She circled him, looking him over from every angle, as if he was a young horse she was considering for purchase. He flushed even harder; he wasn’t used to being given that kind of scrutiny by a woman, or at least, not by a woman like this one.
Solaris
had given him that kind of detailed examination, but there was nothing remotely feminine about Her Holiness; when Solaris sat on the Sun Throne, she
was
the Son of the Sun, and that was all there was to say about it. Kerowyn was as female as she was formidable.
“Right,” Kerowyn said at last, as if answering a question, though he had said nothing. “Come here, boy. I be wanting to be testing the strength of you.”
For a moment he hesitated. What was she going to do, feel his legs and arms, as if he was a young racing colt and she the prospective buyer? But she beckoned peremptorily, and he followed her, not daring to do otherwise.
She brought him over to the comer of the room, to a series of ropes and pulleys. The comer looked like a setting for some kind of arcane torture, or worse. But it turned out that what she had in mind
(thank the God!)
were only tests of how much he could lift, pull, or push; the ropes could be loaded with weights, and she would watch him as he tried to raise them from various positions. When she was done,
he
was sweaty, and she looked satisfied.
“Be better than I be
thinking,”
she told him. “You be not spending all your time pushing paper around on desks. Now, here be what we be going to do. I not be making a fighter out of you, and I be not going to try. What I be going to do, is I be teaching you some things you be using to be defending yourself with, things that be buying you enough time for help to be getting to you.
Real
help, trained fighters.”
“That makes good sense,” he said slowly.
“Here be problem, that we be going to be making these things into ways that you be acting without thinking. And we be going to be making you stronger than you be already. So—” she waved at one of the things he had just been using, weights loaded onto ropes attached to pulleys, “—be doing what I be showing you, fifty more times, then we be working on the first move.”
Not what he wanted to hear....
By the time she was done with him, he was weak-kneed with exhaustion, and quite ready to drop, but he already had one move down well enough to use against an attacker who wasn’t expecting it. The likeliest scenario, as Kerowyn postulated it, was that he would be attacked from behind by someone who intended to strangle him. She showed him how to use the attacker’s rush and momentum to tumble forward, throwing the attacker over as he did so, then get to his feet and run.
With enough practice, he
would
do just that without thinking.
When she dismissed him and sent him out the door with the admonition to return at the same time the next day, he realized that there had been another effect of the lesson besides exhaustion. He had absolutely, positively, not a single drop of desire in his veins for her, despite the fact that they had been tumbling all over each other, often ending tangled in positions that would have caused her father to issue Karal an ultimatum to marry her—had they been in Karse.
He wasn’t certain how that had come about, but there was no denying the effect. If she had stripped herself stark naked and posed for him like one of the street women, he would not have been able to perform with her. She overwhelmed him. She was now, in his own mind, in the same class as Solaris, and therefore untouchable.
He was simply grateful to be allowed to escape.
He dragged himself back to his room; Ulrich was not there, but
someone
had had the foresight to fire up the copper boiler in the bathing room. Johen? If so, then perhaps that young man was not as unsympathetic as he had seemed.
After a hot bath, the world seemed a little friendlier, and he was ready to face Ulrich, the Court, and whatever else came up. And it was a very good thing that he
was
prepared for just that, for just as he finished dressing, there was a decisive knock on the door. Before he could answer it, the door opened.
There was a man standing there; a man wearing dark gray leather very like Kerowyn’s except for the color. Tall, lean, and dark, Karal had never seen a human being who looked quite so much like a hungry wolf before. His hair was snow-white, and his face seamed with scars; he regarded Karal as measuringly as Kerowyn had, out of a pair of agate-gray eyes as expressionless as a pair of pebbles.
He was Karsite; his facial features and body type were as typical as Ulrich’s and Karal’s own. There was absolutely no doubt of that.
Which meant that there was only one person that he could be. Karal had forgotten that he was also scheduled for lessons in the Valdemaran tongue.
Karal swallowed, his mouth gone dry, and bowed. “H-herald Alberich, I-I-I am honored,” he stuttered in his own tongue.
He rose from his bow; Alberich was smiling sardonically. “Honored? To be tutored by the Great Betrayer? I think not.” The Herald strode into the room and closed the door behind him. “You are one of three things, boy—diplomatic, uninformed, or a liar. I hope it is the first.”
Karal didn’t know what to say, so he wisely kept his mouth shut. Alberich looked him over again, and the smile softened, just a little.
“The first, then. When you report, tell Solaris that I compliment her on her choice of personnel.” He reached for a chair without looking at it, pulled it over to him, and turned it so that the back faced Karal. Then he sat down on it backward, resting his arms along the high back.
Karal took this as an invitation to sit, and took a chair for himself. He was weak in the knees again, but this time from the sheer force of the man’s personality.
“First, we’ll see just how much Valdemaran you really know,” Alberich said—and then began a ruthless examination. Or rather, interrogation; he spouted off questions and waited for Karal to answer them. If Karal didn’t understand or lacked the vocabulary to answer, he shook his head, and Alberich moved on to another question.
During this entire time, Alberich never once took those gray eyes off him, and whether or not it was by accident, the questions he asked revealed more about the man than Karal had ever expected to learn.
It was impossible to remember that this man was called the Great Traitor—no, not impossible to remember, but impossible to believe. Not when everything he said or did reinforced Karal’s impression that Alberich lived, breathed, and worked beneath a code of honor as unbreakable as steel and as enduring as the mountains of his homeland.
“Come with me,” Alberich said after about a mark’s worth of this intensive questioning. He stood quickly and gracefully, and Karal scrambled to his own feet, feeling as awkward as a young colt and drained completely dry. “I’ll get you some books to get you started.”
He turned and led the way, Karal following behind him; eventually, after many turnings and twistings and sets of stairs leading both up and down, Alberich turned to open a pair of unguarded doors. Behind those doors—as far as Karal was concerned—lay Paradise.
Books. Floor to ceiling, and huge freestanding shelves full of them. The only other library Karal had ever seen to rival this one was the Temple library at home, and novices were never allowed in
there
alone. He stood in the door, gawking; he would never have known where to start, but Alberich seemed to know exactly where he was going. He went straight to the rear, and took down half a dozen small volumes, blowing the dust from them as he did so. He stalked back to where Karal was waiting for him, and handed them all to him.
“I don’t think anyone has looked at these since I used them,” he said, with another of those sardonic smiles. “There are a couple of Valdemaran-Karsite dictionaries, and a pair of advanced grammar books, and a history of the beginning of the war with Karse from the Valdemaran point of view, written by one of the Priests from the schismatic branch of the Sunlord. It’s a little archaic, but it will give you some perspective and a good lesson in language at the same time. I’ll question you on the first chapter or so tomorrow.”
With that, he led Karal back to the suite; this time Karal tried to memorize the way, since he would certainly want to return to a library as impressive as that one, but for once his memory failed him. That was more than a disappointment; he
wanted
to be able to return there at will. He’d brought his own books largely because he was afraid he would not be permitted access to other books in the Palace, but there were no guards on that library door, which implied that residents in the Palace were free to come and go as they pleased.
If they could
find
the place, that is. Maybe the maze of corridors was enough to keep them out of it!
But Alberich might have been a reader of thoughts after all, for when he brought Karal back to the door of their suite and opened it for him, he paused.
“Any time you want to visit the royal library, ask a page to take you,” he said. As Karal twitched reflexively in surprise, he added—again, with that peculiar softening of his normally sardonic expression, “I’ve seen book-hunger before, lad. There’s nothing in there that’s forbidden you, and you could do a great deal worse than learn how these people think from their own words. Feed your hunger and open your mind at the same time.”
Then he turned on his heel and strode off down the hallway, leaving Karal clutching his books and staring after him.
Finally, Karal went inside and put his books down on his bed, then sat down beside them, wondering where he was going to find the energy to complete the day.
All this—and there was still the formal dinner with Selenay’s Court to endure before he was allowed to collapse!
He’d never thought this was going to be an easy position to fill, but this was insane. How did Ulrich manage his schedule? It was at least as difficult as Karal’s, probably much more so.
The same way he always tells me to take things,
Karal decided.
One at a time....
One thing at a time—and right now, that meant finding and laying out another set of Court clothes for Ulrich. He got to his feet with an effort, and let momentum and habit take over.
One thing at a time.
For the first several days he thought he was going to collapse at any moment. There were never enough daylight hours to complete all of his tasks, and he and his mentor spent long candle-lit sessions after dinner trying to catch up. Sometimes he attended meetings with Ulrich, but often Ulrich scheduled meetings during his lessons with Kerowyn and Alberich, probably a tactful way of excluding him without needing to manufacture an excuse. Ulrich was a diplomat, after all. Karal gave up trying to understand why the Valdemarans were so worried about
him
being present; it really didn’t matter in the long run. And on the positive side, it was one less duty in a schedule that was already too full.
There were endless pages of notes to turn into something legible, Ulrich’s postings back to Karse to write out properly from
his
hastily dictated notes, more pages of notes to transcribe from Ulrich’s private meetings, preliminary drafts of agreements to put together; the work seemed never-ending. For a while, Karal despaired of ever getting any time to himself. It seemed as if the only time he was anywhere without a mindbending task in front of him was when he was in the bathtub!
Yet, after the first rush of activity, things
did
slow down. Initial agreements were drawn up, agreed to by Ulrich and the Queen’s representative—usually Prince-Consort Daren—then sent off to Karse. The initial stage of setting up diplomatic relations was over; now it must all be approved by Solaris and then by the Queen’s Council. Solaris would ponder Ulrich’s suggestions long and hard before deciding on them, then make her own changes; the Valdemaran Council was like every ruling body Karal had ever heard of and must debate things endlessly before agreeing to them. Work for Karal slowed to a mere trickle; work for Ulrich was in getting to know those in power on a personal basis. That meant more meetings, informal ones this time, just between Ulrich and one or two of the people in power—meetings Karal didn’t attend.
Karal found himself alone in the suite more and more often, with nothing to do but read his recreational books, study Valdemaran, and puzzle out the journals that Ulrich had given him. At first he welcomed the respite, but his own books were soon devoured, studying Valdemaran was
work,
and trying to make his way through the journals no less so.
He went out looking for company on several occasions, but the search didn’t bring him any success. When he encountered the highborn offspring of Selenay’s courtiers that were his own age, they ignored his presence as if he was another statue or a plant in the garden. Wherever he met them, they looked right past or even through him, and no one ever replied to his cautious greetings. The Heralds-in-training seemed mostly afraid of him and avoided his presence entirely; Arnod was the only exception to that, and Arnod was on duty only late at night.
He finally found himself sitting and staring out the window down into the gardens one afternoon, burdened by what could only be “homesickness.” Whatever it was, it left him depressed and profoundly unhappy; aching with the need for something, anything that was familiar, and so enervated he found it hard to even think. He wasn’t tired, but he couldn’t find the energy to move, either. What he
wanted
was to be home, back in his familiar little cubicle near Ulrich’s rooms; back in the Temple library, helping Ulrich track down a particular book, or copying out designated text. Oh, this place was very luxurious, but he would have traded every rich and exotic dish for an honest Karsite barley-cake. He would have traded his soft bed and private room for a breath of mountain air, every sweet, cream-rich cake and pudding for a mouthful of fruit-ice, and all their spiced wine for a good, strong cup of
kava.