The Fox (87 page)

Fox snorted. “What rotten interrogators! And how much kinthus did they give you?”

“I don’t know. That first day. He was going to do it again, right before you came.”

Fox shook his head. “Too much at the amounts they use for interrogation used too often and your mind never comes back.”

“I didn’t know it could kill you.”

Fox lifted a shoulder. “You probably haven’t read any of the records of Norsunder’s attack on the morvende, several centuries ago. My mother only has one antique record on brown, crackling paper, come down through my family’s marriage with the Deis. They used to use kinthus in some kind of magic ritual. Supposedly could hear one another mind to mind.” He tapped his forehead. “The way the Old Sartorans did. Again supposedly. I think that was the hyperbole of history—like they were all bigger and smarter and handsomer and more powerful than we are now . . . yet they lost Old Sartor.” He snorted. “Anyway apparently using kinthus and magic killed more mages than it helped with the hypothetical mental powers. What else did you keep from your interrogators?”

“Didn’t keep anything.” Inda looked away. “But they didn’t ask about the treasure—or about you, if you’re coming around to that.”

Fox laughed silently again, and then produced a small flat pan. “Look what I found! Along with some of the spices in the abandoned kitchen. And some of our chickens who flew away flew back to their coop and were sitting in there as if nothing had happened, busy laying eggs. A few of the outlying buildings were only scorched. So we’ve got enough supplies here to rest for as long as you like before we need to scavenge again.”

Inda had already decided what he wanted to do, but he wasn’t going to talk about that yet.

“Eggs for breakfast, with some cheese. Wheel got melted on the outside, but I cut it away,” Fox said, rummaging through the bag he’d brought, and bringing forth various packages wrapped in scraps of fabric he’d found in the ruins. “I even discovered a bottle of wine! And some pepper—”

“Don’t want pepper,” Inda said, too quickly, his stomach closing. “I’ll burn every pepper tree in Tenthan if I ever get home. Orange—” His voice trembled, and he shut his teeth with a click.

Fox set the pan down over the fire he’d set between two stones; then he hunkered directly before Inda. “No, you won’t,” he said. He was serious, the way he had been the other night and never before. “You’ll plant pepper trees in every court. Orange trees, too, though I doubt they’ll grow. Plant ’em behind glass, and every day you wake up you sniff ’em and gloat because you are alive. Free. You survived. ”

Inda’s tension slowly leached away, leaving him weary. “Right. Then when
you
go home you will not drink yourself to death like your father.”

Fox jerked up. "Hah!” And laughed again, his old mocking laugh. “Is that your deal, then? If we ever go home, we’ll hoard mementos of our experiences and triumph over ’em endlessly to the boredom of our progeny? My family already has a tradition of that. Began with the Venn King’s letters in old Savarend’s day.”

Fox busied himself with the food. Inda eased himself down on the soft grass. Following the shifts in Fox’s mood was like trying to track a butterfly during a lightning storm.

“Venn King?” he asked idly, gaze skyward between the stirring leaves high overhead. “Does that have anything to do with the reason the Montrei-Vayirs turned on your family? Were your ancestors treating with the Venn?”

Fox used his knife to beat the eggs into a froth. “No,” he said, grinning. “Boot’s on the other foot. The Montrei-Vayirs were dancing around trying to placate ’em when the Venn King offered favored province rank if we did the work in taking Iasca Leror for ’em—with their help, of course. They were desperate in those days, too, for southern land. Old Savarend insisted if they were making offers they were too weak to take what they wanted. Gave ’em the back of his hand. They sheered off with a threat. And it was after they were safely gone that Anderle Montrei-Vayir turned on us.”

Inda snorted.

Fox checked the crushed olive smeared on the flat pan. It was steaming gently, so he poured out his eggs and turned them slowly with his knife as he observed, “I know what it is you do, now. No magic, no mystery. It’s a matter of mind. Most people, when suddenly overtaken by events that throw habit and training out the window, are helpless. Including me. Some—me—can manage if drilled enough. But your mind runs ahead, faster than events, and begins to shape them. Savarend was one of those. But it seems not to have passed down to me.” He sprinkled his cheese onto the eggs.

Inda waggled fingers in the air. “It’s like drawing. Some see the lines on the paper in their head, others don’t. I see things to do, that’s all.”

“And you like to win.”

Inda grinned. “I like to win.”

They were silent as Fox regarded his cookery, decided it was done. He set the pan on the rock next to the homing ring. “Here, we’ll share.” He passed over a spoon. “So if you were to take Iasca Leror, how would you?”

Inda tapped the spoon absently on a rock in one of the Marlovan drum patterns they’d known from childhood. “Assuming they have to land, I don’t know, depends on how big their fleet is, but let’s say it’s Wafri’s nine times nine . . .”

They,
Fox thought.
Not we
.
He’s thinking of Rajnir and the Venn. He’ll never lead anyone against the homeland. No matter who did what to whom
.

“. . . fake attacks along the coast. Bring all the defenses there, like the pirates did. Then a strike team over the Pass to secure that. That would mean they could land huge forces in Idayago at their leisure. Then they don’t have to extend supply lines over the strait, not with all Idayago’s resources right there. So they come down through the Pass, and strike at . . . what was that city right below the Pass?”

“Ala Larkadhe.”

“Yes. And Lindeth Harbor. Meanwhile our people hear about the Pass and race north to take it back, and those ships they used for the coast attack diversion? This time they land south, maybe Parayid, and march northward. Force us to defend on two fronts.”

And so Inda would try to defend, but despite whatever had cast him out into the world, he would never attack. “Us,” Fox repeated. “Inda, why don’t you go home?”

Inda’s face closed, and Fox thought with self-mockery,
Why don’t you keep your mouth shut?

But then Inda spoke, unexpectedly. And not easily. “I can’t. I promised. It doesn’t matter why,” he added, as if to forestall an objection that Fox now knew better than to make. “I can’t unless there is reason. I mean, a reason that supersedes the promise.” He bent his head, scowling down at his hands as he mumbled, “Whatever others say, we have to live with ourselves. That’s what my mother used to say.”

That’s what my mother used to say, too—and your mother and mine were friends in the queen’s training,
Fox thought. He could see in Inda’s hunched, tense posture that he’d had enough, so he said as lightly as he could, “So what act of madness do you intend next?”

Inda straightened up, obviously unaware of doing so— he wasn’t Inda anymore, who was still a troubled boy in so many ways. He was Elgar the Fox, commander of a fleet. “First, what did you tell Fibi and the others?”

“I set meeting places along the coast for both schooners. The last one along the coast opposite Bren on the full moon of Fourth-month. Assuming either of us is still alive.”

Inda drew in a deep breath of satisfaction. “And you say you don’t look ahead?”

“Maybe I’m learning?” Fox retorted. “Or maybe I’ve gone mad as well. Well, what is it you’re hatching?”

Inda decided it was time to speak.

“It’s just that I know where Rajnir’s army is. I found it on the map you put in that saddlebag. Not even all that far—inland a way north. And you say they aren’t searching for us? Why not go to Wafri’s county and take a squint at what this army looks like?”

“Why not?” Fox mocked, hands open. “It’s as crazy as any other plan of yours.”

Inda ignored this frivolity, feeling better by the moment. “And then we travel south, scout the coast while we’re at it. If they aren’t searching, they aren’t expecting us. So neither of us knows much about woodcraft, but we’ll learn, eh, by the time we reach the central plains? And meanwhile, if Dasta and the others have stayed with the plan, there should soon be rumors about Elgar the Fox attacking pirates on the Fire Islands. Maybe sooner than later. Durasnir and his fleet can go chasing off there—about the time Dasta and Tcholan and whoever else they might raise go south to Freeport.” Inda finished off his share of the food in a few impatient bites, then let his spoon clatter to the pan. “Listen, Fox, have you ever heard of scroll-cases? What an aid that would be! We could talk ship to ship . . .”

Chapter Twenty-five

MOST of the rest of Joret’s story is widely known, for Valdon Shagal’s
Take Heed, My Heirs
has long been one of the most popular royal memoirs.

But more than fifty years of conjugal besottedness understandably graces those first moments with poetic and dramatic joy that wasn’t actually there. Valdon’s record of their first meeting is too well-known to repeat here, and it is correct in all the visual detail: throne room, court in attendance, his mother presenting him to the Aunt Wisthia he had never met, and Wisthia in her turn presenting him to Hadand and then Joret.

He did not actually fall in love with Joret at first sight. It was the usual flash of attraction for her lovely face and figure—nothing that hadn’t happened to her far too often.

Only this time she felt it at the very same moment he did, and they stilled, blinded by that sense that her most famous ancestor described as the sun meeting the waterfall and turning it to liquid light.

It took another month for him to fall in love with her honesty, her sudden bursts of humor, her clear but compassionate view of the world unmarred by courtly cynicism.

As for Joret, though she was attracted so strongly when she first saw the tall fellow who looked so unexpectedly like a dark-haired Evred, she did not believe love was possible anymore—her precious memories of Cama Tya-Vayir were too recent for that.

What she thought—when he turned away and she could think—was:
There is work for me here, and this is a man I could do it with. If he were free
.

Love came to them both: gradual, deep, and enduring.

Two things Valdon never recorded. One he passed over with diplomatic reticence. The second he never saw.

What he passed over was his midnight talk with Hadand in his mother’s flower garden, a month after he arrived home.

Hadand had retired from that night’s impromptu ball. (The difference between impromptu and planned balls was that one could go to the ball in one’s evening gown, instead of retiring to change for the third or fourth time that day.) She had seen yellowing leaves in the gardens, and had been sniffing the wind anxiously every time she saw clouds. It was time to go home, except she had no treaty, despite Valdon’s return home, and the way he vanished during most of the day to deal with overdue matters of state, only appearing at court at night. So far, his pressing concerns did not include her treaty. This mission was her first diplomatic challenge as queen, and it was a failure.

Once she’d unlaced herself from her heavy gown, and Tesar had taken it away to refurbish, she sat down in the pretty cotton-lace wrapper Wisthia had given her. The Adranis had glass doors—something Hadand had never before heard of. Hers stood open onto the fragrant garden, otherwise she was alone. She cut a tiny square of paper and sharpened her pen. Usually writing to Evred was a joy, but now she had to face the truth: it was time to admit defeat.

While she considered how to word it, the locket-magic zapped her.

She opened Evred’s note and read:

Storms moving north:
it meant he too was watching the weather.
He needs me there—but we need that treaty.

She kissed the note—his hands had so recently touched it—and then read it again, and shared his worry over Barend.

She picked up her knife and began to trim the nib when footsteps crunched the gravel outside the open glass door. Well-drilled muscles brought her up and ready before she could even think so she and Valdon gazed at one another in surprise over the threshold of the glass door: he in full court regalia, all silk and lace and ribbons, she in a wrapper with a knife held at a lethal angle.

She set aside the knife, trying to hide the blush that heated up her entire body, and said, with her back turned, “I trust there is nothing amiss?” Her fingers nipped up Evred’s note and crushed it against her palm.

Valdon repeated, blankly, “Amiss?”

Hadand had not failed to notice how much Wisthia’s nephew looked like Evred. Valdon was darker, and his eyes were blue, but the shape of his mouth, his cheeks and jawline, the long body, were all familiar.

He saw the blush she couldn’t hide, and rueful laughter crinkled his eyes. “Oh. I didn’t think what my arrival might look like.” Now it was his turn to blush, and suddenly it was possible to laugh, and to sit down, and to calm one’s thundering heart.

She had learned by now that first assignations were usually arranged during the day—and if successful, people arranged to meet for longer at night.

From there the rules became more subtle, and some of them more fraught, depending on rank, expectations, and families. As Hadand faced him, she thought of what her mother had said once to Joret about the rules governing relationships:
Nothing can tame the human heart.