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Servant of the Dragon
By David Drake, David G. Hartwell Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 1999 David Drake
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-1170-2
CHAPTER 1
Prince Garric of Haft, Heir Presumptive of Valence III, King of the Isles — and already by any real measure the ruler of the kingdom — faced his Council of Advisors. Down the table from him were the chief nobles of the island of Ornifal, some of the most powerful men in all the Isles. They were waiting for him to make known his wishes as Lord Waldron, commander of the Royal Army, argued with Lord Attaper, commander of the Blood Eagles — the royal bodyguards.
Garric's wishes were to be back home in Barca's Hamlet, the village on Haft where he'd been raised for all but the first days of his eighteen years. Life was a lot simpler then, although it had seemed complicated enough at the time.
"You can't go back, lad," whispered the ghost in Garric's mind: Carus, the last king of the united Isles, whom wizardly had drowned a thousand years before. "Even if duty didn't keep you here in Valles, Barca's Hamlet isn't really your home anymore."
"May I remind both of you gentlemen that soldiers have to be paid!" said Lord Tadai, now Royal Treasurer in place of a well-meaning incompetent who'd held the position under Valence. Tadai wiped his round face with a handkerchief embroidered with the arms of his house, the bor-Tithains.
Everyone was getting to his feet and shouting. Royhas bor-Bolliman, Garric's chancellor and closest to being Garric's friend of the men present, snarled, "And speaking of money, Tadai, the honor of the kingdom is being tarnished by your failure to pay —"
"Gentlemen," Garric said in a mild voice. He knew no one would listen to him, but his father had raised him to be polite.
Liane bos-Benliman, a dark-haired girl of Garric's age, sat beside Garric and a half-step back, making it clear that she had no right to speak during the deliberations. In this room she was acting as Garric's secretary. She met Garric's eye and smiled, but there was concern in her expression.
Liane was the only living person present who wanted the things Garric wanted and no more: peace and unity for the Kingdom of the Isles, which wizardry had shattered a thousand years before and which wizardry now threatened to crush to dust. In Garric's eyes Liane was the loveliest woman in the Isles, and a more neutral judge might have concurred.
"The money's there, you just won't release it as your duty demands!" Royhas cried, leaning over the table from his side. Tadai, leaning toward the chancellor with his face the color of his scarlet handkerchief, said, "If you're so set on finding jobs for all your relatives, Royhas, then I suggest you find the money for them as well!"
Garric's index finger touched the conference table. It was of burl walnut, polished to a glassy sheen that brought out the richly complex pattern of the grain. In Barca's Hamlet men shaped wood with an adze or a broadaxe. Garric had never seen a saw or a sawn plank until fate took him from him his home. A table like this was fit for the Queen of Heaven and Her consort, not mortals like Garric or-Reise.
"And besides that —" Royhas said.
Garric slammed his fist down. The table, large enough to seat twelve and heavy in proportion, jumped on the stone floor.
No one spoke for a moment.
Garric hadn't eaten since ... well, he'd had an orange and a roll baked from wheat flour at dawn, with nothing since. Maybe that was why he felt queasy.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I'm going to adjourn this meeting because I'm obviously not in condition to keep it under control."
"I'm sorry, Your Highness, but —"
"I didn't mean to —"
"Of course, Garric, I'll —"
"Well, really, Pr —"
"Silence!" Garric bellowed. The conference room shutters were slatted to let in summer breezes while maintaining privacy from the eyes of folk wandering through the palace grounds. They rattled against their casements. Even Liane jumped, though she immediately grinned as well.
"Gentlemen," Garric continued in the quiet tone he preferred. "We'll resume this meeting tomorrow in the third hour of the afternoon. I know that some of you have written proposals. Leave them with Liane and I'll review them before that time."
Garric's eyes flicked from Royhas to Tadai. Both men had their mouths open to speak. They saw Garric's expression, as grim and certain as a sword edge.
"Quite so," the chancellor murmured as he took from his wallet a scroll of parchment bound with a red ribbon. He handed it to Liane with a courtly flourish.
Lord Tadai had a similar document, though his ribbon was pale yellow, dyed with the pollen washed from beehives. "There's an annex which one of my aides will bring you shortly, Lady Liane," he said in an undertone.
The conference room was one of the many separate buildings in the grounds of the royal palace in Valles. The councillors passed out one by one to meet their aides and bodyguards, the latter carrying ivory batons instead of swords. Only the Blood Eagles and folk the king particularly wanted to honor were permitted to go armed within the palace grounds.
The last councillors remaining were Attaper and Waldron. The two warriors stepped to the doorway together and halted. After a moment Attaper grinned tightly. "I trust you not to stab anyone in the back, Lord Waldron," he said. "Even me." He swept through the door ahead of the older man.
"Puppy!" Waldron muttered as he strode out in turn. He left the door open behind him: opening and closing doors was beneath the concern of a man of Waldron's lineage.
A servant peered into the conference room to see what those still within might wish. Liane shook her head minusculely and closed the door herself.
"It was perfect!" Garric said with a grin. "I almost broke out laughing when you cited Sourous chapter and verse about the worthless parasite he thinks is his friend. Ilna couldn't have done it better!"
Garric thought about the friends he'd grown up with: his sister Sharina, tall, blond, and (like Garric himself) able both to read the classics and to put in a full day's work at their father's rural inn; Cashel or-Kenset, an orphan since his father's early death, almost as tall as Garric and as strong as any two other men —
And Cashel's twin sister Ilna: dark-haired, pretty; a weaver whose skill passed beyond art to wizardry. Ilna's tongue was as sharp as the bone-cased knife she kept for household tasks and to cut the selvage of her fabric. Ilna might well have dressed Sourous down in that fashion, but —
"Ilna would've enjoyed it," Garric said sadly, "I enjoyed it while it was happening, but I shouldn't have. Sourous is a fool, but that's not a crime. I liked to see him squirm because I'm tired and frustrated."
Garric slid his chair back to stand. He kept knocking his elbows on the chair arms of solid black wood. He wondered what people would say if he had the chairs in this conference room replaced with benches.
King Carus laughed at the unspoken thought. Garric echoed the laughter aloud; it broke his mood.
"I don't feel that I'm getting anywhere," he said in a more cheerful tone than he would have used a moment before. Having a companion who knew your every thought and who was always willing to laugh with you — or at you — was a good thing for a ruler. Garric knew both from Carus' memories and from his own experience that kings were generally lied to.
He was luckier than most kings: neither Liane nor the friends he'd grown up with would lie, to Garric or to anybody else. But he was lucky also to have a friend and advisor like Carus.
"You've done more in the past few months than any King of the Isles managed in his whole reign," Liane said with a hint of sharpness. "Anyone since the Old Kingdom, I mean. There's a Royal Army — and more important, there's a royal administration that does more than accept whatever pittance the local landholders claim they owe the state."
"We've got the start of an administration," Garric agreed, "but just a start and that's only here on Ornifal. The rulers of the other islands go their own way. The only reason the Earl of Sandrakkan and the Count of Blaise haven't proclaimed themselves kings of their own islands is that they both think that if they play the game right they can claim the whole Isles."
"And now that they see the king in Valles isn't a weakling who can be pushed aside" said Carus, "they'll be thinking very hard about independence. We'll need to deal with that."
Garric patted the coronation medal of King Carus which he wore on a ribbon under his tunic. The king's presence in Garric's mind frequently laughed but was always alert. Carus was an older version of Garric himself, wearing flamboyantly colored clothing. The right hand of his image was never far from the hilt of his long, straight sword.
"When we have Ornifal organized, you'll be able to extend your administration right across the Isles. After all, it's not just the kingdom that's better for having fair taxation and honest justice, it's all the people of the kingdom."
Garric laughed. "All the people except the ones profiting by the present chaos," he said. "Which means most of the people in power already."
"In the long run —" said Liane. Emotion had raised spots of color on her cheekbones. Liane was so passionate about the plan to reunify the Isles that sometimes she couldn't see the problems for all her sharp intelligence. She couldn't bear to see obstacles in the way of what she knew with all her soul was right.
"People don't think about the long run," Garric said quietly. "They think about what they have in their hand today."
Liane started to speak, then swallowed the retort with a grimace. She was tired too.
"Remember, you and I know the dangers," Garric said. He put his fingertips on the backs of Liane's hands. She'd watched a demon disembowel her father. Magical forces were again rising to their thousand-year peak. No one understood better than Liane what would happen to the Isles if those forces were allowed to shatter even the fragile peace which had returned since the fall of the Old Kingdom. "Most people don't, and it's most people that we have to deal with."
Liane turned her right hand and squeezed Garric's. "And some people, even if they did know what we know," she said, "would keep right on robbing their peasants instead of trying to build a community of honesty and justice. Well, you have the Royal Army too."
"And so you do, lad," agreed King Carus. "A good one, and getting better each day. Just don't be as quick as I was to use your sword instead of talking; and don't forget that however good my army was, there was a wizard who could sink it and me to the bottom of the Inner Sea."
Garric laughed. Liane smiled through her puzzlement: no one but Garric himself heard the words of his ancestor. "I'm reminding myself that wizardry is a danger no matter how good our army is," Garric said, to explain what he was thinking about. It took a particular kind of gallows humor to laugh at the thought, though.
Along the room's sidewalls were leather-covered benches where aides would sit during the meetings they were allowed to attend. For most of his life Garric had slept in a garret room with a bed even narrower than the benches. "What I need most now is a nap. Is there anything so pressing that ...?"
"I'll tell the guards that you're not to be disturbed by anyone but me," Liane said as she rose, folding her travel desk with the same graceful movement. "And I'll be in the service building next door. There's a couch there too. I'm going to fall asleep on my feet unless I manage to lie down first."
"Things are bound to settle down someday," Garric said as he held the door for Liane. A servant tried to take the little desk from her; she motioned him away peremptorily and stepped toward the adjacent building, throwing Garric a parting smile.
Garric shrugged out of his vermilion robe of state. Underneath he wore a tunic of thin wool rather than silk: wool felt right against his skin, because that's what he'd always worn. He settled on the bench, kicking off the silly-looking slippers of gilded leather that he had to wear with the heavy robe.
"Maybe things settle down for some people when they die," said his grinning ancestor. "Not for all of us, though."
And as Garric plunged into the darkness of sleep too long delayed, Carus added, "And besides, what would folk like you and me do if a miracle brought us peace, lad?
Cashel or-Kenset was learning to dance in the city fashion. It was a more stately business than what went on at weddings and harvest feasts in the borough.
"Oh, Lord Cashel, you are so masterful!" said his partner, Lady Besra bos-Balian — a woman Cashel had at first thought resembled his sister. Besra was as dark and petite as Ilna, but she lacked Ilna's principles, her loyalty, and her wit.
In particular, Besra didn't have enough wit to know that while Cashel wasn't smart the way his friends Garric and Sharina were, he wasn't nearly stupid enough to be taken in by Besra's act. She liked to call herself a girl, but Cashel guessed she must be at least thirty — and by the lines at the corners of her eyes beneath a layer of powdered chalk, they'd been hard years most of them.
"No, Lady Besra," Cashel said patiently. "I made a mistake. I swung left when I should've swung right."
He turned his head and nodded to the dance mistress, Lady Kusha. She was, well, ancient.
Lady Kusha had been a maid of honor, whatever that was, to the wife of the first King Valence, grandfather of the man now on the throne. She had black eyes and always wore garments of stiff black linen as though she'd just been widowed. Sharina said that in fact, Kusha had never married.
"Sorry, Lady Kusha," he said sincerely. "I'll get it right the next time."
"I'm sure you will, Master Cashel," Kusha said. "You have an instinct for the dance; it just needs to be tutored into the proper forms."
Unlike Besra and too many more of the people in Valles, Kusha never tried to flatter Cashel by addressing him as "lord." Cashel's father was a miller's son who'd drunk himself to death a few years after he'd come back to Barca's Hamlet with infant children and no wife to mother them.
False honor rubbed Cashel the wrong way, though he'd given up trying to train the Besras of this world out of using it. Cashel didn't set much store by nobility — he hadn't yet met a noble who was better at any of the things Cashel thought were important — but it bothered him to be given something that he knew he didn't have a right to.
There were three men in the marble-floored salon besides Cashel. Two were musicians playing a descant recorder and a kit violin, a tiny stringed instrument which was bowed instead of being plucked like the lutes Cashel was familiar with.
The third man was Lord Evlatun. All of Cashel's teachers seemed to be noble or claim to be, though they didn't have much besides the name and generally the attitude. Evlatun joined with Lady Kusha in measures which needed four dancers.
Evlatun was Besra's partner; whether the partnership was as formal as marriage, Cashel couldn't guess and didn't care. The blond, balding fellow smiled brightly whenever he saw Cashel looking at him, but the times Cashel had caught his unguarded expression, well ...
If Evlatun had been a snake, he'd have been poisonous. Cashel wouldn't have thought twice before breaking his back with a quarterstaff stroke.
There seemed to be a lot of people like that in Valles. Maybe it was just that the palace drew them, the way you found flies on a manure pile.
"You're the most graceful man I've ever danced with, Lord Cashel," Besra said. She laid her right hand on his biceps, sliding her fingers under the fringed sleeve of his embroidered tunic. It was a costume he had to wear for these sessions. Had to, because Sharina had to go through the same business and he didn't want to embarrass her.
Cashel turned slightly to rotate himself away from the woman. Evlatun watched, grinning like a man dying of lockjaw.
"Um," Cashel said. "We dance in Barca's Hamlet, it just isn't the same steps."
He was graceful, that he knew. Besra hadn't been the first person surprised at that, though. Cashel was big, so he moved carefully: big, strong men who aren't careful break things. He'd spent much of his life moving at the pace of sheep or a team of plow oxen, and he'd learned they get where they're going just as sure as more excitable animals do.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Servant of the Dragon by David Drake, David G. Hartwell. Copyright © 1999 David Drake. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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