“And what do you make of our Master Zhevons, Tobys?”
“Seems a capable sort, My Lord,” Raimair replied. “Never heard as how the boy-Prince Daivyn, I mean-was all that fond of wyvern hunting, howsome ever.”
“That’s because he wasn’t… and isn’t,” Coris murmured.
“You don’t say?” Raimair observed. “Now that makes a man feel just a mite suspicious, especially arriving all unannounced this way, doesn’t it just?”
“Perhaps, but Master Zhevons says Captain Harys got them as far as Tarot,” Coris said, lifting his eyes to Raimair’s face. “Of course, by this time it’s entirely possible someone’s figured out how we got here from Corisande, so the fact that Zhevons claims he knows Harys doesn’t necessarily prove anything. It does strike me as an indicator in its favor, though. And then there’s this.”
He pulled out the (already opened) envelope which had accompanied the traveling cage. It contained a sheaf of correspondence, and the earl extracted the letters and showed them to Raimair.
“I recognize the handwriting-both Earl Anvil Rock’s and his secretary’s,” he pointed out.
He looked down at them for a moment, then shrugged and walked across to his bookcase. He ran his finger down the spines of the shelved books until he found the one he wanted, then took it from the shelf, sat down at his desk, and unfolded Anvil Rock’s letter to Daivyn. The chapter and verse notations Anvil Rock had included in his letter were exactly the sort to which a considerably older kinsman and a regent might want to direct a youthful charge’s attention, especially if they had no opportunity for personal contact with the boy. A little somber and weighty for a lad Daivyn’s age, perhaps, but the boy was the legitimate ruler of an entire princedom. Something a bit more serious than the sorts of verses most children memorized for catechism might well be in order, given those circumstances.
Coris wasn’t particularly interested in looking up the passages indicated to check their content, however. Instead, he was turning pages in the cheap novel (printed in Manchyr) he’d taken from the shelf, selecting page numbers, then lines down the page, then words in the lines. Langhorne 6:21-9, for example, directed him to the sixth page, the twenty-first line, and the ninth word. He tracked down each passage’s indicated words, jotting each of them down quickly on a sheet of paper. Then he sat gazing at the sheet for a moment, frowning, before he dropped it into the fire on his sitting room’s hearth, stood, and crossed to the traveling cage. Its gilded bars were topped with ornamental finials, and he counted quickly around them from left to right until he got to the thirteenth. He gripped it, careful to keep his fingers out of reach of the wyverns’ saw-toothed beaks, and twisted, but it wouldn’t budge.
“You’ve got stronger wrists than I do, Tobys,” he said wryly. “See if you can get this thing to screw off. It turns clock-wise to loosen, not counter-clockwise.”
Raimahn raised an eyebrow, then reached out. His powerful hand closed on the finial and he grunted with effort. For a moment, nothing happened; then it yielded. Once it started turning, it went on turning easily until he’d screwed it completely off, revealing that the bar was hollow and contained two or three tightly rolled sheets of paper.
“Well, well, well,” Coris murmured, reaching in and extracting the sheets.
He unrolled them and began to read, then stopped abruptly. His eyes widened in shock, and he looked quickly at Raimahn.
“My Lord?” the guardsman asked quickly.
“It’s… just not from who I thought it would be from,” Coris said.
“Is it bad news, then, My Lord?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.” Coris managed a smile, beginning to come back on balance with the practice of decades as a spymaster. It was, he admitted to himself, rather harder this time than it had ever been before, however. “ Unexpected news, yes, but not bad. At least, I don’t think so.”
He looked back down at the note, trying to wrap his mind around all it implied. The handwriting in the correspondence was definitely Anvil Rock’s, but if the note in his hand was to be believed, Anvil Rock had never written it. Never even seen it, although exactly how the man who had written it-and had the sheer audacity to personally deliver it to Talkyra-had managed to forge the correspondence so perfectly and gained access to the code book Anvil Rock and Coris had arranged so long ago were certainly… interesting questions.
“Earl Coris,” it began, “First, I beg your pardon for a slight deception on my part. Two of them, to be more accurate. First, I’ve never actually met Captain Harys, I’m afraid, nor has any portion of Prince Daivyn’s ‘gift’ ever been within a thousand leagues of Corisande. And, second, I’m afraid my name isn’t actually Ahbraim Zhevons. It serves me well enough when needed, however, and while I’m aware you’ve never heard of me, I’m an associate of someone I’m certain you have heard of: Merlin Athrawes. I do the occasional odd job for Seijin Merlin when it would be impolitic for him to handle them himself, and he asked me to deliver these wyverns to you as a gift from Earl Gray Harbor. I’m sure you’ve noticed they’re a bit larger than most messenger wyverns, and there’s a reason for that. You see-” . II.
Tellesberg Palace and Tellesberg Cathedral, City of Tellesberg, Kingdom of Old Charis
“God, it’s good to be home! ” Sharleyan Ahrmahk sighed, curling up against her husband’s side and resting her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes, feeling as if she were expanding the pores of her skin to absorb the gentle night breeze breathing through the bedchamber’s open windows. Exotic insects she hadn’t heard in too many months sang in the moon-silvered darkness, the brilliant stars of the southern hemisphere hung overhead like ornaments from some cosmic glassblower, and the part of her which had been missing for far too long was back beside her.
“So Tellesberg is ‘home’ now, is it?” Cayleb teased gently, and she nodded.
“At the moment, at least.” She raised her head long enough to kiss him on the cheek, then snuggled back down and wrapped one arm around his chest, all without ever opening her eyes again. “Don’t let this go to your head, but home is wherever you are.”
His own arm tightened around her and he pressed his cheek against the top of her head, inhaling the sweet scent of her hair and savoring its silken texture.
“Works both ways,” he told her. “Except, for me, home is wherever you and Alahnah are.”
“Correction accepted, Your Majesty.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
Sharleyan giggled.
“What’s so funny?” Cayleb demanded. “You’ve got something against formality and courtesy?”
“Under most circumstances, no, I don’t. But under these…”
Her hand slid down under the light thistle silk sheet covering them to the waist, and Cayleb smiled.
“Courtesy is never wasted,” he informed her. “I’m courteous to every naked lady I find in my bed. In fact-”
He broke off with a sudden twitch, and she raised her head from his shoulder to smile sweetly at him.
“I’d consider my next sentence very carefully if I were you,” she said.
“Actually, my brain doesn’t seem to be working very well at the moment,” he replied, scooping her up and draping her diagonally across his body while he smiled up into her eyes. “I think this may be one of those moments when silence is golden.”
The mood was rather different as the two of them headed for the council chamber they used as a working office whenever both of them happened to be in Tellesberg at the same time.
Not the most exacting of their subjects-and not even the two of them, for that matter-could have demanded they give themselves over to official business the day before. Not after that same “official business” had separated the two of them for over four months. HMS Dawn Star ’s arrival in Tellesberg on yesterday afternoon’s tide had been greeted even more tumultuously than Cayleb’s return from Chisholm. In some ways, the citizens of Old Charis had taken Sharleyan even more deeply to their hearts than Cayleb. They loved both of them, but they adored her, which (as Cayleb put it) indicated the soundness of their taste. And like the majority of their subjects, Charisian and Chisholmian alike, the citizens of Tellesberg were entranced by the deep and obvious love between the handsome young king and beautiful young queen who had married for reasons of state. Half the city had crowded the waterfront to watch Dawn Star being nudged gently up against the Royal Quay’s pilings, and they’d seen Emperor
