"This for listening," Shelomith said, and shoved the coin he had concealed across to the mage. It showed the fuzzy-bearded king of Gyongyos, whose image was bordered by an inscription in dernotic Gyongyosian script, which Fernao, recognized but could not read. He did not think the coin's origin said anything about what Shelomith had in mind. Gold circulated freely all across the world, and a crafty man could use it to conceal rather than to reveal. As if to point in that same direction, Shelomith spoke again: "For listening - and for your discretion."
"Discretion goes only so far," Fernao said. "If you ask me to betray my king or my kingdom, I will do nothing of the sort. I will shout for a constable instead."
He wondered if Shelomith would find urgent business elsewhere on hearing that. The stranger only shrugged wide shoulders. "Nothing of the sort," he said in reassuring tones. Of course, he would have said the same thing had he been lying. He went on, "You may remain apart from the proposal I shall put to you, but it could not offend even the most delicate sensibility."
"Such a statement is all the better for proof," Fernao said. "Tell me plainly what you want from me. I will tell you if you may have it and, if so, at what price."
Shelomith looked pained. Fernao got the idea that asking him to speak plainly was like asking the Falls of Leixoes to flow uphill. At last, after another long pull at his cider, he said, as he had before, "You are, are you not, good at getting into and out of tight places?"
"This is where we began." The mage made as if to get up again, this time with the goldpiece in the pouch on his belt. "Good morning."
As he'd more than half expected, another goldpiece appeared under Shelomith's palm. Fernao kept rising. "Good my sit," Shelomith said plaintively. "Only sit, and be patient, and all will be made clear." Fernao sat. The stranger passed him the second goldpiece. He made it disappear: a good, profitable morning. Shelomith looked even more pained. "Are you always so difficult?"
"I make a point of it," Fernao said. "Are you always so obscure?"
Shelomith muttered under his breath. To Fernao's disappointment, he could not make out which language the stranger used when angry. He sat quietly and waited. Maybe Shelomith would feed him still more gold for doing nothing. Instead, with the air of a man yielding himself up to a dentist, Shelomith said, "Does it not wring your heart to see a crowned king trapped in exile far from his native land?"
"Ali," Fernao said. "Sits the wind so? Well, a question for a question: don't you think King Penda is a lot happier sitting in exile in Yanina than he would be had the Algarvians or Unkerlanters caught him in Forthweg?"
"You are as clever as I hoped," Shelomith said, slapping on the flattery with a broad brush. Fernao would have been naive to fail to get his drift.
"The answer to your question is aye, but only to a degree. He is not only in exile; he might as well be in prison. King Tsavellas holds him close, so he can yield him up to King Swemmel if the Unkerlanter's pressure grows too great."
"Ah," Fernao repeated. He fell into slow, sonorous Forthwegian:
"And you want him taken beyond King Swemmel's reach."
"Even so," Shelomith answered in the same language. "Having a mage with us will make us more likely to succeed. Having a Lagoan mage with us will make it less likely that King Swemmel can take reprisal against him."
"A distinct point, from all I have heard of King Swemmel," Fernao said. "The next question is, what makes you think I am the Lagoan mage you want?"
"You have gone into Algarve in time of war, why should you not go into Yanina in time of peace? You are a mage of the first rank, so you will have the strength to do whatever may be needed. You speak Forthwegian, as you have shown. I would be lying if I said you were the only mage at whom we are looking, but you are the man we would like to have."
His friends were probably saying the same thing to the other candidates. As soon as someone was rash enough to say aye, they would lose, interest in the others. Fernao wondered if he was rash enough to say aye.
He'd never been to Yanina. Getting there would be easy enough, if King Swemmel didn't invade; the small kingdom between Algarve and Unkerlant remained nervously neutral. Getting out - especially getting out with King Penda - was liable to be something else again.
Of course, Shelomith was liable not to care whether Fernao got out or not, so long as Penda did. That might make life interesting in several unpleasant ways. A sensible man would pocket the two Gyongyosian goldpieces and go about his business.
"When do we sail?" Fernao asked.
Marshal Rathar endured the search to which King Swemmel's body guards subjected him with less aplomb than he usually showed. He had not conceived so high an opinion of himself as to think he was above searching. But he did begrudge the time he had to waste before being admitted to his sovereign's presence.
Once he'd got past the guards, he also begrudged the time he had to spend knocking his head against the carpet before the king. Ceremony was all very well in its place; it reminded people what a great and mighty sovereign ruled them. Rathar, though, already knew that well. Wasting time on ceremony, then, struck him as inefficient.
King Swemmel saw things otherwise. As always, how King Swemmel saw things prevailed in Unkerlant. Having at last been granted permission to rise, Rathar said, "May it please your Majesty, I am come at your command."
"It pleases us very little," Swemmel replied in his light, rather petulant voice. "We are beset by enemies on all sides. One by one, for Unkerlant's greater glory and for our own safety, we must be rid of them."
He quivered a little on his high seat. He was quite capable of deciding on the spur of the moment that Rathar was an enemy and ordering his head stricken from his body. A lot of officers, some of high rank, had died that way during the Twinkings War. A lot more had died that way since.
If he decided that, he would be wrong, but it would do Rathar no good. Showing fear would do Rathar no good, either. It might make Swemmel decide he had reason to be afraid. The marshal said, "Point me at your foes, your Majesty, and I will bring them down. I am your hawk."
"We have too many foes," Swemmel said. "Gyongyos in the far west-"
"We are, for the moment, at peace with Gyongyos," Rathar said.
Swemmel went on as if he had not spoken: "Algarve!"
Now Rathar interrupted with more than a little alarm, saying, "Your Majesty, King Mezentio's men have been most scrupulous in observing the border between their kingdom and ours that existed before the start of the Six Years' War. They are as happy to see Forthweg gone from the map again as we are. They want no trouble with us; they have their hands full in the east."
He needed a moment to decipher King Swemmel's expression. It was a curious blend of amusement and pity, the sort of expression Rathar might have used had his ten-year-old son come out with some very naive view of the way the world worked. Swemmel said, "They will attack us.
Sooner or later, they will surely attack us - if we give them the chance."
If King Swemmel wanted to go to war with one of his small, weak neighbors, that was one thing. If he wanted to go to war with Algarve, that was something else again. Urgently, Rathar said, "Your Majesty, our armies are not yet ready to fight King Mezentio's. The way the Algarvians used dragons and behemoths to open the path for their foot in Forthweg is something new on the face of the world. We need to learn to defend against it, if we can. We need to learn to irritate it, too. Until we do those things, which I have already set in motion, we should not engage Algarve."