“Ah. So now he attempts guilt?” Alberich replied.
“I would guess,” said Talamir, and shook his head. “At least she came to me with this, looking for reassurance. And I planted another seed.”
“Perhaps you can use the papers soon?” Alberich hazarded. They finally had a translation of them; it took long enough to break the code. When they had, as Alberich had suspected, they proved to be instructions on what to do and say to Selenay to win her, with some very intimate details. Some were things that Alberich blinked at; things that one would have thought were the sort of confession that Selenay would not have given to anyone—girlish daydreams, actually, about the sort of man she was looking for, and the loneliness of being who she was, the despair that she would never have the kind of marriage her father had enjoyed.
Where had all of that come from? Even Talamir had been surprised at the bitterness and anguish of some of it.
But maybe Selenay had been pouring her woes into the ears of one of her servants. Alberich would have thought they were trustworthy, and probably they were, but he supposed there was no reason why they shouldn’t tell others what Selenay had told them.
Some of what had been written were intimate glimpses into Selenay personally, and what to say to her to play to her sympathies, but others—well, Alberich had found himself blushing at the step-by-step instructions for seduction; they did not merely border on the pornographic, they were pornographic. And Alberich was no longer surprised that Norris was so popular with the ladies, nor that Selenay was so deeply infatuated with the Prince. How could she not be, if the Prince was following these instructions, meant to make Selenay believe that here, past all her hopes, was not only her soulmate but a lover who could guarantee the satisfaction of a female partner, closely and with all his attention? Part of him wanted to burn the wretched papers, but they were useful, very useful. If ever Selenay’s attachment began to fade, at the right moment, showing her these things could turn her fading infatuation to distaste. Only she could know how closely the Prince followed his “scripts”—but the more closely he had, the more obvious it would be that he was following a script, and that there never had been any real feeling behind his act.
“Not until after the child is born,” Talamir sighed. “Crathach says that he doesn’t want any more stress on her right now; between matters of state and the Prince’s continuous pressure, she’s got more than enough on her. He’s playing the ’bereft orphan’ very convincingly, and of all of the acts he could contrive, that’s the one that will make her excuse him nearly anything.”
Alberich counted up the months in his mind. “Spring, then,” he said with a sigh. “But the Prince himself will, perhaps, overstep before then?”
But Talamir shook his head. “No, I think that this ’patron,’ whoever he is, has found a way to clamp controls down over the Prince. More than just Norris, I mean, or even young Devlin. Devlin can’t be more than a messenger. It astonishes me. And I wish I knew how real the threat to Selenay is.”
Alberich nodded. There was the real question, truth be told. There were actually a number of interpretations that could be placed on what Norris had said to his control.
First, it could be all bluster. It was one thing to say that the Queen was dispensable; it was quite another to actually act on those words. Norris was, when it all came down to cases, a commoner. Whatever he knew about life at Court he could only learn from brief glimpses and the rather unrealistic views of life among the highborn that he got from his plays, or just perhaps by whatever his patron told him—assuming the patron told him anything at all about life at Court. Selenay was surrounded night and day by Guards that Alberich himself had trained and could vouch for, and by the Heralds as well. To actually assassinate her, someone would have to get past them and Selenay’s own impressive self-defense abilities, and it was guaranteed that whoever tried would not survive the attempt. So the enemy would have to find someone highly skilled, clever, and suicidal—not an easy task. Poison was out of the question; Healers checked everything that she ate and drank, and even if someone managed to slip poison past them, there were no “instantaneous” poisons other than some rare snakebites; Healers would almost certainly be able to save her. Norris (and, presumably, his “patron”) might simply be counting on the hazards of childbearing to remove Selenay. To Alberich’s mind, that was as foolish a hope as finding an assassin; Selenay was in excellent health and by no means delicate. Women gave birth without complications every day without the small army of Healers to attend them that Selenay had.
“I wish I could hazard a guess,” Talamir replied. “It seems a preposterous idea on the face of it. The ForeSeers are no real help either.”
Alberich knew what that meant. Too many future possibilities to sort out. That, or so he had been told, was why he never got any visions inspired by Foresight that extended into the future by more than a candlemark. His Gift evidently operated in the same fashion as he did—if there were too many choices, his Gift elected not to show any of them, so that he could concentrate without distractions pulling him in a dozen directions at once. It only showed him things he could actually act on.
“It is that I think, sometimes, our Gifts are more hindrance than help,” he said sourly.
“Some of them, at any rate,” Talamir agreed. He looked broodingly off over Alberich’s left shoulder for a long moment, staring at nothing, but doing it in a way that tended to raise the hackles on the back of Alberich’s neck. What was he looking at, so intently, with that expression of focused detachment? Alberich was used to that “listening” look that Heralds got when they were conversing with their Companions, and this wasn’t that expression. It also wasn’t the absentminded look most people got when they were engrossed in their own thoughts. The closest analogy that Alberich could come to was that odd look that cats sometimes got, when they stared intently at something that apparently wasn’t there. It was a Karsite tradition that when they did that, they were looking at spirits. Talamir’s look was very like that.
But if the Queen’s Own was seeing ghosts, he hadn’t said anything about it to anyone.
Alberich repressed a shiver and coughed quietly to bring Talamir’s attention back to the present.
Talamir blinked, and picked up the conversation where it had left off.
“I have to think at this point that your actor’s conversation was a deliberate attempt on his part to remind his control and his patron that he knows where all the skeletons are,” Talamir said. “I think he was trying to extract more money from them to buy his silence in case anything did happen to the Queen.”
Alberich thought that over. It was plausible. More plausible than any of his own theories. Norris might stay bought, but when you did that, there was less incentive for your “employers” to try to keep you in their pocket once they had what they initially wanted.
And theaters were more expensive to maintain than a stable full of racehorses.
“A dangerous ploy, that one,” Alberich observed. “He could be removed before a danger he becomes.”