Twice she led her guard too close to the enemy and was knocked unconscious by the weapon of Lant. This should have rallied the Lantiff; instead, the fall of the foe they most dreaded seemed to appall them. They waivered; Deline’s guard charged with renewed fury, routed the Lantiff, and carried her to safety, where she regained consciousness with a bruised and aching body but no other symptoms of her experience except a burning desire to lead another attack.
Inskor was sufficiently concerned about Deline’s conduct to mention it to the peer, and she sent for Arne and received him in the large tent she used when she visited the army. The dumpy little woman was an unlikely-looking ruler, but each time Arne met her he was more deeply impressed with her astuteness. She signaled him to rise and asked her server to bring a chair for him—indication she had much to say to him.
“Inskor told me about the trouble you have been having with Deline,” she said with a smile. “He finds it bewildering, but that is to be expected of an old scout who has never had anything to do with court society. He thought perhaps a peerager might better understand what has gone wrong. He is right. I understand Deline perfectly. The problem is that she is in love with you.”
“Her behavior seems very strange for one who is in love, Majesty,” Arne murmured politely.
“Not for one who is in love and doesn’t want to admit it. I have been observing these things all my life. When I was a child, my mother told me kindly that no one would ever think me beautiful or even pretty. Very few men would love me, but a great many would court me because of what I could do for them as prince or peer. If I didn’t want to be crassly used by my lovers, I had to understand their motives. She told me to observe all the court romances and study the conduct of women as well as men. The knowledge I gained from this has been invaluable to me.” She added, “My mother was right, of course. It took a long time for me to find a consort who was interested in me instead of what he could gain through my position.”
Arne said politely, “Majesty, I don’t understand what that could have to do with Deline. There is nothing either of us stands to gain from the other.”
“It has nothing to do with her,” the peer said. “It has to do with me. I am explaining why I understand Deline. I have been studying romances, and broken romances, and love—requited and unrequited—since I was a child. Deline was the most unpleasant prince I have ever met—obsessed with her position and beauty without a thought in her head for her responsibilities. It is a great tragedy. She could have been a brilliant prince and peer.” She smiled at Arne’s puzzlement. “I had excellent sources of information, you see. The other peers often brought their troubles to me. The peer her mother asked me what she should do about Deline, and I told her—she must take away one of Deline’s names and make her second daughter the prince and heir. This was the only possible solution to an impossible situation, but the peer thought it unnecessarily severe. Long afterward, when Deline raided Midd Village with the guard she wasn’t supposed to have, her mother had to do what I had suggested. It must have been a wrenching experience for everyone but especially for Deline. How did she react?”
“She was stunned,” Arne said. “For a time she seemed to go through the motions of living without feeling anything at all. But she recovered well. She did excellent work, and I know she enjoyed it.”
“Of course. She always had the intelligence to accomplish anything she wanted, but she never wanted anything beyond her own pleasure. Now I will tell you what happened. She had lost everything that mattered to her, she was alone among strangers and reduced to performing menial labor, but fate gave her the most capable, the most conscientious and honorable, the most dedicated, the most wholly admirable man in the peerdom to work with.”
The peer raised a hand to stop Arne’s protest. “Your modesty is as remarkable as your devotion to duty. Never mind. That is how you appeared to her. She had to admire your ability and the way you worked, and admiration is as good a basis as any for love. Unfortunately, the more deeply she fell in love with you, the more she realized you were far more interested in your work than in her and always would be. She finally decided you would never love anyone.”
“But I did love her,” Arne protested. “I asked her to wive me.”
The peer stared at him. “I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have suspected it. What did she say?”
“I was about to visit the other peerdoms to ask for help in forming an army. She said she would tell me when I returned.”
“And?”
“Before I had a chance to talk with her, the land warden told me the prince her sister wanted me to be her consort.”
“But if you loved Deline, surely you weren’t compelled to—” She paused. Then she continued slowly, “I see. Now I understand. When a prince invites a one-namer to be her consort, he is compelled. Poor Deline. Poor Arne. If that mating with her sister had been a brief one, as peerager matings often are, perhaps you could have resumed your happiness. But you and Elone Jermile were both dedicated to Midlow and got on well, the prince became pregnant, and the mating seemed likely to last a long time. It gradually dawned on Deline that she had lost you.
“Then the Lantiff came, and you fought and loved together, the two being more than twice as exhilarating in combination. Her sister was dead, and she thought she couldn’t lose you again, but this time you lost each other—to the war—because she slipped naturally into all of her old ways, and suddenly, without any official notice, she was a prince again. She couldn’t possibly consider wiving you after that, but she would have accepted you as her consort if you had been willing to remain her humble subject, follow her about obediently, charge into battle with her, and attend her when it was over. Since you couldn’t do any of that, her reaction was to blame you for all of her troubles, real or imagined. Poor Arne. Poor Deline.”
“What am I to do?” Arne asked perplexedly.
The peer sighed. “If you had been at Easlon Court when I was a girl, perhaps you would have been one of the rare ones who could court a homely prince sincerely. How sad that Deline can’t appreciate that. There is nothing you can do except what you are doing. Be kind. Be patient. Be loving if she gives you a chance. She will despise you the more for it, but that is all you can do, and eventually she may come to understand that the reason she hates you is also the reason she loves you.”
“She is so reckless that she worries me,” Arne said.
“She worries a great many people. She has reverted to being the self-centered, completely amoral prince. She will continue to act impetuously, do whatever she likes, and decide afterward that it was the wise thing. There is nothing you can do except what you are doing. Now go fight your war. You are right to be concerned about Deline, but you shouldn’t worry about her. You should never worry about things you can’t change.”
There was much about the war that Arne couldn’t change, and these things worried him immensely. The little army of Easlon was losing, but it devastated the Lantiff in every skirmish. It could have held the army of Lant back for sikes, grudgingly yielding ground a few meters at a time, if it’d had unlimited supplies. Defeat loomed inevitably because it could only fight as long as its food lasted.
Every finger of attack the Lantiff extended was shattered and chopped off, but the massive army continued to ooze forward, testing the defenders’ flanks, ever extending the battlefield, ever stretching Inskor’s army thinner and thinner. But refugee one-namers continued to arrive, and the entire one-name population of Easlon was training for war and planning to join the battle the moment it was needed. Easlon’s len grinders continued to produce copies of Egarn’s weapon, and new recruits trained with them before they met the enemy.