Beyond Read online

  Mind, he and Isla were not absent from the boys’ lives. He saw them often, and made a point to visit the nursery where they all lived. Isla spent some time with all of the children, every day.

  She probably spends more time with them than the parents of other nobles spend with their offspring.

  But he knew it hurt her that she couldn’t be their mother. She knew this was how things had to be in order to safeguard them, but she didn’t want to be like the parents of other noble children. She wanted, sometimes so much that it drove her to tears, to be as closely involved in their growing up as any ordinary farmwife. There were so many things she had never gotten to experience. She had not seen their first steps, nor heard their first words.

  They had never called her “Mama.”

  But doing that . . . would only end in her losing them. They both knew that. And so he hesitated to ever bring them up before she did, for fear that mentioning them would make her unhappy.

  “Hakkon wants to know if we’re ready for Restil to take his place with the pages,” she said, as if she had read his mind.

  He was about to say “Isn’t that really Hakkon’s decision to make?” but he stopped himself before he did. This wasn’t the lady of the manor speaking. This was the mother of his child, and Hakkon had been exactly right to ask her. Instead, he thought about it for a moment, recalling his own childhood. “I was only a little older than Restil when I was made a page, and Hakkon was younger.” He pulled on his beard a moment while he thought. “You know, Restil could be assigned as your page . . .”

  Her eyes closed, and she bit her lip. “I was hoping you would suggest that. But is it safe?”

  “Not only is it safe, you can get away with showering him with affection and no one will think twice about it,” he promised her with relief. “He’s a handsome little lad, if I do say so myself, and most ladies of rank are inclined to spoil their pretty little pages. You’ll be no different.”

  She sniffed, signaling that she was holding back tears, which was not unexpected; he moved over in his chair, which was quite big enough for two, and patted the seat beside him.

  She joined him, resting her head on his shoulder, with his arm around her. For a while, they just sat together; quiet on the surface, but mentally he was trying to pick up every detail that might signal her state of mind. Did she just want comfort? Or was she amorous? If the latter, he could certainly throw off his fatigue, but if lovemaking wasn’t what she wanted—

  Their relationship was a trifle complicated. Oh, not in the fact that they were husband and wife, nor that it was an arranged marriage. That was normal enough. No, it was due to his own upbringing, which was decidedly not normal, at least insofar as his own experience deeper in Imperial territory went. His father and his grandfather had both been adamant that sex was not a husband’s “right,” no matter what other people in the Empire said. Nor was it his right to order women about as if they were pet dogs. This, of course, was in direct contradiction to all the examples he’d had at the Emperor’s Court. But—

  She sighed, and he felt her tears on his chest. Ah, well, all right, then. No midnight romping tonight. Good. I need the sleep, he caught himself thinking.

  Instead, he moved his free hand to dry her tears with the sleeve of his robe, and continued the conversation about their son. “As soon as he’s old enough that we know he can keep secrets, we’ll tell him, I promise. And in the meantime, you can act like any of those silly cows in the Court and dote on your pretty page-boy. He’s an affectionate little chap, and he’ll thrive on all the love you give him.”

  “It would be so much worse if the Emperor had demanded him,” she agreed, though her voice trembled a little with emotion. “And I know I am ridiculously lucky. I have my boys within my household, and I can see them whenever I like. I didn’t get married off to someone three times my age who I didn’t even know. I didn’t get the treatment that Delia did when Father died.”

  “But this is still hard,” Kordas replied. He did understand. She liked him, and he liked her; they were ridiculously compatible. But this was much, much different. This was mother-love; she adored her children with all the passion of a warm-natured woman, and to be denied so much of their lives . . .

  Well, it went against instinct, which did not answer to logic and reason.

  She never complained about it, that was the remarkable thing. For the last nine years, she had not complained about it. At most, she had given way to a few tears, like now. She’s braver than I am, he thought soberly.

  “Well, I’ll tell Hakkon tomorrow to put Restil in the page corps and assign him to us. No—to you. There’s no reason you can’t have a personal page.” She gave a shuddering sigh, and patted his hand.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to go to bed early,” she said, as thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance. And since she did not add “and why don’t you come with me?” he just nodded.

  “I’m going to finish off this excellent toddy that you put together. It’s far too good to waste a single drop,” he told her, and gave her a hand up out of the chair. “Better be prepared for Delia to gush about her new prize all during breakfast.”

  “Sometimes I think Father should have married you to Delia rather than me, the way you both worship horses,” she teased, pausing and looking back over her shoulder at him.

  “Thank you, but despite the example of our noble Emperor, I am not inclined to go robbing cradles for a wife,” he retorted. “Besides, I like the one I have. She’s got me broken in pretty well.”

  She managed a hint of a laugh, and headed up the stairs to their bedchamber. He admired the view until the ceiling cut it off. Well, maybe there was some love there after all; nobody ever said love had to only be romantic. It could be based upon admiration, too.

  The conversation tonight had cast his mind back to the five years he had been at the Emperor’s Court, and he mulled over his past as he brooded into the fire.

  He had not been the youngest hostage there; indeed, the youngest had been barely able to toddle. The more important you were—a Prince, say, or one of the Emperor’s subject Kings—the more likely it was that the Emperor would snatch one or more of your children away as soon as they were weaned. The Duke of Valdemar was not important politically or militarily, and certainly was not monetarily important; Kordas had gotten the feeling when he’d arrived on the other side of the last of the Portals that summoning him had been something of an afterthought, and probably not even the Emperor’s afterthought.

  It was far more likely that some flunky on inventorying the thousand or so children at the Imperial Court had noticed that the Duke of Valdemar had not yet sent a hostage, checked the rolls to make sure there were children, and sent for him.

  He had been lucky that his father must have anticipated that—and realized he was going to need an advocate and advisor. That was where Hakkon had come in—masquerading as the body-servant he was allowed to bring with him. Hakkon was ten years older than he, a bastard cousin on his mother’s side, and one that the then-Duke had been happy to add to the household when Kordas’s mother had requested the favor. By the time Kordas was thirteen, Hakkon was tall, strong, as muscled as a muleteer, intelligent, and completely devoted to the family. He’d also spent a great deal of time at the Duke’s side as the Duke made his annual tribute visits to the Imperial Capital, so Hakkon knew exactly what a nest of serpents the place was. The perfect protector to send with Kordas.

  As he and Hakkon had stood just off the Imperial Portal platform, staring at the dozens of people scrambling to and fro, none of whom were paying any attention to them, it became clear that no one in the entire Portal room was prepared to step up to find out who they were, much less help them.

  Hakkon, however, was not prepared to take that sort of treatment. Not after a full day of transiting Portal to Portal, at none of which had anyone offered them so much as a drink o
f water.

  Hakkon had marched out into the room, grabbed the first unburdened person in Imperial livery that he saw, and growled something at the man. Kordas had been too far away to hear what Hakkon said, but it, and Hakkon’s size, evidently made an impression on the servant. The man scuttled away with the speed of a terrified mouse, and by the time Hakkon had returned to Kordas’s side, another harried-looking servant in Imperial livery appeared in a doorway, looking for them.

  That was the first time Hakkon had intervened for him, but it had by no means been the last.

  They’d been led to a vast wing of mostly tiny rooms, about the size of monastic cells, actually smaller than the bedrooms supplied to the servants here at the manor. There had been just enough room for a wardrobe, a chest, and two narrow beds. Hakkon had left him alone to survey this grim prospect with dismay. And, truth to tell, he had been close to breaking down in tears. He hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. He’d been forced to leave all of his friends at the manor behind, and by that time, that had included Isla, who was his very best friend.

  The overt reason for Isla coming to spend time at Valdemar had been to help his then-invalided mother run the manor. Now he knew (although he had not at the time) that their fathers had decided to introduce the two of them to see if they would suit. It had been a clever move; their birthdays were within two moons of each other, they were both highly intelligent, and they were both mages—though their fathers had made it very clear that they were never to reveal this outside the family. The Emperor prized mages, and would collect every one that he found into his service. And Isla had the added bonus of being a Mindspeaker.

  I hate to think what would have happened to her if the Emperor had known about that. The best she could have expected would have been being mewed up with the rest of his mages. He’d seen where they lived, a vast edifice attached to the Imperial Palace; he’d also seen, rarely, some of the mages themselves. They never looked happy.

  The worst she could have expected would be much worse than being locked up in a gloomy mausoleum to labor for the Emperor every waking moment. There were not many female mages among them—so Hakkon had told him—because female mages, unless they were very powerful indeed, were treated like breeding stock for the purpose of making more mages.

  Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d come to Valdemar when they were both eleven, and by the time the Emperor summoned him, they had been absolute best friends.

  And, fortunately, she had also had neither great wealth in the form of a dower, nor great beauty. The former would have made her a rich prize that the Emperor could have used as a reward for one of his faithful. The latter—well, she’d still have been a reward for one of his faithful, but first the Emperor would probably have made her one of his many mistresses. He collected beautiful women and seemed to relish best the ones who were openly afraid of him and dared not defy him.

  Well, she’d escaped the Emperor’s trap. Her twin brother had been the one who’d gone as a hostage.

  And her brother had died there.

  Nothing sinister about that, though. It was just reflective of the lack of care that the hostages got. Idor and his body-servant had both fallen ill. No one came to check on them at first when they did not turn up for meals, and by the time Kordas himself had gone to Idor’s room to see what was wrong, it was the first that anyone knew how sick they were. And by that time, it was too late. Despite the best that the healers could do, they had both died within hours of being found.

  This was typical. You needed someone like Hakkon to make sure you got your share of food at meals, that nothing was stolen from you, that you weren’t beaten or worse by the predators among the children. In theory, having nobles send their firstborn sons (or daughters, if they had no sons) to the Emperor wasn’t a completely bad idea from the Emperor’s point of view. The youngsters were all treated alike, they got the same education, they integrated into the fabric of the Empire, and they would theoretically grow up loyal to him.

  In practice, with a thousand children there, it was barely organized chaos, in which older children ruled the younger, and abuse was common.

  The moment that Kordas had discovered Isla’s brother had been lying sick and alone for days was the moment Kordas had vowed to himself that no child of his was ever going to be sent into Imperial care.

  Pain in his jaw made him realize he was grinding his teeth—as he often did when he thought about the Emperor and the Imperial Court.

  I’m nothing to them, and as long as things stay that way, my family and my people are safe.

  The problem was, he knew very well that could change overnight.

  I need to check with Jonaton tomorrow. Maybe his answer will be different this time. Jonaton was so close . . .

  I’m clenching my jaw again. Time for bed. Today had been good. Perhaps tomorrow would be better.

  3

  Valdemar kept “farmer’s hours,” even at the Ducal level, which disconcerted Imperial visitors a great deal. Breakfast was nearly at dawn, and was the biggest meal of the day.

  The Great Hall of an Imperial-gift manor was meant for holding massive audiences, ceremonies, and enormous celebrations. It was not meant to be used as Kordas used it: as the communal eating-room.

  In an Imperial-style Court, the people of rank ate together in a pleasant, well-lit dining room, while the servants and commoners ate in a larger, windowless, basement room off the kitchen. That was the room that Kordas’s grandfather had cut up into kitchen-staff rooms.

  The Great Hall at Valdemar was set up with trestle tables and benches around the clock, and had never, to Kordas’s knowledge, been used as anything but an eating space. Kordas’s father had partially solved the heating problem by suspending a kind of cloth “ceiling” at about the height where a normal ceiling would be, made of painted sailcloth covered in images of stars, moons, and suns against a dark blue background. Kordas had no idea what things looked like above that cloth ceiling these days. It’s probably the home to about a million spiders at this point, he mused as he entered the room.

  There was the difference between the High Tables, where people other than the servants and commoners ate, and the rest of the hall. There were no cloth coverings on the common tables; people had to pick up their own pieces of trencher-bread as they came in; they needed to bring their own cups, spoons, and knives; and they served themselves out of bowls and platters placed at intervals along the tables. When those were emptied, someone at the table was expected to fetch more from a table along the side of the room. At the High Tables, there were tablecloths, plates, cups, knives, and spoons, and people were served individually by the pages. Not by the youngest ones, who were still in training, and could not be expected to carry heavy bowls and platters of food, but by the ones in their last year of page-duty, at which point they would become squires. About half the pages were from the households of the lords of his manors. Not because he was holding them hostage, as the Emperor did, but to ensure their educations in being gentlemen. The pages were exclusively male. Little girls were expected to be trained in their own households by mothers or senior servants in the duties that were the traditional purviews of women. There might have been exceptions to this, but Kordas didn’t know any. There were rarely female squires—he had three—but they had come to him at the express request of their parents, for martial training as knights.

  Kordas did not enter at the main doors to the Great Hall as most people did; he came through a smaller door up at the end of the Hall where the High Tables were. There he stood, just within the shadows of the doorway, and took a moment to look over the people who served him—and whom he, in his own turn, served.

  Isla had gotten up this morning before he had; she was already in the middle seat of the main High Table, with Delia on the other side of her, both of them involved in a lively conversation that involved a lot of knife-waving. Hakkon was on the other side of
Kordas’s empty chair, keeping a sharp eye on the pages and administering quiet corrections if they made mistakes.

  It was Hakkon that Kordas’s gaze lingered on; Hakkon was the Seneschal, and according to Imperial custom, the highest-ranking person in Kordas’s household. Technically, he even outranked Isla. Kordas had depended on him for decades, and Hakkon simply didn’t have it in him to let Kordas down.

  It would have been very easy, back in those days when Kordas was a hostage in the Imperial Court, for Hakkon to have eliminated Kordas by simple neglect. It was possible for bastards to succeed to a title; it just needed the Emperor’s approval, and that probably would not have been hard to get. Had Hakkon lusted for the Ducal coronet, the opportunity to snatch it had been right there.

  But he had never been anything other than Kordas’s faithful protector and advisor. He had never even once given Kordas bad advice.

  No one would ever have guessed that Hakkon was Kordas’s cousin; Hakkon was still tall and strong and muscled like a muleteer; he didn’t allow himself the “belly drift” of most courtiers. His hair and impressive beard were a startling white-blond, and he kept both in neat braids.

  He never missed anything—perhaps as a result of being Kordas’s watchdog for so long; even though Kordas was still in the shadows of the doorway, his cousin spotted him, and signaled with his eyebrows and a tilt of his head toward the empty seat.