Princess Andromeda stood on the very edge of a ledge three quarters of the way up the cliff above the Royal Palace of her mother, Queen Cassiopeia of Acadia, holding out her arms to the wind. The same wind flattened her tunic against her body, and sent strands of her hair flying about her face as they escaped from the knot at the nape of her neck. She raised her face to the sun, closing her eyes.
I wish I had wings—I used to dream about flying when I was little. It would be so glorious to simply step off this rock and fly, escape the dreariness of being a Princess, with all of the “musts” and “must-nots” that were dinned into her ears, day in and day out, by governesses, tutors, her mother’s ladies, and of course, her mother.
Especially the “must-nots.”
There were an almighty number of “must-nots.” You mustn’t laugh too loudly. You mustn’t speak your opinion unless it’s asked for. You mustn’t talk to anyone below the rank of noble, unless it’s to give them an order. You mustn’t be seen reading in public. You mustn’t frown in public. You mustn’t smile at anyone below the rank of a noble, and you mustn’t smile at any young men, ever. You mustn’t let anyone call you “Andie,” nor refer to yourself by that name.
You mustn’t be seen moving at anything other than a graceful walk. . . .. the list was endless. It seemed that all she ever heard was what she shouldn’t be doing. No one ever told her what she could do—besides look decorative, wearing the serenely stupid gaze of a statue. No one ever came to her and said, “Princess, there is a task you and you alone can perform.” One “must” along those lines would have countered a hundred of the distasteful “must-nots,” but one never came.
Who ever would be foolish enough to envy the lot of a princess with all of that hanging over their head? Nothing but restrictions without responsibilities. I’m less free than a slave, and not allowed to do anything that has any meaning to it.
She took a deep breath of the sea-scented air, and sighed it out again. At least her mother was not going to be plaguing her with one of her unannounced inspections this afternoon, inspections which inevitably ended in well-mannered murmurings of disappointment and the appointment of a new governess. Queen Cassiopeia was holding a very, very private audience with the Captains of the Acadian Merchant Fleet, followed by another with the foreign merchants who plied Acadian waters, and the meetings were expected to last all day and well into the night. Despite her mother’s being asked, begged, by her daughter to be allowed to attend, Andie had been told to “run along.” Under any other circumstances, she would have been happy about the freedom from her governess’s supervision and the opportunity to get out in fresh air and to make a raid on the library. But being treated like a child put a bitter taste on the treat.
She pushed at the stiff wires crossing the bridge of her nose, part of a contrivance called “oculars,” making sure they were firmly on her face, then curled the wires of the side-pieces securely around the backs of her ears. They were a bit of a nuisance, but she loved them, because without them, she’d be half blind. The Royal Guard’s own magician had made them for her when he’d realized, watching her try to hold a book right up against her tiny nose as a child, that she was terribly near-sighted. He’d been pleased enough to do so, though the Queen had been less than happy the first time she saw her daughter scampering about with the wire-and-glass-lenses contraption perched on her face. “It’s unnatural!” she had complained. “It looks like a cheap mask! What need has a Princess to see clearly, anyway?”
She had finally given in only when it was made demonstrably clear that Andie’s never-ending series of bruising falls came to an abrupt end once she could see where she was going.
Not that she cared that I fell, except that all the bruises were an embarrassment to her. Andie sighed again. I can never please her, no matter what I do, so I wish she’d just get used to that and make use of what I actually can do.
Queen Cassiopeia wanted a pink-and-white, sugar-plum princess, a lovely daughter who as a child would have been all frills and giggles, big blue eyes, and golden curls, and as an adult (or nearly, anyway) would be the younger image of herself, immaculately groomed, impeccably gowned, graceful, lovely—
—quiet. Pliant. Uncomplaining and unthinking. A marriage-pawn, who wouldn’t argue about anything, or ask awkward questions, or want to do anything except to look as beautiful as possible.
Andie gave herself a mental slap. Maybe not unthinking. But—certainly more obedient than Andie was. And assuredly much prettier, much neater, and much more concerned with her personal appearance than Andie could ever bring herself to be.
Cassiopeia never spent less than two hours in the hands of her maidservants before first appearing outside of her rooms. Andie could barely tolerate having the maid comb her hair and put it up, and she insisted on bathing herself, without all the oils and perfumes her mother seemed to think were necessary. Cassiopeia went through as many as six gowns before choosing one for the day, and it was always something so elaborate it took at least two maids to help her into it. Andie threw on whichever of her tunics the maid gave her, and if forced into a gown, made it the simplest draped column of fabric with cords confining it at her waist. Cassiopeia wore enough jewelry to finance an expedition to Qin for the most ordinary of days. Andie never wore any ornaments but a hair-clasp.
Cassiopeia had a lush figure that caused poets and minstrels from kingdoms hundreds of leagues away to come write songs about her, and a face that had inspired fifty sculptors. Andie’s figure was straight up and down and no gown could disguise that fact, and as for her face—well, as her mother often sighed, who would look past the lenses that took up half of it?
So how could the Queen ever be anything but disappointed in her daughter?
Andie had long since resigned herself to this, burying the hurt a little deeper each time Cassiopeia made some unconsidered remark. At least there was one area she could achieve success in—anything intellectual. And the Queen did seem to take some small pleasure in that, though she might bemoan the fact that Andie’s nose was almost always in a book. The trouble was, she didn’t seem to think that all of this study had any useful applications.
Even though I’ve quoted her facts and figures about Acadia until I’ve run out of breath, Every time she was going to have an important audience or meeting and I was able to find out about it, I’ve done all the research on the subject anyone could ask for. Today at breakfast, I detailed the revenues on import-taxes, gave her historical background on inter-merchant disputes. . .but I might just as well have been telling her Godmother tales. She just said “How interesting, dear,” as if she wasn’t even listening.
She probably wasn’t listening, actually. She probably thinks I’m just reciting my lessons for her. Once Cassiopeia had realized that her daughter was not going to develop into a miniature copy of herself, she’d left Andie’s upbringing to nurses and governesses, who mostly passed in and out of Andie’s life without making much impact on it, for none of them had lasted very long. Not because Andie was a difficult child, but because even when they were competent, and a shocking number were not, the competent ones sooner or later ran afoul of the Queen and were replaced. The incompetent, of course, we soon found out and sacked.
Not that it had ever mattered. The ones she’d had as a child, when it might have made her unhappy to lose a nurse she had become fond of, had one and all, been rather horrible. Horrible in different ways, but still horrible. Some had been strict to the point of cruelty, some had been careless to the point of danger, some had been neglectful or scolded and criticized until Andie was in tears.
If it hadn’t been for her loyal Guardsmen and Guardswomen, she would have spent a lonely and very miserable childhood.
But they had been everything that the nurses should have been and never were. The same set of six had been standing watch over her safety since she was an infant, and when nursemaids were asleep, or drunk, in the bed of their noble lovers, lording it over the lesser servants, or off flirting with stable-boys, they were the ones who saw that she drank her milk, wiped her tears when she fell, and told her stories at bedtime.
Just as well that I wasn’t the sort of child to get into serious trouble. They never had to get me out of anything difficult.
Not that she was spoiled. The nursemaids had very strict orders from the Queen on that particular subject, and no few of them had taken great glee in loading Andie down with punitive punishments at ever opportunity until she was as much of a model of correct and polite behavior as anyone would have asked. And her Six had too many children of their own to put up with nonsense from her.
From that faithful set of six Guards, she soon learned to know the every member of the Guard assigned to the Palace as soon as her curiosity led her out of the nursery, Guard in tow. If she hadn’t, she’d never have gotten her oculars.
Now she was something of a mascot for the entire Palace Regiment, and she did her best to help them whenever and wherever she could. Not that any of them had ever permitted the slightest slip so that the Queen learned of the peculiar attachment.
If Cassiopeia ever found that out she’d banish the lot of them to some awful assignments at prisons or remote Guard-posts, and put Andie in the care of even more horrible governesses.
One day soon, though, her faithful Six would be retired; Demetre and Leodipes were getting very gray, and the rest weren’t much younger. It was only the fact that duty in the Inner Palace was largely a sinecure that kept them still active. She dreaded thinking of that day, hoping their replacements would be people she knew.
Andie looked down at the Palace and the city below it; from here, just below the lookout point for the Sea-Watch, it looked exactly like the model in the Great Library. The city of Ethanos was deceptively peaceful from here, its people reduced to little colored dots moving along the white streets, the striped awnings and banners too distant to show their stains and tatters, and none of its glorious, brawling untidiness evident from this height.
Which was, she reflected, probably the way her mother would have preferred it. Cassiopeia didn’t like untidiness; not in her Palace, nor her city, nor her Kingdom, nor her daughter.
Unfortunately for the Queen’s peace-of-mind, the only place she could keep untidiness from intruding was within the walls of the Palace—and then only within the places where she herself spent any amount of time.
Andie shook off her melancholy; after all, even if she was still being treated like a child, that she had the whole afternoon to herself, without the intrusion of Queen or governess. She’d finished her set lessons, even the embroidery she hated, and knowing that the Queen was not going to appear in the Princess’s wing today and would be too busy to think of sending one of her ladies to do it for her, Andie’s governess had gone off for a good long gossip somewhere, leaving Andie free to do as she liked.
She had seized on the opportunity to go up the cliff, and thought that while she was at it, she might as well take the Sea-Watch Guard’s noon meal up to him. It was a long way to the top of the cliff, and she always made a pause near the top, to survey Palace, town, and harbor. Today she for her lessons she had just been reading poetry, which made her wonder, perversely, why the poets always talked about the “wine-dark” sea. . . .
It’s no color of any wine I ever saw. Nor the color of anything I’d ever feel safe drinking.
She turned away from the sea and the view below, and scampered up the last few flights of switch-back stairs cut into the rock of the cliff. The stairs ended in a platform planed as flat as a sheet of paper, with a three-sided stone shelter square in the middle of it, a shelter that kept the Sea-Watch Guard shaded from the sun and protected from the worst of the weather. On a gorgeous day like today, Sea-Watch duty was a very pleasant thing, but in bad weather, it was something only the strong of will and body would dare to undertake.
“Thesus!” she called, “I’ve brought up your rations!”
“Come around to the front, Princess!” came the reply. “I’ve got a sail in sight and I don’t want to lose it.”
“A sail?” She hurried around to the front of the shelter, where the big telescope was mounted—also created by Sophont Balan, the Royal Guards’ magician who had created her oculars. Thesus, a powerful and sun-bronzed warrior whose fine body beneath the duty-uniform of sleeveless tunic and trews of brown linen gave the lie to the gray strands in his curly black beard and hair, had his eye planted firmly on the end of the instrument.
“What kind of sail?” she asked, as he showed no signs of looking up.
“Ah, now, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be standing here with this be-damned thing in my eye, would I?” he replied. “There’s nothing painted on the sail, and she’s flying no colors I recognize. From her hull, she’s a merchanter, and maybe come late to the Queen’s meeting, but even if so, she’s a stranger to these waters.”
“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.”
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’ 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 come up here with your ration since I was already coming up anyway.”
“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 she noticed how even though he kept one eye on her, and was making a very 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 riff-raff 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 have to first get past the harbor-town and its regiment of Guards, then up the cliff to the city itself and 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 down on 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 to even 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 last ten years! Or—well, not exactly quote them, but she had all of it noted down and could put her finger on any figure needed within moments. 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 very 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 “advisors” 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 “advisor,” Solen 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.
Solen 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 very discrete 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 and leagues, as well as one very good road that led straight to the heart of the Five Hundred Kingdoms that was very safe and very 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 at need 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 land, 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.
Well—they are. Centaurs and fauns are real too. 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 about them, and the tales had the ring of truth about them, in no small part because they were not tales of great adventure, but 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,” treaties which were on file in the library, and why bother to 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 to have one. 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 Prince had ever ventured across the border or into the harbor. Nothing of any consequence had ever happened here in more than a generation.
No wonder the Godmothers ignored them in favor of Kingdoms that actually did things.
Just—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 is so quiet and small even The Tradition ignores us.
Acadians themselves ignored The Tradition. Of all the people she’d ever mentioned it to, only a few even seemed vaguely aware of such a thing. Maybe, again, because things were so quiet in Acadia that the only thing The Tradition had to work on were 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” being employed in and around Acadia. Even the Sophont, for all that he had the title of Guard Magician, seemed to mostly 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 do nothing for the rest of my life, and the only thing that will change will be 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 slap. 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.
The Chief Advisor, Solen Adacritus, who already relied on others to give him the facts he needed to properly inform the Queen. So what if I start 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 Solen, 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 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.
Besides, she didn’t dislike him all that much. It was only that he was such a fop. It wouldn’t be hard to pretend to respect him.
It was not only a plan, it was a good plan. Workable, logical. And if Solen was as ineffectual as she thought he was, as long as she acted the shy and mousy bookworm, he’d be likely to take what she gave him and look no further than the surface, figuring that a word or two of praise would be all the reward she needed.
Heh. Maybe it’s not so bad a thing that no one looks past my oculars.
For that matter, this might pave the way to ridding her of governesses. . .because if Lord Solen wanted her to do research, he’d want her to have her time free, and to do that she’d have to do without all those stupid lessons in precedence, genealogy, and the Royal Houses of the nearest Kingdoms. Not to mention the dancing-lessons, the etiquette lessons, the deportment and posture lessons, the embroidery, and so on. . . .
This is better than a good plan. I’ll not only have something to do, I’ll be effective.
It was with difficulty that she kept herself from leaping up and running down the stairs to press the notes she had written into Solen’s hands. For one thing, he would be with the Queen in those meetings. For another, she wanted to go over them and make fair copies before she gave them to him. This might be the most important bit of scholarship she ever did in her life. If she was going to convince him of her usefulness, she had to be sure that what she gave him was better than what he was getting from his secretaries.
So instead of pelting down the stairs, she sat quietly and ate her lunch while mentally reorganizing how she was going to present her work, and decided that a bit more digging in the library was not going to come amiss. For one thing, she hadn’t included anything about the foreign merchants, and that would be a gaping hole in an otherwise presentable report, a hole that she could not, at this point, afford.
By the time she had finished eating, she felt she was ready, and gathered up her things with a feeling of determination.
At least, in this battle, she was going in well armed. And as she headed down to stone stairs to take up her “weapons” of pen and paper, she felt herself grinning—because this was exactly the kind of battle she was best suited to win.
—Reprinted from One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey, by permission of Harlequin Books, Copyright © 2005 by Mercedes Lackey. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.