Masters of Fantasy Part 46

She smiled, and Leeana grinned back at her.

"Well, yes, I guess," the girl said. "On the other hand, if I'm going to be honest about it, the real reason I'm taking a shortcut this time is to stay out of Father's sight."

"Oh?" Kaeritha said. "And just how have you managed to infuriate your father so badly that you find it

necessary to avoid his wrath?""I haven't infuriated him at all . . . yet. But I'd like to get back to my quarters and changed out of these clothes while that's still true." Kaeritha c.o.c.ked her head, her expression questioning, and the girl shrugged. "I love Father, Dame Kaeritha, but he gets, well, fussy if I sneak out to go riding without half a dozen armsmen clattering around behind me." She made a face. "And he and Mother are both beginning to insist that I ought to dress 'as befits my station.' " This time she rolled jade-green eyes with a martyred sigh, and Kaeritha was hard put not to chuckle.

"However annoying it may be," she said instead, with commendable seriousness, "they probably have a point, you know." Leeana looked at her skeptically, and Kaeritha shrugged. "You are the only child of one of the four most powerful n.o.bles of the entire kingdom," she pointed out gently, "and men like your father always have enemies. You'd make a powerful weapon against him in the wrong hands, Leeana."

"I suppose you're right," Leeana conceded after a moment. "I'm safe enough here in Balthar, though.

Even Father is willing to admit that, when he isn't being stuffy just to make a point! And," she added in a darker tone, "it's not as if I'm not a weapon against him anyway."

"I don't think that's exactly fair," Kaeritha said with a quick frown. "And I'm certain that's not how he thinks of it.""No?" Leeana gazed at her for several seconds, then gave her head a little toss that twitched her long, thick braid of damp golden-red hair. "Maybe he doesn't, but that doesn't really change anything, Dame Kaeritha. You know as well as I do how many people want him to produce a real heir. The entire King's Council certainly goes on at him enough about it whenever he attends!"

"Not the entire Council, I'm sure," Kaeritha objected, her eyes widening slightly as she sensed the true

depth of bitterness Leeana's normally cheerful demeanor concealed.

"Oh, no," Leeana agreed. "But the only ones who don't are the ones who have sons they think are just the right age to marry off to the heir to Balthar and the West Riding. Or think they're still young enough for the job themselves." She grimaced in disgust. "All the rest of them, though, use it as an excuse to go on at him, like a pack of mongrels snarling at a leashed wolfhound, because they know I make a safe excuse to gnaw away at his power base."

"Is it really that bad?" Kaeritha asked, and Leeana looked surprised by the question. "I may be a champion of Tomanak, Leeana," Kaeritha said wryly, "but I'm also an Axewoman, not a Sothoii.

Tomanak!" She laughed. "As far as that goes, I'm only even an Axewoman by adoption. I was born a peasant in Moretz! So I may be intellectually familiar with the sorts of machinations that go on amongst great n.o.bles, but I don't have that much firsthand experience with them."

Leeana appeared to have a little difficulty with the idea that a belted knight-and a champion of Tomanak, into the bargain-could be that ignorant of things which were so much a part of her own life. And she also seemed surprised that Kaeritha seemed genuinely interested in her opinion.

"Well," she said slowly, in the voice of one manifestly attempting to be as fair-minded as possible, "it

probably does seem even worse to me than it actually is, but it's bad enough. You do know how Sothoii inheritance laws work, don't you?"

"That much I have down," Kaeritha a.s.sured her.

"Then you know that while I can't legally inherit Father's t.i.tles and lands myself, they'll pa.s.s through me to my own children. a.s.suming he doesn't produce a son after all, of course."

Kaeritha nodded, and Leeana shrugged.

"Since our enlightened customs and traditions won't permit a woman to inherit in her own right, whatever fortunate man wins my hand in matrimony will become my 'regent.' He'll govern Balthar and hold the wardens.h.i.+p of the West Riding 'in my name,' until our firstborn son inherits them. And, of course, in the most unfortunate case that I might produce only daughters, he'd continue to hold the

wardens.h.i.+p until one of them produced a son." The irony in her soprano voice was withering, especially coming from one so young, Kaeritha thought."Because of that," Leeana continued, "two-thirds of the Council want Father to go ahead and set Mother aside to produce a good, strong, male heir. Some of them say that it's because of his duty to the bloodline, and others argue that a matrimonial regency always creates the possibility of a succession crisis. Some of them may even be sincere, but most of them know perfectly well he won't do it. They see it all as a club to beat him with, something he has to use up political-capital fighting off, like a constant drain on his position. The last thing he needs, especially now, is to give his enemies any more weapons to use against him! But the ones who are sincere may be even worse, because the real reason they want him to produce a male heir is that none of them like to think about the possibility that such a plum might fall into the hands of one of their rivals. And the third of the Council who don't want him to set Mother aside probably hope that they're the ones who will catch the plum."

Kaeritha nodded slowly, gazing into the younger woman's dark-green eyes. Tellian Bowmaster's marriage eighteen years before to Hanatha Whitesaddle had not only united the Bowmasters of Balthar with the Whitesaddles of Windpeak; it had also been a love match, not just a political alliance between two powerful families. That had been obvious to anyone who'd ever laid eyes on them.

And if it hadn't been, the fact that Tellian had furiously rejected any suggestion that he set Hanatha aside after the riding accident which had left the baroness with one crippled leg and cost her her fertility would have made it so. But that decision on his part did carry a heavy price for their only child.

"And how does the plum feel about being caught?" Kaeritha asked softly.

"The plum?" Leeana gazed back into Kaeritha's midnight-blue eyes for several silent seconds, and her

voice was even softer than Kaeritha's when she finally replied. "The plum would sell her soul to be anywhere else in the world," she said.

The two of them looked at each other, then Leeana shook herself, bobbed a quick half-bow, and turned

abruptly away. She walked down the pa.s.sage with quick, hard strides, her spine pike staff-straight, and Kaeritha watched her go. She wondered if Leeana had actually intended to reveal the true depths of her feelings. And if the girl had ever revealed them that frankly to anyone else.

She frowned in troubled thought, then shook herself and turned back to the window as fresh thunder grumbled overhead. Her heart went out to the girl-and to her parents, for that matter-but that wasn't what had brought her to the Wind Plain, and it was past time that she got on with what had brought her here. She gazed out the window a few moments longer, inhaled one more deep breath of rain from her relatively dry perch, and then turned away and walked briskly towards the tower's spiral stair.

Bahzell Bahnakson of the Horse Stealer Hradani looked up an instant before the library door opened.

The red-haired human sitting across the gaming table from him looked up in turn, and then shook his head as the door swung wide and Kaeritha Seldansdaughter stepped through it.

"I wish you two would stop doing that," Baron Tellian complained in the tenor voice which always

seemed a bit odd coming from a man who stood six and a half inches over six feet in height."And just what is it the two of us are after doing?" Bahzell inquired genially in the deep, subterranean ba.s.s which sounded not a bit odd rumbling up out of the deep chest of a hradani who stood over sevenand a half feet in his stockings.

"You know perfectly well what," Tellian replied, setting the black p.a.w.n he had just picked up back down on the chessboard. "That." He waved at Kaeritha, still standing in the doorway and smiling at him. "You could at least pretend that you have to wait until the other one knocks, like normal people!"

"With all due respect, Milord," the third individual seated in the library-also a hradani, although he was actually a few inches shorter than the human-said, never looking up from the book in his lap, "I don't believe anyone's ever been foolish enough to suggest that there was anything 'normal' about either of them."

"But they could at least try, Lord Brandark," Tellian objected. "d.a.m.n it, it's uncanny . . . and it worries

my men. Phrobus! It worries me, sometimes!""I apologize, Milord," Kaeritha said with a small smile. "It's not really anything we do, you know. It just . . . happens."

"Aye," Bahzell agreed, and the smile he gave the baron was much broader than hers had been. "And come to that, I've not heard yet that champions of Tomanak weren't supposed to be after being 'uncanny.' "

"That's because they are," Brandark said in a slightly more serious tone, looking up from his book at last and c.o.c.king the foxlike ears he shared with his fellow hradani. "Uncanny, that is. And the truth is, Milord," he went on as Tellian turned his head to look at him, "that it's so unusual to have two champions as houseguests at the same time that very few people have ever had the opportunity to watch them being uncanny together."

Tellian considered that for a few seconds, then nodded.

"You have a point," he conceded. "But then, everything about the current situation is on the unusual side, isn't it?"

"It is that." Heartfelt agreement rumbled in Bahzell's deep voice as he leaned back in his

chair-specially built by Tellian's master woodworker to Bahzell's size and weight-and gazed across the neat ranks of chessmen at the human host who was technically his own paroled prisoner. "And I hope you won't be taking this wrongly, Baron, but it's in my mind that there's more than a few of your folk who'd sooner see my head on a pike over your gate than see my backside sitting in this chair."

"Of course there are," Tellian agreed. "Just as quite a few of your father's subjects would prefer to see my head on a pike, if our positions were reversed. Surely you didn't expect anything different when less than two hundred hradani took several thousand Sothoii warriors 'prisoner,' did you?"

"Of course not," Bahzell said. "Not that that's after making it any more pleasant-or keeping my shoulder blades from itching whenever daggers are about-now that it's here."

"On the other hand," Kaeritha observed mildly, "n.o.body ever said being a champion of Tomanak would

be an endless pleasure jaunt, either. Or, at least, no one ever said so to me, anyway.""Nor to me," Bahzell admitted, and his foxlike ears twitched in wry amus.e.m.e.nt as he recalled the conversation in which the G.o.d of War had recruited one Bahzell Bahnakson as the first hradani champion of any G.o.d of Light in the past twelve millennia. "Pleasure jaunt" was one phrase which had never pa.s.sed Tomanak's lips.

"I can well believe that." Tellian shook his head. "It's bad enough being a simple baron without having a

G.o.d looking over my shoulder all the time!"

"That's as may be," Bahzell said, "but I'm thinking it wasn't all that 'simple' for you, either, when we ran up against each other in The Gullet."

"Oh, I don't know about that." Tellian leaned back in his chair and smiled. "If nothing else, at least I a.s.sured that I'll go down in history. After all, how many men have ever managed to surrender to a force they out numbered twenty or thirty times over?"

All four of them chuckled, but there was an undertone of seriousness to the laughter. The unauthorized invasion of hradani lands which Mathian Redhelm, one-time Lord Warden of Glanharrow, had led down the narrow pa.s.sage known as The Gullet, could all too easily have ended in catastrophe for all concerned. But Tellian's solution to avoiding that catastrophe, after overtaking Redhelm, had struck many of his fellow Sothoii as . . . a less than ideal one. His "surrender" of the entire invasion force to Bahzell and the first hradani chapter of the Order of Tomanak was also the only thing which had prevented the ma.s.sacre of that same chapter and, almost certainly, of the undefended citizens of the city of Hurgrum. Yet it had put Tellian-and Bahzell-in positions which were more than a bit awkward.

Officially, Tellian and the entire force he had surrendered remained Bahzell's paroled prisoners.

Everyone considered that no more than a ludicrous fiction, but there was little anyone could do about it so long as Bahzell and Tellian presented a united front and insisted upon maintaining it. Which, given the millennium or so of mutual hatred between Sothoii and Horse Stealer, was also the only way to maintain the fragile peace between their two peoples. Both Bahzell and the baron were determined to keep up the pretense for as long as it took to give that peace some stability, but all too many on both sides-human and hradani alike-would have loved to see them fail. And at the moment, Tellian was under far more fire from his Sothoii peers than anything Bahzell had to put up with from the hradani.

"I have a feeling that you'll go down in history for more than just that, Milord," Kaeritha said after a moment. "But I'm afraid that it's past time I was off on one of those 'pleasure jaunts' Bahzell and I were never promised."

"Ah?" Bahzell c.o.c.ked his head. "And has himself been talking to you again, Kerry?"

"Not directly." She shook her head. "On the other hand, He doesn't speak directly to me as often as He seems to speak to you."

"Perhaps," Brandark murmured in the tone of one in whose mouth b.u.t.ter would adamantly refuse to

melt, "that's because it doesn't require something quite that, um . . . direct to get through to you.""I wouldn't know about that," Kaeritha said primly, and her blue eyes twinkled as Bahzell made a rude gesture at his friend. "But," she went on, "He does have His own ways of getting messages through to me. And the one I'm getting now is that I've been sitting around your house too long, Milord."

"My house has been honored by your presence, Dame Kaeritha," Tellian said, and this time his voice

was completely serious. "I would be most pleased for you to remain here however long you like. And

while I know a champion's duties take precedence over all other considerations, could you not wait at least until the rain stops?"