She apologized for the informality—avoiding formal functions during her confinement, she explained. She sat him down in a huge and comfortable chair beside a homely peat fire and inquired if he cared for mulled ale. The secret was to heat it with a red-hot poker, she explained, smiling, and demonstrated. He admitted that the result was the finest mulled ale he had tasted in years.
The queen herself sat opposite and at times she played with a sketch pad. Mostly she just talked, drawing him out, listening intently as if everything he said fascinated her. As soon as she sensed that he had revealed everything he knew on one topic, she would switch easily to another. Her questions were shrewd and her range of interests enormous—seamanship, the current state of agriculture in the Impire, fashion, trade, and of course politics. Her attention was the most flattering experience he had known in years.
Kadie swept in wearing a ballgown and her mother’s tiara again, and was firmly sent away. A younger jotunn girl named Eva appeared a couple of times to complain that Kadie was being beastly to her, utterly horrid, and the queen settled the matter each time with patient good humor. It was only much later that Efflio realized that the Gath boy had been sitting all the time in a corner, listening to the whole conversation without saying a word.
The queen apologized for her husband’s absence—quite needlessly, had she only known . . . or perhaps she did. The king was on the mainland, inspecting the beehives, she explained. He had promised to return before the tide turned. Never would be too soon for Efflio.
He had rarely met a woman who cared a spit for politics, but then he had never met a queen before. Fortunately he had some interest in the subject. He found himself telling her of the goblins’ raids and their defeat at the hands of the legions, of dwarf trouble in Dwanish and troll trouble in the Mosweeps—even the trolls seemed to be organizing these days, and who could ever have imagined that?—and especially of the djinns. He watched her nimble fingers and the play of shadows on her features until the light grew dim. The fire hissed and scented the room with its friendly smoke. At times he wondered about Impport, if the old place had changed much, and if he still had a daughter there, and whether she might even have a place near her hearth for an old retired sea captain.
Eventually Inosolan laid away her sketch pad with a mutter of annoyance. She clasped her hands and stared a while at the fire. There was a frown showing on those gold-inlay eyebrows. Then she looked up and smiled at him sadly.
“I know Bone Pass. It is a horrible place.”
Zark and Krasnegar were about as far apart as it was possible to be in Pandemia.
“Er, I expect it is worse now, m’lady.”
“Of course!” She sighed. “Why must men behave like that? I knew the caliph quite well. A very remarkable man.”
Now that was pushing things a bit too far . . .
His face had given him away. She smiled mischievously. “I can be even more improbable. I was married to him!”
Efflio wondered what color he had turned now and hoped it would not show in the dimness.
She had turned her attention back to the smoldering peat. “The marriage was annulled by the imperor. In Hub, of course. Azak . . . he was only a sultan then. He went back to Zark, and I came on to Krasnegar. Later he proclaimed himself caliph and began his conquests. I have often wondered if the humiliation he suffered that night . . . More ale, Captain?”
Efflio declined, sure that he had already indulged unwisely. “You have traveled widely, ma’am.”
“Yes. My husband even more widely.” She frowned at the windows. ”He is late. We shall have to eat without him if he does not come soon. I do hope he hasn’t missed the tide.”
“They say . . .”
The queen’s smile seemed to sharpen. “That he is a sorcerer? He always denies it.”
“Er, yes.” That disposed of the subject without resolving much.
“I have never witnessed my husband using sorcery!” Inosolan said with a royal finality that sent a sudden shiver down his back. Her eyes flashed green in the gloom.
“I do not doubt you, ma’am!”
“Good.” She relaxed to being just a beautiful woman again. “If he has missed the tide, Captain, then he has missed the tide. He won’t walk across the waves, I promise you. What is the news of Prince Shandie?”
Efflio forked over his steaming brains. “I think I have told you everything I know, ma’am. He remains legate of the XIIth. Everyone thinks he should be a proconsul at least, but his grandfather . . .” This was not the Impire, so it was safe to say such things. “. . . his grandfather seems to be jealous of his success. He didn’t recall him to Hub for the jubilee.”
The queen nodded. “He must be incredibly old. He was old when I knew him, seventeen years ago.”
“Just turned ninety-two, ma’am.”
“With anyone else,” she said thoughtfully, “one would assume that there was sorcery involved. But of course an imperor is exempt from sorcery by the Protocol.”
Except that supposedly a sorcerer had been responsible for Emshandar’s miraculous recovery when he had been near death seventeen years ago. A faun sorcerer. Perhaps his cure had been more effective than intended? The captain shivered, wishing he had accepted another tankard of that excellent mulled ale.
“Shandie will inherit soon enough,” the queen said, laying aside her sewing. “I hope that all these victories spell a period of peace ahead for the Impire.” She moved as if to rise, but there had been an odd note m her voice.
“Why should they not, ma’am?”
She hesitated. “There’s an odd superstition about the year 3000. You must have heard it?”
“Old wives’ tales, ma’am!”
She laughed. “And I am an old wife, so I can repeat them! All right, I know that wasn’t what you meant! But they bother me. I never cared much for history, but I know this much. The Protocol regulates the use of magic. It protects the Impire, and all of Pandemia also. We all need the Protocol!”
“And twice it almost failed.”
“Right. It broke down at the end of its first millennium, when the Third Dragon War broke out. Jiel restored it. A thousand years later it failed again, and there was the War of the Five Warlocks. That was when Thume became the Accursed Land and so on.”
“There have always been wars, ma’am, and there always will be.”
“But those were the worst, by far! Those were the only times that magic broke loose again like the Dark Times before Emine—dragons, and fire storms, and all the other horrors that sorcerers can inflict. And they seem to come every thousand years.”
“Coincidence, surely?” the captain said uneasily. He had been hearing these stupid rumors for years, and he was astonished to hear them repeated by this apparently level-headed and practical lady.
“Maybe,” she said softly. “But . . . ?”
The queen bit her lip and turned her green eyes on the captain. “But my husband takes it all seriously! And that is not like him.”
And her husband was a sorcerer! Wasn’t he?
Youth comes back:
Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me.
— Longfellow, My Lost Youth
THREE
Voices prophesying
1
The Battle of Bone Pass did not topple the Caliph as the imperor had predicted it would, but it shattered his power. By midsummer the legions had advanced beyond Charkab against token opposition and a torrent of loot was flowing back to Hub to finance the war.
The XIith was relieved then and withdrawn to its home base at Gaaze, in Qoble. Qoble was Impire. It was a strategic center from which forces could strike at Zark, or at the elves in IIrane, or even at the merfolk of the Kerith Islands, although the Impire had never had much success fighting merfolk.
The XIIth was happy to be home. Gaaze was where the men had their wives, their mistresses, and their children. Here they dwelt in permanent barracks instead of insect-ridden tents. Here they could heal and restore their numbers and train for the next conflict.
Ylo yearned for Hub, but he preferred Gaaze to battlefields. He welcomed the civilized surroundings, the superb climate, the luxurious quarters. The women of Qoble were imps, not djinns. They wore pretty dresses instead of black shrouds. They were more visible and much more accessible.
In Gaaze Shandie was still legate of the XIIth, but he was also the prince imperial. Rich citizens fawned over him, inviting him to an unending glitter of parties and balls. He declined whenever he could, but duty required him to attend many, and his signifer was always at his side. The blushing debutantes were presented and when they rose from their curtseys, their eyes would invariably fall on the prince’s companion, the handsome one in the romantic wolfskin cape that was the badge of a hero. Ylo enjoyed Gaaze. Gaaze was good to Ylo.