Servant of the Dragon Read online

  "Quite so," the chancellor murmured as he took from his wallet a scroll of parchment bound with a red ribbon. He handed it to Liane with a courtly flourish.

  Lord Tadai had a similar document, though his ribbon was pale yellow, dyed with the pollen washed from beehives. "There's an annexe which one of my aides will bring you shortly, Lady Liane," he said in an undertone.

  The conference room was one of the many separate buildings in the grounds of the royal palace in Valles. The councillors passed out one by one to meet their aides and bodyguards, the latter carrying ivory batons instead of swords. Only the Blood Eagles and folk the king particularly wanted to honor were permitted to go armed within the palace grounds.

  Garric grinned wryly. Lord Waldron had never gotten quite so angry that he drew his sword in a council meeting, but Garric and the others would have been a lot happier if he were disarmed. Waldron himself might have preferred a legitimate excuse that would keep his hot temper from causing him trouble: the army commander was a choleric man, but by no means a stupid one.

  There was no choice, though. Lord Attaper carried a sword by virtue of his office as commander of the Blood Eagles. Lord Waldron's pride wouldn't permit him to be disarmed in the presence of his rival for military influence.

  "The people who think a king gives orders and things are done," Carus said across a thousand years, "have never been king, lad."

  "Well, I've already submitted a petition!" Lord Sourous said. Because Garric considered Sourous to be insignificant--the young noble had his place on the council because he was head of an ancient, wealthy family and had been one of the plotters who brought Garric to his present position--he hadn't expected further argument from that quarter. Sourous couldn't possibly be as stupid as he sometimes seemed... but he certainly managed to act like he was a moron on occasion.

  This was apparently one of those occasions.

  "Lord Sourous, the prince has personally reviewed your request that Lord Hastern bor-Hallial be given a district governorship, preferably in the north of Ornifal," Liane said unexpectedly. Her tone was dryly pleaasnt. As she spoke, she opened the folding travel desk in which she kept current documents.

  Other councillors paused to listen. Sourous gaped at him like a carp lifted on the springy tines of a fish spear.

  "Lord Hastern ran through his patrimony in the first nine months after his father's death," Liane continued. "At the end he beggared his mother also, by forging her signature and seal to a pledge of the dower portion of the estate. Since then he's been borrowing on the strength of his name and living on the bounty of women."

  Liane's father had used Serian bankers. Liane used those connections to get her information. TheSerians were culturally distinct from the Isles' other ethnic groups, so their assessments of a man like Lord Hastern were detached in a fashion that the opinions of other Ornifal nobles could not be.

  "Lord Hastern has pretty completely emptied his name of value," Liane went on sweetly, "but there appears to be a sufficiency of foolish women to keep him afloat for months and perhaps years to come. He is getting a little long in the tooth, though."

  "I, ah...," Sourous said. He would have fled, but Garric's glare transfixed him.

  "So as you see, Lord Sourous," Garric broke in, "I gave your friend quite careful consideration before I decided whether he was a proper guardian for the revenues of a district. Do you have anything further to add?"

  "No, no," Sourous said. Garric bowed in dismissal; Sourous slipped out the door.

  The last councillors remaining were Attaper and Waldron. The two warriors stepped to the doorway together and halted. After a moment Attaper grinned tightly. "I trust you not to stab anyone in the back, Lord Waldron," he said. "Even me." He swept through the door ahead of the older man.

  "Puppy!" Waldron muttered as he strode out in turn. He left the door open behind him: opening and closing doors was beneath the concern of a man of Waldron's lineage.

  A servant peered into the conference room to see what those still within might wish. Liane shook her head minusculy and closed the door herself.

  "It was perfect!" Garric said with a grin. "I almost broke out laughing when you cited Sourous chapter and verse about the worthless parasite he thinks is his friend. Ilna couldn't have done it better!"

  Garric thought about the friends he'd grown up with: his sister Sharina, tall, blond, and (like Garric himself) able both to read the classics and to put in a full day's work at their father's rural inn; Cashel or-Kenset, an orphan since his father's early death, almost as tall as Garric and as strong as any two other men--

  And Cashel's twin sister Ilna: dark-haired, pretty; a weaver whose skill passed beyond art to wizardry. Ilna's tongue was as sharp as the bone-cased knife she kept for household tasks and to cut the selvage of her fabric. Ilna might well have dressed Sourous down in that fashion, but--

  "Ilna would've enjoyed it," Garric said sadly. "I enjoyed it while it was happening, but I shouldn't have. Sourous is a fool, but that's not a crime. I liked to see him squirm because I'm tired and frustrated."

  Garric slid his chair back to stand. He kept knocking his elbows on the chairarms of solid black wood. He wondered what people would say if he had the chairs in this conference room replaced with benches?

  King Carus laughed at the unspoken thought. Garric echoed the laughter aloud; it broke his mood.

  "I don't feel that I'm getting anywhere," he said in a more cheerful tone than he would have used a moment before. Having a companion who knew your every thought and who was always willing to laugh with you--or at you--was a good thing for a ruler. Garric knew both from Carus' memories and from his own experience that kings were generally lied to.

  He was luckier than most kings: neither Liane nor the friends he'd grown up with would lie, to Garric or to anybody else. But he was lucky also to have a friend and advisor like Carus.

  "You've done more in the past few months than any King of the Isles managed in his whole reign," Liane said with a hint of sharpness. "Anyone since the Old Kingdom, I mean. There's a Royal Army--and more important, there's a royal administration that does more than accept whatever pittance the local landholders claim they owe the state."

  "We've got the start of an administration," Garric agreed, "but just a start and that's only here on Ornifal. The rulers of the other islands go their own way. The only reason the Earl of Sandrakkan and the Count of Blaise haven't proclaimed themselves kings of their own islands is that they both think that if they play the game right they can claim the whole Isles."

  "And now that they see the king in Valles isn't a weakling who can be pushed aside," said Carus, "they'll be thinking very hard about independence. We'll need to deal with that."

  Garric patted the coronation medal of King Carus which he wore on a ribbon under his tunic. The king's presence in Garric's mind frequently laughed but was always alert. Carus was an older version of Garric himself, wearing flamboyantly colored clothing. The right hand of his image was never far from the hilt of his long, straight sword.

  "When we have Ornifal organized," Liane said firmly, "you'll be able to extend your administration right across the Isles. After all, it's not just the kingdom that's better for having fair taxation and honest justice, it's all the people of the kingdom."

  Garric laughed. "All the people except the ones profiting by the present chaos," he said. "Which means most of the people in power already."

  "In the long run--" said Liane. Emotion had raised spots of color on her cheekbones. Liane was so passionate about the plan to reunify the Isles that sometimes she couldn't see the problems for all her sharp intelligence. She couldn't bear to see obstacles in the way of what she knew with all her soul was right.

  "People don't think about the long run," Garric said quietly. "They think about what they have in their hand today."

  Liane started to speak, then swallowed the retort with a grimace. She was tired too.

  "Remember, you and I know the dangers," Garric s
aid. He put his fingertips on the backs of Liane's hands. She'd watched a demon disembowel her father. Magical forces were again rising to their thousand-year peak. No one understood better than Liane what would happen to the Isles if those forces were allowed to shatter even the fragile peace which had returned since the fall of the Old Kingdom."Most people don't, and it's most people that we have to deal with."

  Liane turned her right hand and squeezed Garric's. "And some people, even if they did know what we know," she said, "would keep right on robbing their peasants instead of trying to build a community of honesty and justice. Well, you have the Royal Army too."

  "And so you do, lad," agreed King Carus. "A good one, and getting better each day. Just don't be as quick as I was to use your sword instead of talking; and don't forget that however good my army was, there was a wizard who could sink it and me to the bottom of the Inner Sea."

  Garric laughed. Liane smiled through her puzzlement: no one but Garric himself heard the words of his ancestor. "I'm reminding myself that wizardry is a danger no matter how good our army is," Garric said, to explain what he was thinking about. It took a particular kind of gallows humor to laugh at the thought, though.

  Along the room's sidewalls were leather-covered benches where aides would sit during the meetings they were allowed to attend. For most of his life Garric had slept in a garret room with a bed even narrower than the benches. "What I need most now is a nap. Is there anything so pressing that...?"

  "I'll tell the guards that you're not to be disturbed by anyone but me," Liane said as she rose, folding her travel desk with the same graceful movement. "And I'll be in the service building next door. There's a couch there too. I'm going to fall asleep on my feet unless I manage to lie down first."

  "Things are bound to settle down someday," Garric said as he held the door for Liane. A servant tried to take the little desk from her; she motioned him away peremptorily and stepped toward the adjacent building, throwing Garric a parting smile.

  Garric shrugged out of his vermilion robe of state. Underneath he wore a tunic of thin wool rather than silk: wool felt right against his skin, because that's what he'd always worn. He settled on the bench, kicking off the silly-looking slippers of gilded leather that he had to wear with the heavy robe.

  "Maybe things settle down for some people when they die," said his grinning ancestor. "Not for all of us, though."

  And as Garric plunged into the darkness of sleep too long delayed, Carus added, "And besides, what would folk like you and me do if a miracle brought us peace, lad?"

  Cashel or-Kenset was learning to dance in the city fashion. It was a more stately business than what went on at weddings and harvest feasts in the borough.

  "Oh, Lord Cashel, you are so masterful!" said his partner, Lady Besra bos-Balian--a woman Cashel had at first thought resembled his sister. Besra was as dark and petite as Ilna, but she lacked Ilna's principles, her loyalty, and her wit.

  In particular, Besra didn't have enough wit to know that while Cashel wasn't smart the way his friends Garric and Sharina were, he wasn't nearly stupid enough to be taken in by Besra's act. She liked to call herself a girl, but Cashel guessed she must be at least thirty--and by the lines at the corners of her eyes beneath a layer of powdered chalk, they'd been hard years most of them.

  "No, Lady Besra," Cashel said patiently. "I made a mistake. I swung left when I should've swung right."

  He turned his head and nodded to the dance mistress, Lady Kusha. She was, well, ancient.

  Lady Kusha had been a maid of honor, whatever that was, to the wife of the first King Valence, grandfather of the man now on the throne. She had black eyes and always wore garments of stiff black linen as though she'd just been widowed. Sharina said that in fact, Kusha had never married.

  "Sorry, Lady Kusha," he said sincerely. "I'll get it right the next time."

  "I'm sure you will, Master Cashel," Kusha said. "You have an instinct for the dance; it just needs to be tutored into the proper forms."

  Unlike Besra and too many more of the people in Valles, Kusha never tried to flatter Cashel by addressing him as, 'lord'. Cashel's father was a miller's son who'd drunk himself to death a few years after he'd come back to Barca's Hamlet with infant children and no wife to mother them.

  False honor rubbed Cashel the wrong way, though he'd given up trying to train the Besras of this world out of using it. Cashel didn't set much store by nobility--he hadn't yet met a noble who was better at any of the things Cashel thought were important--but it bothered him to be given something that he knew he didn't have a right to.

  There were three men in the marble-floored salon besides Cashel. Two were musicians playing a descant recorder and a kit violin, a tiny stringed instrument which was bowed instead of being plucked like the lutes Cashel was familiar with.

  The third man was Lord Evlatun. All of Cashel's teachers seemed to be noble or claim to be, though they didn't have much besides the name and generally the attitude. Evlatun joined with Lady Kusha in measures which needed four dancers.

  Evlatun was Besra's partner; whether the partnership was as formal as marriage, Cashel couldn't guess and didn't care. The blond, balding fellow smiled brightly whenever he saw Cashel looking at him, but the times Cashel had caught his unguarded expression, well...

  If Evlatun had been a snake, he'd have been poisonous. Cashel wouldn't have thought twice before breaking his back with a quarterstaff stroke.

  There seemed to be a lot of people like that in Valles. Maybe it was just that the palace drew them, the way you found flies on a manure pile.

  "You're the most graceful man I've ever danced with, Lord Cashel," Besra said. She laid her right hand on his biceps, sliding her fingers under the fringed sleeve of his embroidered tunic. It was a costume he had to wear for these sessions. Had to, because Sharina had to go through the same business and he didn't want to embarrass her.

  Cashel turned slightly to rotate himself away from the woman. Evlatun watched, grinning like a man dying of lockjaw.

  "Um," Cashel said. "We dance in Barca's Hamlet, it just isn't the same steps."

  He was graceful, that he knew. Besra hadn't been the first person surprised at that, though. Cashel was big, so he moved carefully: big, strong men who aren't careful break things. He'd spent much of his life moving at the pace of sheep or a team of plow oxen, and he'd learned they get where they're going just as sure as more excitable animals do.

  Folks tended to think that a big man who counted on his fingers would be awkward besides. Awkward people don't work with axes and heavy weights, not and survive with all their limbs. Ever since he got his growth Cashel had been the fellow folk in the borough called on when they needed a tree felled just right, or a boulder shifted from a space too tight for oxen.

  He wasn't slow, either, not when there was need to move fast. Now and again a drover's guard had too much to drink at the Sheep Fair and challenged Cashel to a bout with quarterstaves or of all-in wrestling. The ones who were lucky staggered away from the flagged ring afterward; the others were carried by their friends.

  Besra moved close again. Cashel turned to face the dancing mistress, putting his back to his partner. He could swear he heard Evlatun's teeth grinding. "I'm ready to go on, Lady Kusha," he said.

  "We'll start from the rigadoon," Kusha said. She tapped her fan toward the musicians; the folding tortoiseshell leaves made a muted clack. "Positions, please!"

  The salon was the large central room of a building meant for entertainment. There were two-story wings on either end, providing separate suites for the male and female guests to leave their outerwear and their servants. Like the rest of the sprawling palace on the outskirts of Valles, the building had decayed badly during the last few years, but repairs were well under way. The crumbled stucco copings on the east end had been replaced, and a pair of workmen were repainting the gilt highlights on the coffered ceiling during the intervals between Cashel's dancing lessons.

  There was a tap on t
he door from the men's suite. Kusha turned imperiously and said, "Begone! This room is engaged!"

  The door opened anyway for a man wearing the blue-gray robe of a palace servant. The tassel on his matching soft cap was gold as a sign of rank. He was the chamberlain, and Cashel knew well him well.

  "Begone, I said!" Kusha shrilled. Her lanky body seemed to expand like that of a toad facing a snake. "I am Lady Kusha bos-Kadriman, here at the express request of the Lady Sharina. I am not to be interrupted by a mere hireling!"

  It seemed to Cashel that being palace chamberlain was a lot more impressive than being dancing mistress, but that wasn't the point. "Here, it's all right," he said, but nobody was paying him any attention at the moment.

  The chamberlain bowed low and drew an S curve in the air with his right hand. It had something or other to do with what they considered manners here. "I beg your pardon most sincerely, Lady Kusha," he said, "but a matter has arisen which I needed to communicate to Master Cashel as soon as possible."

  "I'll take care of the dog!" Evlatun said, his voice an octave higher than usual. He swaggered a step forward and put his hand on his swordhilt.

  "Here!" Cashel said. He didn't mean to shout but he shouted anyway, startling one of the musicians into dropping his recorder. Cashel grabbed the dancer by the back of his collar. The brocade edging was a separate piece; it came off in Cashel's hand.

  Evlatun stumbled forward, yelping and still trying to draw his sword. This was a mess, an awful mess, and it was going to be even worse if the dancer got his weapon out. Cashel gripped the hilt and the chape at the bottom of the scabbard. Evlatun punched him. Cashel ignored the blow and twisted the sword like he was tying it in a bow.

  The scabbard was thin wood covered with velvet. It flew to splinters, but it lasted long enough to keep the sword from cutting Cashel while he was bending it. The blade was the trashy sort of thing you'd expect a man like Evlatun to be carrying: polished so it glittered, but the metal itself no better than that of the blacksmith-made knives Cashel and other men in the borough carried for general poking and prying.