One Good Knight (6 page)

Andie tried not to show her surge of panic.

 

In the end, she needn't have panicked. Lady Charis showed Iris what simple cosmetics to apply, and the gown was not a new one, but one of her old ones, in a jade-green, with the augmentation of some bands of bead-embroidery to the neck-and hemlines. Similar augmentation in the way of jade beads on the straps had been made to her sandals, and she wore a jade necklace and bracelets. Her mother seemed to approve; she smiled slightly when she saw her daughter, and indicated to Andie that for the audience she should take a place next to Cassiopeia's own handmaiden just behind the throne. The one difference between Andie and the handmaiden was that Andie was allowed to sit on a low stool, while the handmaiden stood. The Audience Hall was a single large room, with frescoes of dancing nymphs (all discreetly clothed) on the walls, and the floor set with sand-colored tiles. Two lines of pillars painted with vines supported the roof, and to discourage loitering, there was nothing to sit on except the throne and Andie's stool. While this might be hard on the aged or infirm, it did keep people from crowding in to gawk and gossip.

Andie listened to everything as closely as she could, making mental notes when Cassiopeia deferred some decisions for a later date. Andie intuited that her mother would want information about the families and situations involved, and that it would be Andie's job to find that before the continuation of the audience. After a while, she began to relax and enjoy herself. This was infinitely preferable to lessons with a dancing master that she would never use, or in the genealogies of the royal families of Kingdoms that had never heard of Acadia and would never give their realm a second thought.

There were more petitioners than there was time, which was the usual state of things; those waiting showed disappointment but no surprise when Solon stepped forward to announce that the audience was concluded for the day. Those who had not yet been heard would come back tomorrow, and the next day, returning as many times as it took before the Queen would get to their case. Andie was dismissed along with the rest, but at least she knew the protocols from all of her study of court etiquette; she made her bow and returned to her wing, with one of her new Guards in attendance.

It gave her a bit of a pang not to see one of her Six at the door, but she hid it as best she could, and gave each of the young men standing there an encouraging nod. One opened the door for her, and she went in, to discover luncheon was already waiting for her in her dining chamber, with Iris and a table-servant in atten
dance. Another shock: the only time she'd ever had a table-servant was when she'd eaten with her mother.

The servant presented dishes for her approval, served her portions of the ones she indicated, poured her drink and kept it refreshed throughout the meal—somewhat unnerving for someone who had been helping herself all these years. Lady Thalia joined her, but only after asking permission!

But she had to admit she was beginning to find these shocks were more pleasant than otherwise.

“After your luncheon, you will bathe and Iris will give you skin treatments to smooth your wind-roughened complexion, and a massage,” Lady Thalia announced. “This is the usual order of things for a lady of rank. It isn't done to rush straight into work after eating, it ruins the digestion. Then I have arranged for you to give a proper dismissal to your old Guards. I gather that they are the only ones of your former servants to whom you feel a friendly dismissal and a reward is due?”

Feeling a flush suffuse her face again, she nodded, grateful now to Lady Thalia that had the lady's inherent dignity not made such a gesture unthinkable, she would have leapt out of her chair and run to hug her.

“For future reference, Princess, when a good and faithful servant retires from one's service, it is perfectly appropriate to bid an affectionate farewell, and it is absolutely the done thing to include a monetary reward,” Lady Thalia continued gravely. “Such rewards are part of the household budget. You, how
ever, do not bestow them directly. That is my job. They are made up into packets in leather purses in your colors, and rank and length of service determines the amount. For your information, as you should know these things, although the usual reward for a Guard is rarely more than four thalers, in the case of those who have served as long as your six retainers did, it is appropriate to double the reward to eight.”

“Is that good?” she asked hesitantly.

“Since a very good small farm can be purchased for six thalers, yes it is,” the lady replied with a nod. “Such rewards are calculated on the basis of the worth of a small farm. This allows those who have not been provident on their own to purchase something that can support them in their retirement, and perhaps even acquire a spouse to share it with.”

She blinked a little at that; the way it had been phrased, Lady Thalia made it sound as if the retiring Guards were going to stroll down to the next livestock market and buy themselves a husband or wife….

But then again, what did
she
know? Maybe that was exactly what would happen. Certainly the negotiations that attended the betrothals of any Royal had a lot of resemblance to a cattle-auction….

Well, at least she was going to be able to say goodbye properly!
And
make sure her Six were going to be all right. That made her happy enough that she was willing to put up with gowns instead of tunics, and makeup, and even truly torturous hairstyles—and no more running off to the cliff ever again!

“Well?” Cassiopeia asked, as she relaxed under the massaging hands of her servant. She took ample precautions with her body-servants; all were mute. Not
deaf
—that would have been exceedingly inconvenient. But mute. Most had been slaves, and silenced before she bought and freed them. It was prudent to purchase mute slaves that someone
else
had rendered incapable of speech; they didn't blame you, and they were generally so grateful to be freed and treated decently afterward that they remained faithful despite the occasional beating.

Solon did not need to inquire what her subject was. “I am a little more optimistic,” he admitted. “She looked suitably adult enough to satisfy the people and the Court, and suitably bewildered enough to satisfy me. So long as we can keep her off balance,
all should be well. Your vanity will be pleased by the fact that she is being compared unfavorably to you.”

“Not just my vanity. Anytime you have a potential heir on show, it is wise that people prefer you to her.” Cassiopeia closed her eyes for a moment to judge if the twinge she had just felt was due to some stiffness in her shoulder, or the servant's momentary distraction. “A little more work to the shoulders, please,” she said, and opened her eyes again.

Solon lounged on a nearby couch; his presence—and sometimes the presence of others of her advisers—at her daily massage was of so long-standing an arrangement that it had ceased to be anything to comment on.

Not that anything could or would go on. The presence of not less than three servants made sure of that.

“Why are you so concerned about keeping her off balance?” she asked. “I know why I am, but I am interested in hearing your reasons.”

“Because, the girl has a formidable intellect, and we do not want her to exercise it in any direction save the one we choose,” he replied, his nostrils flaring slightly.
“Ever.”

“I think you overestimate her,” she retorted, feeling a bit annoyed. She knew ambition when she saw it and Andromeda had none. How could mere intellect be a threat? It was the possibility that Andromeda might one day develop ambition that concerned the Queen.

“I think she's her mother's daughter where intell
gence is concerned, and I never underestimate her mother,” was his response, which teased her out of her annoyance. “But Lady Thalia will keep her busy for a while learning the ins and outs of running a household, and by the time she feels equal to that job, I shall have something else equally petty and time-consuming for her.” He sighed heavily. “It would have been so much easier if she had taken after her father in intellect and her mother in looks, rather than the other way around.”

“Perhaps,” Cassiopeia said, preferring not to contemplate the prospect of having a daughter who rivaled her mother's beauty, and had the advantage of youth on top of that. Then again—the answer to that would have been to marry her off to some provincial nobody or fur-wearing barbarian in exchange for a treaty as soon as she turned twelve. “Well, what approach are we to use with the captains from Thessalia this afternoon?”

“Ah.” He brightened considerably. “Andromeda's report gave me some useful ideas on that score.”

She listened attentively as he outlined his negotiation plans, thoughts about her daughter shoved to the back of her mind.

For now.

 

Andie's farewells to her Six would have been a lot harder, if they hadn't been so determinedly cheerful about it. As it was, she kept from crying only with an effort of will, and only because she didn't want to ruin
their impression that she was going to be, as Merrha put it, “Snug as a queen bee in her own hive at last.”

She was glad to turn her mind to something else immediately when they were gone, their rewards heavy in their belt-pouches, all of them looking distinctly odd out of uniform. The audience from this morning left her with a clear set of items to research, most notably, the origins of a dispute over some obscure salvage rights. With only one deep-water port for hundreds of leagues in either direction along the coastline, and plenty of treacherous rocks, shoals and reefs along that same coastline, there was no end to wrecks on the shores of Acadia, and salvage rights were valuable and jealously guarded. Half of everything came to the Crown, of course, but the rest could represent rich pickings indeed.

The trouble was, these rights could be subdivided and sold, inherited or given away. So when two petitioners came, both with apparently equal claims to “all goods come ashore to the Bay of Tralis, from Rocky Point to Oyster Rock,” it was time to research all those old wills, deeds of assignment and bills of sale.

By the time she came to the rather surprising conclusion that the disputed rights were not held by
either
claimant but by a third party who had not even appeared, Lady Thalia was at the door to the library looking for her.

“The magician is here to fit your new oculars, Princess,” she announced.

Recalling that the promise had been for
larger
lenses rather than smaller, Andie would have leapt to her feet and run out of the library at once—

The trouble was, she wasn't in a tunic. She was in a gown, which got tangled around her legs as she hastily shoved her stool away from the table at which she was doing her research, making her lose her balance and have to catch the edge of the table, then disentangle the cloth, flushing with acute embarrassment, while Lady Thalia watched impassively.

She said nothing as Andie finally sorted herself out, but Andie could practically hear that cool, composed voice making critical notes on her behavior. Her face heated, and only cooked when she reached the study and found the Guards' magician waiting there for her.

She gave him a bow of respect.
All
Sophonts deserved that show of respect even from the Queen herself, but Sophont Balan was something special in her eyes. He wasn't a Sorcerer nor anything like one of the sort who constructed remote towers and came to the aid of entire nations; like most of the magicians connected with the Acadian Guard, he might have been called a Hedge-Wizard. But he was a clever one, and intent on finding the most he could do with limited powers. Not content with merely repeating the spells he had learned from the various grimoires he had obtained, he was a researcher, always looking to find new and more ingenious ways of applying magic. It was his contention that the best Magician was not the one who displayed the most
blatant use of power, but the one who used the least power the most efficiently. Which was why he never wasted a mote of magic if he could help it. He would carefully weigh his options when there was a task in front of him, to determine whether it was more efficient to perform it with magic or mundane means.

He didn't look much like a Magician, either. Instead of long, dark robes embroidered with mystic symbols and some sort of outlandish headgear, he chose to wear perfectly ordinary brown uniform trousers and tunics as the rest of the Guards wore, with a long canvas vest over the tunic that must have had twenty pockets sewn into it. Like most of the natives of Acadia, he was dark-haired and olive-skinned, with white flecking his curly black hair; he had a long face, and melancholy eyes that lit up when he saw her.

“Well, Princess!” he said, cheerfully, taking a new pair of oculars out of one of the inside pockets of his vest. “I must say this was one of my happier commissions from the Queen in the past few weeks! When Her Majesty summoned me to create new oculars for you, I was very much afraid she was going to ask me to reduce the size of the lenses yet again, but the Lady Kyria was very clear that she wanted me to make them as large as could be conveniently supported on your head!”

Having gone through examinations and fittings at least twice a year since he had begun to make her oculars, Andie went straight to the chair he had
pulled out from the desk and sat, facing the piece of card-stock he had propped up on the table across the room. The pattern on it was of crisply ruled lines going both horizontally and vertically. He fitted the oculars to her face, and got out of the way so that she could see it.

“It looks quite clear, Sophont,” she said truthfully.

“Well, this matches the last set I made you, but we might as well see if your eyes have changed in the interval. Now—” he muttered under his breath, something she didn't quite catch, and she sensed the glass of the lenses warm, just a little “—better and clearer, or fuzzier?”

“Better,” she said decisively. The lines on the card were sharper than they had been before.

He muttered again; again the lenses warmed. “Better, or fuzzier and farther away?”

They repeated this three more times, until the lines got oddly distant and did get a little fuzzier. He reversed his last spell, which was subtly changing the shape of the lenses, exactly as he would have if he had been grinding them by hand. And, as a matter of fact, he once had done just that. As he had shown her years ago, he wasn't so much altering the lenses as matching them to sets he
had
hand-ground, when he first began making both telescopes and oculars down in his workshop. He had one master set of telescope lenses, and one of ocular lenses, which had taken him more than a year to make. Those were carefully stored away, but he had
touched this set to every set in his workshop, and as he had explained to Andie, by the arcane Law of Contamination, that meant that these lenses “knew” how the others were shaped and could mimic that shape at his command.

“So,” he said, taking out a scrap of paper and writing down the number of the lenses to which he had matched these new ones. “I'll have three more sets up to you by day's end. Lady Kyria has astoundingly sound design sense—you ought to go have a look at yourself in a mirror. She gave me the design she wanted, properly limned out, and it was a pleasure to cast the frames. Don't know why I didn't think to make
cast
frames before. They must be more comfortable than my wire frames.”

“Uh—” she said, not wanting to agree because he'd been so good as to make her oculars in the first place.

“Never mind, I'll take that as a yes.” He laughed. “Anyway, you're to have four sets—to match jewels, I suppose—white gold, pale gold, yellow gold and rose gold. Can't have your oculars clashing with your bracelets, I suppose. I'll send the 'prentice up with them later. I'm waiting for the frames to cool now.”

“If the Princess is not here, you can leave them with her handmaiden Iris,” Lady Thalia put in, and came around to take a look at the Sophont's handiwork. She blinked. “Good heavens. That is
much
more flattering!”

“Yes, it is,” Balan agreed with a lopsided smile. “Now you can see what pretty eyes she has. Well, I'm
off! Lady Thalia, it was a pleasure meeting you. Princess, a delight to serve you!”

As soon as he was out of the room, Andie was out of the chair. Picking up the skirt of her gown this time to keep it from tripping her, she ran to her bedroom to peer into the little mirror over her dressing table.

The difference was astounding. The old oculars had been small, vaguely rectangular, and had cut across her face like a slash mark. These were large, circular and, for the first time, did not obscure her eyes. If anything, they made her eyes look bigger, like those of a young animal, soft and giving an impression of innocence and vulnerability. The frame, of white gold, was very simple and polished, somehow less fussy than Balan's frame of twisted wire had been.

“Gracious!” Iris exclaimed. “What a difference!”

“You don't think they look—well—
owlish?
” Lady Thalia asked, a little doubtfully.

“Not a bit!” Iris declared. “Just look how big they make her eyes look! And
you've
heard all those daft poets, my Lady, going on about a girl's eyes supposed to be like a doe's, or big pools of water! No, this suits her, it does. Lady Kyria knows what she's doing, and that's a fact!”

The same sentiment was echoed by Lady Charis, who arrived moments later with the first of the new gowns and a wardrobe full of new under-gowns, chemises, petticoats and all other such necessaries. This first gown was a high-waisted col
umn of dark blue silk twill, with little, fluttery sleeves. The high waist was accented by a silk and silver cord that tied just under the breasts, the sides were slit up to the hip, and this gown was meant to be worn over an under-gown of cream-colored silk tissue.

“You'll be having dinner tonight with Her Highness the Queen, and two of her guests, Princess,” Lady Charis told her, as Iris helped her into the new gowns, then sat her down to restyle her hair using cord that matched the gown. “This is not quite a state dinner but it will give the Ambassadors an opportunity to meet you under less formal circumstances than a presentation.”

“Ambassadors?” Andie felt her stomach grow tense—was this going to be the situation every night?

“No one of great consequence. One is from the island of Sarmacia, the other from the island of Keles. There will be, at most, ten persons there aside from yourself and the Queen. You will probably be taking your dinner with Her Highness most nights,” Lady Thalia said, confirming her worst fear. “Evening meals are an occasion, just like any other, to study one's courtiers and visitors, and learn from that study. In fact, it would be wise if you ate and drank as little as possible, in order to concentrate on them and take advantage of seeing them in a relatively unguarded state. Say as little as you can, and listen as much as you can. I have called for a pre-dinner meal of fruit and yogurt to sustain you, and I
shall have your cook prepare something that will be awaiting you when you return to your rooms.”

She started to nod—stopped herself, since Iris was in the middle of doing something with her hair, and said, instead, “Thank you, Lady Thalia. I truly appreciate your experience and advice.”