“I am?”
“Yes, indeed; I’m in a direct male line, of course, and you descended from the second son of Tendel the Second, rather than the first son. You’re also descended from a couple of Tendel the First’s daughters, the nobles here tend to marry back into the family.”
This came as something of a shock to Sterren, once he had puzzled out exactly what had been said, and at first he simply didn’t believe it. A king, one of his ancestors? All these people his relatives? He was in the habit of thinking of himself as having no family at all; to find himself in a room crowded with his distant relations was more than he could absorb. He could imagine no reason for the king to lie about it, however.
“Oh,” he said.
“That’s one reason you’re here, straight from your journey. We all wanted a look at you, our long-lost cousin.”
“Oh,” Sterren said again.
This whole situation was beginning to seem unreal. Oh, the castle was real enough, and the people, he could smell them, as well as see and hear them, and he’d never heard of an illusion as detailed as that, but the idea that they were really the ruling class of one of the Small Kingdoms, just a few leagues from the edge of the World, and that he was one of them, a hereditary warlord, seemed so completely absurd that for a moment it was easier to believe the whole thing was a gigantic joke of some kind.
An uncomfortable silence fell, to be broken by Lady Kalira.
“Your Majesty,” she said, “I believe that our new warlord is weary from his journey and overwhelmed by meeting you. Nor has he eaten since dawn.”
This was not strictly true, since Sterren’s party had finished breakfast well after sunrise, but it was close enough.
“Of course,” the king agreed. “Of course. Take him to his room, then, and let him recover himself. We’ll speak with him more when he’s rested and has eaten.” He waved a hand in dismissal.
Lady Kalira bowed, and Sterren imitated her again. Then she motioned for him to follow and led the way to the right, through the crowd to a door, and out of the throne room. Alder and Dogal followed discreetly.
They emerged into a corridor, where Lady Kalira turned left and led the way up curving stairs. Sterren’s stiff legs protested, but he followed her.
At the second-floor she kept going, and Sterren followed without question.
At the third floor he paused, hoping she would change her mind, but she kept on climbing. He suppressed a moan. At the fourth floor he considered asking how much further they had to go, but couldn’t think of the right words in Semmat.
At the fifth floor he was panting heavily.
At the sixth floor the staircase ended, and he breathed a sigh of relief as Lady Kalira led him down a passageway, and then she reached another staircase and started up again. He balked.
Alder and Dogal came up behind him and did not stop; he yielded and hurried on, up into the tower.
After just one more flight, on the seventh floor, they left the staircase and headed down one more short passage, to an iron-bound door. Lady Kalira turned a large black key in the lock, then swung the door open to reveal the room beyond.
“This is your room, as the warlord,” she announced. She stood back to let him enter. “It was your great-uncle’s for almost twenty years, and his father’s, your great-grandfather’s, for half a century before that.”
Sterren stepped in cautiously.
He was in a large, airy chamber, one side mostly taken up by three broad, curtainless, many-paned windows. Thick tapestries, slightly faded but still handsome, hid the stone walls. A high canopied bed stood centered against one wall, with a table on either side, a wardrobe beyond the left-hand table, and a chest of drawers to the right. Opposite the bed was a desk, or worktable, flanked by tall bookcases jammed with books and papers. A chair was tucked away in each corner of the room; counting the one at the desk, there were five in all.
Sterren turned and discovered that the wall around the doorway was covered with displays of weapons, swords, knives, spears, pole-arms, and a good many he could not put a name to, even in Ethsharitic. He wondered if he, as warlord, was expected to learn to use them.
The weapons were all dusty. In fact, everything was covered by a layer of dust, the desk, the books, the papers, everything. The air was full of the dry, dusty smell of disuse. It was plain that nobody had been living in the room recently.
Hesitantly, he crossed to the windows and looked out. He judged the angle of the sun and decided he was looking almost due north.
The view was spectacular; he could see the castle roofs below him, hiding his view of the outer wall and most of the surrounding village. Beyond that he could see a few houses, and then the plain, rolling on into the distance, spotted with farmhouses, orchards, and various outbuildings, marked off into individual holdings by hedges and fences. He saw no roads, however; what traveling was done here was apparently done straight across country.
To the right he thought he could see, out near the horizon, the farms and grasslands fading into desert sand; somewhat to the left of center he thought he might be seeing the peaks of distant mountains somewhere beyond the horizon.
He turned back to the doorway and saw that Lady Kalira and the two soldiers were still standing in the corridor. He had a sudden vision of the door slamming, trapping him inside.
“Aren’t you coming in?” he asked.
Lady Kalira nodded and stepped in.
“What did you wait for?” he asked.
“I would not enter your private chamber without an invitation, Lord Sterren,” she replied.
Baffled by this pronouncement, which clearly implied that he had some authority and was not merely a prisoner, it took Sterren a moment to realize that Alder and Dogal were still waiting in the hall. He looked at Lady Kalira.
She looked back, paying no attention to the soldiers. “May I sit down?” she asked.
“Yes,” Sterren said in Ethsharitic, again caught off guard by her sudden deference. He corrected himself, repeating it in Semmat, as he remembered his escort waiting for him, back out on the plain. Maybe they were serious about calling him a lord.
She pulled a chair from a corner and sat. Sterren considered for a long moment before lowering himself cautiously into the chair by the desk.
The healing salve on his saddlesores was working; he could sit with only mild discomfort.
“You must have questions,” Lady Kalira said. “Now that we’re safely home, maybe I can answer them.”
Sterren stared at her for a moment, still puzzled, and then smiled crookedly. “I hope so,” he said.
CHAPTER 5
“Everything in this room is yours,” Lady Kalira said. “This, and the position of warlord, are your inheritance from your great-uncle Sterren. Nothing else; everything he owned when he died is right here, or was given, at his request, to others.”
Sterren struggled with that for a moment and carefully phrased a question.
“How did he give anything to me? How did he know I... I was alive, when he hadn’t seen my grandmother for so long?”
“Oh, he didn’t know you existed, but he had no choice in the matter,” Lady Kalira said, waving the question away. “Semma has very clear and definite laws on the lines of succession. This room and its contents were his as the warlord, not his, personally, so he had no say about who would receive them, nor who would receive the title. If people were allowed to influence successions it would result in all sorts of intrigues, and frankly, we have too much of that even as it is.”