The Bastard King (13 page)

Certhia gave him an odd look. "Did someone tell you to say that? One of your bodyguards, maybe? Or your tutor?"

"No, Mother," Lanius replied. "I figured it out for myself. It looks pretty obvious, doesn't it?"

For some reason he couldn't fathom, that only made his mother's expression odder. "How old are you?" she asked, and held up her hand before he could answer. "No, never mind - I know you're eleven. But you don't talk like you're eleven. You talk like a man who's my age, or maybe twice my age."

"I just talk the way I talk," Lanius said.

"I know," Queen Certhia said. It didn't sound like praise, or not altogether like praise. After a moment, she went on, "Lepturus gave me the same advice you did - that we go out and face the Thervings there in the foothills with everything we have."

"Will you take it?" Lanius asked.

She nodded. "Yes. Lepturus will lead the army out of the city of Avornis. As head of the regency, I'm going with them."

"I should come, too," Lanius exclaimed. "I'm the king, after all."
Even if I can't do anything much,
he added to himself.

"Your coming along is fine if we win," his mother said. "But what if we lose? What if King Dagipert gets his hands on you?"

"I suppose I'd have to marry his silly daughter," Lanius said, which struck him as all too close to a fate worse than death. Other than that, though, falling into Dagipert's hands didn't worry him all that much. He'd been in someone else's hands - one someone's or another's - ever since his father died. He didn't like it, but he was used to it. And besides ... "With me there, the soldiers will know they'd better not lose."

"I want you to stay here safe in the city of Avornis," Queen Certhia answered, and nothing Lanius could say to her would make her change her mind.

Nothing Lanius could say to her ... After his mother left - stalked out of his bedchamber, really - the King of Avornis sent a servant to Lepturus, asking if the commander of the royal bodyguard would come and see him. Lepturus came at once. "You don't ask me to come see you, Your Majesty," he said after making his bows. "You
tell
me to come see you. That's what being king is all about, you know."

"No, I don't know anything of the sort," Lanius answered. "How should I?"

Lepturus grunted laughter. "Well, you'll find out, Your Majesty. By the gods, you will. When you say'Hop,' you'll never see so many hop toads as go up in the air for you. Won't be so very long, either."

Lanius remembered that for the rest of his days, even though his coming of age seemed much further away to him than it did to Lepturus.

The guards commander asked, "What can I do for you, Your Majesty? You just name it. If it's in my power, it's yours."

That was what Lanius wanted to hear. He said, "When you march against King Dagipert and the Thervings, take me along with you."

"What?" Lepturus rumbled, his eyes widening. Lanius repeated himself. Grown-ups, he'd noticed, had trouble hearing, or at least trouble listening. Lepturus heard him out for the second time, and then asked, "Why do you want to do a thing like that?"

"Because I'm the King of Avornis, and that's what the King of Avornis is supposed to do." Lanius sounded very sure. He explained why. "I've read it in books, you see."

"But the books don't say anything about what happens when the King of Avornis is only eleven years old," Lepturus said.

"Well, if I were bigger, I could fight better, but I don't think one soldier more or less would make a lot of difference about whether we win or lose," Lanius said. "Do you, Lepturus?"

With a chuckle, Lepturus shook his head. "No, I don't suppose so. Tell me, though, Your Majesty, what's your mother got to say about all this?"

"She says,'No!' She says,'Heavens, no!'" King Lanius answered. "That's why I called you - to see if I could get you to change her mind."

"She heads the regency council now. She doesn't have to change her mind for anybody," Lepturus said, and Lanius nodded unhappily. Lepturus went on, "I don't know that she ought to change her mind here, either, meaning no disrespect to you."

"Wouldn't the soldiers fight better if they knew the king shared danger with them?" Lanius asked. The books said things worked that way.

And Lepturus didn't laugh, or chuckle, or even smile. He just rubbed his bearded chin and looked thoughtful. "They might," he admitted. "They just might."

Lanius leaned forward. "Will you talk to my mother, then?" His heart thudded in excitement.

Lepturus rubbed his chin some more. At last, slowly, he nodded. "I might," he said. "I just might."

Aboard the
Otter,
Grus waited for trouble. It hadn't come yet. What had come was a message from the city of Avornis that astounded everyone aboard, from him down to the juniormost sailor.

"King Lanius is leading the army against the Thervings." Nicator still sounded disbelieving.

"Maybe there's more to him than meets the eye," Grus said.

"He's a boy. There could hardly be less to him than meets the eye, now could there?" Nicator answered.

"He's a boy, but he's the King of Avornis," Grus said.

"He's the King of Avornis, but he's a boy," Nicator retorted.

"If he carried the Scepter of Mercy, how old he is wouldn't matter," Grus said.

Nicator scowled. "There weren't any Thervings in the mountains the last time a King of Avornis wielded the Scepter of Mercy. The Banished One stole it before they filtered off the plains to the east."

"I know that. Everybody knows that, the same way everybody knows the Banished One can't use the Scepter of Mercy."

"Sending a little boy into the field isn't the way to make up for not having it," Nicator said.

"How do you know he was sent?" Grus said. "Maybe he wanted to go."

"Not likely," Nicator disagreed. "I wouldn't want to go face the Thervings when King Dagipert's feeling testy. Neither would anybody else in his right mind - and if Lanius does, he likely isn't in his right mind."

"Well, if you put what you're trying to show into what you claim, that does make arguing easier," Grus said, more annoyed at Nicator than he usually let himself get.

Before the veteran could answer back, a watchman called out and pointed to the bank of the Tuola, where a ragged-looking fellow who might have been either an Avornan or a Therving stood waving by a horse on its last legs.
At least he's not a soul-dead thrall,
Grus thought, and ordered the
Otter
to a halt. He hailed the stranger. "Who are you, and what do you want with us?"

"I'm Count Corax, by the gods," the ragged man replied, as though Grus were supposed to know who he was. And, in case Grus didn't, he went on, "I'm just back from a mission to the Heruls, on the far side of the Bantian Mountains."

"Ah," Grus said, and called an urgent order to his sailors. "Man the boat and bring him aboard."

As they hurried to obey, one of them asked, "What about the horse, Skipper?"

"If you can get it onto the boat without any trouble, fine," Grus answered. "If you can't, too bad. I don't think Corax there will miss it."

Sure enough, the horse stayed behind. Corax scrambled up from the boat onto the river galley. No matter how ragged he looked, he carried himself like an Avornan noble, sure enough - one of the arrogant type. He looked at the
Otter
as though it were as much his to command as the horse had been.

"Take me to the city of Avornis, so I may speak to the regents at once," he said.

Grus shook his head. "Sorry, Your Excellency, but I can't do it."

Count Corax turned red. Grus got the idea he wasn't used to hearing people say no. "Why not?" he demanded.

"For one thing, I'm on war patrol," Grus answered. "I can take you to the nearest town and put you on a better horse than the one you had, but that's it. And, for another, the regents aren't - or at least Queen Certhia isn't - at the city of Avornis."

"Well, where are they?" Corax asked. "Wherever it is, you have to take me there right away." He looked set to add,
Now hop to it, gods curse you,
but somehow held back.

"I can't do that, either," Grus said.

"Well, what in creation
can
you do?" Count Corax barked.

"I can tell you that Queen Certhia has taken the field against the Thervings," Grus replied. "I can tell you that King Lanius is in the field, too. And I can do what I said I'd do before that - I can take you to the next town and put you on a horse. The army is covering territory river galleys can't reach."

Corax swore. He kept on swearing for the next several minutes, hardly seeming to draw breath and not repeating himself once. At last, he calmed down enough for a coherent sentence. "I need to see the queen this instant."

"I do understand that it's important, Your Excellency," Grus said. "I'm doing the best I can for you."

"It isn't good enough," Corax snarled.

"Tell me, Your Excellency, are you by any chance related to Count Corvus?" Grus asked.

Corax blinked. "He's my brother. Why do you ask? Do you know him? I don't recall hearing that he knows you." Suspicion filled his voice.

"We met once, a long time ago," Grus said. "And I've heard a lot about him." None of what he'd heard was good. And Corax sounded as hard and unpleasant as his brother.

One thing Corax couldn't do was take a hint. "I should hope you've heard about him," he said. "All of Avornis should know about us." The
Otter's
bow dipped. He grabbed for the rail.

"I'm sure all of Avornis will." Grus didn't mean it as a compliment, but Corax didn't need to know that.

Nicator asked, "What about the Heruls?"

"What business of yours are they?" The nobleman looked down his nose at the river-galley officer.

"Well, if I'm going to fight me a war, I'd sort of like to know how big a war I'm fighting," Nicator answered. "If the Heruls will pitch into Thervingia, King Dagipert can't hit us near as hard as he can if they sit on their hands."

Corax weighed a sardonic reply. Grus reluctantly gave him credit for deciding against it. The envoy did say, "You need to worry less than you may have thought you did."

"Oh, I always worry," Nicator said. "But you're right - the thing is, how much?"

Grus always worried, too. He was more imaginative than Nicator, and so found more things to worry about. A kingdom full of bad-tempered, haughty nobles like Corax and Corvus came to mind. They could do whatever they pleased, especially when the King of Avornis was weak. How many men, all through the realm, were busy lining their pockets because nobody was keeping an eye on them? The answer was,
too many.

When he let Corax off the
Otter
at the town of Veteres the next day, the noble started screaming at the people there to get him a horse and get out of his way. Grus looked at Nicator. "You see?" he said. "He's like that with everybody."

Even before Count Corax galloped off to the northwest, Grus had the
Otter
heading back out toward midstream to resume his patrol. He took war patrol duties seriously. And he needed to. That very afternoon, another horseman came galloping down to the riverbank. This fellow had a bloody bandage on one arm and an arrow sticking out of the saddle behind him. "The Thervings!" he cried. "The Thervings are over the border!"

"Really?" Grus murmured. "I never would have guessed."

King Lanius hadn't known what to expect from life in the field. It was, he realized, much less of a hardship for him than for the Avornan soldiers. His tent could have held a couple of squads of them. He didn't suppose they got the same food he aid, either.

On the other hand, none of them had a tutor accompanying him to war. Lanius wouldn't have minded, or didn't think he would have minded, trading books for a sword. But the tutor wasn't so harsh a taskmaster as usual. He kept looking around, eyes wide and frightened. At last, Lanius asked, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong
now,
Your Majesty," the man answered. "But many more things can go wrong here than they can back at the royal palace."

For a while, Lanius enjoyed looking at the countryside. He rarely left the palace, and up till now he'd never gone outside the city of Avornis. But after a few days, the landscape began to pall. It was, after all, just a landscape - little villages and farmhouses and fields and meadows, some with sheep or cattle or horses in them, and groves and patches of forest and streams and ponds and, rising in the distance, the Bantian Mountains. Lanius began to wish he were home, especially as the terrain grew more rugged and the going slowed.

He made the mistake of saying as much to his mother. "Shall I send you back to the city, then?" Queen Certhia asked eagerly.

He shook his head. "No, thank you. I still want to see what happens."

"People kill each other," Certhia said. "Do you think you'll learn something, watching all the different ways they can die?"

"Yes, Mother, I do," he answered. Certhia gave him an annoyed look and waved him out of her pavilion, which was even larger and fancier than his.

The rough country from which Avornis' famous Nine Rivers sprang was interesting, but only for a little while. As the flat-lands had, hills and gorse and heather and bushes for which he had no names soon lost their appeal. Then a rider came galloping out of the southeast as though he had demons on his tail. He shouted for Queen Certhia and for Lepturus, and closeted himself away with them when they met him.

Again, Lanius' mother wouldn't tell him what was going on. Again, the commander of the royal bodyguards proved more willing to talk. "That's Count Corax who just came into camp," he said when he emerged. "He's back from a trip to the other side of the mountains. Bet you can't guess why."

"To incite the Heruls against the Thervings?" Lanius asked.

Lepturus jerked in surprise. "Well, I guess I should have known better than to say something like that to you, Your Majesty. Still, if you don't mind my asking, how
did
you know?"

"It's the kind of thing Avornis does, whenever we have someone who thinks of it," Lanius answered. "Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's what I've read, anyhow."