Krita smiled, filled a square-bottomed cup of mammoth ivory, and handed it to Hansen without a word. He took it, startled out of his focus on what he was about to say to the king.
“Ah, Your Highness,” he blurted.
“That’s the servants’ side of the table!” Taddeusz snarled. He’d started to rise when his daughter offered the cup to Hansen, but his chair and the table trammeled the abrupt action. He fell back. “Get out of there—and away from here!”
“I am His highness’ servant,” Hansen said, thinking of what he’d told Walker and smiling inside at his own duplicity.
But—he didn’t trust the squirrel/titmouse/crow, and he didn’t understand enough about what Walker was trying to do to protect himself. Hansen thought he understood Golsingh—and the other factors in this equation—well enough, certainly better than the actors did themselves.
Which didn’t mean that Hansen was safe. Just that he knew the name of the lion into whose jaws he was sticking his head.
“Sir,” he said, looking at the king and ignoring the way Taddeusz twisted his chair sideways so that he could get up, “if you’ll let me talk with you, I can serve you better. Maybe—”
He bobbed his beard-stubbled chin toward the warchief with “—better than anybody else. Which may be why they’re afraid of letting me talk.”
“You—” Taddeusz bellowed, lifting his goblet of silver-mounted rock crystal. He might have thrown it, except that Krita stepped between her father and Hansen.
“Sit down, foster father,” Golsingh said. Taddeusz remained frozen in a posture of agonized fury.
“Sit down!” cracked the king’s voice.
“Yes, milord,” Taddeusz muttered. He sank down as if in a state of exhaustion.
“Milord,” said Hansen, wondering what the other warriors in the hall were making of this, “your father and your father’s father were kings, but they didn’t rule further than their armies could march in three days—and that only when their armies were marching. Is that correct?”
“We have the submission of a hundred lords!” Taddeusz snapped. “You’re talking nonsense!”
“And those hundred lords fight each other, one pair or another of them every day, every year. They’ll send you tribute, and they’ll send a message of congratulation when you win a victory, but they won’t send troops to join yours when you march—”
“Some—” said Golsingh with a frown.
“—unless you’re marching by their keep on the way, with enough force to burn the place around their ears,” Hansen continued, speaking with the same brutal frankness that had gathered him enemies regularly during his decade in Consensus bureaucracy.
That had its advantages too. His enemies had made sure Hansen was sent where it was hot; and, since he’d survived, he’d been promoted rapidly into the shoes of officers who hadn’t.
“Do you want tribute and the name?” Hansen said. “Or do you really want peace—Golsingh the Peacegiver?”
The warchief shook his head in frustration. “The business of a king is war,” he said. “And power. Milord, it’s unkingly—unmanly, I’d almost say—to talk of imposing peace. The gods don’t approve.”
Golsingh’s youthful features hardened. “I’m king here,” he said sharply to his foster father. “The gods can rule in their heavens, but—”
He turned to face Hansen. His face was suffused with a hot passion not so very different from what roiled unseen in Hansen’s mind.
“Yes,” Golsingh said, “it’s peace I want. A peace in which a man—a woman!—can walk from one end of my kingdom to the other and never be molested. A peace in which a purse can lie in the center of the road for a year and no one will steal it. That’s what I want!”
Taddeusz got up. “My son,” he said, “you’re tempting the gods. I hope you think better of your words before it’s too late.”
The warchief’s voice was firm with sadness and anger, but he was no longer trying to shout down the discussion. Taddeusz stalked out of the hall, his felt boots cushioning the beat of his heels on the puncheon floor.
Krita turned to watch him go. Hansen had been aware of the warmth of her body ever since she’d interposed between him and her father, although she’d moved a step away afterwards.