin. “I thought I would have a picnic on the cliff, and it didn't seem fair to make a boy climb up here with your ration since I was already coming.”

“Ah, so that worthless stick of a governess of yours has taken herself off for the day?” Thesus asked shrewdly, the corners of his eyes crinkling with laughter as he sat down on a stone bench beside the telescope and unpacked what she'd brought, the standard soldiers' fare of olives, cheese, garlic sausage and a coarse loaf of bread. “Well, it's to be hoped Her Majesty has more of these meetings, then. You've been indoors too much—you're pale as this bit of cheese.”

“A Princess mustn't get sunburned, or no proper Prince will ever look twice at her,” she told him as she sat on the bare stone of the platform across from him.

He snorted. “Then I'd be saying that a so-called ‘proper' Prince is no kind of proper man,” he retorted, and though he kept one eye on her, and was making a quick and neat meal of his provisions, he never let his attention wander from the horizon where a new sail might appear. “But there you are, what do I know about royalty? Nothing, and there's an end to it, I suppose.”

“Well, your advice is more sensible than anything I ever got out of a governess,” Andie told him, feeling a twinge of concern. “Just be careful—”

“No fear of that, Princess,” Thesus chuckled. “I've been with the Royal Guard, man and boy, a good forty years, and I've learned who to keep my mouth shut around.”

“I'll leave you to your duty, then,” she replied, scrambling to her feet.

“Best do that. This spot's a bit exposed, and we don't want someone to catch sight of those oculars of yours flashing in the sun and know who's bringing me my rations. No harm in you picnicking below, but plenty of trouble if you're visiting with riffraff like me. Thankee, Princess. You're a rare little lass.” His blue eyes sparkled as he smiled, his teeth very white and strong-looking, framed in the black beard.

“And you are a true Guardsman,” she said, giving him the Guards' salute of her closed right fist to her left shoulder.

He laughed delightedly, and the sound of his laughter followed her back down the stairs.

Now, there was no harm, no harm at all, in the Princess being up on the stairs themselves. They didn't
lead
anywhere but to the observation platform for the Sea-Watch. No one could get to them except through the Palace. So they were a safe place for her to be, and she was well known for spending entire afternoons up here, or rather, on one of the landings, sitting in the sun and wind and reading. So once she was as far down as one of her known haunts she relaxed.

She glanced back down at the Palace again, and made note of the servants moving through some of the open courts. No one appeared to be looking for her and she relaxed a little more.

On the way up, she had left a few things of her own here, and now she collected them: a blanket, a cushion, and a basket containing a book and her own lunch. Short of being able to sneak down into the city itself, which, on a day when the port was full of foreign ships was simply
not
going to happen, this was the best place for her to spend the afternoon. Not even her friends in the Guard would let her slip out of the Palace when the city was full of foreigners. They might be anything in the guise of common merchants—kidnappers, assassins, spies. Whereas up here, no one was going to be able to get to her without going through several sets of Guards—and even then, she'd see whoever it was coming up the stairs in plenty of time to take refuge with Thesus.

Not that anything that adventurous was likely to happen. No one ever attacked Ethanos. No one
wanted to. You'd first have to get past the harbor town and its regiment of Guards, then up the cliff to the city itself, where the City Watch would greet you with a hail of arrows and missiles. Then you'd have to fight your way through the streets, all of which twisted and turned like a tangled ball of yarn, to get to the Palace, which had its own walls and the Royal Guard to protect it. It was like a sea urchin; maybe the meat inside was sweet, but to get to it, you had to get past a thousand spines, all sharp, and all poisoned.

She spread out her blanket and flopped down on it, stomach against the warm stone, with arms crossed and her chin resting on her forearms as she stared down at the city.

It rankled that, once again, Cassiopeia had refused even to consider her presence at these meetings—and after she had gone to such pains to study the latest reports on every single merchant in the domestic fleet! She could quote import and export figures, tax revenues, profit margins and losses for the past ten years! Or—well, not exactly quote them, but she had all of it noted down and within moments could put her finger on any figure needed. And all she'd asked was that she be allowed to observe—not to participate, merely to watch and listen! After all, she was nineteen, and she still had very little notion of what it meant to rule. The only time she ever saw the Queen exercising her authority was in formal audiences that required the attendance of the entire Court. Those were as scripted
as any play, and gave her no idea of just how Cassiopeia employed diplomacy, strategy and negotiation. The Queen wasn't going to live forever (even if sometimes it seemed as if she might) and when she was gone, Andie did not want to find herself at the mercy of “advisers” and “councilors” who did the actual ruling, while she served only as a figurehead on the throne.

It was all terribly frustrating. Maybe everything she knew was out of a book rather than real life, but at least she knew
something.
Her mother's Chief Adviser, Solon Adacritus, didn't even bother with
that
much; he depended on his secretaries to find out everything for him. That, by Andie's reckoning, was cheating.

Solon had been Cassiopeia's right-hand forever, though Andie could not imagine what her mother ever saw in him. Oh, he was handsome enough, in a rather limp and languid way, but he was the butt of a hundred jokes in the Guard for his manners and the superstitious way he hung himself with good-luck charms and amulets, fiddling with them constantly.

Not for the first time, she wondered if Solon was her mother's lover. Well, if he was, he was certainly so discreet and careful about it that there had never been so much as a hint of it her entire life. And there were plenty of people looking for information like that, she had no doubt. Information was leverage, and the game of inter-and intra-kingdom politics was played largely on the basis of leverage.

Acadia might be small and rocky, but it had the
only protected, deep-water harbor for leagues and leagues, as well as one very good road that led straight to the heart of the Five Hundred Kingdoms and was safe and well patrolled, and that put it squarely on one end of an extremely lucrative trade route. Where there was money, there was power. Where there was power and money, people who didn't have it would be scheming to get it. Knowledge of who, if anyone, was Queen Cassiopeia's lover would be one more weapon to be deployed by those people.
Which is one more thing all my reading has taught me.
You couldn't read history for long without seeing the patterns.

Without that deep-water port, Acadia would have been the poorest of the Five Hundred Kingdoms. Although the sea did well by those who dared the waters to fish, the sea took as well as gave, and fishing was a dangerous profession. The rocky hills could not support grazing for much except goats and a few sheep, the only fruits that flourished were olives and grapes, and the grain harvests were just enough to keep the populace fed without any surplus even in the best years. There were pockets of richer soil, but not the broad, flat pastures and huge fields of waving grain that other lands boasted. Acadia didn't even have a Godmother—hadn't had one in so long that plenty of nobles who never left Ethanos thought Godmothers were as mythical as centaurs and fauns.

There were pockets of all sorts of so-called “mythical” creatures, little colonies in the wilderness that
the country-people traded with. Thesus had grown up playing with centaur colts and faun-kids as his friends, before he'd come down out of the high hills and joined the Guard. He'd told her stories, and the tales had the ring of truth about them, in no small part because they were not tales of great adventure, but of the same sort of mischief that any children got up to. The only difference was that when Thesus and his friends teased a bull or a he-goat, his friends' parents could grab him up and take him to safety on their backs, or speak the same language as the goat and make the patriarch of the herd back down.

Plus, the history of Acadia was full of treaties with the “Other-folk,” or Wyrding Others, treaties that were on file in the library—and how could one write up a treaty with things that were mythical?
I would so like to see some of them…fauns, sylphs, centaurs, dryads and nymphs.

She'd have liked to see a Godmother, too. But it was clear from everything she had read that Acadia didn't have one. Probably Acadia was too insignificant. After all, when had Cassiopeia ever hosted a ball? Or a masquerade? When had other Royals even visited? Not so much as a sixth-or seventh-son Prince had ever ventured across the border or into the harbor. Nothing of any consequence had happened here in more than a generation.

No wonder the Godmothers ignored them in favor of Kingdoms that actually
did
things.

But—if we had a Godmother here, I bet she'd see to
it that Mother started educating me in my duties. Leaving me ignorant like this is just making a big fat hole for The Tradition to stick an evil Prince into. Someone who'd come sweep me off my feet, then oppress my people.
Or was the fact that she was already aware such a thing could happen enough to prevent it from happening? Maybe Acadia was so quiet and small that even The Tradition ignored it.

Acadians themselves ignored The Tradition. Of all the people she'd ever mentioned it to, only a few seemed even vaguely aware of such a thing. Maybe, again, because things were so quiet here that the only thing The Tradition did was to ensure that there were enough poor-but-honest peasants, worthy orphans, hearty fisherman, nosy gossips and that sort of thing.

Or maybe The Tradition is satisfied that we've got our quota filled with Queen Cassiopeia, beautiful and wise,
she thought a little cynically.
It doesn't need to waste its time on anything else.

There certainly didn't seem to be a great deal of anything you could call “real magic” employed in and around Acadia. Even the Sophont Balan, for all that he had the title of Guard's Magician, seemed mostly to tinker with purely mechanical things like telescopes and oculars.

She turned over on her back and closed her eyes, listening to the gulls crying below, finally able to put a name to her restlessness.
I'm bored, but it's worse than just being bored. Nothing ever happens to me.
Nothing is ever going to happen to me. I am going to sit in my wing of the Palace and do nothing for the rest of my life. Mother will probably even outlive me. Or else she'll marry some handsome fool who'll be happy to have the title of Consort with none of the work, have a son, and he'll become King—and then what? I'll still sit in my wing of the Palace, and the only thing that will ever change is that eventually I won't have to put up with governesses anymore.

Would being played as a diplomatic marriage-pawn be any better? It would at least be a change…but it could be worse, she realized bleakly.

But before she sank into despair, she gave herself another mental shake.
There has to be a solution. Mother doesn't take me seriously—so working through Mother is no answer. So who else is there?

And she sat bolt upright as the solution occurred to her. Much as she disliked the man, there was someone who might. Chief Adviser Solon Adacritus, who already relied on others to give him the facts he needed to properly inform the Queen. So what if she started writing up reports for him? It would be easy enough to do—easy enough to give them to him. Easy enough even to flatter his ego while she did it. Say something like, “You have your finger on the pulse of this situation, Lord Solon. Can you see if I've grasped it properly?”
I think it will work. He might even start to rely on me, give me access to information I can't now get. If he starts to take me seriously, it won't matter that Mother doesn't. If he starts to need
my reports and research, he'll make sure Mother never marries me off.