“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 afterwards that they remained faithful despite the occasional beating.
Solen 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. Any time 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. Solen lounged on a nearby couch; his presence—and sometimes the presence of others of her advisors—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.
“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.
“I think she’s her mother’s daughter where intelligence 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 to 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, all other thoughts about her daughter shoved into the back of her mind.
For now.
#
Andie’s farewells to her Six could 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 Clio 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 very 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 neither claimant had the disputed rights, but actually 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, and 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 flush deepened, and only faded when she reached the study and found the Guard magician waiting there for her.
She gave him a bow of respect. All Sophonts deserved that how of respect even from the Queen herself, but Sophont Balan was something special in her eyes. He wasn’t a Sorceror 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 very 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 clever 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 amount of 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 if 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 peppering 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 last 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 every year since he had begun to make her oculars, Andie went straight to the chair he had pulled out from the desk and sat in it, facing the piece of card-stock he had propped up on the table across the room. It had a pattern on it 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 further 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 down the number of the lenses that he had matched these new ones to.
“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 cut across her face like the 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, that 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 the other such necessaries. This first gown was a high-waisted column 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 silk tissue. “You’ll be having dinner tonight with her Highness the Queen, and two of her guests, Princess,” 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 besides 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 fruit and yoghurt to sustain you during the meal, and I shall have your cook prepare something for you 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.”
For the first time, the rather formidable lady smiled. “It was not in my orders from the Queen to give you advice, Princess,” she replied, resting her hand atop Andie’s for just a moment, “But I hoped you would not think me forward to do so.”
“Oh no! Please! Continue doing so!” she said hastily, and sighed. “This is becoming a great deal more complicated than I thought it was—“
“The business of a ruler always is, my dear,” the Steward replied. “Now, if you are not to be late—as soon as Iris gets your slippers tied, you must be away. Collect one of your Guards at the door. You must not travel even within the Palace walls without an escort anymore. You are a lady of consequence now.”
And the unspoken words rang loudly enough in Andie’s mind that Lady Thalia might just as well have said them aloud.
“You are no longer a child. And you must never forget it.”
#
As the each day passed into the next, Andie slowly settled into her new roles. That of researcher and advisor was the easiest, and the one that gave her the most pleasure. Being Princess was as restrictive, in entirely new ways, as it had ever been, but she found that having real work to do made the restrictions less irksome. Lady Charis and Lady Kyria did not reappear after the last of her new wardrobe was completed, but Lady Thalia was a constant companion, and somewhat to Andie’s surprise, became a welcome one. She had been certain that Lady Thalia had been given charge over Andie’s household purely to report Andie’s failings back to the Queen. That might have been the case, but Lady Thalia had her own ideas of what she was to do, and that included patiently instructing Andie on the running of a royal household, on court protocol, on how to watch other people, catch them in unguarded moments, and learn something about them.
And Iris was a treasure; far more of a friend, because she was near to Andie’s own age, than Guard Clio ever could have been. Between them, they turned what could have been an ordeal into something that was merely demanding, and could be quite interesting.
The one thing she didn’t much care for was that she had to wear gowns now, instead of tunics and bare legs. But a great deal of the rest of what Lady Charis deemed needful to a lady was rather pleasant. The daily massages, for one thing. So she didn’t miss running wild as much as she had thought she might.
The only problem was that she kept turning up odd things in the records. . . .
Such as the oddity that in her mother’s lifetime, a substantial percentage of the scavengers’ rights along the coast had reverted to the Crown, and none had been parceled back out again.
Now, since such rights were a traditional way of rewarding good service, that was exceedingly odd. Even odder, it seemed as if every one of the rights that reverted was always the center of a tangle of subdivisions, sales, and inheritances which came out to favor a party who was either dead or vanished.
It was enough to send a shiver up her back as she thought about the old stories of cursed treasures, and ghosts taking revenge on those who profited, however obliquely, by their deaths.
When she looked back over the old records of her mother’s reign, she discovered this had been happening, off and on, ever since her father had died and her mother had begun to rule alone. It appeared that the policy of generations, to use scavengers’ rights to reward those who in other Kingdoms might be given lands and titles, had been reversed. She wondered, was this Cassiopeia’s idea, or had someone advised her to it?
The source of the Queen’s personal wealth, which had been puzzling her a little, was revealed in this, however. No wonder Cassiopeia was able to afford silk, where her predecessor had made do with linen!
She frowned a little and stopped herself just before she began chewing on her nail. Lady Charis would have a kitten—
It was true that this was a way—without raising taxes or harming anyone—for Cassiopeia to increase her “discretionary” income. Seen in that light, there wasn’t anything to find fault with. And it was also true that since Andie had begun paying attention, there hadn’t been much that she would have chosen to reward anyone for—or at least, nothing that would merit the sort of permanent reward that salvage-rights represented. The Queen loved luxury, loved beautiful things, loved ornaments and extravagant entertainment; richer countries than Acadia had been bankrupt by such Queens and Kings. But Cassiopeia seemed to have found a way to indulge herself without bankrupting her country or impoverishing her people. . .maybe she was going against Acadian custom, but in this case, it was hard to fault her.
Then there was the other odd thing; the number of shipwrecks was also increasing.
Now, there always had been and always would be merchants who sought to bypass Acadian harbor-taxes, unloading-fees, and inspections by bypassing the port at Ethanos altogether and meeting up with a caravan at some shallow or less-protected bay or river-mouth or minor fishing-harbor where there were no harbor-officials, no tax-inspectors matching what was unloaded with what was being declared, and no laws saying that they had to pay the longshoremen of Ethanos to offload their ship. And there were always smugglers who wished to bypass all Acadian taxes entirely, and elude customs-officials to bring in items that had been banned. But it seemed that to an increasing extent, such scofflaws had found themselves facing storm and wreck, almost as if some divine hand was at work. Some, when not wrecked, found themselves driven into port before a storm, willing or not.
But there was something very troubling about those lists of wrecked ships, because there was another trend that Andie truly could not find any sensible reason for.
Not only were there more wrecks, but there were more wrecks every year from merchants and countries that had never traded out of Ethanos. Places where the sunken ships gave up corpses that had dark brown, black, or yellow skin, where the cargos were things that had never passed through any market in Acadia before, where no Acadian but a Sophont could read the lettering on the barrels and bales, and only then by bespelling the letters into something recognizable.
Where were they coming from? When Andie sorted through older and older records, she saw that such a prodigy would occur now and again, once every ten or twenty years at most for the entire length of the Acadian shoreline, and be talked about by the scavengers who found it for a generation or more.
Not now. Now the exotic ships were washing up once a month in the stormy season, as if some inimical hand dragged them off course and then threw them onto Acadian rocks. And it made no sense. This was like finding strawberries in winter, or a gryphon-cub among the kittens in a farmhouse litter. Those vessels should not have been anywhere near Acadia—yet there they were, coming to grief, spilling their goods out onto Acadian shores.
More wrecks—wrecks from foreign lands—Andie had a hunch, and looked in still another set of records, to discover that, yes, the storms of the storm-season were getting worse, stronger, lasting longer, and the season began earlier and ended later. Away from Ethanos, fisher-folk were suffering, not being able to put to sea to make their winter catches, and farmers were suffering too, as their growing season shortened. So although prosperity was coming to Acadia as a whole in the form of treasure, it was passing the people who formed the backbone of Acadia, the coastal farmers and fisher-folk, by.
She closed that book and sat staring into space for a moment And a horrible thought dawned on her.
What if the storms are being sent?
It was true that the wrecks were bringing a certain amount of prosperity to Acadia, but only to a few. The rest were suffering. Smaller harvests meant less to eat; so far, the difference hadn’t shown up in the marketplace that she knew of, but the area around Ethanos seemed free of these prodigal storms. The rest of the coastline was not doing as well. And if there was one thing that Andie saw in history, it was that if you wanted to bring a country to its knees, you began by starving it.
Though it might not be Acadia that was the target here. It could be some other land, whose merchants were being driven off-course, whose cargos were being lost. Acadia could be both the unwitting victim of and benefactor from someone else’s quarrels.
So, it was a theory; the question was, could it be done, or was all this some Godmother-tale she was frightening herself with? Can storms be sent? Can you perform some magic to bring them early, make them stronger, and send them where they wouldn’t ordinarily go?
Only one person in the Palace would know.
Not long ago, she would have gone running down to Balan’s workshop herself. Now, with a sigh, she rang a little bell on her desk, and a servant appeared.
“Do you know where Sophont Balan lodges?” she asked the boy.
He nodded. Well, a boy would. Girls tended to avoid the area of the Sophont’s quarters because of the odd smells, sounds, and occasional sights, and a fear that some thing would jump out and bite them. Boys, on the other hand, tended to linger for precisely the same reasons.
“Then take the Sophont my compliments and ask if he can spare me a moment.”
The boy nodded again, and ran off, eager to be granted a task that would allow him inside the Sophont’s door. Who could predict what he would see?
Since Andie knew precisely what he would see, despite her concern she stifled a smile. In Balan’s workshop, which was so neat that even the most exacting housekeeper would be unable to find fault with it, he would see nothing much more exotic than he’d see in the housekeeper’s still-room. Unless he happened to look up. Then he’d see the stuffed crocodile Balan kept hanging in the rafters.
She’d asked him why years ago, and he’d laughed. “Tradition!” he’d said. “Tradition says that Acadian Sophonts have a stuffed crocodile hanging from the rafters! I never wanted one; I threw the first one I had away. In the morning, it was back up there. So I gave it away. In the morning, it had returned. I pitched it in the ocean. It was back the next day with a drape of seaweed across its back and a glitter in its glass eye. Finally I burned it. The next day—that was hanging up in the rafters twice as big as the first! I gave up. There are just some things it’s not worth trying to fight the Tradition over.”
She hoped fervently that she wasn’t interrupting some experiment, because as polite as he was, Balan would come whether he could spare the time or not.
She was quite relieved when, following the boy, he looked as relaxed as if he had been doing nothing more than a bit of light reading when she’d asked him to come. And there were no stains on his fingers, and no burn-holes in his vest, which argued the same conclusion.
She gave him the bow of respect, then launched straight into her question. “Sophont, is it possible for a magician to change the weather?”
His brows wrinkled. “It depends on what you mean by ‘change,’” he said, finally. “Can they make weather vanish? No. Weather patterns have a lot of force behind them. The natural world is one of the hardest things for a magician to alter, because it resists change. Weather can be called, or sent, but that’s still tricky, and it takes a great deal of power. More than I’d have, unless, for instance, the Tradition decided to reinforce me to make weather behave the way the Tradition dictates for a particular time and place.”
It was her turn to wrinkle her brows. “Why?” she asked.
“Because weather is part of the Tradition,” he explained, waving his hand at the clouds outside. “Take Ethanos, for instance—in all the songs and stories about Ethanos, the Royal Family, and the port, you’ll never see one where the weather is bad, so the Tradition tends to insist that we have many more fine days than wretched ones. Every single song sung here talks about rainbows after the rain—and rainbows we have, after every single rain. We’ve got something of a reputation for it, in fact. So if I were going to try to change that, I’d have the entire weight of the Tradition mustered against me.”
“But a strong enough magician could still make the weather go where he wants it to go?” she persisted.
He sighed with reluctance. “A strong enough magician, and an area that doesn’t have a lot of Tradition dictating the kind of weather it gets, yes. He could. Why?”
She told him, and when she was done, his eyes were narrowed in speculation. “Interesting,” he said chewing on his lower lip. “The thing about the open ocean is that you aren’t burdened with a lot of Tradition about what kind of weather should go where, and that’s more than half the battle. Very interesting. . . .”
“Do you think it’s sent at us?” she persisted anxiously.
He shook his head. “I think it’s far more likely we’re getting tangled up in someone else’s fight. See, that’s the other reason you don’t mess with the weather. You don’t know who, or what else you’ll be affecting. They might take offense. You might actually hurt or kill someone. The Tradition might take a hand when someone else’s land is getting weather it isn’t supposed to, and the next time you try a spell, it could snap back at you. But I’ll look into this; if it is someone causing it, there are some counter-measures I can take, and if the weather patterns really are worsening, it might be enough for the Tradition to help me out..”
She sighed with relief, and smiled up at him. “Thank you, Sophont,” she said earnestly.
He shrugged. “For what? I’m the Guard’s magician; that’s part of my duties, and if you hadn’t brought the situation to my attention, since I almost never leave Ethanos, I might not have known about it until something enormously bad happened. I’m in your debt.”
“No, now that’s my duty,” she responded, with an embarrassed smile. “Noticing things and making sure people know about them.”
“Then we’ll call it even,” he replied. “Now if the Princess would excuse me?”
After he was gone, she wondered for a moment if she ought to report this to Solen. After all, it wasn’t what she’d been told to research. . . .
But then again, telling someone when she found something odd, or an unexpected pattern, was part of her duties.
So she uncapped the bottle of black ink—for the “not urgent” reports—dipped in a quill, and began.
In researching salvage rights, I made note of what seemed to me to be an unusual number of foreign wrecks from unknown lands washing up on Acadian shores in the last decade or so. . .
—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.