Still, there was no point in taking chances. The castle was riddled with secret passages and staircases. He could reach his suite of rooms by means of a most aptly named privy stair, which led up to an ancient closet near his rooms that was now used as a storeroom. He sauntered casually along the western wall of the stone keep to a point behind the first guard tower and climbed up into the riot of bushes that grew along its foot. When he was sure no one was watching him but a few odd chickens, he popped a hand-sized stone out of the wall and pulled an ancient metal lever. He thrust his way through the thornbrake around the next buttress. A dark slit in the wall showed where the ancient door had come unlatched. With his fingertips he pried it open and slipped inside.
Once he shoved the stone door closed, he was in utter darkness. The lightfastness of the passage was an element for which he had often been grateful in his wilder youth. He felt to his right for the narrow stair that ascended sharply in between the outer and inner walls of the keep.
The way up was free of spiderwebs and dust. It had been cleaned and swept recently, Magpie was pleased to note, as he climbed up the steep staircase in the dark. The servants went along with the polite fiction that no one but the royal family knew where the secret passages lay. In fact, it had been Leweni, Covani’s predecessor, who had shown this particular doorway to Magpie when he was a boy. He had used it ever since, first for the usual run of boyish escapades, later for more important ventures where an unheralded exit from the castle was called for.
The latter was the chief reason why his father could hardly stand the sight of him.
M
agpie’s sensitive fingertips found the rough surface of the door a step before he bashed his head into it. He felt for the padded catch, and
emerged, blinking, into a small, dim, close stone room full of rolled mattresses and heaps of winter cloaks and blankets, all the things that were hidden away when they weren’t needed.
How remarkably significant,
he thought, wading through a heap of musty feather pillows like knee-deep marsh mud and throwing up clouds of dust. He, too, was an inconvenient sight that many people were willing to conspire to keep out of his father’s sight when he was not specifically of use. Until and unless Inbecca of Levrenn became his wife he was one of those needless items.
He cursed himself for being bitter, but it stung that he was unable to gain his father’s regard. He understood that he was a reminder of how things had gone wrong. It was one of the reasons that he had found so many excuses to stay away from home over the past two years. If he had not loved his father and his homeland so dearly, he would have gone away forever. There were many places that would gladly offer him a home, and a world beyond them that he had not yet explored. Yet he had returned to this simmering pot, roiling with unhappiness under its seemingly placid surface, yearning for a time that had long gone, and a relationship with his father that had never been.
Orontae had now been at peace for two years. Three years before that, war had overtaken the country. Like any conflict, it came about for the most foolish of reasons: a misunderstanding about borderlands, the very Wilds that were part of his father’s grand titles. Magpie had been educated since childhood to know the map of his homeland, which included the forests in the far southwest. They had traditionally been too remote to bother with, and remained the untrammeled province of dryads and elves for centuries, until recently, when trade by ship with more and more remote lands had begun to fascinate the rulers of Niombra. Merchants building ships found the tall, branchless conifers of Orontae’s deep woods ideal for masts, and the heavy, ageless oaks suitable for ships’ timbers. When the most accessible forests were logged out of decent trees, they were drawn to the virgin woodlands of the southwest. So, it seemed, was Halcot of Rabantae.
By the time Soliandur’s woodsmen arrived to begin harvesting trees, half the forests had been stripped of all their best stands of wood. A few hapless workers still on site were arrested by guards and questioned. They had been hired from small villages not far from the woods, on the other side of the border in Rabantae, to cut the trees and send them downriver, to whence they knew not. To the investigators the destination seemed undisputed, since that river floated by Rabantae’s shipyards, and
word had come from traveling peddlers that trade in nails and ship’s fittings seemed to have picked up there considerably.
Affronted, Soliandur had sent emissaries to demand why his old neighbor had invaded his lands and stolen his valuable timbers. Halcot had responded with an insulting message asking why Soliandur did not know the extent of his own most ancient kingdom. The forests were his, and he intended to exploit them as he chose. Soliandur sent back a curt message referring to the lord of Rabantae in thinly veiled terms as a thief. Less diplomatic accusations followed, earning responses ever more heated. Name-calling ensued, and every resentment and petty disagreement of the past thousand years had come bubbling up like the stink in a cesspit.
The two lands, for all that they sat side by side, historically had not had a peaceful relationship. Each thought the other was inferior human stock, a claim neither could bear out, since both the royal family and common folk alike had intermarried for centuries. The crossing between the borders was made as difficult as possible even for those who had legitimate reason to travel, involving presentation of papers, long explanations, and bribes that no one admitted to taking. Magpie had paid quite a few of those himself, and anyone who did not have the privy purse behind his finances had every right to resent their imposition, especially since trying to involve the authorities only increased the number of people to whom bribes had to be paid.
Both tried, without success, Magpie was glad to note, to involve the third noble kingdom of humanity, Melenatae, on his side. Neither could raise the interest of the elves, the werewolves, or the centaurs in the dispute. The dwarves merely ignored the emissaries, leaving the doors to their mountain halls locked and unanswered. At least it remained a battle of humans versus humans.
Ministers, distinguished by their skills in diplomacy, made the long journey between the capitals, braving weather, bad roads, wild beasts, and thieves, trying to smooth out the initial disagreement. Their efforts were without success. Halcot’s woodsmen who attempted to return to the disputed forests for more timber were attacked, and two men were killed. Loss of income was one thing, but loss of life stirred the righteous indignation of all of the southern kingdom. Halcot sent a declaration of war.
Orontae had been ill-prepared for what Magpie had foreseen as the inevitable outcome. Terrifying rumors of secret attacks spread throughout the country. Guards had to be dispatched to keep peace in the
streets while Soliandur decided how to respond. He called upon all of his ministers, including his court wizard, a man of foresight, for counsel. The king made numerous public appearances to quell fears, and managed largely by force of will to turn the people’s attention to defending itself. They had a common cause and a common enemy, not nebulous forces attacking secretly in the night.
Once stirred to action, Orontae organized not only troops for the field, but a force of spies and information-seekers who operated through the office of the prime minister. Magpie enlisted himself with the corps. In his youth he had escaped from the royal court and gone about the countryside disguised as a troubadour who sang and played the jitar. In that persona, he was able to insinuate himself into the Rabantavian towns, even into the capital and the palace itself. He had gotten to know Halcot, even struck up a friendly relationship of sorts, as much as an anointed and crowned king would have with an itinerant wanderer and purveyor of news and entertainment. Halcot often called for private concerts for his family or himself alone. He paid well, so the traveling player was glad to oblige. He did not recognize in the man the child who had once played in those very halls during his father’s official state visits.
Halcot was an old bore, in love with his own dignity, as he had proved once again in Olen’s great room, but he wasn’t a fool. From his first visit Magpie could tell he was troubled that the dispute had escalated so far. He refused to back down out of sheer pride, but was beginning to see that he had made a bad decision. Magpie felt rather sorry for him. In his opinion Halcot was more trusting than he should have been of a clever and witty observer who had the range of the whole castle during wartime. When he was not in the throne room or the grand audience chamber, Magpie sat with whoever wanted to talk, listening, never seeming to ask prying questions, but always leading gently toward garnering information on where the troops had been sent, what armaments they carried, and how long they had been gone. Magpie continued to make note of what he saw and overheard, but out of a sense of honor he refused to sabotage unguarded documents or change orders. He wrote and sang songs for those private performances to please the king, even making jokes with Halcot or one of his ministers as the butt, to take the king’s mind off the war for a while. He often felt closer to the enemy lord than he did to his own father.
What had come after was in no way his fault or his doing. His allegiance never wavered from his cause. He had brought all this information
home. It supplemented gleanings brought to Soliandur by other spies. All of the details confirmed the scrying of the court wizard, who was proving to be a true seer.
Magpie emerged from the privy room covered with dust and feathers just as a maidservant went by. She squawked with surprise, but didn’t drop the pitcher of water she was carrying. He gave her a grin and unlocked the door of his chambers. They were as tidy and free of dust as the secret passageway, as if his mother had had foreknowledge of the exact moment of his arrival home. Gratefully, he stripped out of his dirty clothes and ran a bath for himself. There was no need to light a lamp, with the summer evening sun still pouring in through the unshuttered windows. He was tired of the glare, anyhow. Cradled in the porcelain bath full of steaming water, he remarked upon how little it took for civilized life to break down.
Magpie squeezed out the bath sponge and applied it to his face and neck. Grime rolled off his skin in layers. He had never thought that Nemeth had been much of a magician. His great workings usually failed. An attempt to bring rain to relieve a yearlong drought had been disastrous. Nor was Nemeth able to charm beasts, destroy insect plagues, or enchant weapons. It seemed that his greatest and heretofore untapped talent lay in clairvoyance, the ideal gift for an enchanter whose liege was pitted in a battle of wits with another. Too bad, though, that his father, disappointed in his enchanter’s previous failures and distrustful of everyone, discounted almost everything that Nemeth told him after one incident, in which the enchanter warned him that advance scouts were avoiding lookouts by traveling through the old river tunnels. The king at once sent elite troops, only to find collapsed mine shafts, and no sign that anyone had passed that way recently. Again Nemeth pleaded for the king to listen, that there were other underground passages that the enemy was making use of. The king reviled him and denied his gifts. In vain, Nemeth had protested his innocence, saying that his seeing was true, and he was working on other means of defending the country. Magpie and Hawarti had defended the hapless wizard, who was no better at dealing with angry kings than he was with rainstorms.
Instead, Soliandur put his belief in information that had been bought from a traitor who claimed to be close to Halcot’s general. They found out later that the man had been a spy in Halcot’s pay all the time. They caught him and hanged him when the war was at last over, but it was too late for Soliandur. He threw too many men at too many points along the
border, decimating his forces, and blaming Nemeth for each successive failure.
Two years after hostilities began, a herald had made his shaky way to the front line and surrendered to the nearest officer, and begged to be brought to the king without delay. He had a message of the greatest import from King Halcot. The Rabantavian king was suing for peace.
Soliandur took news of the surrender with grim satisfaction. Details arrived along with Halcot’s chief minister who came to ask humbly for terms at the king’s pleasure. It seemed that the most ancient of maps had been compared by the southern king and his ministers. They had realized their mistake. Halcot offered to halt the fighting and to to pay restitution, for their mutual benefit. Magpie believed that his intelligence was far better than Soliandur’s, or that he paid more attention to it, and realized that little would be left of the two lands if the fighting went on for much longer. A proud man, he had swallowed his pride for his people. Soliandur drew up the terms of the treaty, demanding that Halcot pay tribute for twenty years and acknowledge Orontae as its master. That latter term Halcot would not agree to, but he accepted payment of the monstrous sum Soliandur demanded as weregild.
The war was over, but two years of battle had left Orontae scarred and, though few people realized it, near financial ruin. Soliandur had to try and rebuild a nation without seeming to need to. The king concealed from his people how much he hated the status quo, but he took out his anger on everyone close to him. To keep from revealing to the people how bad things were, Soliandur had borrowed heavily from the queen of Levrenn, his wife’s cousin, and was paying it back mainly from the tribute that Soliandur had exacted from Halcot and new taxes levied upon an already groaning populace. Magpie knew all that had gone through his father’s mind, and how devastating it was to a proud man.