Lord Morin, High Chamberlain to his Imperial Majesty, Ran Borune XXIII, sighed as he entered the Emperor’s private garden. Another tirade was undoubtedly in the offing, and Morin had already heard it all a dozen times at least. The Emperor had an extraordinary capacity for repeating himself sometimes.
Ran Borune, however, was in an odd mood. The bald, beak-nosed little Emperor sat pensively in his chair beneath a shady arbor, listening to the trilling of his canary. “He’s never spoken again, did you know that, Morin?” the Emperor said as his chamberlain approached across the close-clipped grass. “Just that one time when Polgara was here.” He looked at the little golden bird again, his eyes sad. Then he sighed. “I think I came out second best in that bargain. Polgara gave me a canary and took Ce’Nedra in exchange.” He looked around at his sundrenched garden and the cool marble walls surrounding it. “Is it just my imagination, Morin, or does the palace seem sort of cold and empty now?” He lapsed once more into moody silence, staring with unseeing eyes at a bed of crimson roses.
Then there was an odd sound, and Lord Morin looked sharply at the Emperor, half afraid that his ruler was about to go into another seizure. But there was no evidence of that. Instead, Morin perceived that Ran Borune was chuckling. “Did you see how she tricked me, Morin?” The Emperor laughed. “She deliberately goaded me into that fit. What a son she would have made! She could have been the greatest Emperor in Tolnedra’s history.” Ran Borune was laughing openly now, his secret delight at Ce’Nedra’s cleverness suddenly emerging.
“She is your daughter after all, your Majesty,” Lord Morin observed.
“To think that she could raise an army of that size when she’s barely sixteen,” the Emperor marveled. “What a splendid child!” He seemed quite suddenly to have recovered from the gloomy peevishness that had dogged him since his return to ToI Honeth. His laughter trailed away after several moments, and his bright little eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Those legions she stole from me are likely to become fractious without professional leadership,” he mused.
“I’d say that’s Ce’Nedra’s problem, your Majesty,” Morin replied. “Or Polgara’s.”
“Well-” The Emperor scratched one ear. “I don’t know, Morin. The situation out there isn’t too clear.” He looked at his chamberlain. “Are you acquainted with General Varana?”
“The Duke of Anadile? Of course, your Majesty. A thoroughly professional sort of fellow – solid, unassuming, extremely intelligent.”
“He’s an old friend of the family,” Ran Borune confided. “Ce’Nedra knows him and she would listen to his advice. Why don’t you go to him, Morin, and suggest that he might want to take a leave of absence – perhaps go to Algaria and have a look at things?”
“I’m certain that he’d be overjoyed at the idea of a vacation,” Lord Morin agreed. “Garrison life in the summertime can be very tedious.”
“It’s just a suggestion,” the Emperor stressed. “His presence in the war zone would have to be strictly unofficial.”
“Naturally, your Majesty.”
“And if he just happened to make a few suggestions – or even provide a bit of leadership, we certainly wouldn’t have any knowledge of it, would we? After all, what a private citizen does with his own time is his business, right?”
“Absolutely, your Majesty.”
The Emperor grinned broadly. “And we’ll all stick to that story, won’t we, Morin?”
“Like glue, your Majesty,” Morin replied gravely..
The crown prince of Drasnia burped noisily in his mother’s ear, sighed, and promptly fell asleep on her shoulder. Queen Porenn smiled at him, tucked him back in his cradle, and turned again to the stringy-appearing man in nondescript clothing who sprawled in a nearby chair. The emaciated man was known only by the peculiar name “Javelin.” Javelin was the chief of the Drasnian intelligence service and one of Porenn’s closest advisers.
“Anyway,” he continued his report, “the Tolnedran girl’s army is about two days’ march from the Stronghold. The engineers are moving along ahead of schedule with the hoists on top of the escarpment, and the Chereks are preparing to begin the portage from the east bank of the Aldur.”
“Everything seems to be going according to plan, then,” the queen said, resuming her seat at the polished table near the window.
“There’s a bit of trouble in Arendia,” Javelin noted. “The usual ambushes and bickerings – nothing really serious. Queen Layla’s got the Tolnedran, Bravor, so completely off balance that he might as well not even be in Sendaria.” He scratched at his long, pointed jaw. “There’s peculiar information coming out of Sthiss Tor. The Murgos are trying to negotiate something, but their emissaries keep dying. We’ll try to get somebody closer to Sadi to find out exactly what’s going on. Let’s see – what else? Oh, the Honeths have finally united behind one candidate-a pompous, arrogant jackass who’s offended just about everybody in Tol Honeth. They’ll try to buy the crown for him, but he’d be hopelessly incompetent as emperor. Even with all their money, it’s going to be difficult for them to put him on the throne. I guess that’s about all, your Highness.”
“I’ve had a letter from Islena in Val Alorn,” Queen Porenn told him.
“Yes, your Highness,” Javelin replied urbanely, “I know.”
“Javelin, have you been reading my mail again?” she demanded with a sudden flash of irritation.
“Just trying to stay current with what’s going on in the world, Porenn.”
“I’ve told you to stop that.”
“You didn’t really expect me to do it, did you?” He seemed actually surprised.
She laughed. “You’re impossible.”
“Of course I am. I’m supposed to be.”
“Can we get any help to Islena?”
“I’ll put some people on it,” he assured her. “We can probably work through Merel, the wife of the Earl of Trellheim. She’s starting to show some signs of maturity and she’s close to Islena.”
“I think we’d better have a close look at our own intelligence service, too,” Porenn suggested. “Let’s pin down everyone who might have any connections with the Bear-cult. The time might come when we’ll have to take steps.”
Javelin nodded his agreement.
There was a light tapping at the door.
“Yes?” Porenn answered.
The door opened and a servant thrust his head into the room. “Excuse me, your Highness,” he said, “but there’s a Nadrak merchant here – a man named Yarblek. He says he wants to discuss the salmon run.” The servant looked perplexed.
Queen Porenn straightened in her chair. “Send him in,” she ordered, “at once.”
Chapter Nine
THE SPEECHES WERE over. The orations that had caused Princess Ce’Nedra such agony had done their work, and she found herself less and less in the center of things. At first the days opened before her full of glorious freedom. The dreadful anxiety that had filled her at the prospect of addressing vast crowds of men two or three times a day was gone now. Her nervous exhaustion disappeared, and she no longer awoke in the middle of the night trembling and terrified. For almost an entire week she reveled in it, luxuriated in it. Then, of course, she became dreadfully bored.
The army she had gathered in Arendia and northern Tolnedra moved like a great sea in the foothills of Ulgoland. The Mimbrate knights, their armor glittering in the bright sunlight and their long, streaming, many-colored pennons snapping in the breeze, moved at the forefront of the host, and behind them, spreading out across the rolling green hills, marched the solid mass of Ce’Nedra’s infantry, Sendars, Asturians, Rivans, and a few Chereks. And there, solidly in the center, forming the very core, marched the gleaming ranks of the legions of Imperial Tolnedra, their crimson standards aloft and the white plumes on their helmets waving in time to their measured steps. It was very stirring for the first few days to ride at the head of the enormous force, moving at her command toward the east, but the novelty of it all soon wore thin.
Princess Ce’Nedra’s gradual drift away from the center of command was largely her own fault. The decisions now had to do more often than not with logistics – tedious little details concerning bivouac areas and field-kitchens – and Ce’Nedra found discussions of such matters tiresome. Those details, however, dictated the snail’s pace of her army.
Quite suddenly, to everyone’s astonishment, King Fulrach of Sendaria became the absolute commander of the host. It was he who decided how far they would march each day, when they would rest and where they would set up each night’s encampment. His authority derived directly from the fact that the supply wagons were his. Quite early during the march down through northern Arendia, the dumpy-looking Sendarian monarch had taken one look at the rather sketchy plans the Alorn kings had drawn up for feeding the troops, had shaken his head in disapproval, and then had taken charge of that aspect of the campaign himself. Sendaria was a land of farms, and her storehouses bulged. Moreover, at certain seasons, every road and lane in Sendaria crawled with wagons. With an almost casual efficiency, King Fulrach issued a few orders, and soon whole caravans of heavily laden wagons moved down through Arendia to Tolnedra and then turned eastward to follow the army. The pace of the army was dictated by those creaking supply wagons.