Exile's Valor

Alberich sighed. It had been a long shot, of course. He’d hoped that somehow the secret instructions from Norris to the Prince would have some link to the unknown patron. But—no luck, it seemed. Whoever the patron was, Norris had not been thinking of him when he’d been writing the Prince’s “scripts.”

“My thanks, regardless, Mical,” he said. He saw Mical glancing with longing at the door, and he found a bit of sympathy for the boy. It was the first fine day in—well, since autumn. And Mical, no longer under punishment-duty, was probably afire to be out in it. “Go along—”

He hadn’t so much as gotten the words out when Mical was out the door like a shot.

“Frustrating,” said Myste redundantly. “We’ve got one end of the path—Norris to Karath. We have the other, Devlin to Norris. But we still don’t have the so-called ’patron’ who links it all into a neat circle.”

“Nor will we,” Alberich said with grim certainty. “I believe it was the same person who was paying for unrest against the Queen earlier. I even believe it was the same person who was selling information out of the Council during the Wars. And I have my suspicions who that person is. Unfortunately, I do not have a shred of proof. He is too clever at covering his tracks and hiding his identity. He is probably in disguise most of the time when he deals with underlings.”

This “certainty” was not true Foresight, but it came with the scent of Foresight on it. He would have liked to confide his suspicions to someone who had some other Gift that might be used to spy upon this person, but unfortunately, the suspicion was so wild that he knew that even the Heralds would have stared at him with incredulity.

Yes, even Talamir. Even Myste.

Even, perhaps, most of the Companions.

:But not me,: said Kantor, with equal certainty. :So you and I will watch and wait and bide our time—quietly. We’ll catch him eventually.:

“So all we can do is keep a guard on Selenay?” Myste asked mournfully.

“It seems so,” he replied. She sighed.

:I wish I could tell her,: he said to his Companion.

:You can when it’s over,: Kantor replied. :You’re used to keeping secrets.:

And that, alas, was only too true.

It was just too bad that Selenay had not realized that little fact before all of this had begun, and had confided in him rather than—well—whoever she had, who had been so poor at keeping them.

***

Selenay tried to concentrate on the reports in front of her, but her eyes kept drifting to the window, and her thoughts drifting off into nothingness. It was only two moons since the baby’s birth. Two moons. Spring was just beginning outside those windows, and she was stuck inside. And when she managed to wrench her eyes and her thoughts back to the job at hand, an angry wail from the next room cut across her concentration and she winced, and shoved down the surge of angry irritation that made her want to go into the nursery and put a pillow over baby Elspeth’s face—

And immediately, she felt sick with guilt.

—horrible thought. She was a horrible mother. How could she think such things about the baby? She should have been all moony-eyed and willing to bear with anything. She should be longing to hold Elspeth, to cradle her for hours and hours, she should be spending every waking moment hovering over the cradle, gazing down at the little mite with adoration.

Instead, she had thoughts of wanting to smother the poor thing. She was unfit to be a mother. She should never have had a child. . . .

:That’s not a child,: Caryo said testily. :It’s a stomach with a warhorn attached to one end, and a mechanism that produces more excrement than a full-grown cow attached to the other.:

Selenay was glad that there wasn’t anyone in the room to see her as she choked on a laugh. There was some truth to that, though Selenay herself seldom had to attend to the latter. Still. The former—

Elspeth’s wails scaled up a notch. Selenay’s own nurse, old Melidy, was in charge of the nursery, but she seemed to have her hands full with Elspeth, who had an awfully robust set of lungs for something so small, and the need to demand attention constantly.