The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (5 page)

Nicholas was able to school his expression, but felt an angry flush rising up his cheeks. “I believe I serve your lordship,” he said stiffly.

“Fifty years ago,” remarked Lord Arlen, “you could have cried challenge on me for that statement, hired a swordsman to do the deed for you, and the Court of Honor would have held you justified even as I wallowed in my gore. Times change. I have a swordsman in my employ for the look of the thing, and he’s very good. But I don’t expect I’ll ever need his services, not in the same way my father did.”

“No,” said Nicholas evenly. “I don’t expect you will. I can’t afford a first-class swordsman, as you very well know, and I’m not really inclined to cry challenge on you for speaking the truth, particularly as there’s no one else present.”

Lord Arlen smiled, his dark eyes bright in the lamplight. He was a handsome man, with the kind of long, lean face that ages well and beautifully curved lips, oddly sensual in his ascetic countenance. “It’s a pleasure to talk to a man who understands what he’s being told. It’s the only kind of fencing that custom allows us, eh?” He leaned forward, laid something on the desk in front of Nicholas, and sat back again. “Tell me what you make of that.”

It looked like an oak leaf, leathery and dry, curled at one end. When Nicholas picked it up, it proved to be carved out of wood. The workmanship was competent but not fine. There was a pin affixed to the back so that the leaf might be worn as a brooch. Nicholas turned it over in his hand. “Not your usual taste, Lord Arlen,” he said.

“Not my taste at all,” said Arlen shortly. “It belonged to a man from the North, from Hartsholt. I believe he carved it himself.”

Nicholas set the trinket on the desk, where it lay as if blown in through the window, incongruous and faintly disturbing. “It means a great deal to him, then.”

“He won’t be missing it,” Arlen said. “He bled himself to death by chafing in his chains. I wouldn’t have thought it possible myself, but the guards are sure no one entered his cell. The brooch was taken from him when he was arrested. What do you think of it?”

Nicholas picked up the brooch again and examined it closely. If it had any secrets, they weren’t to be read in the tiny marks left by the dead man’s knife. It was the brooch itself that was important. “A badge,” said Nicholas thoughtfully. “You said the man was from Hartsholt. I seem to remember the Duke of Hartsholt at Lord Halliday’s, complaining about troublemakers over dinner. Now that I think about it, I do recall something about oak branches.”

“Yes,” purred Lord Arlen. “Now, cast your mind even further back than Halliday’s dinner, to your schoolroom lessons. What was the most significant event in our history?”

Nicholas thought for a moment. “The fall of the monarchy.”

“Before that.”

“I never cared much for history,” Galing said. “I don’t know. Unless”—he groped at a distant memory—“you mean the union of the kingdoms.”

Arien smiled benignly. “Precisely,” he said. “And would you happen to remember where the old capital of the North Kingdom was?”

“Ah—Aldersyde? No, it’s Hartsholt, isn’t it—that’s why Hartsholt’s a duchy.”

“Very good, Galing. The capital was indeed in Hartsholt, or somewhere near it—there’s nothing left of it now. So tell me, Lord Nicholas, what do you deduce from available evidence?”

It was like pacing through honey, trying to figure out why Arlen was leading him this dance.

“I’m being most unkind, making you go through all this,” Arlen remarked sympathetically. “But really, it would be a shame for all that expensive tutoring your father gave you to go to waste. As I recall, you even flirted with the University for a year or two.”

“I went to a few lectures, to keep my friend Edward Tielman company.”

“Ah, yes. Edward Tielman. Secretary to the Crescent Chancellor. Very sound man. Discreet. His father was your family’s steward, wasn’t he?”

“He still is,” said Nicholas shortly. Did Arlen know he and Edward had been lovers? Was he asking whether they still were? Why should he care? Because Edward was somehow connected to the favor Arlen wanted from him, Nicholas answered himself—Edward and the old capital at (or near) Hartsholt and the oak leaf brooch and the dead man from the North. There was one thing missing, one fact connected to his schooldays, when his tutor had taught spelling and rhetoric and mathematics and history to him, to his older brother the heir, and to Edward, the steward’s son.

“The kings,” Nicholas said slowly. “Before the Union, the kings lived in the old capital city. There was a sacred grove, wasn’t there? An oak grove.” Lord Arlen nodded, very much as the tutor had nodded, glad to see his student performing well. “The man from Hartsholt must have been a royalist, and you think this oak leaf is a royalist badge. And you want me to use Tielman’s connections at the University to find out if there are royalists there, too.”

Arlen laughed. “That’s the bones of it. Very good.” Nicholas felt himself flushing again, this time with pleasure and something else, something he knew Lord Arlen was unlikely to return.

“Quite,” said the older man, disconcertingly. “Now. You are no doubt asking yourself why I am concerned about a handful of unlettered hobbledehoys whose ancestors have been diverting themselves with rebellions for five hundred years.”

Nicholas made a gesture designed to convey his complete confidence in the Serpent Chancellor’s political acuity.

“Nevertheless. The situation is this. The current Duke of Hartsholt’s a wastrel and a bad landlord. His steward is a thief, and his heir is as great a spendthrift as his sire. And it’s not only Hartsholt’s private estates that are suffering. There is famine all through the North, and great poverty. Young men are pouring down to the South, looking to better themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s what the ancient kings did, after all. But there are more of them every year, and all of them are angry. They wear their Northernness like a flag, flaunt their braided hair and their barbaric customs, shout out incomprehensible Northern slogans in City Sessions. This fellow”—Arlen touched the oak leaf—“was all too comprehensible. He got up in open Sessions before the Mayor and offered a formal petition for the king to be restored to the land.”

Nicholas felt as amused as shocked—it seemed like such a stupid, pointless thing to do. But Arlen was studying him gravely, no hint of amusement lighting his face. “What did he imagine it would gain him?” he offered diplomatically.

“I don’t know,” said Arlen. “All he would say under questioning was that the land needed its king again, and the time was at hand.”

“Is it a general uprising, then?”

“No. I don’t think so. It’s more like creeping sedition, with mystic complications. Call it an illness. We need to study it, to discover whether it’s a plague or a mild fever. I’ve sent men North. I need someone here, to determine the extent of the contagion and its severity.” He leaned forward slightly. The effect was of a dark lantern suddenly unshuttered. “I need to know if these royalists have a specific king in mind, and whether it’s one of them or one of us.” He lounged back in his chair again. “There’s what they would consider to be royal blood in all the noble houses, you know.”

A light tap heralded Lord Arlen’s servant, carrying a tray of cold beef. They sat in silence while he pulled the heavy blue curtains over the rainy darkness and lit the lamps. When he’d bowed himself out again, Nicholas helped himself to a slice of beef. “I didn’t know,” he continued, as if they’d not been interrupted. “As I said, I don’t know much about history.”

“You’d best learn, then.” Arlen yawned suddenly and rubbed his face. “Your friend Tielman may be able to help you. I understand he keeps up his University friendships.”

Nicholas smiled, glad to catch his patron out. “Tielman goes down to University twice a year to get drunk with his old friends and impress them with his being the Crescent Chancellor’s secretary—it’s his pet vice. If he suddenly started asking questions, it would occasion remark.”

“Do what you think best, then. If I didn’t trust your judgment, I wouldn’t have asked your help. This affair of the oak leaf may be nothing, but it may equally be very important. It would be a pity if you guessed wrong.” He fixed Nicholas with his hooded eyes.

“Of course, sir,” said Nicholas quietly. “I won’t fail you.”

“Quite.” Lord Arlen nodded, and rang for the servant to show Galing to the door.

ACROSS THE RIVER, IN AN OLD, OLD HOUSE OF STONE, A young man slept, and as he slept, he dreamed. In his dream he stood in an oak wood, very old, with dusty sunlight pouring down in bars around him. He moved forward carefully, not sure of what he might find. There was a clearing ahead, a grove. As he entered it, his body was bathed in golden light. He heard a voice: “Welcome, Little King.” A man was standing in the shadows, by a pool of still water, amongst bushes of dark green holly. He was afraid of the man; but all the man said was, “Welcome. I have been waiting. You come on your time, and now we can begin.”

The man held up a deer’s skin, and a stone knife, sharp as glass. “Do not be afraid,” he said, but the dreamer was afraid. He shuddered, and the oak leaves fell around him.

chapter
III

THE HARVEST TERM HAD BEGUN. ON THE STREETS OF University, students were suddenly everywhere, a constant tide of long black robes, rushing from tavern to lecture and back again. Window-stalls along the winding streets did a brisk trade in steamed buns and pens and penknives and tomato pies and other scholarly necessities. Excited male voices bounced off the stone of buildings and cobbles, arguing, bargaining, greeting friends.

To Basil St Cloud, the noise of the University streets was pure music: a concert of learning, of ambition and community. And the sight of the black-robed students, punctuated by the colored sleeves of the University Doctors (green for Humane Sciences, red for Physic, yellow for Natural Sciences, white for Law), was all he needed to gladden his eye. He moved through the lively streets on his way to the Great Hall and Doctor Tortua’s lecture like a fish swimming the ocean, answering greetings and ducking out of the way of the occasional heedless student with a smile.

The Great Hall was where the kings had once held their audiences; now, it was the place for public lectures—particularly appropriate, Basil thought, for a lecture on ancient history. Anyone could come to a public lecture, and this one was drawing quite a crowd. Under the frieze of watchful stone kings, the Hall’s broad steps were as crowded as the plaza outside a theatre. From stalls at the bronze feet of the Anselmian statues of Reason and Imagination flanking the steps, people hawked nuts and drinks and even green ribbons in honor of the Humanities. Basil pushed his way through a swarm of scholars, the bright sleeves of his doctor’s gown allowing him precedence, until he finally reached the floor of the Great Hall itself.

“Hey! Doctor St Cloud! Over here!”

It was one of Basil’s students, Benedict Vandeleur, waving his sleeve like a black flag.

“We’ve kept you a seat, sir!” Vandeleur’s confident baritone carried easily over the buzz and chatter of conversation. “Fremont,” Vandeleur ordered the man next to him. “Go fetch Doctor St Cloud.”

The seats in the Great Hall were built up in a horseshoe around three sides of the high, vaulted room, bench rising on hard wooden bench. The benches were full; even the steps were packed solid. Henry Fremont was adroit enough, St Cloud noticed, to step only on students; he followed him nimbly back up the same route.

Vandeleur must have been there for hours to get such good seats. St Cloud had a clear view not only of the dais and the high-arched painted glass window above it, but of one leg of the horseshoe and the men sitting there. He saw Tom Elton, Cassius, and Rugg, as promised, and below them a clutch of brightly-clad nobles. Gone were the days when the city’s young nobility would rather admit to drinking bad wine than to attending a serious lecture. Now there was a certain prestige in spending a year or two just learning something useless like mathematics or astronomy. When they became men of power and wealth, some still came to University to revisit the intellectual stimulation of their youth, or to attend public lectures by the distinguished doctors who held Chairs in their disciplines. Basil didn’t mind them; they were colorful, and when they attended his own lectures, they paid up.

In the front row, hard by the dais, was the narrow, dark face of Roger Crabbe, Doctor of History. He was chatting with a University Governor, but he stopped quickly when an old man began shakily mounting the stage.