One Good Knight (26 page)

“At her orders,” Andie said, feeling dizzy, because she knew in her heart that Solon must be doing just that. Too many pieces were falling into place now for her to be able to pretend that the Queen was Solon's puppet. All the reports she had written. Line after line that had proved to her mother that her own daughter was too dangerous and too intelligent—

“And now I think I know why she wanted to be rid of me. I—I pointed this out to her. Told her how the weather was worsening and how the farmers and fishermen were suffering because of it. And I saw the records of the gleanings from the wrecks—they've easily doubled in the past decade. Easily.”

And she felt horrible. Because while things were hard for the farmers, herders, and fishermen, no one on shore had died.
But men had died in those wrecks.
Many men. And her mother knew that.

With a growing sense of horror she recalled the look on her mother's face whenever the tallies from wrecks were brought in.

Satisfaction.

Andie had dismissed that then, although it had made her uneasy. She could not dismiss it now. It had been bad enough to think that her mother felt satisfaction over something that had cost the deaths of innocent sailors and traders, but the Queen could perhaps be excused for not thinking of that at the time, and seeing only the revenue. They were not, after all,
her
sailors. She would not see the roster of the lost. No widows would petition her for some form of pension.

But thinking—
knowing
—that the Queen had willfully allowed the storms to be summoned that sank those ships, and had only smiled when the fruits of that crime were brought to her doorstep—that was a different matter.

That was murder. Cold-blooded murder.

And that was something terrible to contemplate. So terrible that it was all she could do to sit there and let the debate go on around her as her mind went over the pattern of deception and nightmare that Cassiopeia had woven into the tapestry that was Acadia.

The Queen of Acadia had plotted the deaths of innocents whose only crime was that they were following the orders of others who were attempting to evade onerous taxes. And in fact—since Cassiopeia had the sailing schedules for all the ships coming into and out of the harbor…

Well, it was entirely possible she had even plotted the destruction of complete innocents—those who had paid their duties and taxes, and who just happened to have valuable cargo aboard that would float. What next?

Anyone and anything that gets in her way.
Like me.

Andie sat there in a daze. Once in a while Peri would ask her a question and she would reply with something—it hardly mattered what, since he seemed satisfied with whatever answer he got. It was just so hard to think that all this time, the Queen had been—

“Very well,” Adam boomed, startling her. “I don't think any of us have to debate this any longer. The Queen of Acadia is unfit to rule. Her Adviser may or may not be the cause of her current behavior—the fox says not, and I am inclined to believe the beast—but there is no doubt that she has abandoned the responsibility of a monarch to care for her people first, last and always.”

Reluctantly Andie looked up and nodded. Peri sighed gustily.

Adam glanced at him and snorted. “You know very well where this is going.”

“Yes,” Peri said with resignation. “I do.”

Adam stood up to his full height and fanned his wings. “It is our duty as the descendants of the line of Sardonyx and Jasper, the first Dragons of the Light, to combat injustice and tyranny where we find it. Ladies, our course is clear. We must remove the Queen of Acadia from her throne.”

Gina grinned. But Andie felt as if she had just turned to stone.

“We are going to war. Who goes with us?” Adam demanded.

There was stunned silence. “You and what army?” asked Cleo, the first to break it.

Adam, surprisingly, laughed. “Peri and I
are
an army,” he pointed out. “But I have been flying over the capital quite a bit now, and I have to say that it would not really take an ‘army' as such to get into the Palace. We don't need to lay siege to the city. In fact, we don't really want to. What we need is to get into the Palace and take the Queen and Solon. That doesn't require a very large force. In fact, with Peri and myself flying people in, it could be done with as few as a dozen, maybe two.”

Gina had taken out a knife and was studiously sharpening it. At that, she looked up and directly into Adam's eyes. “I'm a Champion,” she said shortly. “This is something no Champion could turn his or her back on. You have me.”

“Ha!” he said, and that is when Thalia stood up.

“This is our land,” she said. “And if that isn't enough, we've been made victims, too. I don't know if you can turn me into a real fighter quickly enough, but you have me.”

“And me!” exclaimed Helena, jumping to her feet, shortly followed by all the rest.

That left only Andie, who felt herself flush and looked at her feet as all eyes came to rest on her. The
silence grew heavier and more uncomfortable with every passing moment. It was Gina who broke it.

“Princess, we understand, she's your mother. You—”

“Actually,” Andie said, looking up, her mouth twisted in a grimace, “you don't understand. Not at all.”

“We probably don't,” said Peri.

“This—this is—horrible,” she managed to choke out. “What she's done, the innocent lives she's taken the—I can't even begin—” She faltered to a stop. She stared at her feet. The silence was thick enough to cut.
I have to do something. This is my bloodline they're talking about. I have a responsibility, too….

There was just one rather large problem. “Without these—” she took the lenses off and flourished them, bitterly “—I'm blind. Even if you could actually train me to do some kind of fighting, which I frankly doubt, the first person that breaks these things turns me from an asset into a liability. A hostage. I'd like to help you, but I'm useless to you.”

She had no idea until the words were out of her mouth how much she meant them—nor how badly they hurt. But they did. Once again, she was useless. She had spent her entire life being useless, it seemed. Nothing she was good at made any real difference to anyone.

“But, Andromeda—” Peri exclaimed. “You are the
most
important person in this scheme!”

“I—what?” she said. “You must be joking.”

Peri shook his massive head. “On the contrary. You are the only person here who has actually been inside the Palace. You know everything there is to know about it. Without that, we can't even begin to mount an attack, now, can we?”

“At least not the kind of attack we can manage with as few people as we have, and as untrained or half trained,” Adam agreed. “You are the key to our plan.”

Of all the things she had heard today this was the most astonishing. She was important. She was vital. She who had never been anything to anyone—

“Besides,” Gina said with a grin, “I can teach you to use something that you won't have to get in close to use. A sling. Believe me, I've seen a good slingman take down seasoned fighters many a time.”

Andie raised her chin and looked into Peri's eyes. “Then you have me,” she said, but could not help adding, “for what it's worth.”

The next day, she went to work with Peri in the “library,” which was nothing more than the big, dry room—probably a former barracks room—where he kept his book hoard. There were no shelves; books were stacked atop one another in piles around the walls, by category, and scrolls were stuck into the necks of wide-mouthed jars. Light came from slit-windows—which had probably been arrow-slits—and candles and lamps placed carefully away from the piles of books and jars of scrolls. Now she discovered just how Peri was able to write things.

He spoke.

He lay on the floor of the room with an open, blank book in front of him. She watched in fascination as he talked and words appeared on the pages. This, really, was the first overt instance of magic that
she had ever seen, or at least, magic that looked like magic. He couldn't correct so much as a single word after it was written, though, so he had to be very careful about how he phrased things.

She, however, was having to use an old-fashioned quill and ink that she'd made herself. Squid and octopus ink was what she'd used at home, but they were far from the coast and the Wyrding Folk that Peri traded with were not literate. After consulting with one of the books in his hoard, Peri gave her a recipe involving soot, water and the white of an egg and sent her off to concoct it. It seemed to work well enough for now, and Gina went out and brought down a goose for quills.

The exterior of the Palace was easy enough to conjure up in her mind's eye, and she had help. Adamant had flown over it many times, and she had stood on the lookout cliff above at least once every few days for most of her life. Between the two of them, they soon had virtually every stone, bush and entrance plotted well enough to have reconstructed the Palace on the spot.

At least from the outside. Now came the hard part. She had to pummel her memory to reconstruct as much of the inside as she could remember. And of course, there were places, like Solon's quarters, that she had never been inside. She could guess what they might look like, but she didn't know.

Nor did she know how many more secret passageways there might be aside from the one that the fox knew about. She'd never actually measured the
rooms; it had never occurred to her to do so. Frustratingly, there was more that she didn't know than that she did know. She took a break at midday only long enough to eat and wash the dishes before continuing until she had a headache from concentrating so hard.

“Enough,” Peri said, looking at her with concern. “You're thinking too hard. You are never going to remember details now if you don't relax.”

“I know but—”

“We do not need this map tomorrow. We will not even need it in the next week. Or even month. You have time.” He brought his head down close to hers, and his eyes, quite literally as large as plates, really did have a soft, green glow at the bottom of them. “You have time,” he repeated quietly.

“I know but—” She laughed weakly as she realized that all the arguments that she was going to use were ones she herself would reject. She knew he was right. She knew her emotions were clouding her judgment. She knew all that, and her emotions were
still
clouding her judgment.

“This is horrible,” she said with a sigh, carefully sealing the tiny vial of ink with a ball of wax, cleaning the quill and putting the map aside to dry thoroughly.

“Then take your mind off it, for just a little while,” Peri coaxed. “Trust me, this will be a good thing. You'll be able to think much more clearly. The memories will drift to the top of your mind instead of staying stubbornly at the bottom.”

“All right.” She looked at him and asked the first thing that popped into her head. “Who are Jasper and Sardonyx?”

He chuckled, the sound deep in his chest. “Trust Adam to invoke them! He is very proud that they are in our lineage. Jasper and Sardonyx were a mated pair of dragons that aided a Godmother—a true ‘Fairy' Godmother, actually—and decided that they so enjoyed the feeling of making things happen for good that they would keep doing so. They became the progenitors of the line known as the Dragons of the Light, although I can assure you that they did not name themselves that. It is one of the Draconic Warrior lines. Our mother, Serpentine, is half Bookwyrm and half Warrior, and takes largely after the Warrior side. Last I heard from her, she had attached herself to a kind of Champion-Chapter on the other side of the ocean.” He sighed wistfully. “Dragons need a lot of territory, you see. She and father were only mated for a season, just to have offspring. Once Adam and I reached adulthood there was no reason for her to remain on this continent any longer.”

“Is that what all dragons do?” she asked. It would make sense, given what he said about needing a lot of territory.

“Not all. Some take mates for life. But it's rare to find a mate that shares your interests that isn't also in your bloodline.” He chuckled. “You think humans have trouble! There are fewer of us than you by far,
and we live longer than you. Not as long as the Fair Folk, but longer than you. So if you're going to take a mate for life you really want it to be someone you can talk to who isn't also your cousin, a child, or more suited to your grandfather, and that's pretty rare.”

She nodded. “So, being a Bookwyrm is less dangerous, I would think?”

He sighed pensively and let his eyes roam over his collection. It really was quite impressive. The Great Library was probably smaller.

“Yes and no. Your average iron-thewed barbarian doesn't come after us, but the people that do are generally quite sophisticated, quite powerful, quite ruthless, and have the wherewithal to purchase top-notch help. They know exactly what they're looking for, they know if we have it, and even though normally I would be inclined to just let them have it, or at least borrow it, they're generally the sort of nasty pieces of work that as a Dragon of the Light, I have to make sure they
don't
get their hands on it.” He sighed. “That's why I collect history books for the most part, and try not to let any magic books sneak in.”

“History?” she perked up. “What kind of history?”

“By preference, historians who are aware that The Tradition exists and can analyze why events happened in the light of that.” He swiveled his head on his long neck and extracted a book neatly from the top quarter of a pile. “Arthur Ventus, for instance.”

She could hardly believe it. “You have Ventus? Which history?”

“Tedious and Long-winded History of the Portaian War,”
he said, and laughed. “You have to admire a man who doesn't beat around the bush when it comes to his work.”

“True, true,” she agreed, and knew she was getting a greedy look on her face. “I haven't read that one—and I love Ventus.”

“Well, I have more—this is just the one I picked off the top of the pile.” He handed it to her. “Be careful with it, it's quite rare. Just not the sort of rare that gets Magicians with impressive staffs and hordes of demonic minions interested in me.”

She took it carefully, and set it down on a stone shelf near the door so she wouldn't forget it. “How do you end up getting these things, anyway?” she asked curiously. “I mean, they're not the sort of items that end up in tombs and whatnot.”

“No, but they are the sort of things that end up on the auction block,” he said, surprisingly. “I buy them, mostly. Adam and I will go out on treasure hunts, sell most of the baubles, then I'll send the money to one of my human agents when I know of interesting volumes for sale.” He bared his teeth in what she figured was a large draconic grin. “That simple, really. And relatively painless, except for the bauble-collecting part. We've always lived on the coastline, though, so we've made it a practice of robbing pirates. That's quite painless.”

“Even more intriguing,” she said aloud. “How can robbing pirates be painless?”

“Because dragons can smell treasure,” he explained. “The bigger the hoard, the easier it is to smell. Unless it's something small but incredibly valuable—that sort of thing gives off its own kind of scent. So we just wait for them to bury the ill-gotten gains, then we move in, dig it up and carry it off. Painless.”

She had to laugh at that.

“So tell me, where did you get those lenses?” he asked, while she was still chuckling.

“Ah, that is a long story,” she replied, and launched into it.

 

“Armor,” said Gina. “The garbage you have them wearing will not do. You've seen how my armor looks. Everything fits, and fits well. Badly fitting armor is worse than none. I don't suppose you know any dwarves?”

“New armor—right—uh—dwarves?” Adam said, taken aback. “I do, but what does that—”

“Dwarves make the best armor. Everyone thinks it's the Elves, but the Elves are only putting ornament on top of Dwarven-made suits. We don't need filigree and chasing. Just good solid pieces that will go on well, stay on, and be light enough that these girls won't be laboring under the weight of it.” She tossed a helm in the discard pile; so far she had not found a single piece that was worth keeping. “This did all right to impress some country lad with his mother's best kettle on his head, but not a trained fighter.”

“So it didn't impress you, then?” The poor dragon sounded terribly disappointed.

She decided not to laugh. This was, after all, a fellow fighter. Not a Champion, perhaps, but worthy of her respect. He had done his best with what he had at hand.

Actually, he had really outdone himself, all things considered. He wasn't even human, and he had managed to make a lot of untrained girls look moderately competent to the untrained eye.

“Adamant—” she began.

“Adam. Please,” he said, bringing his head down to her level. At that moment she marveled at how human he acted and sounded. Really quite amazing when you thought about it.

“Adam. You did a fine job with what you had. No book of your brother's would ever have been able to help you make a gaggle of girls into real fighters. Only someone like me can do that.”

And here she smiled, because this was one of the best weapons in a Champion's arsenal. And it was one of the least known. It did turn up in The Tradition, oh my, yes, but somehow, like The Tradition of the female Champion, the wrongdoers always seemed to overlook it.

“Why you?” he asked.

“Actually—let's get all the girls together. I'd like them to hear this. Down at the arena, I think.”

The spot she had chosen as the training field, which she had dubbed “the arena,” was a flat-bot
tomed grassy bowl. It was just the right size for group exercises and not so big that girls sitting on the hillside would have any trouble seeing or hearing what was going on below. When she had all of them arrayed on the shaded slope—bibble-babbling as she pretty much expected they would be—she went to parade-rest position and cleared her throat in that way that only someone trained by a competent sergeant-major could.

She got instant silence, as she had expected she would.

Adam sat on the floor of the bowl beside her, looking down at her expectantly, which didn't hurt.

“Now,” she said. “We lot are about to invoke a very powerful Traditional path for our own benefit. We are about to become the Ragged Company.”

“The what?” asked Cleo, puzzled. But Thalia, surprisingly enough, clapped both hands to her mouth, her eyes going round.

“You might know it as the Rebel Companions, Cleo,” Gina said, and looked around. Cleo shook her head, and only Helena and another girl, Dita, looked as if they recognized the reference. Well, there probably hadn't been anything like outright rebellion in this Kingdom for a very long time, and it didn't look or sound as if they got much news from the outside world, either.

“The original tale goes like this. In a small Kingdom much like this one, the monarch fell ill and died, the rightful heir, a baby, disappeared, and
affairs were taken over by the Seneschal, who was, as you might expect, a very bad man. He taxed everything in sight, oppressed the poor, so forth and so on—” She waved her hand to indicate the usual thing. “However, he also went further. He had the nobles arrested, all in a single night, and their estates confiscated on various causes. He put his own men in their place, so that the nobles would not be able to topple him. Now there was no one that could effectively oppose him.”

“Except?” prompted Cleo.

Gina nodded. “Except. There was one noble, and a fine old Warrior he allegedly was, too, who had gone into the wilderness to become a holy hermit. The Seneschal assumed he was dead, or else had forgotten about him. But he got wind of what was happening, and he gathered up his arms and armor, donned them and went out to find out what exactly was going on. In the tale he has many adventures, and one by one he collects a band of untrained peasants, traveling entertainers and assorted riffraff, turns them into a small army, infiltrates the Castle with them, kills the Seneschal and conjures up the baby and puts it on the throne.”

“Oh! Now I recognize that,” said Amaranth. “That's Robbing John's Army.” And Adam nodded. The rest still looked blank. All the better. If
they
didn't know it, Solon probably wouldn't, either.

“Now, we Champions know the truth of the first tale,” Gina continued. “Yes, there was a Hermit
Warrior, the King's former war-leader. Yes, he did get wind of what was happening and come to start some trouble. But his army was not a lot of untrained peasants, because even the cleverest villain is going to have some people escape his net. A substantial core group of nobles and their bodyguards and retinues escaped to join the hermit, and the few peasants who also joined up had all been trained fighters themselves, usually serving in one or another of the nobles' militia. And, I'm sorry to say, the ‘rightful heir' was a random infant of the right age and looks. It hardly mattered, since the wee mite was immediately married while still in diapers to our old hermit, making him King. History says nothing more of the child, but the line continues to this day, and history does record that he was a just, honorable and fairly kind-hearted soul, so one assumes that she was happy, or at least as happy as royal heirs in such a situation can be.”