“But he doesn’t even get asked!” Andrin tried to explain. “My parents had their marriage arranged, but father sent flowers every Vothday for a full year before the wedding and had a full garden planted at Hawkwing as a gift for my mother.”
“Wasn’t Empress Varena allergic to half the plants in that garden?” Yamen asked, confused.
“Yes, but that’s not the point,” protested Andrin.
“Your Highness,” Jastyr continued severely, “Whichever prince you choose, you’re going to have to trust him.”
“Trust? This isn’t about trust. I’m just trying to find a way to be polite, or chivalrous, or something.” Feeling every bit as young as her seventeen years, Andrin tried to find the words to explain her problem to the councilors.
Shamir Taje gently laid the list of names flat on the table in front of them and angled the single paper in front of Andrin.
“Your Highness,” he said softly, “Is there any man on this list better qualified to one day serve as Emperor Consort of Sharona than Howan Fai Goutin?”
“No.” Andrin bit her lip. “But my Uromathian is still not very good. He speaks some Ternathian, but this could go very, very poorly.”
“You’ll study. He’ll study.” Yamen shook her head, baffled. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I don’t want him to be forced into this.” Andrin tried again to explain.
“Any prince who’d feel forced by this honor, doesn’t deserve you.” Taje’s eye’s narrowed with quiet anger at the implication anyone would reject his princess.
“You’re my partisans.” Andrin couldn’t help but smile, but it was a thin faint smile.
“Your Highness,” Dulan said, “beside that fact, with which I very much agree, I do believe Prince Howan is already quite taken with you.”
“No.” Yamen lifted warning finger at the change in Andrin’s face. “Your Highness, don’t think it. There’s nothing wrong with having the special Talents thoroughly check him out. This wasn’t any torture chamber session. This prince, and every other we could reasonably consider, has simply had the most thorough background check we could arrange. If they’d known the position they were being considered for-believe us Your Highness! — the ones worth half the gold in their crowns would have volunteered to undergo far more than that.”
“The reality is, Your Highness,” Dulan continued, “that Howan Fai likes you. He might even love you, but this early in a relationship I’d call it deep affection instead. He knows the marital constraints you face and he’s a decent man, so he would never over the ordinary course of things even arrange to put himself back in your presence. In his mind, you’re meant for a higher marriage. But I have every confidence that he’ll be in all ways delighted when he learns he can not only marry you, but in a sense, save you from Emperor Chava by doing so.
“You’ve given him his very own romantic victory, and all he needs to do is say, ‘yes’ at the right moment.”
Andrin took a few moments to compose herself. It wasn’t every day the succession of an empire was decided, and she wanted to get it right. As Crown Princess and not yet Empress, she wasn’t really entitled to the “royal we” just yet, but under the circumstances-
“First Councilor, Privy Voice, Councilors Yamen and Dulan, thank you for your recommendations and advice on Our Imperial Marriage. With due consideration of all candidates, We have made Our decision and are ready to so inform the Conclave.”
Taje leaned forward and squeezed her hand. Andrin looked back at her friend and mentor, finally confident.
Chapter Nine
December 16
“I hope this works,” Therman Ulthar murmured from the corner of his mouth as he and Jaralt Sarma walked placidly across Fort Ghartoun’s parade ground towards the administrative block. Their breath plumed in the frigid air, smoke-white in the icy moonlight, and Sarma slapped his gloved hands together as if for warmth, flexing his fingers energetically, and smiled at the other commander of fifty.
“The good news is that if it doesn’t work, we probably won’t have a lot of time to regret it,” he pointed out in turn.
“Oh, thank you,” Ulthar replied, rolling his eyes.
He heard a snort from behind him and glanced back at the noncom following them across the parade ground. Shield Fraysyr Hathnor was Sarma’s platoon clerk, and he was carrying the record crystal which had been carefully loaded with stacks of routine paperwork. None of it meant anything in particular, but if their calculations proved in error and more than the night orderly was on duty, that paperwork would be their excuse to get close enough to take out the extra bodies, hopefully before any alarm was raised.
He looked farther back, over Hathnor’s left shoulder towards the stables, and those blue eyes narrowed as he caught a brief flicker of movement. It was as much imagined as seen, something gliding smoothly across a patch of moonlight and back into the darkness beyond it. The moon was almost full, and the splotches of light breaking through the trees the fort’s builders had left unfelled to shade its interior were so bright they made the dark beyond them seem even blacker, denser, almost solid. He would have preferred an overcast, or even fog, but the visibility they had was bad enough to suit their purposes.
Probably.
“The truth is,” he said, glancing back at Sarma as they started up the steps to the admin block’s covered veranda, “I’ve been looking forward to this ever since that bastard got the Company massacred. I know the dragon shit we’re about to step into’ll only get deeper if we end up killing him, but I can’t help hoping Firsoma lets him be as stupid about this as he is about everything else. I mean, that would only be fair, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re a very strange man with a nasty sense of humor, Ulthar,” Sarma told him. “It’s one of the things I particularly like in you.”
* * *
Namir Velvelig’s eyes opened.
He woke up the way a septman in the presence of his enemies woke up, which was to say that, aside from his eyelids, not another muscle so much as twitched, and the regiment-captain kept it that way, listening to the deep breathing and snoring around him. The cell in which he and the other officers and senior noncoms of the PAAF garrison had been confined would have provided ample space for a third as many human bodies. There was room-barely-for each of them to have his own patch of floor at night, but anyone who rolled over in his sleep was going to awaken quickly when he was pushed off of whoever he’d rolled onto. On the other hand, there was something to be said for the congested conditions. This far back from the stove, the air temperature was frigid, to say the least, and no one had bothered to issue the prisoners any blankets. The warmth of crowded bodies could be welcome under those conditions.
Velvelig kept his own breathing deep and steady as he tried to decide what had awakened him. He couldn’t identify it at first, and his jaw tightened as he heard the catch and painful wheeze of Tobis Makree’s breath. The Healer had survived another beating the day before, but he wouldn’t survive many more. The Mulgethian was two inches taller than Velvelig, but he’d never been physically robust, and his Healing Talent’s sensitivity made him especially vulnerable to the malice and gloating cruelty behind Hadrign Thalmayr’s brutality. Velvelig wasn’t surprised by his increasing fragility. If anything, he was astounded that the Healer hadn’t already willed himself into the merciful escape of death.
He may not be as “robust” as a good Arpathian septman, Velvelig thought, but he’s tougher than an old boot inside.
It would have been better if he wasn’t, the regiment-captain reflected bitterly. It wasn’t as if any of the Arcanans’ prisoners had any illusions about what was going to happen to them in the end. Especially not Makree or Golvar Silkash. Thalmayr had completely convinced himself that they’d been trying to torture him rather than to Heal his paralysis, and only the intense pleasure he took in beating, kicking, and stomping them had kept them alive-more or less-this long. And of course the Arcanan Healers couldn’t be bothered to waste the magical healing abilities which had restored the use of Thalmayr’s legs on his victims! There’d be no-