“Well?” he said to Tan.
“Esteemed Captain,” Tan said immediately, and bowed.
“You don’t consider our protection here adequate, is that right? You’ve got
special
enemies, that’s what I hear. You think you’ll fare better if your name goes up the hill, do you?”
“If you please to send it, esteemed sir, and I swear to you it will be recognized.”
The captain looked Tan up and down with obvious distaste. “You’re safe enough here, I assure you, so you may set your heart at rest on that account.”
Tan bowed his head and said nothing.
“Huh. A prodigal cousin, are you? Got in bad company and came dragging home to beg pardon and payment of your debts from the lord?”
“If you like,” Tan agreed obligingly. He tried to look dissolute and repentant.
“You think Lord Bertaud will be happy to hear your name, do you? Not likely! Theft, brawling, murder: What else do you drag at your heel? You think the lord will pardon all that for whatever blood you might have in common?” The captain sounded like he doubted this. He said with grim satisfaction, “You think he wants some bastard half cousin up at the great house
now
, with the king’s household in residence? If you had the sense of a turnip, you’d hope no judge had time for you until next month, after the king’s gone back to Tihannad, if you hope for mercy from Lord Bertaud.”
Tan gazed at the captain. He said slowly, “King Iaor is here?”
“You didn’t know?” This time, the captain sounded honestly astonished. “Earth and sea, man, where have you been the past six years? It’s that long since His Majesty began breaking his annual progress in the Delta for a month or more! Ever since Lord Bertaud came home.” He looked grimly pleased to crush Tan’s hopes.
“If Bertaud doesn’t know my name, Iaor will,” Tan declared at once, hoping it was true.
The captain scowled. “
Lord
Bertaud, man, and
King
Iaor, man! Let us have some respect!”
Tan bowed apology. “I beg your pardon, esteemed Captain. I meant no disrespect.” He tried to remember a name that both Bertaud and the king might recognize.
“Well,” the captain said, looking at him hard. “And what name is it that they’ll know, up at the great house?”
“Teras son of Toharas,” Tan said, hoping that this was true.
“Huh.” The captain turned his head and fixed the young guard with a cold eye. The young man straightened his back and swallowed. “Since you and the prisoner are both so concerned for his safety, you can stay on after your shift and keep an eye on him,” said the captain. “Without extra pay, of course.” He walked out.
The young guard looked morosely at Tan. “Thank you so much. I ought to beat you bloody.”
“Your captain may yet send my name up the hill,” Tan said softly. “That chance is worth any beating. So is your watchful presence here. Did you think I did not mean my warning to you? You may well have saved my life tonight.” He bowed his head, adding formally, “I am in your debt, and you may call upon me.” He looked up again, smiling, and added, “For all you may not find such a promise very impressive just at this moment. What is your name, if I may be so bold as to inquire?”
The guard seemed warily impressed, and not very inclined to carry out his threat. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Tenned. Son of Tenned.”
“Tenned son of Tenned. I thank you.” Tan bowed. Then, as the young man did not seem likely to carry out his threat, Tan sat down in the straw, wrapped his arms around his body, and tried not to shiver the last of his strength away. Tenned’s presence was indeed a comfort and a safeguard. Tan might even dare to rest, if he were not so cold.
Tenned regarded him for a long moment. Then he set his jaw, hooked his lantern to a hook high up in the wall, and left the room.
But he came back in mere moments with a threadbare blanket and a hard roll stuffed with sausage, both of which he tossed wordlessly through the bars to Tan.
Despite his surprise, Tan caught the food and the blanket. A flush crept up the guard’s face when Tan stared at him, making him seem younger still. Tan shook his head. “Truly, you need a place in some other company. You are too kind to be”—he gestured at the walls of his cell and, by extension, at the prison entire—“here.”
The guard crossed his arms uneasily across his chest and glanced away. But he said in a low voice, “Maybe, if the captain doesn’t send word up the hill… maybe I’ll go after all. At noon.” He gave Tan a hard look. “If the captain lets me off duty at noon. That’s a double watch. He’ll set up to three extra, if he’s angry enough. He did that to a new guard last week, when he let a prisoner get his keys.”
Tan might have wished Tenned to be careless enough to let Tan get his keys, but this seemed most unlikely. He contented himself with nodding sympathetically.
But at two hours past dawn, the guard captain came back himself, with a pair of extra guards and a set of slender keys. The stamp of their boots woke Tan, who sat up and then got to his feet, laying aside the blanket with a nod of thanks to Tenned.
“I don’t know as anyone recalls your name, mind,” the captain told Tan. “Maybe they’re only interested. But you’re to go up and they’ll take a look at you, at least.
I
wouldn’t care to miss it. I’m taking you up myself.”
Tan looked over the two guards the captain had brought with him and shook his head. “You should have more men.”
The captain lifted his eyebrows. “What? That tough, are you?”
“Not for me. Six men, at least. Ten would be better. You should detail half to keep their attention outward.”
For a long moment, the captain was silent. Tan wondered whether he had at last succeeded in impressing the man with his sincerity, if nothing else. Or, given the captain’s harsh, expressionless stare, whether he had at last succeeded in offending the man beyond bearing. The man had shoulders like an ox; he could undoubtedly deliver a ferocious beating if he decided a prisoner was being deliberately insolent. “Not that I’d try to instruct you in your business, esteemed Captain,” Tan added, trying his best to look respectful.
But the captain only said at last, to one of his men, “Beras, go round up everyone who’s free and tell ’em meet us at the front gate. Tenned. Unlock that cell.” He shot Tan an ironic look and threw the young guard a set of manacles. “Chain the prisoner.”
Tan put his hands out cooperatively, hoping to get Tenned to chain his hands in front of his body rather than behind. From the deepening irony of the captain’s expression, the man recognized that old trick. But he said nothing, and Tenned did indeed allow Tan to keep his hands in front.
The great house stood, in fact, on a long, low hill—low, but the only hill for half a day’s travel in any direction, the Delta not being renowned for hills of any kind. The house was itself essentially long and low, though one wing had two stories and one round tower at the edge of the adjoining wing stood two stories higher than that. The tower was windowless. Tan wasn’t quite certain what that said about the character of the man who had commanded it built.
The house had been built by a succession of Delta lords, each adding to it primarily by building out into
its grounds rather than upward. One wing of the house had originally been stables—but very fine stables—and another had once probably been a mews, from the look of the extremely broad windows. The current stables and mews and kennels were just visible, far around the side of the house. If Tan had seen them earlier, he might have guessed that the king was in residence, both from the general busy atmosphere and from the fineness of the horses. The guard captain appeared to be heading for a door over in that general area.
The captain had, in the end, surrounded Tan with nine guards and had ordered five of them to forget the prisoner and watch the streets. Half a dozen crows flew overhead, cawing harshly. They flew ahead of the little procession and over the rooftops to either side. Another crow perched on the captain’s shoulder, tilting its head this way and that, its bright black eyes intelligent and alert. It seemed the captain had an affinity for crows. At the moment, Tan could hardly imagine a more useful affinity, though he’d have preferred to have a larger flock looking for trouble. Though, even so, it didn’t seem likely anyone with a bow could stay hidden on a roof with even a few crows flying watchfully near. Even a man who could whisper to his arrows and make them turn to strike their target had to aim somewhere
near
where he wanted them to strike.
The captain followed the flight of his crows with a frowning look, then turned his attention back to his prisoner. Perhaps he suspected some ruse on Tan’s part. Tan would have been happy to have a ruse in mind, but he did not. Perhaps it was better so. As his trouble last night had so clearly demonstrated, he might in fact be safer in chains and surrounded by guards than he would
have been slipping quietly through the city on his own. Especially with royal guardsmen set all about the great house.
“Here we are,” the guard captain said to Tan as they came up to a narrow, plain door set in the side of a plain, windowless building. “I see we had enough crows after all—and two or three guards would have been sufficient, after all.”
“Unless the force you displayed deterred my enemies,” Tan suggested blandly. “Esteemed Captain.”
The captain looked at him fixedly for a moment. But then he merely put out one massive hand and shoved the door open. It was not locked. They shed half the guards and all the crows as they went through it, and through a barren entryway, and at last into an unadorned reception room that contained nothing but a small table and one chair.
The chair was occupied. Bertaud son of Boudan—so Tan supposed—looked up. His gaze was intent and mistrustful, but not, Tan thought, actually hostile. At least, not yet. The young man Tan remembered from the court at Tihannad had grown into a solid, self-assured lord. He’d come to look a good deal like his father, which must surely gall him. But there was an interesting depth in his eyes, and lines around his mouth that Tan did not remember. Tan wondered how he had come by that compelling intensity.
Tan went to one knee before Bertaud’s chair, rested his bound hands on his other knee, and bowed his head for a moment. Then he lifted his head and looked Bertaud in the face. Their eyes met. Bertaud’s look became searching, then questioning. He drew breath to speak.
Before he could, Tan said quickly, “Hair darker than yours. Longer than yours, tied back with a plain cord. Ten fewer years, forty extra pounds, and no sense of style. A ring on my left hand—”
“A beryl,” Bertaud said. He straightened in his chair, frowning. “Set in a heavy iron ring. You were before my time.” He meant, before Iaor had made him lord of the king’s own guard. “I remember you with Moutres.” Lord Moutres had held that post of trust for Iaor’s father and then, for some years, for Iaor.
Rising, Bertaud came forward to examine Tan more closely. “How do you come here?”
“Ah…” Tan hesitated. He asked cautiously, “Do you know… what I did for, um, Moutres?”
Bertaud frowned again. “Not in detail.”
“The king knows—”
“His Majesty is otherwise occupied.”
There wasn’t a lot of give in that flat statement. Tan paused. Then he said, “I’ve just come across the bridge. From Teramondian. I was too closely pursued to get across the river farther north; I was forced to run south and even so I hardly made it out of Linularinum. But now I understand that His Majesty is here after all, so that’s well enough. If he’ll see me. Or if you will, my lord, but
privately
, I beg you.”
Bertaud simply looked at him for a long moment. Tan tried to look like an earnest servant of the king rather than a desperate fool who’d put a foot wrong in the Linularinan court and run home for rescue. After a moment, Bertaud said, “Teras son of Toharas, is it? Is that the name I should give to the king?”
Tan hesitated. Then he surprised himself by saying,
“Tan. You may tell His Majesty it is Tan who has brought him a difficult gift.”
“Son of?”
Tan shook his head. “Just Tan.” He was prepared for either suspicion or scorn, depending on whether the lord took him for insolently reticent or the son of a careless father. He certainly did not intend to lay out any explanations. Especially as both answers obtained.
But he saw neither suspicion nor scorn. Lord Bertaud only inclined his head gravely. “So I shall inform the king,” he said, gave the guard captain a raised-eyebrow look, and left the room.
The captain stared down at Tan and shook his head. “Huh.”
Tan bowed his head meekly and composed himself to wait.
After a surprisingly short time, however, the door swung open once more. Bertaud came in first, but stepped aside at once and personally held the door.
Iaor Daveien Behanad Safiad, King of Feierabiand and, more or less, of the Delta, clearly did not keep any great state when he visited Tiefenauer. He had brought no attendants nor guardsmen of his own; he wore no crown and no jewels save for a ruby of moderate size set in a heavy gold ring. But nevertheless, even if Tan had never seen him before, he would have known he was looking at the king.
King Iaor was broad, stocky, not overtall. But he held himself with more than mere assurance, with a presumption of authority that was unquestionably royal. Tan took a breath and waited for the king to speak first. But the king glanced impatiently toward the door, so Tan gathered
they were in fact still waiting for someone—perhaps the king was not without attendants after all.