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  "The Tale of Gregori" could wait!

  Several marks later, he put down the volume and rubbed his tired eyes. This was no scribe-made copy, but someone's handwritten version. The writing was tiny, crabbed, and barely legible in places; the archaic language more difficult to work through than he had thought. He hadn't read more than two pages so far, and he'd been forced to take notes in order to get that done.

  On the other hand, there was still a thrill of excitement as he contemplated the closely-written pages of the book. It was definitely going to be worth working through this. The things he had already gleaned about the Priesthood back in those long-ago days were enough to widen his eyes. When had the order of the Priests of the Goddess Kalanel—the consort of Vkandis—disappeared, for instance? And when had Her statue vanished from its place beside Vkandis' in the Temples?

  The door opened, and Ulrich walked in as Karal put down the book with a slightly guilty start. His master only dropped his gaze to the little volume in his hands and smiled.

  "I see you have been putting your time to some good use," he said. "But before you wear out your eyes, I have some other duties for you to attend to, while I am at private meetings."

  He must have looked disappointed, for Ulrich only chuckled. "Don't fret, they have little or nothing to do with negotiations. I'm going to meet with Lady Elspeth and Darkwind on a regular basis to analyze our various magics. I'll be doing the same with the representatives of the White Winds and Blue Mountain mage-schools. You would find all that very boring, and there would be nothing you could record that would be at all useful."

  Karal sighed but nodded his agreement. His own mage-craft was minimal; barely enough to light a fire, and that only if he happened to be particularly hard-pressed. In ordinary circumstances, he would be well advised to keep a firestriker on his person. "Yes, sir," he said with obedient docility. "What is it you wish me to do?"

  "Attend classes," came the surprising reply. "I wish you to become as fluent in Valdemaran as you are in our tongue. There may be shades of meaning in our negotiations that I may miss otherwise. I do not have the time to spare for this, and you do."

  Well, that was reasonable enough. He and Arnod had been able to make conversation last night, but it had been stilted and rudimentary, and both of them, had paused often to search for words. Someone needed to be able to understand all the talk going on around them. For that matter, he could pick up a lot of information from idle conversation if no one realized that he was exceptionally fluent in Valdemaran.

  He nodded, but Ulrich wasn't finished yet. "You are going to spend far too much time sitting at a desk," he continued. "You need exercise, and more than that, you need to learn how to defend yourself. I can hold off an enemy with magic, but if you were ambushed by someone, what would you do?"

  Karal opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it and closed it again. Ulrich was right; what had served him at the inn and the Children's Cloister would do him no good here. He was no longer just another child, and anyone who intended to attack him here was likely to be trained and practiced, perhaps even an assassin. Yes, the Valdemarans had provided guards, but anyone who had weathered the war with Ancar knew that guards were not always enough. For that matter, there were probably plenty of people in the Valdemaran ranks who would like to see him dead as a means of starting hostilities again.

  "I've arranged for Johen to come and take you to your weaponry teacher in a few moments," Ulrich said. "So you ought to change into something like your riding gear; something you can sweat and tumble about in, and do it before he arrives."

  "Yes, sir," Karal replied and stood up quickly. He was all the way to the door of his room when he thought to ask a question.

  "Who is going to be teaching me these things, sir, do you know?" he asked, as he looked for a clean set of riding clothes in the chest at the foot of his bed. In a way, he was hoping to hear that Rubrik was to be his language teacher. It made sense, and Rubrik was the one friendly, familiar face here.

  "Well, there's only one person who is equally fluent in Valdemaran and Karsite," came the easy reply. "Herald Alberich, the Weaponsmaster. He's already agreed to the idea."

  Clothing dropped from Karal's numb hands, and he felt as if his stomach had dropped right out of his body.

  Alberich? The Alberich? The Great Traitor? The man whose very name was used as a synonym for traitor back home?

  The man whose intimate knowledge of the Karsite Army and the Karsite Border had prevented Karse from gaining so much as a grain of sand or a word of reliable intelligence for twenty years and more?

  The man who was the first that Solaris approached to arrange the truce, he reminded himself. The man she trusted to keep his word when she sent her agents in to negotiate for a Valdemaran envoy. He is not, cannot be, the enemy I was always told he was; if he was, Solaris would never have gone to him. She values honor above all else, except devotion to Vkandis. I have never heard the truth about him, nor why he deserted his post, all those years ago.

  But still—Alberich? The very idea turned his blood to dust.

  "As for your weaponswork," Ulrich continued, blithely unaware of Karal's shock and dismay, since he could not see Karal from his seat in the next room. "I had a volunteer before I even asked for one. Herald Captain Kerowyn."

  Karal dropped his clothes again.

  "Karal?" Ulrich called, when he said nothing.

  Karal tried to move, forcing his shaking hands to reach for his riding clothes. It took him three tries to pick them up, and when he put them back down on the bed, it took him an eternity to get the fastenings undone on his Court robes.

  "Karal, there is nothing to worry about," Ulrich said into the silence, finally divining the fact that Karal was disturbed by these revelations. "She is not going to drive you the way she does the young Heralds-in-training. She knows that you are never going to have to do more than defend yourself in an emergency."

  But she is eight feet tall, his mind babbled, ignoring the fact that he had already seen her just this morning, and she was nothing like the creature that reputation painted. She eats babies for breakfast, and washes them down with nettles and wolves' milk! She can break warriors in half with one hand! She—

  "At any rate, she's waiting for you now," Ulrich said cheerfully, as Karal fumbled his breeches on. "I'm really very flattered; she doesn't take individual pupils very often."

  I'm not! I'd rather have some nice, quiet little under-trainer—

  Oh, calm down, Karal. It could be worse.

  It could be Alberich!

  He pulled his shirt on over his head, and came out into the sitting room. Ulrich had his back to him, examining some papers, as Johen tapped diffidently on the door and entered.

  Ulrich looked up to see who it was, then waved absently at them, returning his attention to the papers. "Off you go, then. I'll see you later, Karal. Try not to get too bruised; we'll be taking our dinner with the Court, and I'll need you to be presentable. I'll get a bad reputation if it looks as if I beat my secretary on a regular basis."

  Karal staggered after the silent Johen, incoherent with nerves.

  Try not to get too bruised! Oh, lovely, I shall....

  Johen led the way down a set of stairs and out into the gardens. Under other circumstances, Karal would have enjoyed the impromptu tour, for the Palace gardens were nothing like similar gardens at home, and were full of trees and plants he didn't even recognize. But he was too numb to pay a great deal of attention, and it was far too soon for his peace of mind that Johen brought him to a large wooden building, standing very much apart from the rest of the Palace complex.

  It didn't resemble any building Karal had ever seen before—but then, he had never had any occasion to find himself inside one of the army training halls. The windows were right up near the edge of the roof, which seemed very strange to him. He couldn't imagine the reason for such an odd arrangement.

  But he got no chance to ask Johen about it, for the you
ng man hurried on ahead of him as if he could not get his escort duty discharged quickly enough. Arnod might be friendly, but this young man certainly was not.

  He followed Johen into the building; once inside, it proved to house, in the main, one huge room. The closest comparison he could come up with was that it was like an indoor riding area with a sanded wooden floor; with mirrors lining the walls, and benches placed in between the mirrors, pushed up against the walls. The fourth wall held racks of wooden practice weapons, and those benches were laden with what even Karal recognized as protective padding. He sniffed; the place held the mingled odors of sweat and sawdust, leather oil and dust. At the moment, it was empty of everything else.

  A door at the back of the room opened, and Herald Captain Kerowyn stepped out into the room. She was not wearing that white livery that every other Herald wore, which seemed very odd to Karal; there was no way of telling that she was a Herald without that white uniform, since her Companion wasn't with her.

  Huh. Maybe that's the point!

  She was, however, dressed in a way that would have scandalized most good Karsites and not just because she was wearing "men's clothing." No one could ever mistake her for a man, in a brown leather tunic and breeches, both so tight-fitting that they showed every curve and muscle of a quite spectacular figure.

  Karal swallowed, hard; she might be old enough to be his mother, maybe older, but there was no sign of those years on her body or in the way that she moved. There was also no question but that she was just as attractive as she was dangerous. He was very glad that his own tunic was long enough to hide his inevitable reaction, but he flushed anyway.

  Then he paled, and his body lost interest, as she shifted her weight in a way that reminded him of her profession and her history. This was Kerowyn, Captain of the Skybolts, mercenary fighter long before she became a Herald. If she didn't eat babies for breakfast, she certainly had a reputation for devouring certain parts of the conquered as a battlefield trophy feast!

  She stood with her feet slightly apart, hands on hips, and studied him. Johen simply made a gesture toward him and left without a word. She tilted her head to one side, and he hoped that his trembling wasn't as visible as he thought.

  "Be steady, youngster," she said at last, in heavily-accented Karsite. "I be not going to eat you. Not without good sauce, anyway; you be too stringy for my liking."

  He flushed again as he realized that she was laughing at him. She knew he was afraid of her, and she was laughing at him! But his fear was a lot stronger than his anger, and his good sense at least as strong.

  Let her laugh—if it keeps her from pounding me into the ground like a tent peg!

  She paced toward him, slowly and deliberately. He stood his ground—mostly because he wasn't able to move. His feet were frozen to the floor, and he couldn't look away from her.

  She circled him, looking him over from every angle, as if he was a young horse she was considering for purchase. He flushed even harder; he wasn't used to being given that kind of scrutiny by a woman, or at least, not by a woman like this one. Solaris had given him that kind of detailed examination, but there was nothing remotely feminine about Her Holiness; when Solaris sat on the Sun Throne, she was the Son of the Sun, and that was all there was to say about it. Kerowyn was as female as she was formidable.

  "Right," Kerowyn said at last, as if answering a question, though he had said nothing. "Come here, boy. I be wanting to be testing the strength of you."

  For a moment he hesitated. What was she going to do, feel his legs and arms, as if he was a young racing colt and she the prospective buyer? But she beckoned peremptorily, and he followed her, not daring to do otherwise.

  She brought him over to the corner of the room, to a series of ropes and pulleys. The corner looked like a setting for some kind of arcane torture, or worse. But it turned out that what she had in mind (thank the God!) were only tests of how much he could lift, pull, or push; the ropes could be loaded with weights, and she would watch him as he tried to raise them from various positions. When she was done, he was sweaty, and she looked satisfied.

  "Be better than I be thinking," she told him. "You be not spending all your time pushing paper around on desks. Now, here be what we be going to do. I not be making a fighter out of you, and I be not going to try. What I be going to do, is I be teaching you some things you be using to be defending yourself with, things that be buying you enough time for help to be getting to you. Real help, trained fighters."

  "That makes good sense," he said slowly.

  "Here be problem, that we be going to be making these things into ways that you be acting without thinking. And we be going to be making you stronger than you be already. So—" she waved at one of the things he had just been using, weights loaded onto ropes attached to pulleys, "—be doing what I be showing you, fifty more times, then we be working on the first move."

  Not what he wanted to hear....

  By the time she was done with him, he was weak-kneed with exhaustion, and quite ready to drop, but he already had one move down well enough to use against an attacker who wasn't expecting it. The likeliest scenario, as Kerowyn postulated it, was that he would be attacked from behind by someone who intended to strangle him. She showed him how to use the attacker's rush and momentum to tumble forward, throwing the attacker over as he did so, then get to his feet and run.

  With enough practice, he would do just that without thinking.

  When she dismissed him and sent him out the door with the admonition to return at the same time the next day, he realized that there had been another effect of the lesson besides exhaustion. He had absolutely, positively, not a single drop of desire in his veins for her, despite the fact that they had been tumbling all over each other, often ending tangled in positions that would have caused her father to issue Karal an ultimatum to marry her—had they been in Karse.

  He wasn't certain how that had come about, but there was no denying the effect. If she had stripped herself stark naked and posed for him like one of the street women, he would not have been able to perform with her. She overwhelmed him. She was now, in his own mind, in the same class as Solaris, and therefore untouchable.

  He was simply grateful to be allowed to escape.

  He dragged himself back to his room—Ulrich was not there, but someone had had the foresight to fire up the copper boiler in the bathing room. Johen? If so, then perhaps that young man was not as unsympathetic as he had seemed.

  After a hot bath, the world seemed a little friendlier, and he was ready to face Ulrich, the Court, and whatever else came up. And it was a very good thing that he was prepared for just that, for just as he finished dressing, there was a decisive knock on the door. Before he could answer it, the door opened.

  There was a man standing there—a man wearing dark gray leather very like Kerowyn's except for the color. Tall, lean, and dark, Karal had never seen a human being who looked quite so much like a hungry wolf before. His hair was snow-white, and his face seamed with scars; he regarded Karal as measuringly as Kerowyn had, out of a pair of agate-gray eyes as expressionless as a pair of pebbles.

  He was Karsite; his facial features and body type were as typical as Ulrich's and Karal's own. There was absolutely no doubt of that.

  Which meant that there was only one person that he could be. Karal had forgotten that he was also scheduled for lessons in the Valdemaran tongue.

  Karal swallowed, his mouth gone dry, and bowed. "H-herald Alberich, I-I-I am honored," he stuttered in his own tongue.

  He rose from his bow—Alberich was smiling sardonically. "Honored? To be tutored by the Great Betrayer? I think not." The Herald strode into the room and closed the door behind him. "You are one of three things, boy—diplomatic, uninformed, or a liar. I hope it is the first."

  Karal didn't know what to say, so he wisely kept his mouth shut. Alberich looked him over again, and the smile softened, just a little.

  "The first, then. When you report, tell Solaris that I
compliment her on her choice of personnel." He reached for a chair without looking at it, pulled it over to him, and turned it so that the back faced Karal. Then he sat down on it backward, resting his arms along the high back.

  Karal took this as an invitation to sit, and took a chair for himself. He was weak in the knees again, but this time from the sheer force of the man's personality.

  "First, we'll see just how much Valdemaran you really know," Alberich said—and then began a ruthless examination. Or rather, interrogation—he spouted off questions and waited for Karal to answer them. If Karal didn't understand or lacked the vocabulary to answer, he shook his head, and Alberich moved on to another question.

  During this entire time, Alberich never once took those gray eyes off him, and whether or not it was by accident, the questions he asked revealed more about the man than Karal had ever expected to learn.

  It was impossible to remember that this man was called the Great Traitor—no, not impossible to remember, but impossible to believe. Not when everything he said or did reinforced Karal's impression that Alberich lived, breathed, and worked beneath a code of honor as unbreakable as steel and as enduring as the mountains of his homeland.

  "Come with me, "Alberich said after about a mark's worth of this intensive questioning. He stood quickly and gracefully, and Karal scrambled to his own feet, feeling as awkward as a young colt and drained completely dry. "I'll get you some books to get you started."

  He turned and led the way, Karal following behind him; eventually, after many turnings and twistings and sets of stairs leading both up and down, Alberich turned to open a pair of unguarded doors. Behind those doors—as far as Karal was concerned—lay Paradise.

  Books. Floor to ceiling, and huge freestanding shelves full of them. The only other library Karal had ever seen to rival this one was the Temple library at home, and novices were never allowed in there alone. He stood in the door, gawking; he would never have known where to start, but Alberich seemed to know exactly where he was going. He went straight to the rear, and took down half a dozen small volumes, blowing the dust from them as he did so. He stalked back to where Karal was waiting for him, and handed them all to him.