And that nasty question raised even more nasty questions.
"You could send for the duke," the countess suggested.
"Shadow? Advise me, dammit! What do we do?"
Shadow shrugged. He was not sure who was playing what games, for he knew he could never understand these prickly aristocrats with their convoluted principles of honor. Security, however, he thought he could handle, and unless someone launched an open assault, the lonely aerie was safer than anywhere. "We send Rorin back to explain that the girl is safe. We'll send one of our people along." Not a trooper, he decided. They had better keep the armed strength up. "The chief of protocol, perhaps? Have him ask the duke for reassurance--he'll probably come himself. Meanwhile you stay here. You can't avoid the scandal now. The damage is done."
Vindax nodded. His arm had gone around the countess, apparently of its own volition. He smiled at her, and she wiggled her tongue at him. He looked up and dismissed Shadow with a nod. "See to it!"
Shadow slipped out and closed the drape carefully, knowing that he was leaving the prince in good hands.
Chapter 5
"...even nestlings are dangerous."
IT was his birthday. He was sixteen kilodays old today, and no one in the world knew it. Probably no one knew his name, either; he often wondered if even the king remembered. For almost five of those kilodays he had been Shadow, and his real name had not been spoken in all that time. He had probably established a record, for it was very unlikely that any previous King Shadow had lasted five kilodays, certainly not in recent reigns.
He was standing in the royal cabinet, staring out a window and brooding on being old: sixteen.
At the far end of the cabinet the king was sitting at his desk with the royal breeder and the deputy royal breeder, talking bloodstock. Birds! Shadow hated birds and had never flown in his life.
The cabinet was an egg-shaped room, high and huge, decorated in white and gold and blue. Normally the king worked outdoors, but he was very careful not to establish a pattern. He changed his work place at random and never announced in advance where he was going unless there was some big formal function planned. Today he had chosen the cabinet--and he seemed to use that only when he had some particularly dark purpose in mind. Shadow thought of it as the spider's parlor, for the tiny king in his white clothes always reminded him of one of the nasty little bleached spiders that turned up under rocks. From the very nature of his position, Shadow must know all the royal secrets, but the cabinet provided an exception. What the king said or heard there was not overheard by Shadow.
Or so the king thought.
That day the king had talked taxes with the chancellor and honors with Feather King of Arms, and now he was wasting hours with the royal breeder, which was what he seemed to enjoy most of all. Nothing nefarious had hatched so far.
The doors were at the wide end of the egg. Anyone coming in was first faced with a big wooden chair, almost a throne, elaborately carved, high-backed and winged and imposing. That was Shadow's seat. The arrangement was deliberate. A would-be assassin who had eluded the guards outside would certainly be in a hurry and probably nervous, and he would see that chair and an occupant dressed like the king--chances were, he would strike there in error. That would give the real quarry a little extra time.
To see the king it was necessary to step around that chair, for the royal desk and a group of flanking chairs stood at the far end of the hall, the narrow end, a long way from the doors.
There were other exits from that room, two of them, behind the desk: hidden doors. One led up to a makeshift aerie on the roof. Aurolron never used it and had had it netted over, but some of his predecessors had kept birds there. Another exit led down to the labyrinth of secret passages which wormed through the palace like giant termite tracks.
Five kilodays as Shadow--it was time now to give him an honorable retirement, a better peerage, an estate, and the royal thanks. Any decent monarch would have done so long since, but not Aurolron. And Shadow did not dare suggest it. A hundred times he had almost broached the subject, and always he had backed away. He feared that his retirement would be arranged to a wooden box.
He knew too much.
And he knew a lot more than the king thought he knew.
He was not a brave man. He often wondered what he would do if he saw the flash of the sudden stiletto, whether he could ever find the courage in that split second to move in front of it. If he had time to think, then he probably could, for when a king of Rantorra died by violence, then Shadow was guilty of high treason and the penalty for that was much worse than a stab wound.
The king made a joke, and his companions laughed heartily.
There were eight windows along both sides of that big room, carefully slanted so that the sun did not shine in directly but caught instead the sides of the deep embrasures and illuminated the room by reflection. The king could see out the windows from his desk; a visitor coming in saw no windows, only the royal dais glowing brightly ahead of him, subtly magnified by the taper of the egg shape. Whoever had designed this place had been full of little tricks like that.
Shadow was standing on the darkward side, staring up at the mountains behind Ramo. He had a good view of the palace aerie and the birds that came and went constantly. Horrible, savage monsters!
Ironically, it was his very dislike of the brutes which had landed him in his terrible job. Almost five kilodays earlier his immediate predecessor had died in an attack by one of those terrors--not a wild, even, but one of the royal stock which had escaped from the aerie and then launched a deliberate attack on the royal party returning from a hunt. With a peculiar irony, it had chosen the king himself for its target, almost as though it knew. Shadow--the previous Shadow--had acted in the heroic tradition of his line, blinkering his mount and steering it into the attacker's path. His bird had fallen with a broken wing, and the fall had broken his neck.
The court had been loyally horrified at the attack and loudly joyful that His Majesty had escaped. Baron Haunder--there! he had thought that name--Baron Haunder had rejoiced with the rest of them and had been discussing the matter with a group of friends when he had been summoned to the Presence.
The king had been badly shaken. Never before or since had Shadow seen him show fear, but that day he had been trembling.
Baron Haunder had begun his congratulations on the royal good fortune; the king had cut him off with the terrible words: "You are to be Shadow now."
He thought briefly of that eager, fresh-faced kid who had been made Prince Shadow less than seventy days ago. He had looked ready to die of shock. He wondered if his face had looked like that. Probably.
"But why me?" the horrified baron had demanded.
"Because you know how to keep your mouth shut," the king had said.
In his terror, he had argued. "I have never flown a bird, Majesty!"
"And we never shall again," the king had said. "It is an unsafe practice for a reigning monarch. If Shadow cannot fly, then we cannot, so we shall not be tempted to change our mind." He had meant it, too. Before that day he had been a keen skyman, but thereafter he had confined his interest in the eagles to their care and breeding. He had flown no more.