The Lady: wealth, fertility, peace.
To Prince Edoran’s astonishment, Ron the fisherboy lingered on—perhaps because when he returned to the city he took a piece of Caerfalas with him.
“It’s only a common sweater.” Moll had looked nervous, saying her farewells in front of the general who commanded Deorthas’ army. “But we knitted in your name, as well as the pattern for Caerfalas. It’s got Togger and my family pattern, too, with a band to show that you’re… adopted, in a sense. Once we realized you were worth adopting into the family, you see.”
Laughter crinkled the corners of her eyes. She was nervous of General Diccon, but not of him. And she said nothing about the name in the sweater being “Ron” and not Edoran, though she added, “I suppose, being a prince and all, you’ll not have much need of it.”
Edoran, who was still wearing his fishing clothes, stripped off the guest sweater and pulled on the one she held out to him. He could tell by looking at the general’s hunched shoulders that his sweater cut the cold spring wind better than Diccon’s fancy jacket.
He also knew how long it took to knit one of these, and how little free time Moll had had in the past few days. She must have started it shortly after the fishing fleet set sail, and Edoran had to swallow down the lump in his throat in order to reply.
“This prince has developed a taste for sailing. I’ll wear it every time I set foot on a deck, and it will keep me warm and safe.”
He’d recognized some of the old gods’ sigils that were knitted in, though there were others he didn’t recognize, and perhaps those were for… remembering? Being true to yourself? Maybe it was just the affection that came with the gift, but even as the familiar luxury of palace life closed in around him, Edoran found that Ron the fisherboy, far from dying, seemed to be showing up more and more often.
It was certainly Ron who was scratching his bare feet as he sat on Weasel’s bed, chatting with his friend, on the afternoon that Sandeman came to make his farewells.
Edoran sat up in alarm when he saw the man’s worn traveling clothes. “You’re leaving? So soon? How will I… Ah, have you had trouble with the courtiers?”
He’d introduced the Hidden priest to his court simply as “my welcome guest,” and there’d been so much else for them to gossip about that Edoran had thought the courtiers mostly ignored him.
“It’s not that,” said Sandeman. “Everything here is fine. You’ll do perfectly well without me—although you’ll be happier if you try for some control, instead of scratching your feet raw.”
Edoran blushed. He knew that the itching in the soles of his feet was really the beginning of a crop blight, in the winter wheat fields south of Westerfen. He’d already sent a message warning the farmers about the threat to their crops, but the wheat had to reach a certain stage in its development before it could be dusted with the powder that would kill the blight. Both the university chemists who’d created the powder and the farmers who’d used it in previous years had told him that. So until the wheat grew to the right height, he had to either suffer the itch or exercise the mental controls Sandeman had taught him.
That was becoming easier, and Edoran knew that eventually it would be something he could do without even thinking about it—but for now, unless he concentrated on handling the sensation, his feet itched. And the itch was beginning to spread up his ankles.
He focused now, finding the source of the irritation, which was not in his feet but in his sensing, and firmly shutting it… not down, but away. Locked in a mental box, until he had need to check on the situation.
The itching vanished, and Edoran pulled on his stockings, feeling that was more dignified for a serious discussion.
“If everything’s fine, why are you going?” he asked.
“In a sense, it’s because everything’s fine,” Sandeman said. “If I’m about to become the head of a legal church—legal for the first time in centuries!—I’d better start organizing. It feels odd, after all this time, to step into the light.”
Some of that light was already in his face, and Edoran sighed. “I suppose you must.”
That would teach him to pick men of true faith for his advisers.
“You know,” said Weasel critically, “you could have wiped that mud on his forehead when you first met and saved us a lot of trouble. Or better yet, when you and I first met! It might have… A lot of things might have been different.”
They all knew what he meant. Miraculously, Arisa didn’t blame any of them for her mother’s death, not even Edoran, but she still grieved. It was hard to watch, though Edoran’s sensing told him she would heal eventually—and that the scars left by her mother’s dishonor would be deeper than those left by her death. Those same scars would keep Arisa from ever following her mother’s path. But it was just as well she wasn’t encountering any of the courtiers these days.
She spent most of her time with Yallin, the Hidden’s seamstressspy, and the old woman’s company seemed to be doing her some good.
And Yallin showed no sign of going anywhere, so Edoran would have someone to go to when his unfamiliar gift baffled him.
But Sandeman was finally answering Weasel’s complaint.
“I couldn’t do anything when we first met, my boy, or even when Edoran and I first met, because at that time none of you had become what you needed to be.”
Weasel frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Sandeman had already explained it to Edoran, but Edoran had understood the heart of the matter since that moment on the beach.
Now the Hidden priest sighed. “It was Deor’s death that forged the crown of earth, the link between any of his descendants who would become king and the whole land of Deorthas. The teachers of that time feared the link would grow weaker as the generations passed.”
“It didn’t,” said Edoran dryly.
Sandeman laughed, curse him. “I think that although it took Deor’s death to create the link, somehow those old teachers managed to fuel it with the withe that exists in every living thing, to keep its power always fresh. Though some of the other teachers disagree about the power’s source. We’re still arguing about it.”
His eyes twinkled, and Weasel snorted.
“But however it was fueled, the crown was forged,” Sandeman went on. “And King Brent, who first experienced it, was even more shocked and baffled than you were.”
“I doubt that,” Edoran said.
“He was angry about it,” Sandeman told them. “According to our histories he hated the gods for what he saw as a curse, and for his father’s death. So the gods granted him one final gift.”
“The sword and shield,” Weasel put in. “Which weren’t actually a sword and shield, but his two chief advisers.”
Sandeman shook his head. “Not exactly. What the gods gave Brent, and his heirs, was the ability to recognize the right people to fill those jobs.”
That part of the story had traveled across the realm with a speed that made Edoran suspect magic—certainly no horse could have moved that fast. In the countryside, a startling number of people remembered enough to understand what it meant when the king claimed the sword and shield. The populace of the city neither understood nor cared, but that was a problem for the future. Edoran had enough troubles right now.
“Neither the sword nor the shield is infallible,” Sandeman went on. “Their advice isn’t divinely inspired. Sometimes they’ll disagree with each other. And kings have been known to go against their advice as well. Look at the woman Regalis’ father married.”
“You mean even with Weasel and Arisa’s advice, I can still screw up?” Edoran asked. “Wonderful.”
Weasel looked interested. “So Regalis really was someone else’s son? You can prove it?”
Sandeman grimaced. “I don’t have documents, or anything like that, but it was proven to our teachers’ satisfaction, because… You have to understand, more than a thousand years had passed since Deor and Brend, and certain traditions had been developed by both our faith and the royal family. The most important was that our teachers had realized that the moment when an heir claimed the sword and shield marked the moment he was ready to receive the crown of earth. It wasn’t any set age, though I think all of them were at least in their teens when they recognized their sword and shield. And that didn’t always happen at the same time, either. Sometimes an heir would claim one or the other, but wait for years till he could… well, complete the set. In those first centuries, the noble families would fight, sometimes even kill, to get their kinsmen into a position where a prince might choose them.”
“Like shareholders sending their daughters to court,” said Edoran, growing interested himself. He hadn’t heard this part of it before.
“Like that in some ways, but a lot less civilized,” Sandeman told him. “Those were violent times. The idea of one king ruling the whole realm was still a new one—and not entirely popular. Anyway, over time the teachers decided that only when an heir had claimed both sword and shield would he be given the crown. Sometimes that didn’t happen till after he’d inherited the throne, so it soon became a private ceremony.
“The country folk all remembered what it meant, but with the rise of the narrow god’s church—which performed the official ceremony when a new king took the throne—the city people soon forgot that another ceremony even existed. And the kings themselves developed… a family tradition, call it. They’d tell their sons about the crown of earth, but they wouldn’t tell them what they had to do to get it. The claiming of the sword and shield, which sooner or later all descendants of Brend’s blood would accomplish, was considered the final confirmation that this was an heir of the true blood.”
“And Regalis never claimed the sword and shield?” Edoran asked. “That’s how you knew he wasn’t the king’s son?”
“Oh, he claimed the sword and shield, loudly and repeatedly,” Sandeman told them. “But he never claimed the people the sword and shield represented.”
“I’m surprised some courtier didn’t tip him off to the truth, in exchange for being chosen,” Weasel said cynically. “Or the servants. Surely some of them came from the country.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Edoran. “Servants and courtiers… they’re not really…”
“Regalis surrounded himself with people who thought like he did,” Sandeman said. “And the private ceremony… Perhaps it was because when the heirs were given the crown they tended to vomit, or faint, or fall over”—he nodded to Edoran—“but the private ceremony had become very private. A lot of nobles didn’t know what claiming the sword and shield entailed, and some didn’t believe the gods’ gifts were real, even though their king demonstrated them all the time. They thought he had ‘good sources of information’ or some such thing.”
“So with Regalis, the line of Deor’s descendants was broken,” Edoran said. “And none of his heirs knew the truth.”
“And the old faith had been outlawed,” said Sandeman. “In part for pointing out to those who did remember that this king was not of the true blood.”
“So in a way,” said Weasel, “you’re responsible for all the problems between the city and the countryside yourselves.”
Sandeman scowled. “That’s a vast oversimplification! And Regalis was a false king. It was our duty to…”
Weasel’s overly innocent expression gave the game away, and Sandeman stopped, the scowl fading. “All right, you got me going. Perhaps some of it was our fault, though mostly it was the drought, taxes, and Regalis’ own preference for… for regarding the country as something that existed only to produce food for the important people. The important people, in his mind, being nobles and the craftsmen who produced their luxuries. So it all fell apart. And there was no heir of Deor’s blood to put it back together… until now.”
Edoran, feeling that heavy burden descending on his shoulders, grimaced. “So my father wasn’t descended from Deor?” His father had suspected that himself, writing about it in his journals, but Edoran had always hoped…
“No. He was a good man,” Sandeman said. “He might have been a good king. Several of Regalis’ descendants were both those things. But Deor’s blood came to you through your mother’s family.”
“You told me that your father was doing genealogical research when he met her, didn’t you?” Weasel asked.
Edoran nodded. He barely remembered his mother, but his father…
“He was a good man,” the Hidden priest repeated. “He did his best. Let the rest of it go.”
“So when did you realize you had a true heir again?” Weasel asked.
“When he claimed the sword and shield,” Sandeman replied. “Right in the middle of what was about to turn into a pitched battle, between a mob of pirates and a group of guardsmen they outnumbered three to one! I’m not sure,” he added thoughtfully, “but I think that was the worst moment for a claiming in the entire history of the realm.”
“Had I been warned,” said Edoran with dignity, “I might have done it sooner. Under better circumstances. And Arisa’s mother might still be alive.”
Or executed for treason. Or in prison. Or still in a position of power, plotting to murder her way to the throne.
“Don’t you understand yet?” Sandeman’s voice was oddly gentle. “You couldn’t have chosen them earlier. They hadn’t yet become what they needed to be, in order to be the sword and shield you needed. When you first met him, Weasel was a small-souled pickpocket—”
“Ex-pickpocket,” Weasel inserted.
“—whose primary goal in life was to become a forger. And Arisa,” the priest went on, “was in a fair way to becoming the kind of fanatic that no sane person wants in charge of their military. As for you, ah…”
“As for me, I was the last person anyone would want on a throne,” said Edoran. “And I wouldn’t have recognized the true sword and shield if they’d bitten me on the ankle.”
He realized why that particular phrase had occurred to him, and scratched his ankle vigorously before banishing the sensation once more.
“None of this was guaranteed in the beginning,” Sandeman finished. “All we could do was keep an eye on the three of you and pray you’d grow into what you had to be… without getting yourselves killed in the process. You made a pretty fair attempt at that,” he added.
“I was trying to keep everyone alive!” Weasel said indignantly.
Edoran regarded the Hidden priest thoughtfully. “I made a mess of things, didn’t I?”
“It was messy,” Sandeman admitted. “But you didn’t do too badly. All in all, I think you managed pretty well.”
Edoran snorted. “All I did was get rescued. Three times. I never rescued myself, not even once!”
“Maybe not,” Sandeman said. “But you did save Caerfalas’ boats. And whoever the pirates would have preyed on in the future. And you saved the whole realm from the Falcon’s schemes. That, my boy, is what kings are supposed to do. They have minions to rescue them, should they ever be so foolish as to need it. Again. Which would be really foolish.”
Because he wouldn’t be around to do it. “I won’t,” Edoran said. “Well, I’ll try not to. Before you go… would you lay the cards for me? For my future?”
If anything was about to go wrong, it would be nice to have warning.
Sandeman shook his head. “You can do that for yourself, should you need to,” he said. “Or Arisa can do it for you. But you already know what you’d see.”
He left then, closing the door behind him.
“That was cryptic,” Weasel grumbled.
But Edoran did know what he’d see if he laid the cards: the fool, with the storm to his left and the hanged man to his right.
He didn’t know everything. He didn’t know how people would react to the worship of the old gods being legal once more. He didn’t know what Weasel would do or say in the next minute.
But he knew that he needed to reroute the city sewers so they no longer emptied into the river; the bay was almost a desert already, empty not only of fish but of any kind of sea life. That odd fellow at the university, whom everyone ridiculed because he was obsessed with finding a way to turn sewage into clean fertilizer, wouldn’t be laughed at so much when he received full crown funding.
Yes, Edoran would need the scientists. He’d need the cooperation of the city workers, who’d embraced the church of the One God, as well… though something needed to be done about their working conditions.
The thought of facing down some angry manufactory owner made Edoran cringe, but that was the king’s job. And both Weasel and Arisa would be with him when he did it. With Weasel and Arisa at his side, anything was possible. Anything.
