2
Inos spent a miserable day. For the last two weeks and more, she had been rising before dawn; now she managed to sleep until almost noon and left herself feeling frowsy and off key. By the time she was bathed and dressed, both Kade and Zana had already departed for a tea party with the sorceress, and that was a terrifying development—how could anyone keep secrets from a sorceress? Surely Rasha would learn at once of the note that had been sent to intercept Azak as he left on his hunt at daybreak.
Kade had designed a cryptic message, in the best traditions of conspiracy, but she could not have made it cryptic enough to deceive Rasha without making it unintelligible to Azak. And if Rasha did learn of it, she might well resent Inos seeking an alliance with Azak, whatever he was to her.
Inos worried and fretted and tried to seem calm and relaxed. The habitation felt more like a prison than ever. She spent a couple of hours exploring it, just for something to do. In need of an excuse to keep moving, she worked her way systematically from dingy, stuffy wine cellars up to the divine glory of the master bedroom. Then she went down and played a few games of thali with Vinisha and some of the other women. They all wanted to hear about Inos’s visit to Rasha’s chamber of puissance, and that was the very thing she did not want even to think about. They must be wondering why she had abandoned hunting so suddenly, and that was a humiliation she preferred not to discuss. The conversation was stilted and pointless.
Why could a person’s memory not forget things to order?
Every now and then, just when Inos was least expecting it—admiring the late Prince Harakaz’s collection of hunting boots, or in the middle of a coup at thali—she would be struck by a spasm of mental agony. It was like having a broken bone somewhere, or a torn muscle, and accidentally putting weight on it. It was remembering the one most awful thing that had come out of the previous night’s horrors, the one she had tried to store away deepest in her closet of Things Not to Think About. And it kept falling out and hitting her: Marry a goblin!
It was unthinkable.
She was of royal blood. Queens or princesses were rarely fortunate enough to marry for love. Dynastic marriage was their lot. A year ago, facing exile in Kinvale, Inos had refused to admit that obvious truth. Now she could see that the best she could ever hope for was a husband who was relatively decent, agreeable, and not too absurdly old. But a goblin, any goblin—that was carrying duty altogether too far.
The trouble was, it made so much sense from everyone else’s point of view. It would placate the witch of the north, who was a goblin herself. It would favor neither the imps of the Impire nor the jotnar of Nordland, so no one need lose face. The citizens of Krasnegar might resent the idea at first, but now that tempers had been roused, the jotnar among them might even prefer to see a goblin on the throne than an imp; the imps might rather have a goblin than a jotunn. Winning was less important than not losing. And the old men of the council would be happy, because a goblin king would have no interest in actually running the kingdom. From what little Inos knew of goblins’ social habits, he would certainly not allow his wife to do any real reigning either. He would leave that to the council, while he concentrated on . . . On what? What in the names of all the Gods did goblins do all the time?
They bred ugly little green babies, that’s what they did. And tortured people.
The afternoon dragged on, hot and desolate. The sorceress’s tea party seemed to be lasting a very long time.
Inos was having her third stroll around one of the many shadowed gardens when Thralia came hurrying through the magnolias and honeysuckles in search of her. Apologizing abjectly for having forgotten earlier, she offered Inos a book. The princess had left that for her, she said, when she went out.
Well! Inos kept her temper, smiled icily, and retreated to a shady bench to see what Kade might have in mind. The volume was huge and very tattered, and obviously ancient. Its faded ink must have been hard on Kade’s old eyes, but Prince Hakaraz had certainly been no patron of literature, so perhaps this was the best she had been able to find to read. The cover was torn and the title unreadable. What remained appeared to be a collection of quotations and extracts from other volumes. On her first, fast flick—through, Inos saw how the writing changed, from labored and straggly at the beginning to a heavy, arrogant scrawl near the end. The final few pages were blank.
Clearly this tome had been some long-ago prince’s commonplace book. He might have chosen the passages himself, or they might have been selected by his tutor. Perhaps he had been expected to memorize them afterward, as many seemed to be concerned with princely decorum. There were lists; there was history, and religion, and philosophy. Some pages held very sickly sentimental poetry that might have been original; a few extracts near the end were so erotic that Inos discovered she was not as unshockable as she had thought. She wondered what Kade had thought of those!
On a second, more careful leafing-through, she found a fresh flower petal. It lay near the middle, among a group of passages on history, but the vellums were only inscribed on one side, so there was no ambiguity—Kade was directing Inos to an extract from a drama, and specifically to a long and very turgid speech attributed to a man named Draqu ak’Dranu. Alongside the petal she read:
He who smites mine foe is my friend, and he who turns a blow from me I shall embrace. To aid my enemy is to offend me; to stay him, nay yet to hamper him, shall win my praises and rich gifts. Know then that the white and the blue befriend us when they harry the gold, for the claws of the gold rake hard upon our flesh; our women are made to weep, our children starve and cry out. And though the white and blue may not stay the claws lest a greater evil befall, yet will they suffer not that doors be opened, nor the ways smoothed.
There was more, much more. But that was enough to explain why Kade had been so certain that she could win Inos an audience with Azak. It even explained how she had dreamed up the cryptic message she had been planning to use: I have met a man with a golden helmet. That would mean a lot to Azak, she had insisted, but would likely make little sense to any commoner who might intercept the note. The palace of Arakkaran would not have changed its princes’ upbringing much in the last few centuries, and the Big Man would have been reared on the sort of fare represented by this book.
“Gold” meant the warlock of the east, of course, and the four claws would be the legions; the imperor’s symbol was always a four-pointed star. White and blue were the wardens of north and south respectively. The Protocol forbade any sorcerer but East from using magic on the legions; Kade had said so, and Rasha had confirmed it. That prohibition included the other wardens. If they wanted to help the imperor’s opponents, which in the example quoted had evidently been some Zarkian confederacy led by the verbose Draqu, their help would have to be very limited and indirect.
What Inos had not realized was that there was a subtle exception to those rules. The extracts that preceded Kade’s marker made the point more clearly: The other wardens were within their rights in stopping East from aiding the legions with magic. Obviously the best that the imperor’s enemies could ever hope for was that their battles would stay mundane, but obviously they often did, else the Impire would have conquered all Pandemia ages ago. Of course most lands had fallen to the legions many times, only to win back their independence in due course. The tide flowed and the tide ebbed. Guwush was part of the Impire now, but the old map on Inos’s schoolroom wall had shown it as a collection of independent gnomish commonwealths. Zark had been conquered and liberated repeatedly—she’d learned that much since she arrived.
She went back to Kade’s curious digest, and a few pages later found an account of a battle in some other century. The Imperial forces had been driven back against a ravine. A bridge had appeared by magic to save them. A few minutes later it had vanished again, and stayed away. The resulting carnage was described in loving detail.