Trouble with Kings (14 page)

For a moment I dismissed Garian and his rage, contemplating the fact that Jason had not really answered my question. Why not?

“What happened to the man I bribed? I hope Garian didn’t—”

“Took whatever it was you gave him and ran. What was it, your jewelry?”

“Yes. Maybe I was foolish to ride in the darkness—though it seemed a good idea at the time—but how do you make that out to be cowardice?”

“Didn’t say it was.”

“Yet you said I was a coward yesterday. Or whenever it was.”

“So?”

Good question. Why
did
his opinion matter? It ought not to matter, not the least bit. I said in my grumpiest voice, “I don’t know why I even bothered to remember. You are all selfish, stupid blockheads, every single one of you. That’s the worst of what is laughably called courtship: men.”

“So you females don’t court men—or women—who have money, power, or the promise of acquiring them?” he asked.

I thought of Gilian Zarda trying to twine her little hands round Maxl’s crown, and made a face. “Everyone is an idiot,” I stated. “Except me. Because I don’t court at all, and if I did, it wouldn’t be for money, or power, or any of the rest of it.”

Jason’s mouth quirked. “Easy to say from the position of vast wealth.”

“I’d say it even so.” I hesitated, thinking, was that true? What would I be, had I not been born a princess? I would have found my way to music. Somehow.

“You’ll be home soon enough, once your brother pays up, and you can spend the rest of your life reviling against me.”

“You didn’t tell me what you want my fortune for.”

“No,” he agreed. “Music. Now I understand why Garian was annoyed when you found that lute in his library.”

“At first he denied me access to music. Playing or hearing. Just to underscore his authority. Another way to wear down my will and force me to accede to his plans, but after my memory blanked, I realize he was afraid that might bring it back.”

“What is there in music that commands your attention?”

“That you have to ask that question—” I paused to cough, and then to catch my breath. “That you have to ask implies that you find music at best frivolous. Bad music, I’ll agree, is frivolous. Worse, it jars on the spirit. Disharmony—” I shook my head. “Never mind. Good music is an art.”

“Art being?”

I remembered Jewel’s disparaging description of Lathandra’s barracks-like royal castle. Was he in truth so ignorant? No, ignorance implied no access. Art and army did seem contradictory ways of life; I could envision him dismissing the arts as irrelevant to the all-consuming passion for war.

Despite my increasingly hoarse voice, I said, “There are as many ways to define it as there are forms of art, but the best of it takes skill and insight to create, and it is not merely pleasing to the senses, but can have meaning for us. As individuals. As people.” I stopped. That was usually far more than anyone would listen to.

“Go on.”

“With music you can tell the truth about human experience. My great-aunt told me when I was little that every choice, a shift from key to key, a new melodic line developed counterpoint to a known melody, each becomes a personal, that is, a unique, response to universal experience.”

“What about those who only hear noise?”

I hesitated, sorting his words, his tone, his expression. “Noise,” I repeated. “So many have said that to me, in derision. Accusation. Defense. I don’t have an answer, except for the observation that some people truly are tone deaf. Others, well, they haven’t had access to music from childhood, which—this is something else my grandmother told me—is akin to a person who was never taught letters looking at a book and seeing hen scratchings on paper.” I stopped again.

“Go on.”

“That’s pretty much all I have to say. For me music is true art, whereas words—so I’ve learned, growing up in a court—are at best artful.”

He gazed past me at the fire. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking, bored, or just wondering when we’d eat next.

I sneezed, buried my face in the handkerchief. Magic whisked away the nastiness of a runny nose and eyes. When I emerged, Jason said, “What I want to discover is whether Garian knew about your interests and dismissed them as frivolous, or whether he exerted himself to conceal them.”

“Why should it matter? We all knew right from the start that your so-called courtship was an excuse to extort my inheritance by legal means. My brief lapse in memory hasn’t obscured that.”

“Had nothing to do with you.”

“I should have known that.” Pause to cough. “It never has! Just my wealth. Now I really comprehend why princesses—and princes—run away to become bards.”

He cast the quill aside. “Leaving the field to the enemy.”

Two against twelve, wasn’t that what his armsman had said? As thunder rumbled across the sky, I comprehended that we existed in vastly different paradigms.

Instinct prompted me to say,
You won’t understand
. After all, I held the high moral ground, as victim, and he, as villain, had to be in the wrong.

The words were there, my tongue ready to shape them, my throat constricted to utter them, but I couldn’t. He’d listened to me talk about music, which was, as far as I could tell, so much hen scratching to him. Though we were enemies, we did sit at the same fire, with time’s steady measure slowed to the movement of winter ice, and so I said, “You mean, making kingdom affairs into personal? I guess I can see the objection—if the princess who runs away to become a bard is the trained heir, abandoning responsibility because it’s boring. But—” I shook my head.

He said, “But?”

I glowered at the fire. “But when you say ‘field’ and ‘enemy’ either you mean war, or figurative language that suggests you see kingdom affairs in terms of war. And where is the virtue in doing one’s duty if ‘duty’ is defined as sending countless unknown people, on both sides, to death?”

At that point Garian would either have laughed or slapped me. It was just that kind of answer that had provoked him.

Jason Szinzar said, “What if every alternative you see ends with war?”

“Every? I’d say it sounds like someone is seeking an excuse.”

He looked down at his papers. I waited, while the fire snapped and the rain roared, until I realized he was not considering an answer, that he was not going to make an answer.

Twice more this odd sort of conversation happened.

Once he asked abruptly if I disliked the rain, of all things—I said no—he said I was the first court woman he’d met who didn’t, but his tone was not complimentary. It implied I was lying, and I retorted that most of the men I knew (I was thinking of Spaquel) hated rain. Anyone did if one wasn’t dressed for it. Then we were off on court clothes (him: expensive and useless) and court behavior (him: as flimsy as the clothing) and before I knew it I was into my mistrust of words before I wondered if I was lecturing and stopped.

The second time he was even more abrupt, asking if I knew anything of Velethi history. Astonished, I stared—were his brains boiling with his fever? Taking up the implied challenge, I named their kings and queens going back three hundred years, and added in the major battles. It wasn’t until I said that our tutors had exhorted us always to know the enemy that he stopped talking.

I turned my back and went to sleep.

I woke to the sounds of arrivals. The armsman once more offered me food and steeped leaf, and when that was finished, he said, “Can you ride?”

“Of course.” I was annoyed at the implication that all I knew how to do was sit in carriages.

They were clearly relieved. The logistics of that big old carriage were daunting. I never did find out where Markham had managed to find it. I can only report that when we walked out of that cottage—which I fervently hoped never to see again in life, if I couldn’t avoid it in nightmares—horses awaited, their coats glistening in the light rainfall.

As I mounted up, I caught several glances of amusement at my no doubt unflattering appearance. Yet there was no derision in those glances, or mockery. Just—humor.

The journey was sedate, down a narrow trail alongside a tumbling stream. Markham and the four silent men-at-arms were watchful of their master, whose only betrayal of weakness was an angry sort of grimness by the time we reached a camp near a great waterfall. They took him into a tent. We were all soaked through from the rain, a state that was to be constant over the next couple of days.

I did not see Jason again, except in glimpses, during that journey eastward.

Brissot turned out to be the captain of a military company that included a number of women. These latter took charge of me, at first trying to hide their considerable amusement at the spectacle of me—dyed blue—in Markham’s battle gear. Or half of his battle gear. Once I was in their tent, one of the women produced some clothes that turned out to be for their young recruits. These fit me much better, right down to the warm softweave mocs—no riding boots for me. My long, bedraggled braid was coiled up and hidden under a helm.

And so we proceeded, an anonymous troop of Ralanor Veleth’s army, riding on some kind of mountain maneuvers. Nothing was explained to me, but on the day or so it took to wind our way through the border mountains, we were met more than once by Drath’s violet-clad guard riding on their own unnamed errands. No one gave me a second glance, even though at one point an entire troop of them lined up to watch us ride single file over a bridge. Jason was too far ahead in the line for me to see, but presumably they didn’t recognize him either, for he was wearing clothing belonging to one of his warriors.

I had no desire whatsoever to cry out, or draw attention and cause a battle—which might end with me back in Garian’s hands. So I stayed silent.

The clouds were low, heavy and gray as we descended into Ralanor Veleth. I hadn’t a hope of escape. Just once, briefly, I envisioned myself managing to vanquish all these foes and galloping straight for home—except where would one possibly begin? “Vanquishing” has to start somewhere, but I hadn’t a clue what the first step might be.

And wasn’t vanquishing another form of war? Yes, I decided. So my weapons had to be my wits.

Use them
.

While I tried unsuccessfully to figure out how, the journey was not unbearable. I watched diligently when we stopped, but I was always surrounded when we ate, and though I might begin an evening alone in the women’s tent, the sound of laughter and the clash of swords outside made it clear their favorite campfire activity was dueling practice. Assuming I knew where to go, I wasn’t going to sneak past that with any success.

Their conversations with one another were those of friends, punctuated by laughter, and their questions to me were at first tentative. When I recognized shyness, rather than the reserve of contempt, I exerted myself to bridge the gap between our two countries, and sensed them doing the same. Our talk was nothing political, or deep, or even all that interesting. But friendly in intention—mostly me asking questions about them, and their ready answers about a life that filled them with pride. But they didn’t confine themselves to talk about war-related things. Far from it. Friends, horses, food—all the easy subjects were canvassed, with only a single reference to recent events. One of them muttered a remark about Drath’s young guardsmen that caused them all to burst into laughter, but when I asked her to explain, she blushed, hastily said she had patrol duty, and whisked herself out of the tent.

By the time we reached Lathandra, their capital, we had established about as good an understanding as any captive princess ever had or was likely to get.

And so, after this journey I found myself with mixed feelings when we reached a formidable city built on a ridge and ringed with three sets of walls, their contours picked out by myriad torches. Silent sentries patrolled all the high points, and there were many.

We rode up the cobbled streets toward the central, highest rocky hill and the last ring-wall, which surrounded the Szinzar castle and the peak it was built into. Through a massive and well-guarded gate into a broad courtyard in which a great host could gather. The women who had stayed with me offered me salutes before they departed, which surprised me, but I gave them friendly words in parting, as if I was about to visit my elderly great-aunt and not about to get thrust into a dungeon. Or whatever form my prison would take. I was determined not to show how hard my heart hammered.

Everyone seemed to know exactly what to do, and did it with military efficiency. The company marched off one way, the supply people another, the stablehands leading the mounts toward a stable far bigger than ours at Carnison.

Out of this maze of ordered activity a liveried man appeared, and beckoned to me. “This way, your highness.”

He led me through a heavy iron-reinforced door and up narrow stone stairs. My coughs echoed oddly. Down a hall, lit at intervals by torches in sconces. I remembered that dungeons could be above ground as well as below. In fact, I’d read that some stuck their prisoners in towers, and I’d seen plenty of torchlit towers standing squarely against the gray-black night sky.

But then the man paused by a door and opened it, bowing slightly. I went through—and discovered that I was in what appeared to be the hallway leading into a residence wing. The floor was stone, but it was slate, cut and tiled, and the walls were a smooth cream-colored plaster, with doors inset along the way.

A woman appeared. Her eyes were wide-set and merry, her wild dark curls barely confined to a sedate braid. She too wore the Szinzar green and a fresh apron.

“Your highness.” She dropped a curtsey. “This way.”

I was too astonished to speak.

Numb, wet, I slogged after her, very aware of the squish, squish, squish of my mocs in the quiet hall, until she stopped at a double door, and bowed me into a spacious room with old-fashioned but fine walnut furnishings and what appeared to be a feather bed. There was even a rug on the floor, woven in pleasing geometric patterns of fish and birds and berries. Across the room a good fire in a huge fireplace made the air warm and mellow. In the corner stood a wardrobe, the right size to contain a cleaning frame.