“Your Majesty,” he asked, “are you reassured, truly?”
Andrin looked at him and allowed her expression-for a rare moment-to show her deep concern. “I don’t know if I can be reassured, Shamir.”
“It’s a good solid choice. One that can and will hold the new empire together.”
“Yes,” his crown princess agreed. “And I should probably be grateful there’s just one Howan Fai Goutin. Imagine if there were three good Uromathian princes and I had to roll a die to pick between them. This is how it is though, isn’t it? You dance with a decent seeming prince once, politics force the situation, and then you need to marry and hope he’s up to the task.”
“He should be, but we’ll study his background. And there may be others we can find if there’s a significant problem with him.” The first councilor spoke firmly, his tone confident and reassuring, but Andrin’s lifted eyebrow showed he hadn’t quite pulled it off. Well, he’d already known she was no one’s fool, and the truth was there weren’t any others to find, really. A few more Uromathian princes existed with less firm ties to Emperor Chava than the man’s own sons, but if something were to happen to Howan Fai Goutin, the council would be looking to Howan’s brothers, not to some other family.
“I don’t need everything coated in honey, Shamir. In fact I think I’ll do better if I can hear from the outset if we find any problems,” the crown princess said, straightening her shoulders. He bowed in response and secured the precious list before chan Zindico opened the door.
A quartet of night shift guardsmen in thick protective suits wearing braces of throwing knives in addition to their usual gear stepped to the side of the hallway as Andrin came through the door, and the first councilor frowned in surprise.
“Is this a new security measure?”
Chan Zindico shook his head. “No, My Lord, just a practice session. We’ve been doing these exercises down in the training salles for weeks, but the guard commander decided we should move them to some of the actual hallways we defend.”
At the first councilor’s startled look, the armsman added, “But only at night. We wouldn’t want to skewer one of the staff. And our practice blades aren’t poisoned, so it wouldn’t be much of a wound anyway. Thrown blades of the type the Order of Bergahl use in their knife dances aren’t much of a threat without the poison.
“And the commander’s added a few more effective weapons to the training in case local troublemakers decide to be creative.” Chan Zindico gestured down to the cross hall away from the direction they needed to go. Something black and feathery shot across the perpendicular hallway.;, it was followed almost immediately by a yelp.
“They aren’t our usual tools,” he said, “but we need to be ready to defend against them.”
“I see.” Shamir Taje rubbed his head, looking distinctly like he could use a second cup of morning tea. “I just wish your definitions of night aligned more closely with mine, Master Armsman chan Zindico.” He cast a look at the steadily brightening morning light now spilling in through the window.
“Dawn does some interesting things to shadows in the halls and makes the deflections more challenging, My Lord,” the guardsman said, but he also inclined his head in acknowledgement of the first councilor’s point.
“So of course you lot had to try it then.” Taje shook his head. “You might try just dodging.”
“Sometimes, yes, My Lord.”
Chan Zindico, the first councilor noticed, didn’t point out that none of the guards would be ducking if they thought doing so would let a missile through to any member of the imperial family they’d sworn to protect.
Andrin took in that reminder also. She wasn’t the only one in danger if Emperor Chava learned about their subterfuge, and after they announced her marriage, the threat to her father’s guards and her own would only increase.
On that sobering thought, Andrin and chan Zindico returned to her suite to face the coming day.
* * *
A pair of men had been following Howan Fai Goutin for a day and a half. The Crown Prince of Eniath was certain of that. Well, almost. He was only almost certain because the men kept changing. And there were whole hours at a time when he was very nearly certain that no one but his own personal guardsman, Munn Lii, was consistently with him.
Last night Howan Fai had decided it was all in his imagination, born of spending too much time in close proximity to the Uromathian Emperor. Chava VII had no fresh reasons-that Howan Fai knew of-to attack him or any representative of Eniath, but history abounded with enough old reasons to make anyone uneasy, whether Chava had something actively in mind or not.
Chava Busar was certainly not the sort anyone wished to cross lightly, and the avaricious emperor tended to offend with excruciating ease. Eniath had proved too tough to be swallowed easily by the Busars during King Junni’s reign, but it was always possible another attempt would be made in this same generation.
Last night’s dinner had been at a small Ternathian cuisine restaurant tucked in an out-of-the-way corner of Tajvana. Just a group of his fellow small kingdom princes together in a rented back room for an evening of simple food and very fine beer straight from the tap. The bartender had displayed healthily muscled arms and an even more impressive belly as he regaled the group with stories and elicited the most remarkable outpouring of their own worst childhood antics. The entire room had been laughing at Howan Fai’s tale of attempting to induce a stolen goat to eat his tutor’s lecture books and instead having the side of his trousers slimed and gnawed as the goat tried to get at the grain and molasses mix which he’d used to attract the beast and then absently stuffed in his own pockets.
If the bartender had somehow lost the gut overnight and grown a nose a size or two larger, he would be the prosperous man of business who’d trailed him through the last three jewelry stores, seemingly just another shopper. A shopper who was always interested in storefronts and stalls that which just happened to keep him on the same meandering path as Howan Fai and Munn Lii. He would have pegged the man as a thief except for the similarly muscled spotter set up at a corner cafe at an uncovered table with a full view of Gem Street. The table should have been empty in the cold winter drizzle, and the spotter should have been a child, or at most a poverty-slimmed man, if he’d truly been dealing with thieves desperate enough to try a snatch in broad daylight in this wealthy part of Tajvana. So if Howan Fai wasn’t simply imagining things, simple thievery wasn’t on the table.
He would have ended the shopping trip early and returned to the somewhat safer apartments being used by all the Conclave members, but family experience taught him not to trust a rented safe house. Besides, Uromathian intimidation tactics were usually much more blatant. These watchers seemed to be merely tracking his routine, so Howan Fai saw no reason to stop what he was doing just to let them get out of the cold.
His mother’s birthday was coming up in a few months, and she was far too valuable as a potential hostage to ever leave the security of Eniath. Trapped at home, she always loved it when he picked up something from his travels for her, but everything he’d seen so far could be bought in the flourishing stores of his father’s kingdom. He knew how much she’d longed to travel to Tajvana for the Conclave, and we wanted something truly special for her this year.