King of Swords (The Starfolk) (31 page)

Rigel produced Saiph. “Go tell the queen it’s time that she and I had a little chat, and if you say one more word I’ll fillet you. Go!”

He found a marble bench that looked appealingly comfortable to him in his present condition. He stretched out, primed what Izar would call his “self” to awaken when spoken to, and made the world disappear.

H
alfling Rigel?”

Rigel opened his eyes and sat up with a wince—he was as stiff as a hockey stick. The moon had covered about an hour’s worth of sky. The man standing over him was human, wearing a jeweled collar of office with the cotton gown and head covering of a mudling.

“I am.”

“What business do you have with Her Majesty that needs disturb her at this time of night?”

He was a youngish man, with a solid build, as far as could be seen under his robe, and quite tall for a mudling. Rigel rose to his full 196½ centimeters and looked down on him.

“What business is that of yours?”

“I am Alfred, Her Majesty’s private secretary.”

“And did the harpy I sent speak to her or to you?”

“To her, of course.”

“Then so will I.”

“Follow me.” The man turned and stalked away, following a light from a finger amulet.

Rigel caught up in two strides to walk alongside him. “How long have you been her private secretary?”

“I do not see how that concerns you, halfling.” But the man’s expression showed more amusement than annoyance.

“It doesn’t. I was just thinking that if she appointed you before she disappeared twenty-odd years ago, your workload must have increased rather drastically in the last few hours.”

“And the stars are many.” A Starlands agreement, no doubt.

“How is Regent-heir Kornephoros?”

“Dying.”

Alfred opened a door. A rush of cooler air and unfamiliar scents proved that it was a portal, and Rigel stepped through into somewhere very different from the palace at Canopus. Instead of monumental stone, it had hardwood floors, plaster cornices, and thick rugs. The windows were hung with heavy drapes, the walls lined with gilt-framed pictures and animal head trophies. It smelled of dust and old polish. He was led to a long flight of stairs.

“Where in the world is this?”

“We’re still in the Starlands, and still in the royal domain. This is Balmoral, a royal retreat, pseudo-Victoriana kitsch. Her Majesty commanded that you wait in here.” Alfred opened another door and went ahead to turn on several lamps that were passable imitations of gaslights. They illuminated a vast four-poster bed, two stuffed armchairs, a marble-topped washstand, and two ugly, oversized wood chests. The air was stale, smelling of dust and mildew, and the only charitable thing to say about the gloomy paintings of cloud-racked moors that covered the walls was that they hid some of the wallpaper.

“What happened to whoever imagined this place?” Rigel asked.

“He was extroverted to the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Glad to hear it. I have not eaten since early this morning, and murder makes me hungry.”

Alfred smiled. “Me too. I shall see what I can do.”

He departed, closing the door behind him.

Curious! Why would a royal private secretary be so tolerant of a lowly halfling’s sassing? It would be interesting to know exactly what instructions the queen had given him. Rigel flopped into one of the velour chairs, which smelled distinctly musty, and prepared to salivate for an hour while someone made him a cockroach sandwich.

He hadn’t reckoned on the power of magic. In a few minutes Alfred returned, wheeling a trolley laden with steaks, hotcakes, fried eggs over easy, hash browns, pie and ice cream, and a large decanter of orange juice.

Imagine that! Rigel ate it all, and was barely finished before the door opened and Electra entered.

He hauled himself off the chair and bowed.

At first she didn’t even look at him. “Jesus, what a mess!” she said, as if speaking to herself. “And I used to find running the Starlands boring.” She walked over to the washstand and poured water from the urn into the basin. “In all my 1,776 years, I have never witnessed such a fuckup.” She rinsed her face with her hands, then turned to face him.

“Hello, Rigel.”

“Hello, Mom.”

She half-smiled, half-nodded. “Sit. You look beat. I sure as hell feel it.”

“How’s the prince?”

“Still dying, but he won’t be much longer.”

Why
was he dying? He didn’t ask. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. Kornephoros was one pissy, stuck-up elf, and you wanted to kick his butt real hard.”

And often. “I am sorry for Talitha’s sake. This is a bad time for you too. Our talk can wait.” He had been given the confirmation he came for.

“No.” She waved him back into his chair. “It can’t. This is important; you’re important. You love Talitha?”

Not the question he had expected. “If it were possible for a halfling to aspire to love a starborn, I would throw my heart at her feet.”

“And who would clean up the mess? I asked her about you.” She hauled open the draperies on the four-poster. “Close your eyes.”

He closed. “And?”

“The hots. No shit. She’s head over her pretty little heels for you. She’s yours any time you make your move, I’d say. You can look now.” Her Majesty was in bed, with the covers pulled up to her waist and her discarded wrap lying on the floor. She arranged the pillows and leaned back on them, looking at least 1,750 years younger than she really was. A billion stars sparkled on her shoulders and neck.

He concentrated on the wallpaper. “It sounds as if the princess’s life doesn’t need any more complications right now.”

Electra made a little sideways,
how-about-that?
motion of her head. “That’s not a stereotypical male response. You’re a good man, Rigel Estell.”

“And you’re a good woman, Mira Silvas.”

She smiled politely—amused, but not very. “Just a hunch or did I give myself away?”

“Queen Electra was the last one known to have handled Saiph, and she turned up in Canopus right when I did. It was completely obvious after you explained what a Cujam was, because the mob in the store attacked both of us. Mira also happens to be the name of a star.”

“I meant how did I give myself away when I was Mira?”

“You were
wrong
. No one specific thing; there were just too many little things that didn’t make sense. You claimed you were hiding out, but you’d come to an unpopulated area when everyone knows cities offer safer cover. You claimed to have a license to carry your handgun, and it’s just about impossible to get one in Canada. No US license would be valid there, and a detective would know that. You had it with you when you were just sitting by a campfire, as if you were expecting trouble, but you had left the campground gate open, which would advertise to anyone looking for you that there was someone there. Saiph gave me no warning of the bear attack, so I wasn’t in danger. You said you had bought the Winnebago, but it had rental company plates and no rental company name sticker, so it was obviously stolen, which explains why you didn’t care about getting blood in it. The floor was clean as a whistle, but there had been a lot of rain, all over the island, so there should have been more mud. You were leaving fingerprints everywhere and a detective’s prints would be on file with the FBI and Interpol. You had silk and needles handy, but you didn’t look like a petit point sort of gal.”

He thought for a moment. “And even I never healed
that
fast before.”

“Perry J. C. Mason! I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.”

“And this morning, on the barge, I mentioned Tarf and Tegmine to you, and you didn’t ask who I meant. Humans can’t read names.”

“G’damn it! I really must be getting old.”

“So who sicced the bear on me?”

She sighed. “I did.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

This time she gave him a real smile. “I deserve that. But I’d tried to make friends with you three times, dissembling a different person each time, and you kept shutting me out. Your defenses were too high. Not that I blame you for that; you had a helluva raw deal, son.”

He thought back. “A blond girl on the Swartz Bay ferry?”

“That was one of me.”

She had come across as seriously weird, he recalled.

“Yeah, but a
bear
?” Her admission about the bear hurt more than anything else she’d done to him, and she had plenty to answer for.

“Stuff it,” she said. “There was no risk—you wore Saiph, and it was a struggle for me to even delay its response. You had about two seconds of terror, and then you knew you’d stabbed Bruin to death. Don’t tell me that it didn’t feel good. You were able to bring your pain under control in minutes, and if you hadn’t been able to, I was ready to give you a fake morphine shot and do it for you. Don’t start being a crybaby now, Rigel, my son.”

Being 1,755 years his senior made his mother very hard to argue with.

“Let’s talk about the rest of the raw deal, then.”

She nodded, covering a yawn. “’Scuse me. It’s been a very long day and I’m not used to them any more. Okay, here it is. I was never one of those alley-cat types you met at Alrisha, but I’ve always enjoyed a good tumble. You have two brothers and a sister somewhere—full-blooded starfolk, of course. After I became queen I found that ruling and pairing don’t mix. Pretty soon all my partners would start asking for favors for brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts. I still needed company, though, so I got into the habit of keeping a lusty young bed-warmer on hand. I’d boot them out as soon as
they tried playing politics. That worked better, although few of them lasted longer than a couple of months. And then…”

What she had not spelled out was that in switching from consorts to gigolos, she’d also switched from starfolk to mudlings. Obviously.

“Then me?”

“You. Stars! Imp impending! I knew I was fading. That’s starborn talk for aging. I was dumping more and more of the job on Kornephoros. I hadn’t conceived in six hundred years and never dreamed that I still could. I decided I couldn’t face all the tattling and scandal. So I slipped away with your father and went to ground. Went to Earth, literally. I picked Canada because it was sanitary and had a nice cool climate—Winnipeg in January is wonderfully bracing.”

“And you took Saiph with you?”

Electra nodded. “We took all sorts of amulets, but the birth went terribly wrong, and none of them would stop my bleeding. I didn’t dare go to a hospital. Think of the ruckus it would cause if I’d changed into someone else on the table, someone from a different species. Imagine them trying to match my blood group! Type E, Rhesus squared? I should have had more help. Your father did the best he could, but he decided he needed to introvert and bring back a trustworthy mage. By that time I was in no state to look after a newborn. Your Gert had just had a stillbirth, so he…”

She saw his doubts and her eyes narrowed. “Something bothering you,
Son?”

“That was very convenient, wasn’t it?”

“Not as it turned out,” she snapped. “There’s no such thing as baby formula in the Starlands. We had always planned on finding a wet nurse for you, some human welfare case who was due to give birth at about the same time as me, and would
welcome a cushy job as royal nursemaid. We had a wonderful domain picked out…” She glared. “We would have taken her child there with her, understand? None of that changeling crap! When I went into labor, your father checked on all the candidates and learned that Gert had just lost her child. He more or less told her, ‘Look after this for me, I’ll be right back.’ And that was that.”

Silence. This was going to be as close to the truth as Rigel ever got, and he might as well accept it. He smiled.

“She skipped, of course?”

Electra shrugged. “He wasn’t gone an hour…”

“But she’d already left town.” Gert would have been terrified that it had all been a mistake and
They
would come and take her baby away, whoever
They
might be.

“She was gone. And then, to make things much worse, we discovered that your father had put the wrong amulet on your wrist. The one he’d intended to give you would have let us track you. He certainly didn’t mean to give a newborn a
Lesath
! Rigel—Rigel, my son—I swear by the stars that I have been looking for you ever since. Twenty-one years I have scoured North America from coast to coast. I knew your name before you were born, and ‘Rigel’ is not a common name on Earth. I got very close to you several times.
Oh, you mean Rigel Whosit, the skinny boy with the white hair?
But Gert, or whatever she was calling herself at the time, had always moved on already, whereabouts unknown. I knew I could pick your face out of a hundred million male earthlings, if I ever set eyes on you.” She chuckled. “I found three halfings, as it happens. The other two were the wrong age, but I delivered them to their proper place, which is here. And they were both musicians. That switched on a light for me. Now it was,
Rigel the minstrel? Sure I know him. Heard he’d
gone west again.
By then, I had realized that you had never left Canada.”

“You were seancing all this?”

“No, no! I was down in the field, hiring detective agencies, placing ads in newspapers, interviewing people, and scanning every medical journal I could lay my hands on for reports of strange new syndromes. I thought the Starlands could look after themselves, because I never dreamed it would take me so long—and it wasn’t long by our standards. Then one day I heard you singing in Granville Island Market in Vancouver, and I knew my quest was over.”

It was a cute story if it were true. “I’m not much of a minstrel by starfolk standards.”

“You’re hell on skates by human standards. I wept to hear singing like that again. The next step was to try to become your friend, and you took to me like Teflon to water.”

He thought of Talitha’s insistence that Electra would never have abandoned a baby, any baby. He thought of the poor mudling sod, whoever he was, who’d lucked himself into a job as the queen’s gigolo. How would the kid have felt when he suddenly found himself watching his lover die in labor in a strange city in a strange land—heck, probably a strange world. Small wonder that the kid had lost it so badly that he’d chosen to trust a screwball like Gert.