Exile's Valor

:As long as she doesn’t run in terror from my face,: he said dryly, :I doubt there is anything else about me that cows her. Underneath, that woman is someone that would appal people if they only knew her. There are things she will not compromise on. And things that she would kill over, if it came to that.:

Which was, of course, how she was getting away with purloining secrets out from under the very noses of the owners, and with their cooperation. At some point, perhaps in that last battle, Myste had found, or gotten, her courage. Now he doubted that anything could effectively stand in her way if she believed in or wanted something badly enough.

Like me—?

He sat firmly on that thought and crammed it back into the little mental cupboard it had come out of.

Back to business. :What do you Companions know about ciphers?: he asked. After all, better to cover all possible avenues with this one.

:Nothing much,: Kantor said with regret. :Nobody here at the Collegium for sure, and I think not anybody alive. Just because we’re good at Mindspeech doesn’t mean we’re good at everything. Working ciphers takes a particular kind of mind—the kind that can see patterns where the rest of us would see only chaos.:

Well, he’d had to ask. :Should I just leave all this to Talamir, then?:

:He knows more about who to trust in this than you do. I think I know who he’ll be taking the papers to, and no one is safer.:

Well, that was a dismissal if he had ever heard one. Time to stop worrying about that end of the situation, and think about the part he could do something about.

Such as discovering just who, besides young Lord Devlin, his contact in the Court, Norris was meeting.

12

It was spring, at long last, and the gardens were bursting with greenery and blossoms, as if to make up for last year’s sorrowful season. With every breeze, the ornamental cherries carpeted the ground beneath their boughs with pink and white petals; the air was full of a hundred different scents. Kingdom business be hanged; Selenay was going to walk in her gardens before the season ripened any further into summer.

So she told the Seneschal at their morning meeting over breakfast that she wanted him to shorten the usual afternoon audiences by half.

“If I stay within walls for much longer I’m going to shred something,” she said a little crossly, expecting him to object. “I’m tired of never seeing the sun except through windows, and I am exceedingly tired of hearing people whining. I would like to hear birds for a change, and if I must hear voices, I would prefer it to be the voices of people who are not complaining to me, at least for a candlemark or two.”

But he only nodded his graying head, and regarded her kindly. “If Your Majesty will recall,” he told her, “your father was exactly the same, in the spring.”

And now that he had reminded her, she did remember it, but not as a memory of him ordering shorter audiences, but as seeing him in the gardens every fine afternoon, and walking there with two or three friends in the evening, too. But she—

I was taking classes, or practicing, and he’d always done that, every spring, so it never struck me as odd, she decided. I didn’t know then that the business of government takes up so much time, and that he must have been stealing time from it for a little while.

Or perhaps, it wasn’t that he had been stealing time at all, though she would certainly have to, and the only place where she felt she could in good conscience take it was from the Audiences. Now that she thought about it, her father had definitely had more “leisure” time than she seemed to.

But then, he had been King for all of her life (obviously) so he’d had some practice at it. Maybe it would get easier as she went along; perhaps the more practiced she became, the less of her time it would take . . . perhaps, some day, she would have some candlemarks of leisure for herself.

She felt guilty; then decided that feeling guilty was stupid. If she was ready to rip someone’s throat out now, how would she be without taking some time, at last, for herself? A pox on that. Bridges were not going to fall down, nor buildings collapse, because she walked in her garden and played at games a little while with her ladies.

“Well, then schedule fewer petitioners for the foreseeable future,” she ordered, adding, “if you please.”