Nobody’s Son Read online

  Count Laszlo’s cold eyes twinkled. “Of course, the Duke and I must joy to see our sovereign glad.”

  “Of course,” Anujel said drily. He bowed before an imposing dowager. “Duchess.”

  Quickly Count Laszlo bowed. “Here I take my leave of you, dear coz. Your health, and health unto your father.” And then, “Duchess! Your servant. Could you condescend to take a turn about the room with me?”

  The Duchess, a grim, horse-faced woman in her late fifties, nodded imperceptibly and continued her stately cruise with Count Laszlo behind her like a round-bellied merchantman in tow to a battleship.

  Mark stepped back from the threshold as Anujel walked by; they pretended not to notice one another.

  What the hell? The Count’s smug as a pig in mud ower you wedding Gail, but why? And why should Duke Gerald be whistling too, as Anujel seemed to say?

  Gerald and Laszlo are about to be your brothers-in-law. Don’t seem the types to be happy about having a workman in the woodpile, and yet…

  Mark shook his head, puzzled.

  His fingers fretted for a bit of string or a loop of wire to fiddle with. Wish they had pockets in these damn tunics. He settled for resting his right hand on the butt of the black dagger belted at his side. It was cool to the touch, real as stones, sure as winter. It made the scene before him seem to fade, as if he were standing outside in a cold street, with a wind blowing and rain starting to spatter on the cobbles, peering into the Dining Hall through the slats in a shuttered window…All those cloaks and candles meant less to the real world than a breath of wind.

  Mark shook his head again. He held on to the dagger, as if it could shield him from the plots he felt weaving round him. They’re waiting for you, Mark my lad. There’ll be a bow bent behind every bush for you, you can bet on it. You’re not a sportsman, you’re not Somebody’s son, but you’ve poached on their hunt.

  Ah!—And there’s the fox you beat them to!

  Followed by Lissa, her lady-in-waiting, the Princess Gail entered through another archway. Mark guessed her mother must have been working on her, for now she wore a fashionable knee-length hoop-skirt and high-necked black doublet on which gleamed a golden necklace. A circlet of golden wire held back her short brown hair. Two more drops of gold, like dragon’s tears, hung from her ears; they shivered as she strode into the room.

  Brass-bold and sharp as steel, Mark thought admiringly. What lambs a ram could make, on such a ewe!

  At last, his one ally in the Court had made it to the Dining Hall. Mark squared his shoulders, tossed his cinnamon-coloured cloak gallantly over his left shoulder, and strode into the room.

  “Princess!” he said when he caught her, bowing low.

  His cloak piled in cinnamon folds on the tile floor; he stepped on one corner of it and almost fell.

  There must be a trick to this bloody bowing business.

  Steady on, steady on. Probably she never noticed; try a little charm. Show her you’ve got the hang of the gentle speaking. “May I have the honour of your company for a turn around the room?”

  Gail’s lips pressed together in annoyance. They were thin lips, he noticed: more used to commands than kisses. “Lissa,” Gail said. “Inform the honoured gentleman that his conduct is improper.”

  The lady-in-waiting curtsied respectfully to Mark. “Sir, with all respect unto the customs of your birthing-place, in Swangard, prior to an introduction by a friend or member of the family, one may not importune an unknown lady.”

  “But she’s to be my bride!”

  (Soothingly.) “Of course she is! Which makes it all the more important you conduct yourselves impeccably until the jointure of your single states into a wedded sanctity. Any impropriety that touches on a Princess is sweet to Scandal’s tongue. Would you subject your bride-to-be to calumny, or allow the Gossip’s dirty fingers to leave stains upon her honour?”

  “Oh great,” Mark growled. “Fine. Whatever. Please, madam, would you do me the honour of introducing me to your mistress?” Tall, awkward, and swathed in his horrible cloak Mark felt like a cinnamon-coloured lighthouse. He flung the bloody thing savagely back over his shoulder.

  Lissa’s voice was soft, her manners pleasing. “Only a gentleman, one known to both the Princess and her kin, could make this introduction with propriety.”

  “Bull-pizzles!” Mark snapped, looking directly at Gail. “We’re to wed! You can’t tell me we can’t chat about the bloody likelihood of rain.”

  Eyes were fastening on them like leeches.

  Lissa turned to the Princess. “Claiming an acquaintance on the strength of pending marriage, Shielder’s Mark believes no harm could come from brief and clearly innocent remarks when made in full view of the Court.”

  “Tell the gentleman he does neither of us credit by making a public jackass of himself,” Gail hissed.

  Lissa turned politely back to Mark. “The Princess has observed that while you—”

  “Shite and swan’s-piss! I’m going, all right? I’m going!” Holding his cloak out with one arm to keep it from piling on the floor Mark bowed and fled to the appetizer tables at the back of the room. Here, standing before trestles laden with food and drink, he stared fixedly at bits of fruit bobbing in tureens of bright pink punch.

  This was it: he had hit bottom. All his life he had looked forward to this day, his triumphant return, his hero’s welcome. Instead, he was alone among strangers and enemies.

  So much for happily ever after.

  Wasn’t it every boy’s dream, to marry a princess with flashing eyes?

  He’d been so sure Gail wanted him to ask for her hand. Damn it, she made me do it! But now she was acting like any other high-born lady, despising his manners, his birth, his breeding. The feast he had come to so hungry, after so many years of lonely toil, had turned to ashes in his mouth.

  “Delicious, isn’t it?”

  The speaker was perhaps five years older than Mark: a young man still. His clothes were soft, comfortable, and expensive-looking. His small mouth was all but hidden by a magnificent beard, carefully trimmed, of warm brown hair soft and silky as ermine. He frowned at a pair of silver epaulets on his forest green tunic, as if they were a brace of toads he’d found squatting unexpectedly on his round shoulders. His hands were soft and pale; on his little finger he wore a silver ring set with an emerald. Instead of a dagger he carried at his hip an odd copper cylinder, narrower at the top than at the bottom.

  Most remarkably, he wore a strange contraption on his nose: a bridge and two circles of wire, holding discs of glass through which peered his pale grey eyes. His arched eyebrows gave him an eternal look of faint surprise.

  He seemed friendly. “I prefer the trout, myself. Some like the almond-spears: too sweet before a meal, I think.” As he spoke he turned a flake of trout deftly onto a small cracker. A round pink-rimmed hole appeared in his silky beard; he popped the cracker in.

  Mark wondered how long it would take him on handyman’s wages to buy just one of those crackers, topped with flaked trout. He felt his hackles rising.

  The courtier finished his cracker, looking like a small brown owl snapping down a mouse. “Magnificent! Atrexides’ Avayar’s Valerian’s Archibald’s Valerian,” he said with a bow. “Your name of course is known to all. May I have the honour to inquire on how your honoured father fares?”

  “Dead,” Mark snapped.

  Valerian blinked. “Er. Um. Allow me to express my—”

  “I don’t know he’s dead: I only hope so. Like as not he just abandoned us.”

  Valerian took the contraption from his face, and polished the glass discs with his satin tunic-hem. “The only trial of spectacles: they get so easily smirched.” He frowned, held them to the light, settled them back on his nose. He peered at Mark as if trying to work out a difficult sum. “At Court the Truth, like vinegar, is a better garnish than a beverage,” he remarked, biting into a second cracker. Bits of flaked trout clung to his beard. “For instance, when I inquire about your
honoured father, you say ‘As well as we could hope.’ You shake your head in sorrow, to give me time to sympathize, without encouraging a further question. Then in turn you question me about my honoured father; listen; nod; and echo my trivialities.”

  Mark smiled in spite of himself. “Tell me, sir: how is your honoured father?”

  Valerian swallowed. “Cross as a crab and sick of the sight of me,” he said frankly. “Would you stalk one angry leftward stride? I’d like to try the punch.”

  Deftly Valerian ladled pinkness into a crystal cup. He nodded to Mark, blinked, and smiled. “Advice unsought I know is rarely welcome. Yet allow me one cautionary word. Every person in this room is drawn to you like filings to a magnet. Greatness is the breeding-ground of flattery, and intrigue, and all the other plagues that power can bestow. Well it were for you to know these courtiers are not your friends: they mean to use you, if they can.”

  “Except you of course! You want to help me from the goodness of your heart, right?”

  Valerian laughed. “Of course not. Actually, I do mean well, but I also have a use for you. A drink?” he asked, holding up a ladleful of punch. Mark nodded; Valerian poured. His hand trembled, and behind his spectacles his pale grey eyes blinked more rapidly. “But unlike these others, I don’t want your power. I will aid you any way I can; if my service seems of use, then all I ask is leave to attend you when at last you settle on your new estate, wherever that may be.”

  “Estate?”

  “Of course. Was that not your master-stroke? A princess cannot wed a commoner; in asking for his daughter’s hand, you force the King to make you son and noble too. A lesser man would not have played his card so well.” Valerian goggled anxiously at Mark. “That was your thinking, was it not?”

  “Um,—of course.”

  Valerian seemed relieved. Nervous ower summat else, though: he’s blinking like a bat in sunshine. “You were telling me how you meant to use me,” Mark prompted.

  “Er, right. Who’s near to you is near to Gail, and who’s near to Gail is near to—Lissa!” Valerian said her name as if it were a butterfly he meant to pick up with his breath.

  Mark chuckled. “And you’re the ram who’s out to straddle her.” He glanced over at Gail’s lady-in-waiting. Blond, willowy, discreet: come to think of it, Lissa would make a better princess than the Princess did.

  “St-st-st-straddle!” Valerian squeaked. Above brown beard his cheeks flushed punch-pink with agonies of embarrassment. “Allow me to assure you, sir, that my intentions to that fairest of all women—that shaft of sunshine! She upon whose brow discretion vies with wisdom! She who—”

  Mark waved his hands, smirking. “No straddling, then. But you want to come wi’ me, to, er, warm yourself in that shapely shaft o’ sunshine, right?”

  Valerian puffed his feathers; blinked; shifted from claw to claw. “Er…more or less.”

  Mark guffawed. “At last. Someone in this bloody place I understand.”

  Valerian shrugged. “I am small, and have no power, so I am the first to greet you. Some have more to lose, and thusly more to fear. When they have drunk a tumblerful of courage, they will find you.”

  “Fear? Why should any man fear me?”

  Valerian frowned. “You underestimate yourself. Why, every cheek you look upon turns white beneath its powder. Ladies blanch beneath your gaze, and fair hearts speed: but not for love.”

  “But why?”

  “Why!” Val drained his glass and filled it up again. “You broke the spell that lay upon the Ghostwood! Where you succeeded, Stargad and Fhilip and Aron Duke of Swans had failed. You came before the King in boots begrimed with Red Keep dust. From your sheath you drew a weapon out of legend, claimed the greatest prize in Astin’s realm, and dared him break his direst oath!” Valerian waved a hand out at the room of nobles. “You think this happens every day? Can you not see that you are terrible?”

  “Oh.” Sheepishly, Mark shrugged. “It slipped my mind.”

  “Hmmmph!…Then too, there is the matter of the Crown.” Thoughtfully Val stroked his soft brown beard. “One of Astin’s daughters will be Queen. That daughter’s husband will be consort, second greatest power in the land. Duke Gerald and Laszlo, Count of Maltis, worked for years to win their places. We know them, and they know us. But you! We know nothing of you.”

  “That reminds me—” and Mark told Valerian of the conversation between Anujel and Count Laszlo, which seemed to imply that Laszlo and Gerald were strangely delighted at the prospect of having him for a brother-in-law.

  Valerian bobbed owlwise, like a schoolmaster. “The Count and Duke believe the King will never make you Consort, nor let your blood besmirch the royal line. Gail seemed once a likely choice for Queen: there is steel in her. Gerald and Laszlo and the other dukes fought like dogs for years to keep great Richard, Duke of High Holt, from forcing Gail’s engagement to himself. It seemed that they had lost when Anujel came in on Richard’s side. But lo! in Shielder’s Mark a hope unlooked-for! They think the King will not allow a workman’s child to sit astride the throne. The Duke and Count must now believe they have the contest to themselves.”

  “So the buggers have no reason to fear me,” Mark said, anger edging his voice. He caught a glimpse of Laszlo across the room, his round head riding on its plate of lace, talking to a Bishop.

  “To underestimate a man like you is not the kind of error those men make,” Valerian said, frowning. “Nor will Duke Richard. The powerful will think: a man so great as he must be, who broke the Ghostwood from its ancient spell, once having married Astin’s daughter may find it no great matter to reach out and pluck the Crown as well. Greatness will not sleep tonight, my friend, but pace its floor with furrowed brow, and gaze upon the moon, and curse at fate for bringing peril to the palace, shaped as Shielder’s Mark. Can you imagine Astin has thought of aught since you arrived, but how to keep his kingdom from your clutches, and your knife out of his back?”

  “But I didn’t mean…I didn’t know—”

  Valerian grinned. “Poor Mark,” he drawled. “My eyes drop millstones for you, thrust abruptly into greatness, power, wealth and wife.”

  Eh?

  Mark grappled with the idea of himself as one of the great, wrestling for power and influence.

  Power.

  All he’d ever wanted was to break the curse and earn a safe place for himself and his family. But how safe were grey stones and soldiers in livery if he still had enemies?

  But if he used his position well, took advantage of the power it offered him, he and his could be safer still.

  He looked thoughtfully at Valerian. “Is that why the King filched Sweetness? He didn’t want its name added to my own?”

  Valerian sipped his punch. “A voice would carry farther, that sang to Sweetness’ song. And his Majesty knew something must be salvaged for his vassal, Richard.”

  “Who is this Duke Richard? Everyone seems to be watching ower shoulders for him.”

  Valerian nibbled a piece of crumbly Rhenant cheese. “Duke of High Holt, Richard is, and greatest noble in the land. He has many friends at Court. His strings are fine as cobweb: hard to see, but sticky, running everywhere. He’s like to be your closest, kindest, deadliest enemy.” Mark blanched. “No great act is without its consequences, good and evil,” Valerian said quietly. “If you will set free a shadow chained a thousand years, there will be changes in the land, and in your life, and nothing says those changes will be good. Or had you never thought of that?”

  “You…you make it sound very complicated,” Mark said.

  “Power is rarely simple,” Valerian replied. “At least, not here.”

  As Mark digested this unpleasant thought a bell rang to announce dinner, and they were seated.

  How do the lasses sit while wearing those hoop-skirts? Mark wondered, mystified. But manage it they did, and flawlessly.

  The King and Queen sat at the head table, along with their daughters, Duke Gerald, Count Laszlo, and the horse-fac
ed woman Mark had seen earlier, whom Val identified as the Duchess of Fenwold. “Heavier than lead and tougher than mutton,” he whispered.

  The rest of the company was arranged six to a table. Mark and Valerian were to dine with the Countess Malahat; Talyard Cirdon, the Bishop; a sharp-featured young woman named Janseni (“Brilliant musician!”); and Lord Peridot, dressed in a peach doublet with blueberry lace and hose. “He looks like dessert,” Mark muttered as they sat down.

  Val stifled a smirk.

  If nothing else about Mark’s reception had been what he had hoped, the dinner at least lived up to expectation. Seven magnificent courses, punctuated with excellent wines and ices; truly a feast worthy of a hero.

  And the hero needed it. Still, after the turtle soup and the wildflower salad, the stuffed quail and the braised peacock in mustard sauce, Mark began to slow down, trying to savour the glorious food.

  You might eat like this the rest of your life, you lucky bastard!

  Never go hungry again. Never wake up wi’ belly snarling at darkness, knowing there isn’t a mite for breakfast. Never hammer your face into a smile and shake your head at someone’s charity while your legs feel like willow-wands from hunger. Never forage for sloes and fiddleheads to throw in the pot because you have neither bread nor grain. At the thought, a looseness spread from his belly to his back, as if his stomach had been clenched around hunger all his life and only now relaxed its grip.

  He spied on his tablemates. They had smooth skin and soft hands that had never known a plow or scythe or hammer. They did not know how special, how holy a wonder this dinner was that their servants set before them, platter after plate.

  Lord Peridot controlled the conversation at their table, Mark soon saw, always ready with a well-placed question to start someone talking, or a well-placed thrust to finish them off. As the butlers served the fifth course, pheasant braised in garlic butter on a bed of watercress, Peridot was asking Janseni her opinion of Sir Avedut, composer to the Court and songmaster in the employ of Councillor Anujel.