Kingmaker (20 page)

Ellie nodded, but she couldn't help feeling a small doubt. She would have preferred Sergius want to listen to the people rather than think of them as a counterweight to the nobles.

Even if Sergius had forgotten or forgiven, Ellie couldn't help remembering all of the peasants Sullivan had slaughtered, just to make things a little more difficult for Sergius as he approached Dinan. She could understand the political expediency that let Sergius embrace the man who'd committed these criminal acts, but she didn't like it.

Sergius had been staring at her while she thought and she nodded quickly. “Excellent plan, Sire."

His half-grimace let her know he'd followed her thoughts. But he turned away quickly, flashing his smile at the Bishop. “You may proceed."

The Bishop wore a crimson robe and his small army of priests all wore black. They carried in the crown, which Sergius had reluctantly parted with, as well as a flail and hammer symbolizing royal authority.

Ellie barely managed to suppress a smile. On the Earth where she'd been raised, the combined hammer and sickle represented the worker and farmer, reflecting the fundamental reality that power came from working people rather than from the nobility. The Soviet Communism that had embraced and perverted those symbols had failed, but the idea of power coming from the working people rather than the nobility was still valid. Although Lubica might have forgotten the origins of those symbols, Ellie hadn't. If the King were to rule effectively and well, he would rule with the people and for the people.

She'd done her best to tell Sergius that and to give him some ideas on how he might accomplish it if he wanted to. She could only hope that the magic of this ceremony would strengthen the King's determination to keep his promise.

Certainly the bishop's words wouldn't. For the bishop, the flail represented not an agricultural implement, but the King's power of judgment. Which wasn't a complete misreading. After all, flails are used to separate wheat from the chaff. That wheat could be real, or it could be metaphorical—people separated for judgment. According to the bishop, the hammer was supposed to represent Sergius's need to hammer out opponents of the faith.

Ellie wondered if she was the only one who noticed that there wasn't any magical manifestation to the coronation.

When she and Lawgrave had crowned Sergius, purple flares had arched for yards around them signifying and magically creating the bond between king and country. But when the bishop pressed the flail and hammer into Sergius’ hands and pressed the crown down on his head, there was nothing.

Maybe the magic only worked one time and she and Lawgrave had already summoned it. But the flail and hammer both gleamed with their own jewels—jewels that looked suspiciously like the dimensional gems that mages, including her, used to focus their magical energies.

She wondered if the bishop didn't know about the magical potential of these objects. She hadn't seen Lawgrave since the Bishop had taken his place at Sergius’ side so she couldn't ask the one priest she trusted.

The bishop didn't mention anything about the consent of the nobility, consent of the army, or consent of the people. Instead, he gave a long sermon on the role of the king as protector of the church and left it at that.

An hour later, the King was official. He kissed the bishop's ring, tossed the flail and hammer to Ellie, and had two of the sergeants carry out a heavy chest.

Not unexpectedly, the chest was filled with cloth bags that gave pleasant tinkles as he lifted each, read the name of the sergeant on the label, and handed out the promised
donativum
with almost as much ceremony as the bishop had used in his coronation.

He offered a bag to Ellie, who shook her head, and then to Mark, who took it.

Mark gave her a strange look when she turned down that bag of gold. Obviously, a mall security guard doesn't make so much money he can turn down enough gold to buy a house. For that matter, an unemployed martial artist doesn't, either.

But the money looked like a payoff to her, and Ellie didn't want Sergius to think that she would take anything as a substitute for delivering on his promises. He might see the wisdom of buying the support of the people, but Ellie knew enough history to realize that Kings are leery of sharing power, especially with people who aren't from their class.

That wasn't the only reason, though. Even if Sergius had already announced the parliament, she couldn't have taken the gold. Growing up, she'd never seriously considered the possibility of using her martial arts for real, to kill or maim others. Now, she'd done it more times than she could count. More than she could count awake, anyway. Because her dreams were haunted by the ghosts of every man she'd killed.

Each battle had been a blur of action while it happened. She let her martial arts training serve her, protect her, and also give her a bit of distance from the brutal reality of killing and maiming. But that distance faded at night as she sought sleep.

If she took Sergius's blood money for what she'd done, she wondered if she'd ever be able to sleep again.

"Less to pay back, then,” Sergius said when he looked down at the single bag of gold left at the bottom of the chest. “I'll be spending the next couple of days taking fealty from the nobles, clergy, and guilds. You sure you don't want to take the gold and relax? Last chance."

Ellie shook her head. “I'm not that much of a partier. I'll camp with the army. Let me know when you're going to announce the parliament, though."

"Not tomorrow, but the next night. I'm having a banquet. It'll be a big occasion.” He flashed her his smile. “Sullivan is paying for it so make sure you drink plenty of his wine. But check for poison first."

He pocketed the remaining bag of gold and marched out of the cathedral surrounded by his growing entourage of barons and bodyguards.

They watched him leave. Mark jingled his own sack of coins. “You think he'll keep his promise?"

"He understands that he'll have a firmer grip on the crown if he's got a counterweight to the nobility,” Ellie said.

Mark stared at the gold. “Maybe. But does he need the peasants? I think the army is plenty weighty."

"He'll need the army to take on Harrison. They won't always be handy to keep the local nobles under control."

"I guess you're right.” Mark paused, then glanced around the empty church. “Hey, I guess I'm rich. Can I buy you a drink?"

"Maybe we should get back to the camp. We need to plan what we're going to do against Harrison. Besides, I suspect that drink prices just went through the roof around here."

"Good idea.” Except Mark didn't look like he thought it was a good idea. He looked disappointed.

Well, Mark could get something to drink around the camp. In a world where clean water was in short supply, beer and wine were an ever-present part of the local diet. Although Lawgrave had taught her a pattern to sterilize her water, few could afford to waste magic on drinking water.

Thinking of Lawgrave reminded her of the lack of magic at the coronation, though. And that troubled her. “You haven't seen Lawgrave around, have you?"

"He was supposed to be back in Moray somewhere."

"I think I'll look him up before I head for camp."

Finding Lawgrave wasn't easy.

Ellie started at the bishop's residence where she'd first met the dour priest.

The priest who opened the door for her disclaimed any knowledge of Lawgrave's whereabouts, or even of Lawgrave's existence. He'd only been on the job for a couple of months, he explained.

The bishop was unavailable, recovering from the stresses of the coronation, the priest informed her. He shrugged off her announcement that she was the returned princess. The bishop was still unavailable.

Moray didn't have a public library the way Los Angeles does, but Ellie asked around.

Residents of Moray were happy to give her their opinions of the coronation (favorable), the future of Sergius's army in the face of Harrison (favorable) and the Rissel (bleak), and of the way the city had been decorated for the King's arrival (they thought it had been a waste of their time and were angry the bishop had reneged on his promise to pay the people he'd made scrub down the city walls and streets).

When it came to answering questions about where a mage-priest might be stashed, they were a bit less forthcoming—to the point where Ellie wished she'd gone ahead and taken the King's money. She could have used the gold to bribe her way around.

Still, persistence and threats have a way of getting questions answered. And the library wasn't exactly a secret.

What it was was a crumbling half-timber structure that covered most of a city block. Occult symbols of turquoise on white stucco formed a frieze near the roofline and a complex series of knots surrounded each of the small high windows. It was well away from the cathedral, far distant from the royal palace, but close to the river that ran through the middle of the city and that, unfortunately, also served as its sewer.

Once, when the city had been far smaller, the library might have been central, accessible, even in a position of importance. The neighborhood had deteriorated around it, though, until it was little better than a slum.

A small interior courtyard led to a single massive doorway. There was a guard station, but it was unoccupied. When Ellie looked more closely, she saw a thick coating of dust on the seat where a guard would sit.

In pre-industrial societies, books tend to be rare, expensive, and valuable. The lack of protection had to mean that this wasn't the library after all, or possibly that there was some other guard set to stop any thieves.

She loosened her katana and grasped the heavy stone doorknob.

It bristled with energy and resisted her twist.

But she recognized the purple sparks of magic and smiled to herself. In this universe, libraries were for mages. And a mage would rely on magical rather than on human guards to protect her treasures. From the energy draining out of her as she turned the knob, Ellie guessed that the door not only kept out the non-magical, it also used each mage's power to reinforce the protective spells.

It was a pretty neat system.

The doorway led directly into a single room with open stacks, comfortable looking leather chairs, and casting tables where mages could practice the spells.

A person used to the wealth of books in a L.A. Public Library branch, or even in the local Barnes and Noble wouldn't be impressed by the number of volumes held by the largest library in the Lubica nation.

Perhaps one hundred books were placed on the shelves. Each one faced out, its leather or wood cover embossed with gold and hand-lettered with the book's title.

A few of the titles made sense to Ellie.
Basic Spell Patterns
sounded useful but obvious. Others didn't make much sense at all.
Fungal Macrobiology of Red Gemstones and Their Limitations
sounded like something only a Ph.D. candidate could love.

Three men, all wearing the brown cassocks of the local priesthood, looked up when she walked in. None of them was Lawgrave. Every one of them frowned.

"The library is barred to women,” one said. He was a tall slender man whose pale blue eyes gleamed with power and malice.

"The library is barred to the secular,” the second told her. He was a fat man who looked like he should be the happy joking type. But he wasn't happy or joking now.

"What the hell do you want?” demanded the third. Despite his robes, he didn't look like a priest at all. He was built like a bodybuilder and his head seemed planted directly into his shoulders.

Ellie dumped her gemstones on one of the tables. “I am a mage and have every right to be here. The library was built by mages, not by the church."

At least she thought so. Some of the symbols built into the brick and timber structure were very similar to the Celtic-style knots that formed the protective boundary to the pattern that had brought her to this universe. And those, according to Lawgrave, had come from earlier faiths than the one that currently dominated.

"Is that right?” The second priest wasn't asking her. He turned his attention to the third, rudest, priest.

Father Muscles shrugged. “Ancient history. We're in control now. And the presence of women still distracts us from our meditations."

"Proper attitude should take care of that problem,” Ellie said. “Concentrate on your breathing and free your mind of distractions."

"We aren't interested in your pagan notions of prayer,” the big priest told her. He took another step toward her as if he intended to throw her out physically.

It had been a rough couple of months and Ellie had gotten out of practice at taking crap. “I'd hate to spill your blood in this nice library."

"You could try."

The fat priest whispered something to the bodybuilder.

"Really? She's that—oh.” He turned his attention back to her. “Uh, so, what do you want?"

"I'm looking for Father Lawgrave."

The tall thin one giggled. “She's not the only one."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

The thin one avoided her glare and picked up one of the books, pretending to be interested in its intricate cover. “Lawgrave came back to the monastery, then he sort of vanished. Nobody knows where he's gone. The bishop had half the acolytes running around the city looking for him."

He looked like he was telling the truth and the other priests nodded although Father Muscles gave her an unfriendly glare.

"If you see him, tell him Ellie is looking for him."

"Right."

They moved to the side to let her leave but Ellie figured, since she was here, she might as well do a little research.

They weren't happy about it, but big-muscles didn't say anything and she picked up her jewels and browsed the shelves.

It would have been handy if one of the books had been named something like
Magical Aspects of Royal Coronation
, but Ellie wasn't counting on it. She didn't find it, either. And there was nothing about crowning in the basic spell pattern books.