It was always easier to hold power than to give it up. That was how the Son of the Sun and his strongest Priests had come to rule Karse. And look where that had gotten them.
Kantor seemed to be following his thoughts. :Good idea. I’ll tell Caryo.: And after a moment, :Who do you want for Selenay’s bodyguards? I doubt she’ll be able to take more than a day away from her duties, but she’ll need guards when she does.:
Bodyguards . . . someone out there was trying to cause trouble over Selenay’s rule, and even if he was doing it as a distraction, it was still possible that his words would find fertile ground in some poisoned mind and bear unexpected fruit. Maybe she wasn’t in quite as much danger as she had been during the Tedrel Wars—
But maybe she was. He was in charge of her safety. He could not take the chance. So . . . that meant very good bodyguards, all over again.
Good question, who he should assign; assuming that the Collegia would be taking a full set of holidays, the various teachers and their assistants wouldn’t be needed up here, but the Royal Guard would, in its full strength, both at the Palace and at the Festival. They would be busy keeping watch over all the highborn; he needed someone watching over Selenay and only Selenay. :Might as well make it Keren and Ylsa for the daylight hours.: He gave some more thought to what this Festival should involve, for lowborn and high as well. :I suppose she’ll have a feast and entertainment for the highborn in a pavilion on the ice the same evening that she attends the games? Or should I say, there will be two feasts, one for the common folk, and one for the Court? And I mean all of the highborn, as many as can come at short notice in winter? It would be good for building loyalty.:
Kantor was taken by surprise by that question. :I don’t think she’d even considered a Court Feast for the entire roster of the highborn throughout the Kingdom, but it’s a good idea. A very good idea. I’ll pass it on.:
Alberich felt a certain amusement that he, born poorest of the poor, and bastard to boot, should be the one to be making suggestions about what the great and grand would find appropriate. Still. He’d been raised on tales of it, after all. Virtually every child had. And he’d been watching this Court for years now. :A grand feast for the Court will help lighten things considerably. Midwinter was shadowed; the first one without Sendar, and Selenay still in mourning. I don’t think anyone had the heart for it. But this won’t have any memories, any connotations. It’s the sort of thing that ought to make the Councilors happy with the whole idea, since they’ll be able to haul in all their so-called eligible candidates for her hand and hope that one of them charms her.:
He added that last, with just a touch of sourness. Sourness, because, truth to tell, it annoyed him to see these supposedly sensible men trying to force the poor young woman into a destiny of their choosing. And because they were wasting so much time and effort on the project, time and effort that could be going to some task more useful. If they would put half the concentration they put into working together that they put into finding a mate for the Queen, three quarters of the current difficulties besetting the Kingdom would vanish overnight.
And for just a little while, it was a relief to think about something other than plots and intrigues. He had never been very comfortable in dealing with plots and intrigues, except for his singular talent of being quiet and unreadable. He was better at it now, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it.
Well, except for the occasions when he had an excuse to let off some of his tension by breaking a few heads. Hmm. This Festival just might give him a chance at that form of relief—
He quickly sealed that thought away from Kantor.
:She can be impartially charming right back to any would-be suitor without giving any of them hope,: Kantor agreed. :I wish that more of them were worth being charming to.:
:So do I.: The fact that so many potential mates had been systematically disqualified by Selenay in public meant that anyone who was dredged up and hauled in for the Ice Festival was bound to be marginal at best. Unsuitable in the extreme, unless some distant cousin out of the back of beyond happened to get dragged out of his manor, Chosen on the spot, and proved to be the man of Selenay’s dreams. If she even had any dreams on the subject. It was hard for Alberich to tell. Selenay’s mind was often opaque to him; he didn’t have a great deal of experience with young women. Come to that, he didn’t have a great deal of experience with women in general.
:And whatever suitors are hauled in will probably be stone-deaf and ninety at worst,: Kantor sighed. :Poor Selenay! It will be a shabby lot of dancing partners she’ll be getting.:
Another aspect that hadn’t occurred to him. With things so subdued at Midwinter, she hadn’t seemed to want any dancing. The Selenay he remembered had loved dancing. Well, maybe he could do something about that.
:I think at an occasion like an Ice Festival, she ought to dance every other dance with a Herald, don’t you?: he asked Kantor. :In fact, isn’t there some sort of mandate about that, somewhere? So that no highborn can claim two dances with her in an evening?:
:If there is, Myste can find it,: Kantor replied, with a chuckle. :And if there isn’t—:
:Myste can still find it,: he replied, thinking with real pleasure of how Myste and Selenay together had foiled the entire Council plan to get her safely betrothed to someone of their choice. It had been a thing of beauty, according to Myste. He was just glad that he had kept himself out of it, so that when he’d been asked, he’d been able to truthfully disclaim any knowledge of it all.
Not that he’d wanted to be anywhere near the room at the time the entire thing unfolded. Whenever certain members of the Council were thwarted, they always looked at the Karsite as the source of their troubles. Funny. They suspected his hand behind even this without his being anywhere near the Council Chamber that day; they’d entirely overlooked Myste. :I’m not entirely certain about all those cross-cousin links Myste was finding. Surely the highborn of Valdemar aren’t that closely inbred.:
:Chosen! You don’t think Herald Myste would concoct information, do you?: Kantor asked, pretending to be aghast at the thought.
:You’re forgetting she was a clerk before she was a Herald,: he replied. :They spend a quarter of their lives writing things down, a quarter finding what other people have written down, a quarter in hiding what was written down, and a quarter in making sure if it should have been written down and wasn’t, it is now.:
Kantor had no real reply for that, but Alberich didn’t really expect one. And no, in the case of something important, he really did not think that Myste would stoop to forgery. But in the case of something like this, where nothing was hanging on a little judicious creativity but Selenay’s all-too-rare pleasure, Myste could and would unbend her rigid ethics in order to ensure that the “tradition” existed, even if it hadn’t been a tradition until a few moments ago when he’d thought of it.