The Privilege of the Sword (16 page)

“That’s different. You’re a man. And you could fight.”

“So you’re a woman. And you will be able to fight. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to reconsider?”

“Reconsider what?” I said rudely, deep in my own misery. “It’s not as though I have a choice.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose that’s true. Do you have any idea why he’s doing this?”

“None,” I said. “Because of my father. He hates us.”

“I think he hated his own parents more. I think he thinks that if your mother had known how to fight, they couldn’t have forced her to marry if she didn’t want to.”

I stared at the man across from me. “Did he tell you that?”

“No. I figured it out.”

“They didn’t force her. She wanted to get married. No one’s going to want to marry me.”

“So what? You can have lovers.”

I nearly yelped with shock. What did he think I was? “I’ll clean up,” I said instead.

Before going to bed, I opened his sword chest. The weapons were so finely crafted, they looked like settings for jewels. I touched the tip of one, gently, so that it did not break the skin. The oil from my finger’s tip would be enough to darken and corrode the steel. I pictured the shining metal covered with blood. Keeping cloth between my hands and the blade, I examined the dragon’s head sword. Near the hilt, a fleck of red. I rubbed at it. Rust. I should clean it, or tell him it was still there. Carefully, I wiped away the bit that I had touched.

H
E WAS GONE WHEN
I
GOT UP THE NEXT MORNING.
He’d left plates and crumbs on the table and walked away. I helped myself to breakfast, then began to rearrange things—not on purpose, but piece by piece, as I got ideas on where they would look nice. I set the dolphin glasses to catch the sun, made the jam and oil and honey pots line up in order of size and even angled the benches so we’d each have more room to sit. I did it all wearing my sword, too. Nothing had been moved in a long time; there were marks everywhere on floor and shelf, and so I swept and dusted as well. When I finished, it looked quite nice: a tidy room, glowing in the autumn sun.

I was drinking cold tea when the swordsman came in. His face was bright, his cloak thrown back, as if he’d been for a good long walk.

“Hello,” I said politely. “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes.” He smiled. He didn’t say anything about the room. He walked forward and smashed into the bench, landing hard on the table, and sent my cup flying. I shouted, “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” The swordsman got up slowly. “I just didn’t see it. Have you moved things?” I’m afraid all I could do was stand and gape. “Because it would be better if you didn’t.”

He could see, I knew he could! I remembered the way he’d shown me around, the sure way he cut the bread and dished things up…. My skin crawled when I thought of our duel with the bare-tipped swords, and his annoyance at having grazed my sleeve just once.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to whisper. “I won’t anymore.”

He brushed himself off, found the bench and righted it and walked around the table, touching it, seeming to see it with the edges of his eyes.

I glanced over at the glasses, the pots.

“Shall I show you the rest?”

“No, I’ll find them. I just wasn’t expecting it.”

“I’m sorry. I could move things back—”

“No, I’ll take care of it.”

I had to know, and was afraid to ask. I watched him touch things and look at them. He never held them up in front of his face, but somewhere to the side, or even above. Sometimes he’d find them and touch them first, and never seem to see them at all. It was as if his hands and his eyes were not connected: one knew the world one way, the other another one, and to make them speak to each other was an act of deliberation.

“Lady Katherine.” He did not like being watched. “You might take this time to practice. We will duel this afternoon.”

I should have been quiet, obeyed the dismissal in his voice, been a good child, kept the unspoken agreement between us that neither would ask anything uninvited, or come too close. But I was frightened now. Nothing was as I’d thought. I had power over him, to move things and make him crash into them, to hurt him by shifting a bench, and he had power over my every breath and I didn’t even know who he was—

“Are you blind?” I demanded.

“Almost.”

“But then how…?”

“Hold your hands up in front of your eyes. No, a little further than that. Now, can you see?”

“Yes—No—I can see around them, but not…”

“That’s exactly it. It takes some getting used to.”

“What happened to you?”

“Nothing. It just came on me.”

“Were you a swordsman?”

“I am a swordsman if I am anything.”

“But if you can’t see—”

“I can see what I have to.”

“Did you work for the duke? Were you his swordsman?”

Surprisingly, the man smiled. “I suppose you could say I was his. And I certainly am working for him now: I’ve never been anyone’s tutor before. It will be interesting to see what you can learn.”

This time, I took his unspoken direction. “I’d better go practice, then.”

Outside, I closed my eyes and hurled myself against the weight of the sword, the quickness of my own breathing, the slowness of my feet, the brightness of the day.

chapter
II

A
S THE
D
UKE
T
REMONTAINE HAD PREDICTED,
there was chaos in the Council of Lords, and some of it could be laid at his door. The apportioning of new land taxes had been all but decided upon, and penalties for noncompliance laid out strictly but fairly. The unfortunate lack of rain in the south did not excuse a poor harvest; the nobles whose lands were the country’s breadbasket would just have to extend themselves in some other way—lumber, perhaps. It was unfair that the northern nobles were expected to provide more than their share of wood for shipbuilding, at a time when trade was so profitable and the river so low that in places you could barely bring the northern lumber down at all. But foreign grain was cheap this year, and shipping lucrative. And if the river was impassable, roads could be widened and improved—roads that happened to pass through the lands of the ambitious Philibert, Lord Davenant, and his political affiliates. They were powerful men; they served their country well, as had their fathers before them. What harm in a little profit for their faithful service, when the benefit to all was so clear to any but the most pig-headed of councilors?

But when copies of a certain document—a private agreement between Davenant and a foreign shipper, misleadingly worded so as possibly to be mistaken for a treaty between two countries—began to circulate, it threw the motives of all his associates, these noble councilors, into question. The original of the document was never found, of course, and no one could ascertain where the copies had come from; but it was enough to throw the coalition into disorder, their opponents into a rash of aggressive realignments and their tax proposals into brightly fluttering shreds. If that wasn’t enough, that same Lord Davenant was suddenly burdened with a faithless actress mistress, an angry well-placed wife and a chief lieutenant who’d acquired one and, some said, the other, as well.

While no one could say exactly how or why, many of the coalition thought their troubles stemmed once again from indiscretions on the part of the Mad Duke, who always seemed to know more about the city than anyone could remember having told him. Nor did he scruple to disseminate his knowledge where a true gentleman would have kept his mouth shut. There was no use challenging him again; his swordsmen were as likely to win as not. The sword loved Alec Campion, it seemed, and always had.

The Crescent Chancellor, leader of the Council of Lords and head of the Inner Council, decided to go and speak to the Duke Tremontaine. Anthony Deverin, Lord Ferris, had not visited the Riverside district in many years—not since his days as Dragon Chancellor, when the future duke had been a callow and obnoxious boy known only as Alec, and Deverin, already Lord Ferris, a rising star.
^*
Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, had taken Ferris under her wing and tutored him in statecraft. When he tried to outsmart her in that shadowy arena, she smoothly engineered his downfall, sending her young kinsman to Council to do the deed. Everyone knew, after all, that the beautiful duchess never meddled in politics.

His punishment, an ambassadorship to the icy and barbaric lands of Arkenvelt, wasn’t a death sentence, though, and Ferris liked to think Diane had retained enough feeling for him to send him where he might succeed if he had the nerve and the brains, not to mention the endurance. The rewards of frozen Arkenvelt did include access to some of the world’s finest fur trading, and when his exile was over Ferris returned home with enough wealth in his pockets to reestablish himself in style. He frequented the right gatherings, married the right woman with the right connections, who died leaving him a small country estate and a good house in the city. He resumed his family seat on the Council of Lords, and there combined sense with statecraft in such perfect accord that, a mere ten years after his return, he was elected head of that august body of noblemen. It was in that capacity, now, that he paid a visit to Diane’s heir and successor, whom he disliked as much as ever.

At the time of his last visit to the little island between the river’s banks, Riverside had been no one’s domain: a warren of criminals and swordsmen living in abandoned houses. But the Mad Duke in his fancy now occupied it, in more ways than one. Ferris was aware that once he crossed the Bridge, he trod the duke’s territory. The City Watch still gave wide berth to the unsavory district, but it was honeycombed with Tremontaine’s people. So the Crescent Chancellor traveled in semi-state, with both guards and swordsmen, that no one there might mistake his person.

Lord Ferris had never been invited to Tremontaine’s Riverside house, and knew he was not welcome. Nevertheless his horses were stabled, his escort refreshed with courteous efficiency, and he was ushered into the ducal presence in very little time. It was not a house he himself would have chosen to live in: old-fashioned small rooms, dark paneling, heavy curtains…nothing shocking, though. Ferris felt almost disappointed. If there were indeed the pornographic frescos, instruments of torture, naked serving girls and other items popular opinion had decorated the duke’s house with, they were not on public view.

The duke himself was sitting in an upholstered chair eating crackers and cheese and slices of apple. He was wearing a brocade robe, and possibly not much else. His hair was tousled, imperfectly caught back in a black velvet ribbon.

He bit a cracker and shrugged. “Sorry. I get hungry.”

Lord Ferris refused the offer of any refreshment. If he’d roused the duke from carnal pleasures so be it, but he would be heard. “Tremontaine,” he said, “I’ll not take much of your time. I come from the Council on my own initiative, to ask you to reconsider your stand on the new tax laws.”

“Stand? I have no stand.”

“Of course not,” Lord Ferris said with mild irony. “You never do. Like your grandmother, the late duchess, you have no interest in politics.”

The duke smiled. “Exactly like.” One of the late duchess’s secret protégés, Lord Ferris knew the worth of that statement better than most. “It’s a family tradition.”

“And it is by pure accident that you have managed to bring down a coalition that was months a-building to make some honest change—”

“Honest change? Honest? Has someone altered the definition of the word while my back was turned, or have you recently developed a sense of humor?”

Lord Ferris pressed his lips together tightly. He endured these little sallies in the open Council Hall, as His Lordship of Tremontaine sporadically descended upon their proceedings. But there was no audience here to snicker appreciatively.

“Oh, Campion,” Ferris sighed. “Your grandmother was no friend to chaos. I wonder what she was thinking of when she made you her heir.”

“Perhaps,” the duke said around a mouthful of apple, “she thought I would reform.”