Beyond Read online

  Kordas took that as the dismissal it was, plucked his shirt and tunic off the side of the loose-box, and gestured to Delia and Cestin to follow him. “We’ve been given our walking orders,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s get out before he chases us out with a broom.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, my lord,” the stablemaster countered, as they left—leaving behind the mage-lights, which would naturally fade and then vanish on their own as dawn approached. “I’d just set the dogs on you.”

  Only Delia had a rain cape, which made Cestin grumble under his breath, but Kordas was actually grateful for the downpour. His trews were already probably ruined, so a little rain wasn’t going to make any difference, but the unusually warm rain was doing wonders for rinsing the sticky birth-fluids away. “Hold this, would you?” he asked Delia, handing her his shirt and tunic so he could “wash” his hair as they walked.

  It wasn’t that far to the manor, a fanciful piece of architecture sprouting delicate towers and elegant domes that was perfectly capable of holding the population of the entire Dukedom at a pinch, and was about as defensible as a sand castle. This, of course, was exactly how the Emperor wanted things; he did not want his landholders to be able to mount any kind of effective defense of their realms. He wanted to be able to march in and take everything if he pleased, and he wanted his nobles to be aware of that every single moment.

  “Why is this storm so warm?” Delia asked, through the downpour. There wasn’t much lightning and thunder, but the amount of rain coming down was almost enough to drown out her words.

  “There’s a war out on the frontier,” Kordas reminded her. “The Emperor never stops trying to conquer someone. I’m told there are lots of mages in those two armies, and it’s messing with the weather. I wouldn’t in the least be surprised to have this turn into a blizzard by morning.”

  “I hope not!” Delia replied with alarm. “That would be a disaster!”

  Kordas shrugged, then, aware that she couldn’t see him in the dark and downpour, added, “Not much we can do about it without tipping our hand to the Emperor that I have more mages living here than he is aware of.” Now, that was an advantage to having that enormous pile of a manor—he could have as many mages as he cared to host here, and unless they made themselves “visible,” no one would be the wiser.

  And since at least a third of his mages were busy full time masking the presence of the others, he was as certain as he dared to be that the Emperor had no idea so many had come to him for protection. He glanced up at the tops of the towers overhead. There were lights in the windows of all of them. His mages were hard at work tonight—perhaps. Of course they could also be curled up next to their fires with cats (or dogs, but mages seemed to prefer cats), mulled ale, and a good book.

  Cats, mulled ale, and a good book sounded very attractive right now, but his bed sounded even more attractive. At least he’d washed all the muck off. Though if Isla had ordered him a hot bath . . . I wouldn’t turn it down.

  The nearest entrance to the stables was the kitchen, which at this hour was dark and fragrant with the scent of the herbs in the cleaning water and a slight yeasty scent of the dough left to rise overnight for the first baking in the morning.

  No one slept in the kitchens at Valdemar except, perhaps, the kitchen cats. With a superfluity of rooms, even the lowliest scullion had a little cot of his own tucked away in the warren of servants’ cells next to the kitchen. They were too small to be called rooms, in Kordas’s opinion, but they were private, comfortable, and each contained a proper bed, which was far more than most servants ever got. That had not been something that had been built into the structure. It was an innovation Kordas’s grandfather had made, converting a single large room next to the kitchen into twenty little kitchen servants’ rooms, each one with a door to allow the privacy that servants were so seldom accorded.

  Kordas paused just inside the kitchen, next to the banked fire, to drip for a few moments. Cestin wrung out the hems of his robes at the hearth. “If you have no further need of me, my lord—?” he said, making it a question.

  Kordas clapped him on the back. “Not tonight. There’s probably cakes in the larder.”

  Cestin brightened at that. “I am a bit peckish,” he admitted, and went for a rummage, returning with a napkin full of tea-cakes. “It was a good night’s work, my lord.”

  “And a success, thanks to both of you.” He clapped Cestin on the back again, and noticed as he did so that a cold draft was coming from the crack under the kitchen door. The temperature had dropped while they waited, just as he had predicted. Good work on Stafngrimr’s part, getting that mare and her foal up to the stables when he did. Wretched mage-weather! It just might blizzard by morning!

  Cestin noticed too. “I believe I will get back to my room and enjoy these in bed with a cup of tea. I fear the weather is turning. Good night, my lord.”

  “Good night, my friend,” Kordas responded with a smile.

  When Cestin had gone, Delia made no move to leave. Instead she peered through the gloom at her brother-in-law. “Did you really mean that? About giving me the filly?”

  “I wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t meant it. I’d been thinking about it for a while. I might not have if it had been a colt, because I want to put any colts back into the breeding program, but you ought to have a horse you’ve personally trained, and I can’t think of anyone else who deserves one of Arial’s foals more than you do.”

  Delia made a little sound he recognized as a sigh of pleasure. “Thank you, brother. This means a lot.”

  “It does,” he agreed, with a half smile. “It means a lot of work. And that work will start immediately. You need to get the little one used to you from the beginning, and used to the idea of a little light weight on her back every single day. Not much. Just enough for her to notice, like resting your hand on her back while she moves about. Grim will teach you, and you’ll teach her, and it needs to be every day. There’s nothing like working with a horse from the moment it’s foaled to get an extraordinary mount. What are you going to name her?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Delia replied. “I need to think about it. Is she going to be a Gold, like Arial?”

  “Definitely. Another Valdemar Gold.” He had plenty of experience in telling what color a horse was going to be even when soaking wet, and the filly was going to be within a shade of Arial’s glorious autumnal color.

  “Something about sun, then, maybe,” Delia mused, and stretched. “Well, I’m dry enough now I won’t leave drips all over the hallway. I’m heading for bed and maybe a small cup of mead.”

  “I think I’ll be doing the same,” he agreed.

  They parted company at the kitchen door, Delia going off to her own suite in a quiet part of the manor, and he to his tower, though before he got there he became aware that his shirtless state was getting uncomfortable as the temperature dropped.

  Of course, he could have had all those mages he sheltered do something about keeping the manor warm by magic, but that would be a dead giveaway that he had all those mages. Only the Emperor and the Emperor’s favorite cronies were supposed to have enough mages on hand to do trivial things like keep their dwellings warm or cool.

  He draped the damp tunic and shirt over his shoulders, and hurried his slightly squishy steps.

  His tower was just off the seldom-used audience chamber, and he sighed with relief as he opened the door to the bottom level and his night-guard saluted him. There was a good fire down here; it had been banked when he’d left for the stables, and it looked like the night-guard had taken it upon himself to build it up again. He saluted back, and began to climb.

  * * *

  —

  Delia was glad to get out of sight of her brother-in-law the Duke, and even gladder to get back to the privacy of her spacious suite—which was not in a tower, something this manor had a superfluity of. She didn’t care for
towers, except to occasionally go up one to look at the view. She didn’t like the way they swayed a little in a high wind, she didn’t like the eerie sounds the wind made up there, and she preferred the feeling of being on the ground.

  It was not that she didn’t enjoy Kordas’s company. Quite the contrary, she enjoyed it just a little too much. But his generous gift had come perilously close to causing her to crack the mask she always wore around him and her sister.

  Every gift he had ever given her was generous, as far as that went. Take this suite, just as a for-instance. Granted, there was no shortage of room in this manor; in fact, she doubted that it was more than half occupied. But still, even by those standards, this was extraordinary.

  The first room alone was the size of the suite she’d had as a child. This was the “public” room, the one where she would have brought guests, if she ever had guests. She could have hosted twenty people here with no crowding. It had a fine fireplace, comfortable padded furnishings upholstered in a dark brown leather, and walls lined with bookshelves. There were two windows with cushioned window-seats, and sheepskins scattered over the polished wooden floor. The next rooms were her bedroom, a closet so big her clothing barely took up a quarter of it, a bathing room, and a shielded magic room she never used at all because she wasn’t a mage. Everything matched: gleaming dark wood and shining dark leather, exactly the way she liked it. The bed was big enough for four, and had mage-lights in little cages mounted on the headboard, which had a little bookcase built into it.

  Delia didn’t know the story of how Duke Valdemar—Kordas’s great-grandfather—had gotten a mage-built manor as a “gift” from the Emperor, but she knew why it had happened. It was all part of how the Emperor kept control over his nobles. You couldn’t safely refuse his offer to have his mages construct such a place for you, after all. But everything about the enormous piles they would make for you was calculated. It would be the height of luxury, setting you apart from your people immediately. Especially in a relatively poor Duchy like this one. It would also be utterly indefensible, which tended to discourage thoughts of rebellion. And, of course, since the layouts were exactly alike, you could not boast of having a better manor than someone else. The Emperor’s gifts always had many sticky threads attached.

  Instead of seeking her bed, she stripped off her cape and draped it over a drying stand, and went to the window. Pressing her hand against the glass to check the temperature outside, she judged that it probably wasn’t going to snow, but it wasn’t going to be warm until whatever had caused the weather fluctuations passed them by. There was always war at the borders of the Empire, but this was the first time to her knowledge that what went on out at the frontier was actually affecting the Empire itself.

  And what is the Emperor going to make of that? Probably nothing, as long as it didn’t inconvenience him.

  Thinking about the Emperor got her mind off Kordas for a moment, which was a good thing.

  It was fine to love your brother-in-law, just don’t be in love with your brother-in-law.

  A fact of which she reminded herself on a daily basis.

  She turned away from the window and went to the table against the wall where wine and mead waited, poured herself a generous portion of the latter in a pewter cup, and turned to the fire.

  She’d left the fire well stoked when she’d gone down to the stables, and it only needed another log put on it. That was just a matter of a moment.

  She didn’t bother raising the shades over the mage-lights; the light from the fire was enough.

  Cup in hand, fire going well, she slumped down into her favorite high-backed chair on the hearth, pivoted so her legs hung over the right-side arm and and her back was up against the left-side arm, leaned her head against the padded back, and contemplated the ironic comedy that was her life.

  The first irony was that Kordas and Isla liked each other very much, were indeed the best of friends, but theirs had been an arranged marriage (as nearly every marriage among the nobility of the Empire was), and they weren’t in love with each other. Not even after three children. And Delia? Delia wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the fact that she and Isla had no brothers. When their father had died, the Emperor had swooped in, assigned the Baronial title and estates to one of his sycophants, and cut Delia out completely. She’d been lucky to be allowed to take her personal belongings with her when he unceremoniously threw her out.

  Could be worse. I could’ve been forced to marry the Emperor’s puppy to cement his position. Fortunately for her, he already had a wife and was disinclined to divorce her or otherwise put her away, in order to marry someone who was in many ways that woman’s inferior. Delia had gotten a good look at her while she was packing; there was no doubt she was beautiful, and probably had been the Emperor’s mistress at some point or other. She was also tall, willowy, graceful, and wealthy in her own right, all things Delia was not. The perfect trophy of a wife, a living display of the Emperor’s favor.

  “You’ll be moving out, of course, girl,” the wife had said. She could still hear that distant, dulcet voice in her mind. It hadn’t been more than a moment after she had been introduced to the new Baron of Sterngal and his wife. The wife hadn’t even bothered giving Delia her proper name; she’d just stared down her nose at Delia, and said, “You’ll be moving out, of course, girl,” in tones that suggested Delia should do so on the instant.

  Delia had been at her wits’ end. Her father was barely in his tomb by a day, she was still in grief and shock at his sudden passing, and at the very least she had expected that she would be allowed to move to the dowager house or at worst the gatehouse on the grounds. She’d have been perfectly happy in either place. Her needs were few, and she’d still have been home.

  But no.

  They had shown up out of the blue, parading through the activated Portal with their entire household, which had included enough armed men that she had felt utterly intimidated.

  And as she had stood on the steps of what was no longer her own home, wondering what the hell she was going to do, with the Ice Queen glaring down at her from one side, and the Ice Queen’s husband looking everyplace except at Delia, she had been tempted to run inside, flee up the stairs to the highest tower, and fling herself off it in despair to land messy and dead at their feet. Not being one of the Emperor’s mage-built edifices, that tower wasn’t that tall and she wouldn’t have splattered their lovely garments when she hit, but she’d at least have made an inconvenient mess for them to clean up and explain.

  And that was when there had been a flurry of trumpets above as the two Heralds announced yet another group approaching the manor. She’d stopped herself—because it might have been the Emperor’s people coming to fetch her to the Capital, and while that was far from ideal, if the Emperor was fetching her, it meant he would probably make sure she wasn’t stripped of everything.

  But it hadn’t been the Emperor’s representative.

  It had been Kordas.

  Riding in on one of his beautiful Valdemar Gold horses for which he was famed—she knew now it had been Arial, the mare she had just helped—and trailed by three empty wagons, he had come trotting up to the steps of Sterngal Manor as if he were the owner, not this trumped-up Emperor’s lapdog. And he didn’t even bother to greet the new owner and his wife; he came down off his horse and went straight to Delia, and embraced her as if he had known her all his life instead of meeting her no more than a handful of times at best. “Delia, my dear, I am so sorry,” he said, as she involuntarily responded to the kindness in his eyes and the warmth of his embrace by burying her face in his tunic with a muffled sob. “I’ve come to take you home to Valdemar, of course,” he continued. “You can’t possibly go anywhere else, I won’t have it.”

  Then, and only then, did he look up at the usurper. “Ah, good, you’re here. That’s convenient. See that your servants pack up Delia’s things and load them in t
he wagons, will you? I’m going to take her up to her rooms so we can make sure that anything breakable is properly protected.”

  And just like that, he put his arm around her shoulder and urged her up to her rooms, while the new Baron and his wife stared at them in slack-jawed astonishment.

  They’d done what he’d asked too, probably assuming the Emperor had sent him, and not daring to do anything to contradict him. Or, more to the point, to interfere with what Delia said was hers. Which, among other things, were all the items that Isla had left behind when she’d married, and all the books in the library.

  So instead of having to fight that gorgeous, rapacious harpy over every single possession that wasn’t an article of clothing, with Kordas’s help she had managed to make off with enough valuables to count as a decent legacy.

  Kordas had actually done far more than she had in that regard. After her rooms had been packed up—not the furnishings; he’d taken one look at them and said “We’ve got better” and instructed the servants to leave them—he’d taken her around the manor, pointing to this and that, and saying “Your father left you that, right?” and she had just nodded. He had an uncanny eye for small, extremely valuable objects, and they kept well ahead of the new Baron and most especially his wife, snatching up treasure after family treasure before the interlopers even laid eyes on the pieces to know what they were losing.

  Then he’d ordered her horse—pony, really, she had only been thirteen at the time—put her up on it, and led the whole cavalcade back to the Gate at the edge of the manor grounds, and through it, straight to the matching Gate here at Valdemar.

  She had been in almost as much of a daze at the end of the sweep as the usurper and his wife had been. It was only when she was within sight of the manor of Valdemar that it hit home for her.