Once the loyalty of the villages had been established, the last stages of the conflict had been absurdly one sided. With no audiences for his bravado, the self-styled Prince of Potcher was soon left with only a few score giddy boys and girls with longbows and a dozen suicidal bomb-throwers whose numbers were reduced each time they acted. The pretender could only flee to a point of no return, where Aufors promptly bottled him. It was this salutary end to the matter which gained Aufors Leys both a colonelcy and appointment to an unspecified term as the Marshal’s equerry.
The rank was high for one of his age. It was much too high for one serving as an equerry or, conversely, an equerry’s duties were demeaning for one so distinguished in battle. Despite Aufors’s gratitude to the Marshal, the disparity did not escape his notice. The Marshal, though harsh, was reputed to be a fair man, however, and Aufors believed his benefactor would be little agitated by Aufors’s voluntary departure—which the unspecified term allowed him—so long as it occasioned no inconvenience to the Marshal himself.
With that in mind, Aufors recruited a junior officer of noble blood, impeccable manners, and limited ambition whom he began training for the job. While this went forward, Aufors wooed persons of influence in order to finagle a post where he might gain rank high enough to guarantee an honorable, even luxurious retirement.
Before Aufors’s finagle fruited, however, the Marshal invited him to a school soiree. The Lord Paramount’s suggestion—the reason for the invitation—was quoted to Aufors by the Marshal himself: “See what a youngster like Aufors thinks, he’ll know if she’s an acceptable, attractive, quiet, biddable girl who’ll fit in.”
His military exploits had made Aufors better known to the court than the court was known to him. He was unaware—as was the Marshal himself—of the danger carried in innocent-seeming and transparent words that floated along the corridors of power like jellyfish in the tide, death hidden in every tentacle. Aufors took the assignment at face value. If he assumed anything, it was what any outsider might assume: that the Lord Paramount and the Marshal were thinking of betrothing the Most Honorable Marchioness of Wantresse to some noble scion who was perhaps refusing to get involved until he knew whether Genevieve was “acceptable,” or was a lady-too-long-in-waiting being foisted upon the credulous.
Attending an evening party was a small favor to ask of a man who considered himself a good judge of women, and Aufors agreed. He would go with the Marshal to have a look at the girl, have some good food and wine, and write out his impressions for the Lord Paramount. Seeing that the girl in question was the Marshal’s daughter, it might make the wording a bit ticklish, but Aufors felt his diplomatic skills were equal to the task
By the time he left the soiree, however, the towers of his ambitions had been toppled flat as the Plains of Bliggen. All his careful career maneuvers had been driven from his mind, and he found himself unable to concentrate on anything except a young woman whom he had no reason to think he would even meet again. Her eyes seemed permanently fixed before his own. Her lips curved around his every waking moment. The feel of her bosom, swelling so softly against him in the dance . . . Ah, who would have thought he was so vulnerable?
On the morning after the soiree, Aufors regarded himself soberly in his mirror and told himself he was an idiot. Which idiocy was compounded when the Marshal announced the move to Havenor. At that point Aufors did not resign as equerry and go marching off toward glory, as he had intended. Instead, he not only retained his lowly position as the Marshal’s aide but also became a panting dogsbody much involved in the family’s relocation. Burning with desire to be helpful to Genevieve, he did it all eagerly and without a second thought.
All this could possibly be explained as one of those infatuations to which even the most sensible men fall prey, or, equally, by the fact that Aufors had a particular mental picture of his mother. She had died when he was very small, abducted and presumably killed by Danian brigands, a presumption that his brother amplified in order to terrorize Aufors. Aufors himself remembered a certain delicacy and grace and how flowery she smelled and how he had loved her laughing manner and diligent care and, above all, how clever she had been at figuring things out and solving problems. Aufors had built upon these impressions a description that differed greatly from the stick-stiff, flat-as-paint person some itinerant artist had supplied for the family hall. Though he carried a copy of that portrait with him, he never looked at it, for it confused his memories.