Trickster's Choice (2 page)

G
eorge Cooper, Baron of Pirate’s Swoop, second in command of his realm’s spies, put his documents aside and surveyed his only daughter as she paused by his study door. Alianne—known as Aly to her family and friends—posed there, arms raised in a Player’s dramatic flourish. It seemed that she had enjoyed her month’s stay with her Corus relatives.

“Dear Father, I rejoice to return from a sojourn in our gracious capital,” she proclaimed in an overly elegant voice. “I yearn to be clasped to your bosom again.”

For the most part she looked like his Aly. She wore a neat green wool gown, looser than fashion required because, like her da, she carried weapons on her person. A gold chain belt supported her knife and purse. Her hazel eyes contained more green than George’s own, and they were set wide under straight brown brows. Her nose was small and delicate, more like her mother’s than his. She’d put a touch of color on her mouth to accent its width and full lower lip. But her hair …

George blinked. For some reason, his child wore an old-fashioned wimple and veil. The plain white linen covered her neck and hair completely.

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you plan to join the Players, then?” he asked mildly. “Take up dancing, or some such thing?”

Aly dropped her pretense and removed her veil, the embroidered cloth band that held it in place, and her wimple. Her hair, once revealed, was not its normal shade of reddish blond, but a deep, pure sapphire hue.

George looked at her. His mouth twitched.

“I know,” she said, shamefaced. “Forest green and blue go ill together.” She smoothed her gown.

George couldn’t help it. He roared with laughter. Aly struggled with herself, and lost, to grin in reply.

“What, Da?” she asked. “Apart from the colors, aren’t I in the very latest fashion?”

George wiped his eyes on his sleeve. After a few gasps he managed to say, “
What
have you done to yourself, girl?”

Aly touched the gleaming falls of her hair. “But Da,” she said, voice and lower lip quivering in mock hurt, “it’s all the style at the university!” She resumed her lofty manner. “I proclaim the shallowness of the world and of fashion. I scorn those who sway before each breeze of taste that dictates what is stylish in one’s dress, or face, or hair. I scoff at the hollowness of life.”

George still chuckled, shaking his head.

“Well, Da, that’s what the students say.” She plopped herself into a chair and stretched her legs out to show off her shoes, brown leather stamped with gold vines. “
These
look nice.”

“They’re lovely,” he told her with a smile. “Which ‘they’ is it that proclaim the hollowness of the world?”

Aly flapped a hand in dismissal. “University students. Da, it’s the silliest thing. One of the student mages brewed up a hair treatment. It’s supposed to make your hair shiny and easy to comb, except it has a wee side effect. And of course the students all decided that blue hair makes a grand statement.” She lifted up a sapphire lock and admired it.

“So I see.” George thought of his oldest son, one of those very university students. “Don’t tell me our Thom’s gone blue.”

Now it was Aly’s turn to raise a mocking eyebrow at her father. “Do you think he even notices blue-haired people are about? Since they started bringing in the magical devices from Scanra, he’s done nothing but take notes for the mages who study how they’re made. The only reaction I got from
him
was ‘Ma better not see you like that.’ I had to remind him Mother’s safely in the north, waiting for the snows to melt so she can chop up more Scanrans.” Aly had left a pair of saddlebags by the door. Now she fetched them and put them on a long table beside George’s desk. “The latest documents from Grandda. He says to tell you no, you can’t go north, you’re still needed to watch the coast. Raiding season will begin soon.”

“He read my mind,” George said crossly. “That cursed war’s going into its second year, your mother’s in the middle of it, or will be once the fighting warms up, and I stay here, buried under paper.” He indicated his heaped desktop with a wave of a big hand and glared at the saddlebags. “I’ve not seen her in a year, for pity’s sake.”

“Grandda says he’s got an assistant trained for you,” Aly replied. “She’ll be here in a month or so. He
is
right. It’s no good holding Scanra off in the north if Carthak or Tusaine or the Copper Isles try nipping up bits of the south.”

“Don’t teach your gran to make butter,” George advised her drily. “I learned that lesson before you were born.” He knew Aly was right; he even knew that what he did was necessary. He just missed his wife. They hadn’t been separated for such a long stretch in their twenty-three years of marriage. “And an assistant in a month does me no good now.”

Aly gave him her most charming smile. “Oh, but Da, now you’ve got me,” she said as she gathered a wad of documents. “Grandda wanted me to take the job as it was.”

“I thought he might,” George murmured, watching as she leafed through the papers she held.

“I told him the same thing I did you,” replied Aly, setting documents in stacks on the long table. “I love code breaking and knowing all the tittle-tattle, but I’d go half mad having to do it all the time. I asked him if I could spy instead… .”

“I said no,” George said flatly, hiding his alarm. The thought of his only daughter living in the maze of dangers that was ordinary spy work, with torture and death to endure if she were caught, made his hair stand on end.

“So did Grandda,” Aly informed him. “I
can
take care of myself.”

“It’s not the life we want for our only girl,” George replied. “My agents are used to living crooked—you’re not. And whilst I know, none better, that you can look after yourself, it’s those other folk who worry me, the ones whose business it is to sniff out spies.” To change the subject he asked, “What of young what’s-his-name? The one you wrote was squiring you about Corus?”

Aly rolled her eyes as she sorted documents into stacks. “He bored me, Da. They all do, in time. None of them ever measures up to you, or Grandda, or Uncle Numy”—her childhood nickname for her adoptive uncle, Numair, the realm’s most powerful mage—“or Uncle Raoul, or Uncle Gary.” She shrugged. “It’s as if all the interesting men were born in your generation.” She scooped up another pile of documents from the desk. Soon she had the various reports, letters, messages, and coded coils of knotted string in four heaps: decode, important, not as important, and file. “So you can forget what’s-his-name. Marriage is for noblewomen with nothing else to do.”

“Marriage gives a woman plenty to do, particularly the noble ones,” George said. “Keeping your lands in order, supervising the servants, using your men-at-arms to defend the place when your lord’s away, working up your stock of medicines, making sure your folk are fed and clothed—it’s important work, and it’s hard.”

“Well, that lets
that
straight out,” she told him, her eyes dancing wickedly. “I’ve decided that my work is having fun. Somebody needs to do it.”

George sighed. He knew this mood. Aly would never listen to anyone now. He would have to have a serious conversation at another time. She was sixteen, a woman grown, and she had yet to find her place in the world.

Aly rested her hip on George’s desk. “Be reasonable, Da,” she advised, smiling. “Just think. My da and grandda are spymasters, my mother the King’s Champion. Then I’ve an adopted aunt who’s a mage
and
half a goddess, and an adopted uncle who’s a mage as powerful as she is. My godsfathers are the king and his youngest advisor, my godsmothers are the queen and the lady who governs her affairs. You’ve got Thom for your mage, Alan for your knight”—she named her oldest brother and her twin, who had entered page training three years before—“and me for fun. I’m
surrounded
by bustling folk. You need me to do the relaxing for you.”

Despite her claim to studying the art of relaxation, Aly had sorted all of the documents on her father’s desk. She set the important pile in front of him and carried messages to be decoded to the desk that she used when she helped George. There she set to work on reports coded in the form of assorted knots in wads of string. Her long, skilled fingers sorted out groups and positions of knots in each message web. They were maps of particular territories and areas where trouble of some kind unfolded. The complexity of the knot told Aly just how bad the problem was. The knots’ colors matched the sources of the trouble: Tortallans, foreigners, or immortals—the creatures of myth and legend who lived among them, free of disease and old age. Most immortals were peaceful neighbors who didn’t seek fights, since they could be killed by accident, magic, and weapons, but some were none too friendly.

George watched Aly with pride. She’d had an aptitude for codes and translations since she was small, regarding them as games she wanted to win. She had treated the arts of the lock pick, the investigator, the pickpocket, the lip reader, the tracker, and the knife wielder in the same way, stubbornly working until she knew them as well as George himself. She was just as determined a student of the languages and history of the realm’s neighbors. How could someone who liked to win as much as she did lack ambition? His own ambition had driven him to become the king of the capital’s thieves at the age of seventeen. Her mother’s will had made her the first female knight in over one hundred years, as well as the King’s Champion, who wielded the Crown’s authority when neither king nor queen was present. And yet Aly drifted, seeing this boy and that, helping her father, and arguing with her mother, who wanted her daughter to make something of her life. Aly seemed not to care a whit that girls her age were having babies, keeping shops, fighting in the war, and protecting the realm.

Perhaps I
should
let her work, George thought, then hurriedly dismissed the idea. She was his only daughter. He would never let her risk her neck alone in the field. It was bad enough that he’d taken her to some deadly meetings in earlier years, meetings where they’d had to fight their way out. If she’d asked to try the warrior life as a knight, one of the Queen’s Riders, or one of the battle-ready ladies-in-waiting who served Queen Thayet, he would have found it impossible to refuse. His wife and Aly’s adoptive aunts would have had many things to say to him then, and none would be a blessing. But she wanted to be a spy in the field. That he could and did refuse. He’d lost too many agents over the years. He was determined that none of them be his Aly.

He looked up, realizing that she had given him a weapon in her pursuit of fun. “What would you have done, mistress,” he asked sternly, “if you
were
a spy and I needed you to go out in the field, with that head of hair acting as a beacon?”

Aly propped her chin on her hand. “It comes out in three washings, first of all,” she informed him. “Second, if I was in Corus or Port Caynn, it would make no never mind. The apprentices and shopkeepers’ young there pick up university fashions straightaway. Any other big city, I could just say it’s the newest style in Corus. Or I’d say that they’d remember the hair and never the face under it, just like
you
taught me.” George winced. Aly pressed on, “If none of that eased your flutterings, Da, I’d say that’s what razors and wigs are for.” She brightened. “I’ll wash it out right now if you’ve a field assignment for me.”

George got to his feet. “Never mind. Leave your poor hair alone. It’s near suppertime.”

When Aly stood, he came over to put an arm around her shoulders. At five feet six inches, she fitted just under her tall father’s chin. George kissed the top of her very blue head. “I’m glad you’re home, Aly.”

She smiled up at him, all artifice and playacting set aside. “It’s always good to see you, Da.”

That night they ate with Maude, the Swoop’s aging housekeeper and Aly’s former nursemaid. Maude clucked over her hair, as Aly had known she would. She loved to make Maude cluck. Then she could remind the old woman how much she had changed from the Maude who had once disguised her young mistress Alanna as a boy and sent her off to become a lady knight. Maude always got flustered by that. Alanna was now a legend and a great lady of the realm. Maude could say it was fate that had made her open-minded back then, but she knew she was being inconsistent when she said it.

Aly liked to tease her nursemaid, not to mention everyone else. Her father knew her tricks and enjoyed catching her at them, which was fine. She knew most of his, too, because he’d taught them to her himself. She disconcerted most people, from the many boys who came calling once they’d noticed her mischievous eyes, ruddy gold hair, and neat figure to the hardened brigands and criminals who carried information to her father. She could even make her brothers yelp like puppies if she worked at it. Her twin, Alan, was particularly vulnerable, since she knew his mind nearly as well as her own.

The only person she left alone was her mother. Lady Alanna of Pirate’s Swoop and Olau, King’s Champion and lady knight, known throughout the Eastern and Southern Lands as the Lioness, did not startle well. She had a temper and her own particular way of doing things. Alanna showed a sense of humor only around her husband. Aly knew her mother loved her two sons and lone daughter, but she was seldom home. She was forever being summoned to some crisis or other, leaving her children to be raised by her husband and Maude.

Not that her children required any more raising. Aly was sixteen, almost an adult and ready for adult work, as people were forever reminding her. Aly sometimes felt that everyone in her world had more exciting things to do than she did. She hadn’t seen her mother, Aunt Daine, or Uncle Numair since the Scanran war began a year before. In the last month, while Aly had been in the capital, her grandparents were constantly advising the king and queen, so much so that she couldn’t impose on their hospitality any longer. Her brother Thom, two years older, thought mostly of his studies. Her twin, Alan, who’d begun his page training three years late, was kept busy by the training master. She had seen him twice during her visit, and only for brief periods of time. She had felt left out, even as she had understood that for the time being, Alan belonged to his training master more than he did even to his twin sister. Rather than distract him from his training, she left him alone. Alan was like a cat: he would return to her when he was ready, and not one moment sooner.