Kings of the North (48 page)

“I still think you must bind him,” Berne said. Arian nodded.

“It is gross discourtesy; he has been humiliated enough,” Kieri said.

“He said he wants to feel your blood on his hands.”

“I know. I was there. But he will not want it less for being bound. He talks of honor; let us see if he will give his word, and keep it.”

“And if he does not?”

“He has no weapons, and no poison on him; he has been bathed and dressed in our garments. Aside from that, if he wants to fight me barehanded and is foolish enough to do so here—I am not incapable.”

“I know, my lord king, but your life is our responsibility.”

“You will be within call.”

“We should be in the room with you. What if he calls up an evil demon?”

Kieri shook his head. “He could have done that to escape those who captured him. Let us not make up trouble for ourselves. Just outside the door will be well enough; he can’t lock it against you.”

He moved to the door himself, hearing approaching footsteps. The king, under close guard, was coming down the passage. He wore the garments he’d been offered, a velvet tunic over heavy wool trousers and low soft-soled boots. He stopped abruptly when he saw Kieri.

“You!” he said in Common. “You are the king? You lied to me.”

“No more than you to me,” Kieri said, “when you sent that old woman to spy at my coronation and she said you wanted peace. She should have described me better.” The king said nothing. Kieri went on, this time in Pargunese. “You spoke to me of honor. If you give your word that you will not attack me while we talk, you will not be bound, and my Squires will leave us alone. Will you?”

“Why should I?”

“Because, if I wished it, you could be bound like a herdbeast and killed, or locked in a cell. If you are intent on killing me, you will have time. If there is a way of having peace between our people, yours and mine, I want to find it. And you will be more comfortable unbound.”

“I cannot swear never to kill you.”

“No one could swear that,” Kieri said. “That is not what I ask. Swear not to attack me for one turn of the glass.”

“And then you will kill me?”

“Not if I can avoid it,” Kieri said. “Though I do not expect you to believe it.”

The king looked at the King’s Squires to either side of him, and shrugged. “It makes no difference, I suppose, one glass. You can lie, and I will listen, if that is what you want. But one of us will die, and if it is I, your land will suffer.”

“If either of us dies, both lands will suffer,” Kieri said. “My people would like to hear you say it in Common, if you will.”

The king uttered an oath in Pargunese, then said in Common, “I
have given my word not to attack your king for the full turn of a glass. I would see the glass.”

“Here it is,” one of the Squires said.

The king looked, and nodded. “Well, then. I am ready.”

“Come in,” Kieri said. “And be seated.” He waved at the chair, and the king sat in it, gingerly at first, and then leaned back.

“It is too soft,” he said. “A man would learn to slump in such a chair.”

“My apologies,” Kieri said, sitting in his own. “I was thinking of your long ride. I can have someone bring a hard one.”

“No matter. Have your say; perhaps in this soft chair I can sleep and not listen to your lies.”

“If you are trying to anger me,” Kieri said, “and force me to fight you, that will not work.”

“Will it not? I had heard you were a man easy to anger, quick to take offense.”

“Perhaps I was once, but I am trying to learn better,” Kieri said. When the king said nothing, he went on. “Until I came here, I knew nothing of where your people came from. I did not know you were Seafolk from over the eastern sea.”

The king opened one eye. “Did you not? It is common knowledge with us. Where did you think we came from?”

“I suppose I thought you were mixed mageborn and old human, like most of those in the Eight Kingdoms.”

“Mixed! We do not mix, and certainly not with magelords. You drove us out of our homes, and then, here, attacked us again.” The king leaned forward. “And then, not content with attacking us, confining us to colder, less fertile land north of the river, you despoil my daughter.”

“You sent her here,” Kieri said. “Why?”

“My first wife’s sister thought you might have changed, and of my daughters, Elis was the strongest … you had wed one of your soldiers before.”

“She told me you had promised her a home far in the north, where she could live unmarried.”

The king waved his hand. “It was a girl’s fancy. And yet, I might have let her—she had frightened away several suitors—but when
you came, I thought, if she and you wed, it might bring peace. Worth more than a girl’s daydream, if that could be.”

“Um.” Kieri nodded at the pitcher on the table. “There’s water, if you want it.” The king shook his head. “Elis told me you gave her a knife—a poisoned knife—to kill me on our wedding night. That if she did so, and escaped, you promised to let her live as she pleased.”

The king looked the way Kieri had felt when Elis told him. “She—she said
what
? I gave her no such knife!”

“She had such a knife. She told me where her escort kept it. I had their things searched, and it was there. She said she’d been forbidden all weapons but that, and that only after our wedding.”

“I did tell them not to let her have weapons. She is a wildcat; she might have attacked her own escort.” He scowled. “But I never gave her a poisoned knife to use on you, much as I wish you dead. And Elis … I cannot believe she would lie about that. Who told her?”

“She said her escorts told her it was your command. And it is her escorts, is it not, who reported to you that she had been dishonored?”

“Yes …” Now the king looked thoughtful.

“Tell me,” Kieri said, “why you came alone, in disguise, instead of sending an envoy, or coming in person, openly. It is not a kingly act.”

“It is
my
disgrace.
My
honor. My brothers—my sister-sons—all said so, and the challenge was given. It is our way.”

“I do not understand,” Kieri said, though he was beginning to guess. He needed better than a guess.

“A leader protects his people. If he cannot protect them, he is no better than a slave … someone will challenge for leadership, and either they fight for it or the others vote … it depends on the issue.”

“And they challenged you because your daughter stayed here?”

“Because you sent her to that place of infamy.”

“To us,” Kieri said, “it is a place of honor, where Knights of Falk are trained.”

“Falk!” the king said, and spat on the carpet. “A magelord! What could be honorable about Falk?”

“Do you even know the story?”

The king waved his hand again. “Something about working in a
stable to free his brothers … that’s not how to free prisoners. He should have fought …”

“That’s what I told the Knight-Commander when I trained there,” Kieri said. “He did not appreciate it.”

“You trained in that place?”

“Yes.” Kieri could feel the man’s intense curiosity, and also his determination not to ask. “It is a place to learn more than just fighting skills. I did not grow up in this palace.” As quickly as he could, he told the story: the fateful journey, the abduction, the years of torment.

“Scars do not lie, but men do,” the king said. “If you have been so mistreated, surely you bear the marks of it on your body. Show me.”

“I will,” Kieri said. He felt suddenly cold, but not the same way he had as a boy. “I would ask that you allow one of my Squires to attend me.”

“As you wish,” the king said.

Kieri called Berne; he came in the door in a rush. “It is no emergency. The king has offered me no violence, but would see my scars; I want someone in the room while I disrobe.”

“Disrobe? For this—”

“This
visitor,
” Kieri said carefully, “has asked proof of my history. The proof lies in my scars.”

“But … Sir King …”

Kieri shrugged. “If this ends our enmity, it will be worth any embarrassment.” With Berne in the room, he felt safe enough to pull his tunic over his head; the momentary blindness always bothered him, but less this way. With the king’s eyes on him, he unbuttoned his shirt, pulling it from his trousers and then taking it off. The scars had faded with age, as they did on most, but still made a raised pattern on his naturally pale skin. The newer scars, the ones from the wars he’d fought, were clearly made by weapons and overlaid the older, finer patterns laid on by his master in the years of captivity. He turned away from the king’s eyes, raising his arms so they showed clearly, from neck to waist.

When he turned back, the king was staring, mouth a little open; his mouth snapped shut abruptly, then he said, “That was done when?”

“I was taken when I was four winters old, and did not escape for at least eight years. There are more scars, which you will
not
see unless you kill me and strip my body.” Kieri said this as grimly as he felt; he saw understanding seep into the other king’s face.

“You were only a child … and you say this was a magelord who did it? How do you know?”

“He had the magery to force people to stillness.” Kieri put his arms back into the shirt Berne held for him, and buttoned it again. “He could force prisoners to silence even in great torment, or hold them motionless for the same.”

“How did you ever escape? Eight years … no normal child could survive …”

“He had no intent to kill me. He wanted me alive, to suffer. But—” Kieri looked over at the glass, now quickly running out. “—you promised to listen for only one glass. I would not abuse your patience.”

“Turn the glass again,” the king said. “I am not convinced I will not have to kill you, but I must know how you escaped.”

“I
t is part mystery and part your own people,” Kieri said. “How I was freed is the mystery; I do not understand it still, except as a gift of the gods. How I came back across the sea was a gift of the Seafolk, who, finding me hiding aboard and retching myself dry, did not throw me overboard to drown, but took pity on me for these same marks—some then still bleeding—and carried me across the sea to Bannerlíth and there set me ashore with a full belly, a few coins, and a shirt to my back. If not for the Seafolk I would not now be alive.”

“You did not tell them who you were?”

“I did not know, by then. The baron told me a short version of my true name over and over, until it was all the name I knew. I was too young—I had a few memories, but no way to describe them to anyone and all I had learned told me it was dangerous to try.”

The king chewed his lip for a long moment. “I heard a tale,” he said finally. “I am a king; kings have spies; you will not despise me for that—”

Kieri shrugged. “Of course not. Any man of war must have spies.”

“Good. Then—I heard a tale, brought by a spy from Tsaia, that you said something like this to that Council, and were believed.”

“Some of them believed,” Kieri said. “Some did not. But their belief or unbelief does not affect the truth of it.”

“It is a tale someone might tell,” the king said, “who perhaps had
been orphaned and mistreated, and wanted to think himself a lost prince.”

“Indeed,” Kieri said. “But I had no thought of being a lost prince: not then, not later. I knew I had come from a good home, and had found myself in a bad one: that is all. When I came to Halveric—” It had been in this season, with the trees losing their leaves, the nights cold, the days crisp, and harvests gathered in. “—I came in autumn, having gone inland from Bannerlíth—something drew me; I knew not what. But having found scant employment, and none with winter drawing in, I came to Halveric Steading a starveling beggar. And they took me in, as your folk had done, and fed me and would have had me a house servant, as I had been trained and was neat in serving at table.”

“From servant to squire is a long step,” the king said.

“All praise to the Halverics for giving me every chance they could,” Kieri said. “And that is a very long tale to tell. But it is due to the Halverics that, again, I lived—lived through that winter when I would otherwise have died, and lived years with them to relearn what a good home is, and then a good commander. You have spies in Aarenis, you said: they must have told you about Halveric Company.”

“Yes. Good fighters, well-disciplined, and not such as we wanted to meet. Yours the same. But both of you use women badly, and do not protect them.”

“Some women do not want to be protected,” Kieri said.

The king snorted. “Oh, some girls are wild and think they want adventure; they little know what war is. They are brave enough, our women, but their blood should be shed only in the marriage bed, bearing strong sons.”

“And daughters,” Kieri said.

“And daughters, yes. We must have daughters for the people to have children and live on. That is why a brave woman’s death in war is a waste.” He paused, staring at his hands on his knees, a man clearly trying to think of something else. When he looked up, he said, “The tale I heard included a magic sword … made by elves, the spy told my advisor, but you might as well know we think elves are but magelords themselves.”