Am I right? Am I being a wise king at the moment, old friend?
Will my daughter be the queen we hope for?
What next, for my two sons?
Gods, that they be, none of them, like me…
He had had his misspent youth, out of which Elfwyn had come. He had been, himself, no great scholar, only adequate for a young gentleman. He knew his ciphers only because the Quinalt father in charge of his earliest education reported regularly to the king his father, Ináreddrin. Ináreddrin, a true Marhanen, had had his own temper—and his son had had his own to counter it. A king, being king, could have his son confined to his room if his son did not get a better report on his math—
And he had escaped out the scullery doors, gotten caught, and beaten. And did it twice and three times more, finally enlisting his brother in his schemes and driving off his tutor in as elaborate and long-fought a series of maneuvers as he had ever contrived.
Then his father had found Master Emuin for his two sons’ betterment. Emuin, a gray-robed Teranthine priest, had let him get by with nothing and had his own ways of getting a prince to pay attention to his books. Cefwyn, having found someone who listened when he asked that question that doomed him with other tutors, that deadly dangerous word, why?—and equally perilous, why not?—had launched off into old records and acquired a habit of citing them whenever he was angry at priests or nobles.
Contrarily, his father had then decided his elder son was too studious by far, that he had all the bookwork a Marhanen prince could possibly need. Ináreddrin had decided it was time for his heir to get the other half of a practical education, to learn not the theory, but the practice of the law, to understand not how bees made their hive, or what made the moon change her shape, or what the Quinalt practices had been before they limited the gods to five—but what the oaths were between the king and each province, and how to provision an army—he wanted his heir to have a practical understanding of how to keep his quartermasters from pilfering the stores, how to break a rebel or train a horse, how to read a map and, from his father’s example, how to hold an angry, unruly people in fealty—thank the gods, in those days, for his bodyguard, who had kept him alive, and for Emuin, who never left him, even when the lessons turned darker and more dangerous and less to his liking. :
His younger brother, Efanor, however, had seen the storm clouds flashing with paternal lightning, and Efanor, having a religious bent, had become more religious before their father’s attention turned to him. For a few years Efanor had been insufferably righteous, estranged from sin, sinners, and his elder brother. The army, subsequently, had sent back an angry elder prince with the habit of command, with less patience, not more; and things had only gotten worse between him and his father. Efanor had, at the same time, made himself the dutiful, the proper son, favored by the priests and ultimately by both their father and certain lords, sycophants who had had their way with the law and their father. Their father had formed a desire that Efanor should succeed him, and sent his heir to Amefel, a province rife with Elwynim assassins, in hopes of losing an argumentative heir and gaining an excuse for war; but it was Ináreddrin who had died, instead, trusting the wrong men.
Now Ylesuin was under his rule, Efanor was his right hand, and he had gained Elwynor not by war but by treaty and marriage. He had the difficult south bound closely to the Amefin, and the rebel Amefin, who were nearer Elwynim than not, bound to him in fealty and friendship, in the person of Lord Crissand—it was all a web of fragile threads they had made.
But in order to keep it together after him, Aewyn had to follow him, as Aemaryen would follow her mother, neither of them having seen the realm take shape, and they would have to learn their own lessons, how to mollify both sets of priests and how to keep their outer borders safe without letting any provincial lord build up a private army or exercise private ambitions.
Most of all they had to have the wisdom to understand who was honest, who was paying his taxes fairly, and who was skimming a bit off, that old pitfall of human wickedness. Blindness to corruption, thinking that just a little convenient corruption would do no harm, had led his father to disaster.
History. History, ciphering, and enough catechism to keep the king-to-be from saying the wrong thing to the wrong priest… this much he had gotten a priest or two to teach his unwilling son, thus far.
But now—now, too, remembering what a watershed the education of princes had been between him and Efanor—at the same time as he settled his illegitimate son in some useful and scholarly endeavor, he could not ignore this sudden bloom of interest in books that Otter had raised in Aewyn, this raiding of the library. He must not let that bloom fade or be the one to kill it, by stealing Otter away too abruptly. He knew Aewyn’s temperament, he knew its angers and its schemes and the softer elements of it, the vulnerable heart Aewyn guarded so secretly, and he knew he had to steer that stubborn Marhanen will in the right way and get him to copy Otter’s virtues…
Virtues acquired in a much harder situation, with far fewer prospects than the dazzling horizon of a prince. He had to get both his boys to ask the right questions, the whys and why nots of the world, and to come up with answers his own generation had failed to find.
Emuin would be the ideal tutor, once Otter went… wherever Otter must eventually go, for his own sake, and for his own happiness, for a few years. Emuin would be ideal. But Emuin, alas, had passed from the world years ago, simply, quietly vanished, before Aewyn had a chance to benefit by that wisdom. Emuin had been, even among the religious, that excellent thing in a royal advisor—too slippery to raise controversy in what he taught, no matter he belonged to neither major sect, simultaneously turning out a cynic of a king and a devout and cannily religious man in his brother.
If he knew where to lay hands on a Teranthine father these days, he said to himself, he’d hire the man on sight, unexamined. But he had no such resource. The Teranthines had quietly disappeared from their monastery and left a vacant shrine in Amefel.
He sat alone in the chair in front of the fire, watched it devour the wood, and waited for a particular coal to fall—if Emuin were here, they could lay wagers on it, and the old man would cheat. He was sure Emuin had cheated in such bets, having a Sight he lacked.
Whomever he found now to teach his son, it must be someone he could bring here, because it was impossible to send Aewyn away to study, twice lonely, parted from Otter and settled somewhere, worse, where he could have no idea what the boy was learning—or doing.
Surely there must be, in all the kingdom, some reasonable learned man he could hire to keep the boy’s nose in the right books.
Let them go together to Elwynor? The Quinalt priests would howl… their Marhanen prince gone to learn from heretics.
There might be other disadvantages to that idea. Boys changed into men, and granted he could sunder them now by a decree, he was by no means sure yet what this stray son of his would become when he was a man.
Otter, now, the determined scholar—the Bryaltine fathers in Henas’amef had taught him his letters, but not Bryalt catechism: a royal order had settled that. And a royal request, once he understood the boy’s growing need, had had books sent down from Duke Crissand’s library, on loan for Otter’s studies in the Bryalt shrine.