Lanius sighed and shook his head. Who but another archivist could possibly appreciate what an archivist did? Not even Anser really understood it. He’d come because he liked Ixoreus. But then, he liked everybody, just as much as everybody liked him, so how much did that prove?
On the way back to the palace, one of the guardsmen asked, “Your Majesty, what’s the point of even keeping old parchments, let alone going through them?”
By the way he said it, he plainly expected the king to have no good answer for him. Several of the other guards craned their necks toward Lanius to hear what he would say. The last thing he wanted was to seem a fool in front of them. He thought for several paces before asking a question of his own. “Do you read and write, Carbo?”
“Me, Your Majesty?” Carbo laughed. “Not likely!”
“All right. Have you ever gotten into an argument with the paymaster about what he gives you every fortnight?” Lanius asked. To his relief, Carbo nodded at that. Lanius said, “You know how he settled things, then. He went through the parchments that said how much pay you get and when you got it last. That’s what the archives are—they’re like the pay records for the whole kingdom, as far back as anybody can remember. No matter what kind of question you ask about how things were a long time ago, the answer’s in there—if the mice haven’t chewed up the parchment where it was hiding.”
“But why would you care about what happened before anybody who’s alive now was born?” Carbo asked.
“So in case the kingdom gets into a kind of trouble it’s seen before, I’ll know how it fixed things a long time ago,” Lanius answered. Carbo could see that that made sense. But no matter how much sense it made, it was only part of the truth. The main reasons Lanius liked to go exploring in the archives were that he was interested in the past for its own sake and that people hardly ever bothered him while he was poking through old parchments.
And Carbo didn’t bother him the rest of the way back to the palace.
Three Chernagors stood nervously before King Grus. They’d escaped from Nishevatz with a rope they’d let down from the wall. All three were hollow-cheeked and scrawny. Through Beloyuz, Grus asked them, “How bad off for food is Nishevatz?”
They all tried to talk at once. Beloyuz pointed to the man in the middle, the tallest of the three. He spewed forth a mouthful of gutturals. “He says the city is hungry,” Beloyuz told Grus. “He says to look at him, to look at these fellows with him. He says they were strapping men when this siege started, They might as well be ghosts now, he says.”
They were, to Grus’ eye, rather substantial ghosts even now. The king asked, “How hard will the Chernagors fight if we attack them?”
Again, all three talked at once. This time, they began to argue. Beloyuz said, “One of them says Vasilko’s men will strike a blow or two for appearance’s sake and then give up. The others say they will fight hard.”
“I heard Prince Vsevolods name in there,” Grus said. “What did they say about him?”
Vsevolods name in Grus’ mouth was plenty to start the Chernagors talking. Whatever they said, it sounded impassioned. Beloyuz let them go on for a while before observing, “They do not think well of His Highness, Your Majesty.”
“I would have guessed that,” Grus said—an understatement, if anything. “But what do they think of fighting on the same side as the Banished One?”
When Beloyuz translated that into the Chernagor tongue, the three escapees began arguing again. Without a word of the language, Grus had no trouble figuring that out. One of them said something that touched a nerve, too, for Beloyuz shouted angrily at him. He shouted back. Before long, all four Chernagors were yelling at the top of their lungs.
“What do they say?” Grus asked. Beloyuz paid him no attention. “What do they say?” he asked again. Still no response.
For a heartbeat, he didn’t think even that would remind Beloyuz he was there. Then, reluctantly, the noble broke away from the other Chernagors. “They say vile things, insulting things, Your Majesty,” he said, his voice full of indignation. “One of them, the vile dog, says better the Banished One than Vsevolod. You ought to burn a man who says things like that.”
“No, the Banished One burns men who don’t agree with him, burns them or makes them into thralls,” Grus said. “They will be free of a bad master once he is gone from Nishevatz. Tell them that, Beloyuz.”
The nobleman spoke. The Chernagors who’d escaped from the besieged city spoke, too. Beloyuz scowled. Reluctantly, he turned back to the king and returned to Avornan. “They say Nishevatz will be free of one bad master, but it will have another one if Vsevolod takes it.”
Grus muttered to himself. He’d known the people of Nishevatz disliked Prince Vsevolod. He could hardly have helped knowing it. But somehow he had managed to avoid realizing how much they despised Vsevolod. If they thought him no different from the Banished One… If they thought that, no wonder they put up with Vasilko even if he followed the exiled god.
“Send them away,” Grus told Beloyuz, pointing to the men who had come out of Nishevatz. “Feed them. Keep them under guard. Then come back to me.”
“Just as you say, Your Majesty, so shall it be.” Beloyuz went off with the other three Chernagors. When he returned a few minutes later, curiosity filled his features. “What do you want, Your Majesty?”
“How would you like to be Prince of Nishevatz once we take the place?” Grus came straight out with what he had in mind.
Beloyuz stared. “You ask me to… to betray my prince?”
“No,” Grus said.
“I think you use this for an excuse to do what you want to do anyhow because you do not like Prince Vsevolod,” Beloyuz said. “You ask me to betray my prince, when I went into exile for him.”
That set Grus to muttering again. Beloyuz was right—he didn’t like Vsevolod. By all appearances, next to nobody could stand Vsevolod. The three Chernagors who’d gotten out of Nishevatz had had no use for him. From what they’d said, the rest of the people on the walls and behind them felt the same way. It was just Grus’ luck to want to replace the unpleasant exiled Prince of Nishevatz with one of the few men who actually thought well of him.
With a sigh, the king said, “Well, Your Excellency, I won’t ask you to do anything that goes against your conscience. Still, you ought to think about what’s best for you and what’s best for Nishevatz.”
“What is best for Nishevatz is Prince Vsevolod. What is best for me is Prince Vsevolod.” Beloyuz bowed and strode off.
What Grus muttered this time made two or three of his guardsmen gape. He’d said worse while a river- galley captain, but not since taking the crown. He knew what would happen next, too. Beloyuz would tell Vsevolod about the usurpation he’d tried to arrange, and Vsevolod would throw a fit. Grus’ head started to ache just thinking about that.
But Vsevolod didn’t come to bother him. Day followed day, and the King of Avornis didn’t meet the Prince of Nishevatz. He didn’t ask where Vsevolod was or what he was doing, either. He didn’t care.
Then one of the Avornans who guarded Vsevolod and his followers came to Grus and said, “Your Majesty, I think you’d better go see the prince.”
“Why?” Even to himself, Grus sounded like a boy told to take a bath he didn’t want.
“He’s… not well,” the guard answered.
“Oh.” Grus made a sour face. “All right, in that case.”
When he went to Vsevolod’s tent, he went with two squads of his own guardsmen. He assumed Beloyuz would have told the other Chernagors who’d left Nishevatz with Vsevolod about his proposal. He also assumed they wouldn’t like the idea, and wouldn’t like him on account of it.
Beloyuz saw him coming, and walked up to greet him with three or four other refugee Chernagor noblemen.
