The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (13 page)

He took a bite of fish just as Katherine turned her attention to him: “What about you, Theron? Do you hear anything about the ancient kings there at University?” He nearly choked. “Or are you studying geography these days?”

“Rhetoric, actually.” Theron coughed, and waved away the helping hands. “Language. Are you talking about Tortua’s lecture?”

“Poor Doctor Tortua,” mused Sophia. “He was so lively when he was young; I remember him at one Sowing Festival being very silly with a painted pole. I suspect a seizure of the brain, though Treadwell thinks it’s an excess of bile in his liver.”

Katherine tried not to look annoyed. “I was talking about the City Sessions, not University gossip. Honestly, doesn’t anything penetrate those streets from outside? And they say that the Council of Lords is out of touch with the City! I bet you didn’t even hear.”

“Didn’t hear what?” Diana asked. “Do you mean that lunatic standing up in open Sessions and petitioning the Mayor for the kings to be reestablished? My husband told me. Everyone in the banks was talking about it.”

“Kings.” Isabel shuddered. “Just what we need. Power-mad tyrants pushing us all around. Who on earth thinks that’s a good idea?”

“The kings weren’t all bad.” Theron hated ignorance. “If you go back far enough, you find—”

“Death to tyranny!” shouted Andrew. It hadn’t been that long since he and his friends had played Wizards Against Nobles up and down the stairs, and he knew his lines. His sisters shushed him.

“It’s the North,” his father said. “They’re having terrible times up there, with the weather and rotten harvests. Either too much rain or too little. How they hope a king will help is beyond me, but it seems to be the way people think: that radical troubles call for radical change. What did the Duke of Hartsholt say about this kings business?” he asked Katherine. “Was he there?”

“Hartsholt miss a meeting of the Inner Council? He loves getting the chance to dress up almost as much as I do.”

It was true. If the formidable duchess had a weakness, it was clothing. And she had a wide range to draw on. From her earliest days in the city, when her uncle, Theron’s father the Mad Duke, had had her trained as a swordsman, she had worn men’s clothing more often than not. But she also possessed a notable collection of ball dresses. Tonight the duchess was wearing a gaudy, shapeless over-gown, the sort she favored at home, where she fondly believed what she looked like didn’t matter. She had quite a collection of these, in various jewel-toned velvets and silk brocades. She tended to throw them on over just about anything and consider herself dressed. Once Theron was sure he’d seen her dine in one over a nightshift.

“What’s amazing,” she continued, “is that Arlen himself was there, all got up in his Serpent Chancellor robes. I was surprised; he doesn’t usually so honor us. But with Lord Horn beginning another term as Crescent, and Edmond Godwin stepping down as Raven although we specifically asked him not to—well, Arlen must have wanted to show where he stood, with the Crescent and Dragon.”

Marcus leaned over the table to his young son. “You have not, of course,” he said, “heard any of this.”

It used to work with Theron when he was that age: the implication that all political discussions were very secret and important, that he was not to understand them—and therefore would try as hard as he could to decode them. He’d even followed Katherine and her staff into the Council Hall— where he’d discovered that the sessions of the Council of Lords did not consist of men garbed as mythic beings fighting for great causes. The chancellors had colorful names and colorful robes, but it was only symbols. (He’d actually dreamed of being Dragon Chancellor someday, until he found out all it was was Chancellor of the Exchequer.) Half the Council of Lords behaved like a theatre audience, and the other half like boring lecturers droning on and on about taxes and rights of property and procedure. Even the exclusive meetings of the Inner Council, comprised only of the ducal houses and the elected Chancellors, which he’d been permitted once to attend as Katherine’s heir apparent, was far too much like just another grown-up party, without any drinks. Finally, it all boiled down to a lot of bad-tempered people trying to disagree without appearing to be rude to each other.

Still, it kept things running, and he’d be doing it himself some day—a thought that gave him no pleasure at all. Now he had the idea that the duchess would be very pleased if he contributed something to the discussion she’d begun. “The University,” Theron said, “looks at the kings from another angle. Not political, but historical.”

Katherine gave him a long look that was meant to be benign, but failed. “And I’m sure that’s very interesting. But when you’re ready to come and join us here in the present, I hope you’ll let me know.”

Theron stood his ground. “But history is what has created the present!”

“Theron,” Marcus said indulgently, “it’s theory versus application. You can’t win.”

“You need a theory to apply!” Theron protested.

“But a theory based on what? On present fact.”

“On precedent.”

“Precedent says that monarchy is a useless form of government,” Katherine put in. “That’s all the history we need to know.” She wrinkled her nose. “How can you stand to study that stuff? Dates and treaties; I never could abide it.”

“Our very own rights and privileges come from precedent,” Theron persisted. “If we want to maintain and perpetuate them into the future, don’t you think we need to understand why?”

“Here’s a future for you,” Marcus grinned. “Right now, Hartsholt’s lands are in disarray, and his son is running him into debt. He has two daughters. Marry one of them, and you can add huge Northern holdings to Tremontaine.”

“I wouldn’t allow it,” Katherine intervened cheerfully. “The North has never been anything but trouble. Theron’s going to have to look elsewhere for his bride. Have you considered anyone new lately, cousin?”

Andrew sniggered. Oh, to be thirteen again, Theron thought enviously, and just shrug his shoulders and glower.

“Stop tormenting the boy,” Susan told her husband and his employer. “This is a dinner, not a Council meeting . . . honestly. More peas, Theron?”

His mother said to Susan, “I never know if you’re just being kind, or if this is something I still don’t understand, of what is all right to talk about with food, and what is not?”

Susan opened her mouth, but her youngest son spoke up unexpectedly. “It isn’t the food, Lady Sophia, it’s the meal. Dinner together,” he quoted piously, “is supposed to be a pleasant occasion.”

“So,” Sophia reiterated: “nothing to do with human bodies, dead or alive or in transition . . . this I understand for many years, now. But—no business? Or”—she glanced at Theron—“just no business my son doesn’t want to hear?”

The duchess applauded. “I do love hearing you figure things out, Sophia, it makes it all so much clearer. But honestly, Susan, all any of us is interested in is business of one kind or another. Can’t the family get some kind of exemption? Or is it all to be Andy’s latest kickball match, and whatever Theron is studying?”

“I study, too,” Andrew objected.

“Of course you do,” said his father warmly. Marcus persisted in adoring all his brood, no matter what sort of difficult stage they were passing through. “Your schoolmaster tells us you’re a wizard at spelling.”

Theron said, “You’ve still got him in school, Marcus? Let me know when you’re ready to get him a tutor. I know plenty of good men at University who could use the employment.”

Andrew kicked his chair leg. “I like school. We play ball at the breaks. And anyway, my master says that University men know all too much about all too little—whatever that means,” he added, hoping to save himself from a scolding.

Lord Theron laughed. “I’ll bet he does. But you see, Andy, learning can be a joy in itself, when you find something that interests you.”

Andrew gave him the age-old look the young reserve for the idiocies of their elders.

His very well-mannered father said, “Thank you, Theron. When he is ready for a tutor, I’ll ask you for advice.”

“It’s not that we haven’t thought about it,” Susan added. “If Andy takes to a subject when he’s a little older, we thought he might go straight to University.” Andrew made a face. His mother gave him a look.

“In any case,” Marcus went on, “while we’d be glad to help out any of your friends, Theron, I hardly think teaching a city man’s son is the prize they’re aiming for.”

“Well, of course most of them would love to devote themselves to pure scholarship, but that being a starving sort of proposition, I expect they could be induced to teach this brat the astrolabe,” Theron said fondly.

Katherine dangled a golden ring over her wineglass; she had a habit of taking her rings off and on during a meal. “What Marcus meant, Theron, is that I’m sure the post they’d all be aiming for would be something on your own staff, when you have one.”

Susan and Lady Sophia exchanged a look across the table. Theron said haughtily, “My friends are not aiming for any sort of position.”

“Oh, come, my dear.” Katherine was doing her best not to provoke him, but her best wasn’t very effective, since she was not one to back down on a point. “I’m sure they’re very fond of you, but they know that when you take your place in Council there will be important positions to be filled. University men are ideal to fill them, and you seem to know them all.”

“I know them well enough to know a friend from a toady.”

The Duchess Katherine took a long drink of wine. Her face emerged from the goblet a reasonable shade. She said mildly, “I should like to meet these admirable friends of yours.”

Concerned for her feelings, Sophia said, “Theron does not have his friends to the house, not even in Riverside with us.”

But the duchess was just warming up. “I wonder,” she asked the air, “what is so particularly unappealing about Tremontaine House? Jessica never wanted to bring anyone here either.”

“You can’t compare Theron to poor Jessica,” Susan Ffoliot put in unwisely.

Katherine ignored her. “I have entertained a great many people in this house, at this very table, in fact. Few, if any, have ever complained of the comfort, the food, or the conversation.”

A glacial stillness descended on the room. Marcus was looking at Katherine with puzzled concern. He never understood what made her pick at her heir, and privately she admitted that she didn’t really either. “It’s the way he just closes us off,” she essayed once. “It makes me want to break him open—to see what’s in there, maybe. If anything is at all.”

Theron was priding himself on not losing his temper. He might be a great disappointment, but at least he maintained his self-control and dignity.

Sophia grieved, not for the first time, over the trouble between her son and his cousin. Sophia loved Katherine with the fierce loyalty of a stray who had been taken in out of the storm, given a safe place to raise her son and support in her chosen career. She loved the duchess for being a woman who commanded and did not care what people might think. At the same time, Sophia felt protective of her; she knew how hard it was.

None of these feelings was useful when Theron and Katherine butted heads. But Tremontaines, she had discovered, could almost always be distracted by asking them a question with a complicated answer. She was sifting her brain for one, when Diana, who had been oddly silent, let out a shout.

The girl looked sheepishly around at the startled faces. “Sorry. This has been going on for days. That one just surprised me, is all.”

Sophia glanced from her sweating face to her untouched dinner and said, “You’d better walk about for a bit. I will attend you.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.” Diana waved her away, then yelped and clutched her belly. “Oh, dear. Is this it? It is, isn’t it? What happens next?”

“I will tell you as we walk,” Sophia said. “It is not proper dinner table conversation.” She helped Diana to her feet. “Marcus, take the boy home and send word to Martin. Theron, ask Farraday to send to Riverside for my bag. Oh, there’s no need to hurry. First babies are never anxious to come into the world. Sit down, all of you, and eat your fruit.”

Whatever people might say about the Tremontaines and their habits—and they said a lot—Sophia was still one of the best midwives in the city. Sure enough, Diana’s son was born the next day, having already done much to improve the atmosphere of the family circle.

chapter
VIII