“Assume, I must, that you overheard something that might of importance be?” Alberich prompted.
“Two men arguing,” Kimel replied. “And one of them was the Prince.” He coughed. “I knew about what happened this afternoon, and I guess he’d gone to someone to complain about it.” He frowned as he concentrated on what he was going to say. “I didn’t recognize the voice, but he got not much sympathy. In fact, the person he was talking to gave him a regular dressing-down about it. The man said that the Prince was on the verge of ’spoiling it all,’ though he didn’t say what ’it’ was.”
“Go on,” Alberich told him. Surely there was more to this story!
“Well, then the Prince said something about the unfairness of it all, and the other man told him to be patient, and that Selenay was—” here Kimel blushed, “—well, anyway, what he went on to say was ’once the child is born, there is no law preventing you from becoming Regent, when something happens to Selenay. All you have to do is to be patient.’ And the Prince muttered something, and the man laughed, and they all went out of the room.”
So. There it was. “You may have done Her Majesty a great service, Kimel,” Alberich said gravely.
“I am in a position to do more,” the young Guard replied, to Alberich’s surprise. “So long as I wear my uniform, and look as if I am guarding
“If you did, invaluable, it would be,” Alberich said, hardly able to believe the luck.
“Then I will.” That seemed to be all that Kimel felt urged to say on the matter; he remained a little longer, but not much, and excused himself.
19
Everyone knew the obvious that night—that the Prince had not attended the Queen at dinner. By morning, though, there was a better bit of gossip to take its place—that the Prince had not spent the night with the Queen, nor even (it was said) in the Palace.
By breakfast, that gossip had inflated further, with the addition that the Prince had returned at last, from somewhere outside the Palace walls. And he had gone to his own suite, not the Queen’s.
Valdemaran royal marriages, like most royal marriages, were not always for love. Hence, the Consort always had his (or her) own suite of rooms within the larger Royal Suite. It had its own entrance; the one who occupied it could come and go without disturbing the Monarch. It would not be the first time that the Monarch’s spouse had elected to take up residence in his own private space. The trouble was, this defection of the Prince would have gone unnoticed except that this was supposed to have been a love match. Selenay herself had virtually bullied the marriage through the Council. And now, it seemed, it was already falling apart.
So tongues were wagging from the first, and Alberich did not think it possible that Selenay was unaware of the gossip. She’d have to be blind and deaf, and she was neither. It made him sick inside to think how unhappy she must be, but there was little he could do about it.
She was paying a heavy price for her infatuation; this was going to be a very expensive lesson in thinking things through. However unhappy the Prince was with his wife and his situation, Alberich doubted that Karathanelan was going to relinquish what he
No, unless the Prince actually committed an overt act of treason, Selenay was stuck with her bad bargain. And if she was unhappy now, when the last of the infatuation wore off, she was going to be even less happy.
Alberich wished there was something he could do, but he knew that, in this case, there really was nothing. He was entirely the wrong person for her to confide in on two counts. First, the task required someone who was a close friend, which he was not—someone, perhaps, that was Selenay’s yearmate at the Collegium. Second, his sex was against him; he knew instinctively that to become a confidant and adviser in this situation, a man just would not do.
Which, unfortunately, left Talamir out of the running as well. Perhaps she was confiding in her Companion; perhaps at this point Caryo was about the only one she could confide in. He hoped that Caryo was wise enough to
