Servant of the Dragon (3 page)

Funny how little you know about somebody you've known all your life. Funny how little you know about yourself even.

Cashel grinned. "He didn't ask to see Ilna, then?" he said.

Reise grinned back, about the first time Cashel had seen that expression on his face. "He did not," Reise said. "I'd have been glad to arrange that meeting, and I might well have waited to watch it develop."

Katchin had treated his niece and nephew as poor relations; which they were, of course. Cashel didn't let most things bother him: he liked some people better than other people, but the ones he didn't like he just tried to avoid.

Ilna had kept herself and her brother fed and clothed since their grandmother died when they were seven. They lived in the mill. Their father had sold his rights to the business to Katchin for enough money to keep him in ale and hard cider until the winter night he froze in a ditch, but use of half the building belonged to Cashel and Ilna under the terms of their grandfather's will. Ilna had the sharp mind to figure that out, and fingers which even as a child wove tighter, faster, and better than any other woman in the borough.

She also had a tongue like a bradawl and no hesitation about using it on anyone she thought was acting like a fool. Katchin was a fool in a lot of ways, but not so great a fool that he'd ask Ilna for a favor.

Cashel shrugged, sobering a little. "Sure, I'll talk to my uncle," he said. He guessed it was a duty, like checking the sheep each night for fly sores. "Where do I go?"

Reise nodded. "He's waiting in the male servants' room," he said, turning his eyes toward the door from which he'd entered the salon. "I'll bring him in, or you can see him there—or see him anywhere you please, of course, sir."

Cashel shook his head in amazement. Garric's father calling him sir. "I'll go there," he said, walking toward the door.

He felt the air along his spine. He'd ripped his fancy tunic flexing his muscles during the fuss with Evlatun. Duzi! He didn't like to think how much something like that cost. He didn't even know who'd bought the garment in the first place.

Cashel had been a little surprised that his uncle hadn't come bursting into the salon if he was so close by. When he entered the waiting room he saw why. Katchin was there, all right, red-faced and puffing; but with him were two husky palace ushers carrying ebony staffs of office with silver knobs on either end. The rods weren't a patch on a proper quarterstaff like Cashel's, but they were surely enough to keep Katchin in his place.

Here in the palace, Katchin's place was wherever the chamberlain said it was. No wonder the miller looked mad enough to chew rocks.

"Good afternoon, uncle," Cashel said. "I wasn't expecting to see you here."

And Duzi knew, that wasn't half the truth.

There were benches built into three of the room's four walls. In the center was a table; markings for the game of Bandits were inlaid into the top in light-colored wood. The stone counter along the fourth wall was for refreshments and had a hole at one end to support a wine jar. Even the servants did themselves well at palace parties, it seemed.

Katchin twisted his mouth into a smile. He had a flowing moustache, maybe to make up for the way the hair on his head had thinned to a speckly band above his ears on either side. He ate too much and drank too much; it showed in his face, his belly and most of all in the way the flesh of his fingers puffed up around the rings he wore on every finger.

"Well, my boy, you must have known I'd come as soon as I heard you and our Garric needed help!" Katchin said.

"Master Cashel?" said Reise in a voice as dry as a salt-cured ham. "I'll leave the ushers at the outer door. They'll guide your visitor to wherever you tell them at the end of your interview."

He bowed—to Cashel, not to Katchin—and stepped through a back doorway, drawing the ushers with him. One of them winked at Cashel as he left.

Cashel surveyed his uncle. Katchin's clothing was brand new: layered tunics, the outer one striped beige and maroon crossways; a sash of gold brocade from which hung a sword that was even more of a toy than the one Cashel had just bent double; and on his head, a peaked cap with a swan's feather dyed a sort of muddy purple. Katchin looked like a juggler come to the Sheep Fair, though Cashel knew the rig-out must have cost the price of a farm in the borough.

"I'm sorry you did that, uncle," Cashel said. "Garric hasn't said he needs your help, and I surely don't. You'd be happier back home, I guess."

"I can't believe I'd hear ingratitude from the child I raised!" Katchin said. He probably meant it, too. Katchin didn't exactly lie, but he managed to remember events in whatever way served him best. "Prince Garric needs trusted men to help him govern. I came to him as soon as I heard his need."

Cashel shook his head sadly. Katchin was such a little man. Cashel had never noticed it before. The bluster had made Katchin seem larger in Barca's Hamlet. Here he was just a buffoon come to the city from some sheepwalk nobody in Valles had ever heard of.

"Uncle," Cashel said, "you ought to go home. If you won't do that, at least get rid of those silly clothes. Put on a clean wool tunic and be yourself, not a joke for the palace servants to laugh at. You saw how the ushers looked at you."

Katchin's face went dark with a rage he couldn't swallow down. "And who are you, beggar boy, to lecture on fashion to Count Lascarg's bailiff?" he shouted.

"I never begged," Cashel said. He didn't get angry over words, and those particular words were too foolish to get angry over anyway. "And as for what I know of fashion, well, I don't guess I could live with Ilna all these years and not know something. Merchants came all the way from Valles to buy the cloth she wove, you know."

Katchin's moustache fluffed with the force of his breathing. He'd break something inside if he wasn't careful. "Look, Cashel, my boy," he said in forced jollity. "Just take me to see our Garric and he'll understand what he's being offered. You're a strong, honest lad, but this is a business beyond your understanding."

Cashel smiled. "I guess you're right, uncle," he said. "But that's why you shouldn't have come to me. Garric has people to tell him who he's going to see. I don't know enough to go against what they decide."

He gestured to the door. "Go back home, Katchin," he said. It embarrassed Cashel to say things that shouldn't have to be said at all. "You'll like being a big fish in Barca's Hamlet better than you will being bait in Valles."

Katchin's mouth opened and closed, but fury choked his words for several moments. Finally he said, his voice breaking, "And I suppose you belong here, Cashel the Shepherd?"

"I belong wherever Sharina is, uncle," Cashel said. A year ago he'd have been tense as a chain on a heavy drag if he'd had to talk about this sort of thing. "I guess I always did. It's just that now I know it."

He gestured toward the door again with a scooping motion, as though he was shooing a puppy out from where it didn't belong. Choking on bile, Katchin obeyed.

Cashel smiled at the thought he'd just had: he knew he belonged with Sharina; and Sharina knew she belonged with him, too.

* * *

Sharina's meeting with the delegation of Western Region landholders had been moving along at approximately the speed of mortar setting on a humid day. Watching mortar set would have been a good deal more interesting.

"It's not that the assessor sent to my parish is a bad lad," the delegate now holding the floor said. Sharina had tried to memorize their names, but she just couldn't: she was tired, sick and tired, and they were all the same. It was like trying to make individuals out of twelve peas. "He doesn't understand us, is all. Why, it's hard for us to understand him with that twang of his, not that I have any quarrel with him being a Northerner born and bred."

A hummingbird whistled by, pausing to drink from the trumpet-shaped scarlet flower of a lotus. Another hummingbird whirred toward the first. The pair disappeared deeper into the gardens, chittering angrily at one another.

The delegation in the tiled gazebo consisted of eleven men and one woman—a representative of each parish of the three western counties of Ornifal. They wore high-laced boots and tunics with ribbon ties down the front so that the lower half could be cinched into breeches when work required it. The delegates were substantial people in every sense—physically, they were built like so many treestumps topped with gray moss—but the Western Region was a patchwork of smallholdings unlike the great estates of northern Ornifal. All the delegates had guided a plow themselves at some time in their lives, and most of them probably still lent a hand during the furious demands of the harvest.

The parishes of the Western Region were similar to the borough on the east coast of Haft where Sharina grew up, in fact. She could understand their concerns better than they themselves probably imagined.

The trouble was, the twelve of them individually were so like Katchin the Miller that he could have sat at the end of the row and no one would find him out of place. Puffed up little people full of personal pride, with a vision as parochially narrow as that of the most mincing dandy among the palace courtiers.

A different parochial vision, of course.

"Just the same for us!" said the delegate from one of the coastal parishes: he had a rhomboid representing a turbot worked in silver thread onto the breast of his tunic, and a similar pin on his velvet cap. "'Where do I buy peat for my cook-fire?' he asked me. Peat! And when I said we burn wood here, he looked at me as if I were mad! 'You can afford wood to burn, here?' he said, and I could just see the silver eagles tumbling around in his mind!"

"Just the same!" echoed other delegates like the chorus of a play. Three then started to tell their own detailed version of the injustice of having outsiders sent into their parishes to assess the taxes.

Eight of those present had had their say thus far in the afternoon. The speeches could have been interchanged or even intercut sentence by sentence without making any real difference. It all boiled down to, 'Outsiders don't know how we do things here in the West.'

A clerk brought down from an estate in the north whose waterlogged soil didn't support trees might very well be surprised that heat for homes and food came from dead limbs rather than bricks of peat cut from the bogs and dried under shelters. That didn't mean he wouldn't adapt to the new circumstances: tax assessments were made on the local value of produce, not what the produce might have brought if it were transported somewhere else to be sold.

The real problem—and the one that the delegates speaking so earnestly to Sharina, making broad flourishes with their arms to emphasize their points, had no intention of raising—was that because Garric's new assessors were from outside the local power structure, they were working for the government in Valles instead of on behalf of themselves and their cronies. Oh, they could be bribed—they were human, after all, and could be expected to have human failings. But district supervisors kept an eye on the assessors, comparing individual revenues against those of similar parishes under different men.

Besides, it isn't nearly as easy to bribe a stranger as it is a man you've known all your life. Like any other criminal conspiracy, bribery requires that the parties trust one another. How do you trust a fellow with a funny accent and weird ideas about food?

There was a faint chime from the nympheum in the center of the palace grounds, where the giant waterclock stood. A bronze bowl had flipped on its axis, spilling into the pool the water that had filled it drop by drop. The servant watching it struck a tuned rod. Other servants waiting at crosswalks throughout the grounds called, "The fifth hour has sounded!" their voices seeming to echo as those farther away took their cue from the ones nearest to the nympheum.

Sharina rose to her feet. The three delegates who were speaking simultaneously fell silent, though with nervous looks at one another. They were afraid—rightly—that Lady Sharina intended to end the audience before they'd had time to say everything they wanted. Sharina had learned from months of listening to similar representations that the thing all the delegates wanted most was a chance to hear their own voices. More than a reduction in taxes, more than better roads, more than a restoration of local tolls which they'd been pocketing to the detriment of trade and communication through their bailiwick....

"Mistress and masters," Sharina said, nodding to the woman and then to the eleven male representatives in a general sweep of her head. "During the past three hours, I have listened to your concerns. I sympathize with you, and I'll discuss what you've said with the officials in whose charge these matters lie."

The truth was that after three hours with these people, Sharina wouldn't have been able to manage much sympathy for them if they were being boiled in oil. Sharina's maid had dressed her as a private citizen of high rank. Chancellor Royhas had picked the outfit to emphasize that Sharina wasn't a court official and therefore couldn't bind the government by anything she chanced to say.

Sharina understood the purpose. She even managed not to feel too insulted that Royhas was treating her like a silly girl who might want to remit a district's taxes or promise a governorship to some charlatan who claimed to be a royal bastard. Royhas was simply being careful, and it was to the benefit of the kingdom that the Isles have a careful chancellor.

The problem was that the garments worn by a private Ornifal citizen of high rank were even heavier and more confining than court dress of beige silk robes with a stripe on the side to indicate the wearer's rank and position. Sharina's blond hair was teased up in a vast pile supported by ribbons and gold combs. Her tight-laced bodice was cloth-of-gold over a robe of heavy green silk, with applique panels showing the birth and exploits of the mythical hero Val.

For comfort, Sharina had decided to hold the meeting in a water garden of the palace. Cypresses shaded the slate-roofed gazebo; streams played from the mouths of stone dolphins to plash into the encircling lotus pond, cooling the air.

Nothing could make this clothing acceptably cool! Sharina had been more comfortable—less uncomfortable—tending the bread oven in the middle of the summer. The garb was as stiff as armor and as stifling as the steam baths that were a Cordin specialty which the elite of Valles had begun to take up.

"While I promise you consideration...," Sharina continued. Royhas would be pleased at my diplomacy. "I can't tell you that there'll be an immediate change in the principle that the government has instituted. You see—"

The one female delegate—Mistress Alatcha—said, "Princess, the king's your brother! Can't you tell him we deserve to be ruled by our own folk?"

Physically there wasn't much to distinguish Alatcha from her colleagues. When standing—she was seated now—her tunic fell to her ankles instead of being knee-height, and there was a narrow band of lace dangling from her hat brim to do duty for the veil of respectable widow. Her sex had emboldened her to interrupt with the protest that the male delegates were swallowing, however.

Sharina smiled to show that she'd accepted the interruption in good part. She nodded—very carefully, because the mass of combs and hair was heavy enough that she worried what would happen if she leaned too far—and said, "I'll certainly discuss the matter with my brother Prince Garric, Lady Alatcha—" thank goodness she'd at least remembered that one name out of the twelve "—though I hasten to remind you that Valence III is King of the Isles. Like yourselves, my brother and I are the king's loyal subjects."

Mild as Sharina's statement was, the male delegates edged away from Alatcha as though she'd suddenly begun frothing at the mouth. Garric and the advisors who'd helped make him the real power in the Kingdom of the Isles were extremely careful to maintain the fiction that Valence was still king. To do otherwise would stir up trouble on Ornifal as well as probably pushing the rulers of other islands to declare their independence.

Alatcha looked frozen with fear. To take the unmeant threat out of her correction, Sharina stepped forward and offered the woman her hand. Alatcha gripped it as though she'd been drowning.

"But since you've raised the point, I'll address it directly," Sharina said. She patted Alatcha with her free hand, then disengaged and stepped back to survey the entire delegation. "Your taxes are being levied by people you don't know, and perhaps you've heard—I'll tell you now if you haven't—that within the year circuit courts under royal judges will begin hearing all cases of manslaughter and civil matters where more than twenty silver eagles are in dispute."

"Oh!" said one of the standing delegates. His colleagues, nodding grimfaced, had obviously heard the rumor already. In embarrassment the fellow sat down. The two others who'd been standing to speak sat also. For the first time this afternoon, the delegates were listening to something other than their own voices.

"The men who are coming to your districts were clerks in the households of northern landholders," Sharina said. "They're being paid by the treasury, though. Their loyalties, like their responsibilities, are to the whole kingdom rather than to one nobleman or another."

She paused, wishing she had a mug of the sharp, dark germander ale that her father had brewed in his inn. A swallow of that would cool her throat and clear the phlegm from it.

"But they don't know us," one of the delegates said, giving frustrated urgency to the point the speakers had been repeating with embellishment all afternoon.

"They'll get to know you," Sharina said forcefully. "But they'll serve the king. And if you think you're unhappy at having to deal with folk from the North, you can imagine how those northern nobles feel about assessors who come from the commercial houses here in Valles. Can you imagine how many times I've heard, 'But you can't propose that Lord So and Which pay taxes like some plowman in West Bay!'"

The delegation broke up in guffaws of delight. "Is that so?" a delegate cried in wonder.

"Well, Prince Garric does expect all the fine lords to pay their taxes," Sharina said. "And he expects the Valles shippers to pay theirs as well, which they will since they're being watched over by some of your own sons and daughters. Isn't that true?"

Over the general murmur of agreement, a man whose moustaches divided his face into two florid parts said, "Aye, my nephew Esmoun's one of them, he is. The king pays him seventeen eagles a month, a month that is, and in cold, hard cash!"

During the crisis just past, when the queen strove through wizardry to gain the kingdom, taxes due from the outlying regions had generally gone unpaid. There were two reasons why the new government had money to pay its employees. First, the conspirators who'd opposed the queen—when King Valence was too weak to do so himself—were wealthy men in their own right. They'd backed the new government with their purses as well as their lives.

The second reason was that the queen had amassed enormous wealth before her defeat. Some had been looted, more was destroyed in the riot that made Garric the heir to the kingdom; but a great deal of the queen's treasure remained, and Lord Tadai had been quick and efficient in bringing that wealth into the royal treasury.

It was an open question whether Tadai would have been quite so scrupulous to avoid further enriching himself in the process had he not known that Chancellor Royhas was keeping very close track of matters. In the event, Tadai knew that he was being watched, so Tadai's worst enemy couldn't complain about the way he carried out his duties as treasurer.

"And Rohan, he's the second son of Robas, the miller in Helvadale, he went off to the king in Valles too," another delegate agreed. "Sharp as a bodkin, that boy, but what was there for him if he'd stayed in the parish? You can't split a grist mill, can you? Nor can you keep two families on what a mill brings in, not in Helvadale, you can't."

There was a pause for general consideration. Mistress Alatcha rose carefully to her feet. "Lady Sharina, you'll tell your brother that the Western Region is loyal, won't you?" she said. "I mean, we're used to the folk here in Valles treating us like we were scrapers to clean the muck from their boots—and we won't have that!"

Several representatives cried, "No sir!" or something similarly agreeable. One launched into a story about an absentee landowner who didn't keep up his fences, but a pair of his fellows hushed him immediately.

"But we'll stand for the kingdom if the kingdom stands for us!" Alatcha concluded. The men around her bellowed, "Aye!" and "Hear hear!" in voices that threatened to rattle the roof slates. Servants and minor officials passing nearby craned their necks to see what was going on. Here in Valles, that many people shouting at the same time probably meant a riot rather than cheerful enthusiasm.