Our waitress, far too young for me but just about right for Anders, brought us drinks and bread. The menu was scrawled in chalk on a board on one wall. As we studied the fare, I caught the voices of two tradesmen at the table behind me.
“… worst domestic scandal we’ve ever had.”
“It’s not a scandal, it’s just the inevitable result of dealing with women.”
“You’re too cynical. My wife isn’t so bad. Certainly not a child-killer.”
“Well, you know the government’s not telling us everything. I hear that she’s a moon priestess; I bet it was all part of some spell.”
“To do what? She married the king of Arentia, she’s the most powerful woman in the country now. What more did she need?” His voice dropped. “I bet there’s another man involved, and the king found out it wasn’t his child. This is just his way of saving face.”
“I just know that I don’t believe they’re being straight with us.”
“This king isn’t like that. He doesn’t hide in his castle behind guards and soldiers, he’s never had a scandal, and he’s never been caught in a public lie.”
“Maybe he’s just better at hiding it than his father was.”
That tied in with the message Anders had given me, and I began to understand its urgency. After we ate, I excused myself and went into the tavern for a nightcap. I couldn’t imagine sleeping in Arentia while sober.
The tavern was half the size of the dining hall, lit with a few oil lamps and the smoldering fireplace. But the nearest waitress wore a blouse so low-cut the brown circles around her nipples poked above the hem, and the slit up her thigh went nearly to her waist. She tossed her hair as she turned and gave me the kind of professional smile that promised many pleasant surprises, if my money pouch was heavy enough. Then she looked me up and down the way a butcher might appraise a steer.
“Hi, handsome,” she said. She held her tray with one hand and put the other on her hip, which emphasized her narrow waist. “Like a table?”
“No, thanks, I’ll just sit at the bar.”
“Your loss,” she said with a mischievous wink. For a moment I considered that it really might be. I felt too old, though, to need her kind of distraction.
One thing I hadn’t expected was how weird it was to hear so many Arentian accents. My own had faded into a kind of neutral regional one, but I was slipping back into it with each word I spoke. Usually if I heard someone say “loss,” or “coin,” or any of those words that really emphasized the way Arentians talk, it would be a novelty. In Arentia, of course, everyone spoke that way, and it inexplicably made me nervous.
I sat at the bar. It took my eyes a while to adjust to the dimness. I saw a half-dozen fellow patrons, four clustered around a single table, one at a table by himself and one at the far end of the bar. They were from all over: Suamico, Trego, Winneconne. The other guy at the bar had a tattoo on his arm marking him as a wizard from Colfax, even though he wore neither the robe of his calling nor the insignia ring. Either he was incognito and just not very good at it, or he’d broken their vow of chastity and been formally derobed. I suspected the latter, given the speed with which he put away the ale. Poor bastard, that’s what he gets for signing up with a group of men who decried sex as the world’s greatest evil. The moon priestesses, now, they had the right idea.
The woman behind the counter, a tall, cool blonde with a scar along her jaw that somehow made her more attractive, served me without a smile. I downed it in one swallow, asked for a refill and prompted, “Pretty bad about the queen, ain’t it?”
“Shit happens,” she said as she poured. She wasn’t going to make this easy.
“I’ve been out of the country for a few years. What’s this Queen Rhiannon like?”
“Blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous,” she said, as if reciting the ingredients of a recipe. “Sings like a bird, dances like the wind. Can heal the sick, raise the dead, make the young men talk right out of their heads. Or so they say.”
“She’s a healer?”
She looked at me with disdain and blew a strand of hair from her face. “That’s exaggeration for effect. Sarcasm, I think they call it.”
I raised my drink. “Here’s to ‘they.’ ” After I took a sip, I asked, “You believe she did it?”
She leaned her hands on the bar and fixed me with her best no-nonsense stare. “I don’t care, mister. I thought King Philip was doing a bang-up job before she came along, and if she made him happy, I was happy. Now I just wish we still had a death penalty, because the bitch deserves to hang.”
That pretty much ended the conversation. I finished my drink and went upstairs, where Anders was already asleep, fully dressed. His sword lay on the floor atop its scabbard, and a dagger handle peeked out from beneath his pillow. I took off my shirt and boots, washed my face in the basin, then dropped off asleep from trail exhaustion more than peace of mind. I dreamed of screams and fire.
FIVE
We reached the outskirts of Arentia City at noon the next day. Again, I don’t know what I expected-a storybook castle, the brightly colored child’s-eye view I remembered-but what I got was a city like any other, filled with people trying to get by and buzzing with the latest scandal.
The city walls loomed at the end of the road, a great rectangle across the horizon. Legendary for their thickness and impregnability, they rose from the Eagle’s Plain (once known as the Vulture’s Plain, due to the inconclusive battles fought there in ancient times) like artificial cliffs. The city’s population believed it could never be sacked because of them, and that sense of safety led many to forget how much bloodshed still existed in the world beyond those walls.
Outside the walls a second city had grown up, peopled by the merchants and farmers selling their wares. This population was seasonal, but at its peak, as it would be in a couple of months, it rivaled the permanent citizenry of the city proper. With the first spring harvest out of the way and the second planting well into its season, this extended shantytown encircled the walls to a thickness of over a mile, and the straight roads split into little side paths, like a river’s delta, that wound through the wagons, buggies and semipermanent stalls of this alternate Arentia City.
This was one advantage of peacetime that the more belligerent kingdoms envied: a strong economy based on agriculture and manufacturing, not preparation for, and recovery from, war. It took Arentia a while to achieve this, but it became a sort of economic beacon to show other kingdoms that conquest was not the only way to grow riches. Arentia could certainly defend itself-ask the queen of Shawano, especially any of the few survivors of the Battle of Frog’s Lip-but had learned over time that economic security trumped the military one. A lot of this came about because of the courage of Queen Gabrielle, mother of the great King Dominic and grandmother of the man I was being brought to see.
My thoughts returned to the present as we entered the great mass of merchants. Vendors yelled and waved as we passed, holding up goods and hawking services. Anders, at least, looked like he had money to spend, and that made him a prime target. He politely refused each and every offer without once losing his temper over the constant supplication, something I know I couldn’t have done. The people who did approach me got only an angry glare in response; few of them were Arentian, and their goods were either substandard or sublegal.