Helga waved her hand. “Never mind, never mind. It’s not as if I care. I’m just curious. Who here in Solinga is crazy enough to marry her?”
Dead silence fell upon the room. All of Demansk’s counselors were studying the tapestries on the walls. Except Trae, who seemed utterly engrossed in the ceiling. Which, as it happened, had not so much as a single fresco painted upon it.
Treacherous bastards. Demansk sighed, drained half his goblet in one long swallow, and set it firmly down upon the table. Most powerful man since Marcomann. Courage!
“I am,” he announced.
* * *
He was prepared for a ferocious brawl. After Helga stopped laughing, at least. But, to his surprise, his past-and-future son-in-law intervened.
Until that moment, Adrian Gellert had said nothing since he arrived, beyond a few murmured words of polite greeting. So far, at least, Demansk was rather mystified by the man. For someone who’d had such an incredible impact on the world, his daughter’s lover seemed more like a distracted Emerald scholar than anything else. The kind of man you wouldn’t trust to walk across a small town without getting lost on the way.
“It’s a good move,” he said firmly. “Might even prove to be a brilliant one.”
Helga choked off her laughter and goggled at him. “You have got to be kidding! You’ve never met her, Adrian. You have no idea—” Another choked-off laugh. “For as long as I can remember, every nobleman in Vanbert has made fun of her. You don’t want to know what the matrons say! Especially the time—”
“Who cares what they think?” demanded Adrian. “Helga, don’t you understand yet?” He pointed a finger out the window of the airy salon. The southern window, that was. A thousand miles beyond it lay the great capital of the world’s greatest empire. “You’re talking about the aristocracy, which is finished.”
His eyes swiveled toward Demansk. Incredibly blue, those eyes were. But what struck Demansk far more was the weird sense that something lurked within them. Something wise as well as pitiless. As if a scholar was inhabited by . . .
Helga’s “spirits.” The gods save us, she was right. And maybe that’s what will do it, since the gods have gone away.
“Not, at least, in their present form,” Gellert continued. “We haven’t spoken yet, sir, but I imagine you’ve already given some thought— Well, that’s for later. I think of it as the nobility of the pen, rather than the spear.”
He turned back to Helga. “What matters—this is what your father understands and you don’t—is what the gentry thinks. Because you can destroy—cripple, anyway—a small elite. You can’t destroy a numerous class of gentrymen. Not, at least, without destroying most of your educated populace. And try building an efficient and civilized realm without them. It could be done, but not without paying a bitter price.”
Demansk felt the tension in his shoulders ease. Took another drink from his goblet—a sip, this time—and leaned back in his own chair.
Helga was right, bless her. By whatever gods might still exist, I’ll forgive her all her trespasses. Just for having had the sense to fall in love with the right man.
Then, half ruefully: Might even add five years to my lifespan, letting her quarrel with him instead of me.
“The gentry,” Adrian reemphasized. “They’re the key. One of them, at any rate. And what’s the old saying about the Vanbert gentry? There’s nothing they adore more than a crazy aristocrat—who does all the things they’d never dream of doing, and provides them with half their gossip, to boot. Provided, of course, that the aristocrat is a real one. The crust of the upper crust, as it were.”
He glanced at Demansk, then Sallivar. “I’m not personally familiar with the lady, but I get the sense—”
“Gods, you’re serious,” exclaimed Helga. She shook her head, as if to clear it. Then, for the first time, seemed to finally consider the question as something other than a joke.
“Oh, she’s that, all right. Adrian, you have no idea. Not only is Arsule Knecht the wealthiest woman in the Confederacy—was, at least, before all this—”
“Still is,” said Sallivar firmly. “She’s really not ‘crazy,’ Helga. In some ways, she’s saner than most. She took the precaution, over the past several months, to move almost all of her portable assets and wealth to her estates in Hagga. She’s closely connected to the Haggen aristocracy, you know, on her mother’s side. And since she’s showered the Haggen with philanthropic enterprises for decades—she grew up there, on her mother’s family estates—they think most highly of her.”