One Good Knight Read online

  “Here!” she said, holding out the basket and leather wineskin. “I thought I would have a picnic on the cliff, and it didn’t seem fair to make a boy climb up here with your ration since I was already coming.”

  “Ah, so that worthless stick of a governess of yours has taken herself off for the day?” Thesus asked shrewdly, the corners of his eyes crinkling with laughter as he sat down on a stone bench beside the telescope and unpacked what she’d brought, the standard soldiers’ fare of olives, cheese, garlic sausage and a coarse loaf of bread. “Well, it’s to be hoped Her Majesty has more of these meetings, then.

  You’ve been indoors too much—you’re pale as this bit of cheese.”

  “A Princess mustn’t get sunburned, or no proper Prince will ever look twice at her,” she told him as she sat on the bare stone of the platform across from him.

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  He snorted. “Then I’d be saying that a so-called

  ‘proper’ Prince is no kind of proper man,” he retorted, and though he kept one eye on her, and was making a quick and neat meal of his provisions, he never let his attention wander from the horizon where a new sail might appear. “But there you are, what do I know about royalty? Nothing, and there’s an end to it, I suppose.”

  “Well, your advice is more sensible than anything I ever got out of a governess,” Andie told him, feeling a twinge of concern. “Just be careful—”

  “No fear of that, Princess,” Thesus chuckled. “I’ve been with the Royal Guard, man and boy, a good forty years, and I’ve learned who to keep my mouth shut around.”

  “I’ll leave you to your duty, then,” she replied, scrambling to her feet.

  “Best do that. This spot’s a bit exposed, and we don’t want someone to catch sight of those oculars of yours flashing in the sun and know who’s bringing me my rations. No harm in you picnicking below, but plenty of trouble if you’re visiting with riffraff like me. Thankee, Princess. You’re a rare little lass.”

  His blue eyes sparkled as he smiled, his teeth very white and strong-looking, framed in the black beard.

  “And you are a true Guardsman,” she said, giving him the Guards’ salute of her closed right fist to her left shoulder.

  He laughed delightedly, and the sound of his laughter followed her back down the stairs.

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  Now, there was no harm, no harm at all, in the Princess being up on the stairs themselves. They didn’t lead anywhere but to the observation platform for the Sea-Watch. No one could get to them except through the Palace. So they were a safe place for her to be, and she was well known for spending entire afternoons up here, or rather, on one of the landings, sitting in the sun and wind and reading. So once she was as far down as one of her known haunts she relaxed.

  She glanced back down at the Palace again, and made note of the servants moving through some of the open courts. No one appeared to be looking for her and she relaxed a little more.

  On the way up, she had left a few things of her own here, and now she collected them: a blanket, a cushion, and a basket containing a book and her own lunch. Short of being able to sneak down into the city itself, which, on a day when the port was full of foreign ships was simply not going to happen, this was the best place for her to spend the afternoon. Not even her friends in the Guard would let her slip out of the Palace when the city was full of foreigners. They might be anything in the guise of common merchants—kidnappers, assassins, spies. Whereas up here, no one was going to be able to get to her without going through several sets of Guards—and even then, she’d see whoever it was coming up the stairs in plenty of time to take refuge with Thesus.

  Not that anything that adventurous was likely to happen. No one ever attacked Ethanos. No one One Good Knight

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  wanted to. You’d first have to get past the harbor town and its regiment of Guards, then up the cliff to the city itself, where the City Watch would greet you with a hail of arrows and missiles. Then you’d have to fight your way through the streets, all of which twisted and turned like a tangled ball of yarn, to get to the Palace, which had its own walls and the Royal Guard to protect it. It was like a sea urchin; maybe the meat inside was sweet, but to get to it, you had to get past a thousand spines, all sharp, and all poisoned.

  She spread out her blanket and flopped down on it, stomach against the warm stone, with arms crossed and her chin resting on her forearms as she stared down at the city.

  It rankled that, once again, Cassiopeia had refused even to consider her presence at these meetings—and after she had gone to such pains to study the latest reports on every single merchant in the domestic fleet! She could quote import and export figures, tax revenues, profit margins and losses for the past ten years! Or—well, not exactly quote them, but she had all of it noted down and within moments could put her finger on any figure needed.

  And all she’d asked was that she be allowed to observe—not to participate, merely to watch and listen! After all, she was nineteen, and she still had very little notion of what it meant to rule. The only time she ever saw the Queen exercising her authority was in formal audiences that required the attendance of the entire Court. Those were as scripted 22

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  as any play, and gave her no idea of just how Cassiopeia employed diplomacy, strategy and negotiation. The Queen wasn’t going to live forever (even if sometimes it seemed as if she might) and when she was gone, Andie did not want to find herself at the mercy of “advisers” and “councilors” who did the actual ruling, while she served only as a figurehead on the throne.

  It was all terribly frustrating. Maybe everything she knew was out of a book rather than real life, but at least she knew something. Her mother’s Chief Adviser, Solon Adacritus, didn’t even bother with that much; he depended on his secretaries to find out everything for him. That, by Andie’s reckoning, was cheating.

  Solon had been Cassiopeia’s right-hand forever, though Andie could not imagine what her mother ever saw in him. Oh, he was handsome enough, in a rather limp and languid way, but he was the butt of a hundred jokes in the Guard for his manners and the superstitious way he hung himself with good-luck charms and amulets, fiddling with them constantly.

  Not for the first time, she wondered if Solon was her mother’s lover. Well, if he was, he was certainly so discreet and careful about it that there had never been so much as a hint of it her entire life. And there were plenty of people looking for information like that, she had no doubt. Information was leverage, and the game of inter- and intra-kingdom politics was played largely on the basis of leverage.

  Acadia might be small and rocky, but it had the One Good Knight

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  only protected, deep-water harbor for leagues and leagues, as well as one very good road that led straight to the heart of the Five Hundred Kingdoms and was safe and well patrolled, and that put it squarely on one end of an extremely lucrative trade route. Where there was money, there was power. Where there was power and money, people who didn’t have it would be scheming to get it. Knowledge of who, if anyone, was Queen Cassiopeia’s lover would be one more weapon to be deployed by those people. Which is one more thing all my reading has taught me. You couldn’t read history for long without seeing the patterns.

  Without that deep-water port, Acadia would have been the poorest of the Five Hundred Kingdoms.

  Although the sea did well by those who dared the waters to fish, the sea took as well as gave, and fishing was a dangerous profession. The rocky hills could not support grazing for much except goats and a few sheep, the only fruits that flourished were olives and grapes, and the grain harvests were just enough to keep the populace fed without any sur-plus even in the best years. There were pockets of richer soil, but not the broad, flat pastures and huge fields of waving grain that other lands boasted.

  Acadia didn’t even have a Godmother—hadn’t had one in so long that plenty of nobles who neve
r left Ethanos thought Godmothers were as mythical as centaurs and fauns.

  There were pockets of all sorts of so-called “mythical” creatures, little colonies in the wilderness that 24

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  the country-people traded with. Thesus had grown up playing with centaur colts and faun-kids as his friends, before he’d come down out of the high hills and joined the Guard. He’d told her stories, and the tales had the ring of truth about them, in no small part because they were not tales of great adventure, but of the same sort of mischief that any children got up to. The only difference was that when Thesus and his friends teased a bull or a he-goat, his friends’ parents could grab him up and take him to safety on their backs, or speak the same language as the goat and make the patriarch of the herd back down.

  Plus, the history of Acadia was full of treaties with the “Other-folk,” or Wyrding Others, treaties that were on file in the library—and how could one write up a treaty with things that were mythical? I would so like to see some of them…fauns, sylphs, centaurs, dryads and nymphs.

  She’d have liked to see a Godmother, too. But it was clear from everything she had read that Acadia didn’t have one. Probably Acadia was too insignificant. After all, when had Cassiopeia ever hosted a ball? Or a masquerade? When had other Royals even visited? Not so much as a sixth- or seventh-son Prince had ever ventured across the border or into the harbor. Nothing of any consequence had happened here in more than a generation.

  No wonder the Godmothers ignored them in favor of Kingdoms that actually did things.

  But—if we had a Godmother here, I bet she’d see to One Good Knight

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  it that Mother started educating me in my duties.

  Leaving me ignorant like this is just making a big fat hole for The Tradition to stick an evil Prince into.

  Someone who’d come sweep me off my feet, then oppress my people. Or was the fact that she was already aware such a thing could happen enough to prevent it from happening? Maybe Acadia was so quiet and small that even The Tradition ignored it.

  Acadians themselves ignored The Tradition. Of all the people she’d ever mentioned it to, only a few seemed even vaguely aware of such a thing. Maybe, again, because things were so quiet here that the only thing The Tradition did was to ensure that there were enough poor-but-honest peasants, worthy orphans, hearty fisherman, nosy gossips and that sort of thing.

  Or maybe The Tradition is satisfied that we’ve got our quota filled with Queen Cassiopeia, beautiful and wise, she thought a little cynically. It doesn’t need to waste its time on anything else.

  There certainly didn’t seem to be a great deal of anything you could call “real magic” employed in and around Acadia. Even the Sophont Balan, for all that he had the title of Guard’s Magician, seemed mostly to tinker with purely mechanical things like telescopes and oculars.

  She turned over on her back and closed her eyes, listening to the gulls crying below, finally able to put a name to her restlessness. I’m bored, but it’s worse than just being bored. Nothing ever happens to me.

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  Nothing is ever going to happen to me. I am going to sit in my wing of the Palace and do nothing for the rest of my life. Mother will probably even outlive me. Or else she’ll marry some handsome fool who’ll be happy to have the title of Consort with none of the work, have a son, and he’ll become King—and then what? I’ll still sit in my wing of the Palace, and the only thing that will ever change is that eventually I won’t have to put up with governesses anymore.

  Would being played as a diplomatic marriage-pawn be any better? It would at least be a change…but it could be worse, she realized bleakly.

  But before she sank into despair, she gave herself another mental shake. There has to be a solution.

  Mother doesn’t take me seriously—so working through Mother is no answer. So who else is there?

  And she sat bolt upright as the solution occurred to her. Much as she disliked the man, there was someone who might. Chief Adviser Solon Adacritus, who already relied on others to give him the facts he needed to properly inform the Queen. So what if she started writing up reports for him? It would be easy enough to do—easy enough to give them to him.

  Easy enough even to flatter his ego while she did it.

  Say something like, “You have your finger on the pulse of this situation, Lord Solon. Can you see if I’ve grasped it properly?” I think it will work. He might even start to rely on me, give me access to information I can’t now get. If he starts to take me seriously, it won’t matter that Mother doesn’t. If he starts to need One Good Knight

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  my reports and research, he’ll make sure Mother never marries me off.

  Besides, she didn’t dislike him all that much. It was only that he was such a fop. It wouldn’t be hard to pretend to respect him.

  It was not only a plan, it was a good plan.

  Workable, logical. And if Solon was as ineffectual as she thought he was, as long as she acted the shy and mousy bookworm, he’d be likely to take what she gave him and look no farther than the surface, figuring that a word or two of praise would be all the reward she needed. Huh. Maybe it’s not so bad a thing that no one looks past my oculars.

  For that matter, this might pave the way to ridding her of governesses…because if Lord Solon wanted her to do research, he’d want her to have her time free, and to do that she’d have to do without all those stupid lessons in precedence, genealogy and the Royal Houses of the nearest Kingdoms. Not to mention the dance lessons, etiquette lessons, deportment and posture lessons, embroidery and so on…

  This is better than a good plan. I’ll not only have something to do, I’ll be effective.

  It was with difficulty that she kept herself from leaping up and running down the stairs to press the notes she had written into Solon’s hands. For one thing, he would be with the Queen in those meetings. For another, she wanted to go over them and make fair copies before she gave them to him. This might be the most important bit of scholarship she 28

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  ever did in her life. If she was going to convince him of her usefulness, she had to be sure that what she gave him was better than what he was getting from his secretaries.

  So instead of pelting down the stairs, she sat quietly and ate her lunch while mentally reorganizing how she was going to present her work, and decided that a bit more digging in the library would not be amiss. For one thing, she hadn’t included anything about the foreign merchants, and that would be a gaping hole in an otherwise presentable report, a hole that she could not, at this point, afford.

  By the time she had finished eating, she felt she was ready, and she gathered up her things with a feeling of determination.

  At least, in this battle, she was going in well armed. And as she headed down the stone stairs to take up her “weapons” of pen and paper, she felt herself grinning—because this was exactly the kind of battle she was best suited to win.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Queen paid little attention to her luncheon, concentrating instead on the notes from yesterday’s conferences as she ate. The morning had been occupied with purely Acadian concerns, but this afternoon she would be dealing with the Merchant Captains again. She hoped Solon’s secretaries had managed to unearth more information, particularly on the foreign merchants. The men had been rather opaque and difficult to read, and had not been at all forthcoming with responses in the initial negotiations. Worse still, when she had made certain purposefully offhand remarks, there had been no reactions. The Merchant Captains were worse than professional taroc players.

  In her experience, most men let down their guard at least a little around a beautiful woman—but not these.

  She heard Solon’s familiar footsteps, as always, 30

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  accompanied by the soft rattling of his myriad charms and amulets, and did not bother to look up.

  A
stack of papers appeared beside her notes.

  “I suggest you read this,” said Solon, his soft and pleasant voice with a dry edge to it that told her there was something about this report that was of particular interest to him.

  Still without glancing up, she shoved the notes aside and took his stack. At once, she knew this one was not from one of his usual sources. The hand-writing was different from that in any other report she had seen—neat, precise, academic. Not an agent, then. A new secretary?

  If so, this was the most competent secretary Solon had found yet. She did not permit her eyebrows to rise, since such incautious expressions made wrinkles in the forehead, but she did nod approvingly.

  This person, whoever he was, not only duplicated everything she already knew, he provided her with a few facts and figures that were new. Nothing earth-shattering, but useful, especially the information on the foreigners who had been so opaque to her.

  “Well!” she said, when she had finished. She looked up at her Chief Adviser. Solon was not particularly tall, but he was well-proportioned—nothing like her muscular Royal Guards, but she happened to know that beneath his embroidered linen robe, he had a very fit body. His face was a little too long for classic beauty, but it was very pleasing to the eye. His hands, graceful and immaculate, and skilled, were One Good Knight

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  the best features of a man who was widely considered one of the handsomest of her court. “I am impressed. Instead of merely competent help, you have conjured up someone quite clever! This will come in quite handy in my subsequent discussions.

  I hope you intend to keep him.”

  “Her,” Solon replied; unconcerned with wrinkles, he did raise one immaculately groomed eyebrow.

  “And I am not at all certain you will be as happy when you discover that this report was pressed upon me at breakfast this morning by your daughter.”

  With great difficulty she kept her own eyebrows under control; true, her daughter was a scholar, too much of a scholar really, but Cassiopeia had not expected so…practical a turn to her scholarship.