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July, 355 M.E.
After a month, Edwin still wasn’t used to living in the Pradivani Palace. Its long, musty halls and dark cellars had seemed exciting at first. That had been his only comfort when they had arrived there, exhausted from their journey. He had looked around a little, while he was supposed to be resting, and he had said to himself, “This will be fun to explore.”
But the attics had nothing but cobwebs, and the long hallways only went to empty rooms with peeling walls and dead wasps on the windowsills. The cellars were a bit more interesting, but parts of them were damp and musty with rusted steel doors. Edwin worried he might get stuck down there by accident, so he stopped going there by himself.
He was trying very hard to think about the palace and all the wonderful new sights of Briddobad, because he didn’t want to remember those last few days at the Bocburg, right before they had left. Or the weeks on the run, when he had to sleep in the woods or in church crypts, and every time they heard hoofbeats, Elwyn and Uncle Lawrence would draw their swords and stand in front of him. He felt weak, stupid, and helpless whenever he thought about that frantic journey, so he tried his best not to think about it.
Sometimes he had nightmares where men in black surcoats found them in the woods, and they made him watch as they killed Elwyn and Uncle Lawrence. Or the boat sank as they were leaving the Bocburg, and he fell into the dark, cold waters of the Trahern and couldn’t swim, drifting down and down into the weeds and muck, surrounded by shipwrecks and skeletons. Or his mother and little sister Alice and Alice’s friend, Jennifer, were all arrested by the Gramirens and thrown into a dim and airless dungeon.
One night he woke up from one of these dreams to find his sister Elwyn standing over him with Lady Rada, the bodyguard assigned to their family by the Vizierate of Magy. Finding Elwyn there wasn’t much of a surprise. He had been sleeping on the settee in her room, rather than in his own bed, because she said she needed someone to protect her, and of course as a gentleman, he could never have said, “no.”
But seeing Lady Rada there was unusual. For the first few days she had been with them, right after they came over the border, she had been almost entirely silent. She would trade a word or two with Elwyn or Uncle Lawrence, as the need arose, but never with Edwin. In fact, she had sometimes looked at him with a stern, hard-eyed expression like he had done something bad to her personally.
After she found him having a nightmare, however, she became much nicer. She took him to his room and for a few nights, she sat up with him until he fell asleep.
“Your majesty must be missing your mother,” she said.
“Yes. She had to stay behind with Alice, so protecting Elwyn is my job.”
“I will protect both of you,” she said. “And your sister needs her sleep. She is having a hard time adjusting, as well.”
“She’s sad about Sir Alfred,” Edwin said.
“I know.” Lady Rada looked even more sympathetic than ever. “It’s very sad. I understand he was a fine man.”
Edwin could hardly believe Sir Alfred Estnor was dead. It didn’t seem possible. Alfred had been very nice and very friendly to everyone, and he was supposed to be the great hope of the Sigor dynasty. Or at least that was what Edwin’s mother had said.
Elwyn must be even more upset about Alfred’s death than Edwin was. Sometimes he saw Elwyn go into the garden and sit by herself on a bench in the back, where no one could come near without her seeing them first. He had an idea that she went there to cry, but whenever he tried to go over and sit with her, she would jump up and say, “Oh, Earstien, look at the time!” And then she would make Edwin go do some lessons in mathematics or Classical Immani.
One time, however, he found her over by the stables, and he managed to get close enough to hear her whisper, “She must have heard about Alfred. She must be coming to help.” Edwin had no idea who “she” was supposed to be, however, and when he asked, Elwyn practically dragged him back to the palace, where their uncle was supposed to be giving him a lesson in the Sahasran language.
Despite his best efforts, Edwin had a hard time focusing on his lessons, though. It wasn’t because he missed his mother, or because of his nightmares. It wasn’t even because he would have rather been at the famous Atherton school, where his mother and father and older sister had gone. Yes, he did want to go to Atherton when the usurper was defeated. But he had never seen the place, and he found it difficult to miss a place he had never been.
The reason he couldn’t concentrate on his lessons was because they had nothing to do with the subject foremost on his mind, which was how the usurper—Cousin Broderick—had managed to take over the country. Reading the poems of Claudius wouldn’t help Edwin figure out how his family had lost the war. Learning to conjugate Sahasran verbs wouldn’t help. Neither would math or history or Ivich theology, or any of the other topics his uncle tried to teach him in brief, random lessons.
More exiles who had supported the Sigor family were arriving in Briddobad every day, and at least once a week, Edwin had to go to a feast or a party where he met these people and nodded politely while they bowed low to him. They all told him how much they hated Cousin Broderick. They all said the usurper would be overthrown “any day now.” They all claimed that “everyone” hated the Gramirens.
But if that was the case, then how had Uncle Lawrence and Sir Alfred and the other Sigor commanders managed to lose? Clearly some people somewhere must have supported Cousin Broderick. Clearly he must be a great general, even if people said he had somehow “cheated” to win.
Edwin asked Sir Walter Davies, who had been an officer under poor Sir Alfred, to describe how the Siege of Leornian had happened. Edwin had been there, of course, and in theory he had been in command of all his troops. In practice, though, his uncle and his mother had rarely bothered to inform him of what they were doing.
So, with Sir Walter’s help, and a map of Leornian, borrowed from Uncle Lawrence, Edwin sat down at one of the big dining room trestle tables and tried to figure out how they had lost. Edwin brought a box of his toy soldiers, and he set them all out in the formations that Walter had described.
He tried different tactics and different concentrations of troops. He tried bold counterattacks. He tried simply sitting behind the walls and daring the enemy to attack. Every time he thought he had solved the problem and found a way his army could have won, Sir Walter would move the toy soldiers representing the Gramiren troops and gently say, “Unfortunately, your majesty, if we had done that, then the usurper would simply have done this.”
It looked very much as if they were bound to lose Leornian whatever they did. Mostly because Cousin Broderick had far more troops than the Sigors did. Which simply went to show that there were indeed lots of people who believed in Broderick and wanted him to be their king.
Edwin couldn’t help feeling personally rejected. Particularly since there were people who had fought on Broderick’s side like Flora Byrne, Duchess of Keneburg, who had always seemed like friends. Flora had been almost like a favorite aunt to Edwin and Elwyn. But when it came down to it, she had rejected them and helped Broderick.
Why had she done that? Why had anyone in Myrcia done that? What was so special about Cousin Broderick? Edwin had no idea, but he was determined to find out.
A few days after Edwin had started sleeping in his own room again, Uncle Lawrence brought a tailor to the Pradivani Palace to make new clothes for them all. The fellow was from Formacaster originally, and had come to Briddobad because he “couldn’t stand to live under a false king,” or so he said.
As the tailor took his measurements, Edwin got to talking with him. Edwin liked talking with people. They discussed Formacaster for a while—a city Edwin hadn’t seen in three years, but still remembered very well. They talked quite a bit about all the people the tailor had made clothes for over the years.
“I made hunting jackets for his late majesty, your majesty’s father,” said the tailor. “And for your majesty’s uncle, the late King Ethelred, too. And for his lordship, the Earl of Hyrne, your majesty’s other uncle, as well.”
Looking at himself in the mirror, Edwin asked casually, “Did you ever make any clothes for my Cousin Broderick?”
“For the blasted usurper? Yes, your majesty, though I wish I could say that I hadn’t. They say that clothes make the man, but no clothes could disguise a heart as black as his.”
“Um...yes, I suppose.” Edwin stood up straight and pushed his shoulders back, trying to make himself as large as possible in the mirror. “Do you happen to remember how tall he is?”
“H’m? How tall, your majesty? Oh, the usurper is a rather large man...which is in contrast to his dark, shriveled heart, of course.”
“Of course.” Edwin put his hands on his hips and tried to flex the muscles in his thin arms.
“As I recall, your majesty, the usurper is just an inch shy of six feet.”
Last time Edwin had measured himself, he had been a little over five feet tall.
“And the usurper’s chest and shoulders and arms are very large, your majesty. Much larger than one might expect, even in a tall man.”
Edwin remembered his Cousin Broderick being quite big. But the last time they had seen each other in person had been three years earlier, when Edwin had been 8, and virtually everyone in the world had seemed big to him.
He remembered, too, that people said Broderick was very handsome. So he asked the tailor about that.
“Ah, well, handsome is as handsome does, your majesty.”
“Really? What does it do, exactly?”
“What does what do, your majesty?”
“Being handsome. If handsome is as handsome does, then what does handsome do?”
The tailor frowned. “I’m...not precisely sure, your majesty. It’s just a saying.”
Edwin let the matter drop, because he was pretty sure what being tall and strong and handsome did—it made people like you and admire you and follow you into battle, even if you were a terrible human being under it all.
“And meanwhile, look at the alternative,” thought Edwin, deflating as he regarded himself in the mirror.
While the tailor went to measure Uncle Lawrence for a new coat, Edwin put on his old clothes and went into the garden. Elwyn was there with her bow and a quiver of arrows, but she seemed to have stopped her archery practice some time earlier, and was now sitting on a wall, staring sadly into a quiet pool full of water lilies.
She heard him approaching and looked up. With some effort, she managed to smile. “There you are. Have you finished with the tailor?”
“I suppose so.”
“What’s wrong?” She moved her bow so he could sit next to her on the wall.
He joined her and told her about his conversation with the tailor. “Is it wrong,” he said, “that I wish I were more like Cousin Broderick?”
“You shouldn’t wish for that,” she said.
“Why not? Everyone likes him.”
She let out a snort of laughter. “Are you joking? No one likes him. No one.”
“But then why does everyone support him?”
“People are fucking scared of him. That’s a long way from liking him.” She shifted so she was facing Edwin. “Listen, remember how his own son helped us escape from Formacaster?”
“Of course, but Young Broderick is different.”
“Yes, he’s a decent person. Think how bad a father you would have to be that your own son disobeys your orders and lets your most important captives escape.”
Edwin thought about that for a few moments. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Of course, it’s true. And you know what they say about his wife.”
“Cousin Muriel?” Edwin shivered. “I...I don’t like her.”
“Nobody likes her. Well, except the young men she’s always having affairs with. Think about that—Cousin Broderick’s own wife can’t stand him.”
“Oh. Oh, that’s sad.”
Elwyn smiled and gave him a quick hug. “That’s adorable that you feel bad for him.”
“That’s me,” Edwin sighed. “I’m adorable. He’s frightening.”
“You say it like being adorable is a bad thing. The people who know him best hate him. Meanwhile, the people who know you best all love you. Mother and Alice and Uncle Lawrence love you.” She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “And I love you, too, you great big twat. So cheer up!”
He smiled and submitted meekly to another tiny kiss.
“Go get your bow,” she said. “I’ll show you how to hit a moving target. And let’s just forget this business about wanting to be like Cousin Broderick.”
Edwin went and fetched his bow, and he spent most of the afternoon shooting at little barrels that Elwyn rolled across the lawn for targets. It was fun, and he nearly forgot about Cousin Broderick at all. At least until later, when the fun was over and he was alone with his schoolbooks again.
He believed Elwyn when she said she loved him. And he knew his mother and Alice and Uncle Lawrence loved him, too. But in the end, was that enough? It was nice to be loved—very nice, indeed. Did that make him a good king, though?
“I’d like to think that it does,” he thought. “But I’m afraid maybe it doesn’t.”