Exile's Valor

Alberich was—nor were Keren or Myste. They might be able to feign the adoration, but the kind of ladies that Norris kept company with were the sort that made men turn in the street and stare after them.

Not surprisingly, no few of them were ladies of negotiable virtue, but the price they placed on their services was very, very high. They were nothing like the common whores of the Exile’s Gate neighborhood. And Alberich could not make up his mind if Norris was paying for their company, or getting it on the basis of his reputation, popularity, stunningly handsome face, and muscular body. If he was paying for it—where was a mere actor getting the money? On the other hand, someone who looked like Norris did generally had women fawning on him, and Alberich saw no reason to suppose that expensive courtesans were any less likely to fawn than supposedly “honest” women.

Thanks to Norris’ face and flamboyant style, the troupe was certainly prospering, as was the inn to which they were attached. They didn’t even have to give plays every day for the public anymore. Once every two days, the courtyard was packed with spectators for one of the repertoire of plays they put on, and it certainly wasn’t because of the high literary standards of the things. Moving to that tent on the riverbank during the Festival had been a shrewd move—putting on their play there spread their reputation to the entire city, and the city evidently followed them back to their home ground when the Festival was over. Norris even was beginning to get something of a following among the highborn of the Court—while the plays they put on for the public were hardly great literature, evidently they had in their repertoire a number of classical works, and the troupe had been hired to give private performances at least twice now. There would, without a doubt, be more of those, though how lucrative they were in contrast to the public performances, Alberich had no way of telling.

Which created another problem. It seemed to Alberich that Norris was living somewhat beyond his means, but without getting close to the man, there was no way to know that for certain. He didn’t know how Norris was paid, or if, now that he had a bit of a following among the highborn, he was getting gifts or patronage.

If so, then young Devlin would have the perfect excuse to add to that patronage, and even visit the actor openly. So Alberich still did not know what was being exchanged, whether or not it mattered to the Crown, nor how dangerous it was, and at the moment he had no way of finding these things out.

And there was another thing that worried him, that had nothing to do with the Devlin problem. It seemed to him that Selenay was not looking entirely well. It wasn’t that she looked ill, exactly, but that she looked far more subdued than he liked. It was the death of her father, of course; it couldn’t be anything else. The Festival had been an all-too-brief diversion from her grief, he suspected. He wished he could do something for her, but the honest truth was that he was completely unsuited to that sort of task. All he could do was what he was good at, and let others—Talamir, who was, after all, Queen’s Own—do their job without any interference.

Assuming that the Hurlee players didn’t drive him utterly mad before spring.

***

“The problem is,” Myste said, over a good slice of beef in the Bell, “you don’t understand the sports-minded.” Both of them were in disguise; he as a middling craftsman, she in some of her old garb from her previous life, including the spectacles she had worn then, lenses held in frames of wire. This was the first time he had brought Myste down into Haven to try out her disguise, but it was more for his benefit than for hers. He wanted to look like an ordinary craftsman in the audience at the Three Sheaves, and if he didn’t have to talk, he stood a better chance of passing as Valdemaran.

“The bloody-minded, not the sports-minded,” he muttered under his breath, then said, louder. “And you do?” It seemed unlikely. Bespectacled Myste held as much aloof from the Hurlee madness as he did, as far as he could tell.

“As a matter of fact,” she retorted, “I do. I was raised here, in an ordinary family, and not in a Cadet School. People with a bit of leisure time. Ordinary folk like sport, even if they don’t play a game, or at least, don’t play it well. That’s why they like to cheer on those who do.”

“That, I do not understand, at all,” he admitted, reluctantly.

She sniffed. “You ought to. It’s part of what makes it easy for a sufficiently unscrupulous leader to get his people involved in a needless war. Look, it’s like this, as I reckon it. People like to be in groups, on one side, so they can tell themselves that their side is better than the other. They can get the excitement and the thrill of being worked up about just how much better they are than the other side is. And when they’re in a group doing that, then the excitement is doubled just because everyone else is doing the same.”

“That, I understand,” he said darkly. “So you are saying that being sports-minded, a little like being in a war is?”

“Without the bloodshed,” she replied, and sighed. “Without the consequences. People like competition, but at the same time, they like cooperation almost as much. With something like Hurlee, you get to either be on a team, or for a team, and you get cooperation, like being in a special tribe. But then, your team goes against someone else’s team, and there’s your competition. It satisfies a whole lot of cravings all at once. It’s like a bloodless war, and then you get to go out and buy each other beer afterward, and you get cooperation all over again.”

He shrugged. It made sense, he supposed. He thought about how he had been shouting at the end of the last skating-race, along with everyone else. If even he could get caught up in a sport to that extent, then what Myste said made sense.

And there wasn’t any warfare going on. People who had been used to living with a conflict and an enemy now found themselves with nothing of the sort. Maybe those who had actually fought were perfectly comfortable without having an enemy, but those who hadn’t—particularly all those youngsters—might be