“Where are my royal brother and sister-in-law?” Iselle asked the warder.
The warder made her a little bow. “The royina is resting. The roya is visiting his menagerie, which is a great consolation to him.”
“I’d like to see it,” she said, a little wistfully. “He has often written me of it.”
“Tell him so. He’ll like to show it to you,” the warder assured her with a smile.
The ladies’ party was soon deeply involved in a frantic turning out of luggage to select garments for the banquet, an exercise that quite clearly did not require Cazaril’s inexpert assistance. He directed the servant to place his trunk in his narrow room and depart, dropped his saddlebags on his bed, and rooted through them to find the letter to Orico the Provincara had strictly charged him to deliver, into the roya’s hand and no other, at his earliest possible moment upon arrival. He paused only to wash the road dirt from his hands and spare a quick glance out his window. The deep ravine on this side of the castle seemed to plunge straight down below his sill. A dizzying glint of water from the stream was just visible through the treetops far below.
Cazaril only lost his way once on the way to the menagerie, which was outside the walls and across the gardens, an adjunct of the stables. If nothing else he could identify it by the sharp, acrid smell of strange manures neither human nor equine. Cazaril stared into an arched aisle of the stone building, his eyes adjusting to its cool shade, and diffidently entered.
A couple of former stalls were converted to cages for a pair of wonderfully glossy black bears. One was asleep on a pile of clean golden straw; the other stared up at him, lifting its muzzle and sniffing hopefully as Cazaril passed. On the other side of the aisle stalls housed some very strange beasts that Cazaril could not even put a name to, like tall leggy goats, but with long curving necks, mild and liquid eyes, and thick soft fur. In a room to one side, a dozen large, brilliantly colored birds on perches preened and muttered, and other tiny, equally bright ones twittered and flitted in cages lining the wall. Across from the aviary, in an open bay, he found human occupants at last: a neat groom in the roya’s livery, and a fat man sitting cross-legged on a table, holding a leopard by its jeweled collar. Cazaril gasped and froze as the man ducked his head right next to the great cat’s open jaws.
The man was currying the beast vigorously. A cloud of yellow and black hairs rose from the pair as the leopard writhed on the table in what Cazaril recognized, after a blink, as feline ecstasy. Cazaril’s eye was so locked by the leopard, it took him another moment to recognize the man as Roya Orico.
The dozen years since Cazaril had last glimpsed him had not been kind. Orico had never been a handsome man, even in the vigor of his youth. He was a little below average in height, with a short nose unfortunately broken in a riding accident in his teens and now looking rather like a squashed mushroom in the middle of his face. His hair had been auburn and curly. It was now roan, still curly but much thinner. His hair was the only thing about him that was thinner; his body was grossly broadened. His face was pale and puffy, with baggy eyelids. He chirped at his spotted cat, who rubbed its head against the roya’s tunic, shedding more hairs, then licked the brocade vigorously with a tongue the size of a washcloth, evidently pursuing a large gravy stain that had trailed down over the roya’s impressive paunch. The roya’s sleeves were rolled up, and half a dozen scabbed scratches scored his arms. The great cat caught a bare arm, and held it in its yellow teeth briefly, but did not close its jaws. Cazaril unwound his clutching fingers from his sword hilt, and cleared his throat.
As the roya turned his head, Cazaril fell to one knee. “Sire, I bear you respectful greetings from the Dowager Provincara of Baocia, and this her letter.” He held out the paper, and added, just in case no one had mentioned it to him yet, “Royse Teidez and Royesse Iselle are arrived safely, sire.”
“Oh, yes.” The roya jerked his head at the elderly groom, who went to relieve Cazaril of the letter with a graceful bow.
“Her Grace the Dowager instructed me to deliver it into your hand,” Cazaril added uncertainly.
“Yes, yes—just a moment—” With some effort, Orico bent over his belly to give the cat one quick hug, then clipped a silver chain to its collar. Chirping some more, he urged it to leap lightly from the table. He dismounted more heavily, and said, “Here, Umegat.”
This was evidently the groom’s name, not the cat’s, for the man stepped forward and took the silver leash in exchange for the letter. He led the beast to its cage a little way down the aisle, unceremoniously shoving it in with a knee to its rump when it paused to rub on the bars. Cazaril breathed a little easier when the groom locked the cage.
Orico broke the seal, scattering wax on the swept tiled floor. Absently, he motioned Cazaril to his feet and read slowly down the Provincara’s spidery handwriting, pausing to move the paper closer or farther and squinting now and then. Cazaril, falling easily back into his old courier mode, folded his hands behind his back and waited patiently to be questioned or dismissed at Orico’s will.
Cazaril eyed the groom—head groom?—as he waited. Even without the clue of the name, the man was obviously of Roknari descent. Umegat had been tallish, but was now a little stooped. His skin, which must have been burnished gold in his youth, was leathery, its color faded to ivory. Fine wrinkles wreathed his eyes and mouth. His curly bronze hair, going gray, was tightly bound to his head in two braids that ran from his temples over his crown to meet in the back in a neat queue, an old Roknari style. It made him look pure Roknari, though half-breeds abounded in Chalion; Roya Orico himself had a couple of Roknari princesses up his family tree on both the Chalionese and Brajaran sides, the source of the family hair. The groom wore the service livery of the Zangre, tunic and leggings and a knee-length tabard with the symbol of Chalion, a royal leopard rampant upon a stylized castle, stitched upon it. He looked considerably tidier and more fastidious than his master.
Orico finished the letter, and sighed. “Royina Ista upset, was she?” he said to Cazaril.
“She was naturally disturbed to be parted from her children,” said Cazaril cautiously.
“I was afraid of that. Can’t be helped. As long as she is disturbed in Valenda, and not in Cardegoss. I’ll not have her here, she’s too . . . difficult.” He rubbed his nose on the back of his hand, and sniffed. “Tell Her Grace the Provincara she has all my esteem, and assure her that I have concerned myself with her grandchildren’s good fates. They have their brother’s protection.”
“I plan to write to her tonight, sire, to assure her of our safe arrival. I will convey your words.”
Orico nodded shortly, rubbed his nose again, and squinted at Cazaril. “Do I know you?”
“I . . . shouldn’t think so, sire. I am lately appointed by the Dowager Provincara to be secretary to the Royesse Iselle. I had served the late provincar of Baocia as a page, in my youth,” he added, by way of recommendation. He did not mention his service in dy Guarida’s train, which might well trigger the roya’s more recent memory, not that he had ever been more than one of the crowd of dy Guarida’s men. A little unplanned disguise was surely lent him by his recent beard, his gray-flecked hair, his general debilitation—if Orico didn’t recognize him, was there a chance that others also might not? He wondered how long he could go here at Cardegoss without giving his own name. Too late to change it, alas.
He could remain anonymous a little while longer, it appeared, for Orico nodded in apparent satisfaction and waved his hand in dismissal. “You’ll be at the banquet, then. Tell my fair sister I look forward to seeing her there.”