That strangely confessional letter that His Divinity the Emperor Vandiruk left on the ducal banquet table at Trelaninth was the beginning of twenty-four years of peace between Poyn and Tuvel. Vandiruk was as good as word. Or perhaps an attack on Poyn had simply become distasteful to him. Even the most jingoistic of the storytellers and bards on the streets of Poyn and wandering through the towns and villages of the kingdom scarcely dared to suggest that Vandiruk was afraid, for it was well known that he feared nothing. It was said that His Divinity disdained keeping promises, and it cannot be said that the peasants and townsmen of Poyn ever felt quite secure. Anxious rumors sometimes appeared, passing from tavern to tavern, and people told stories of the war and the resistance not just to boast, but because they thought they might have to do it again, and wanted to remember how. Yet year after year, the grain was planted and grew tall beneath the rain and sun, and was harvested, without ever being trampled by soldiers' boots. And children became men, who had never seen swords cross, but in sport. And so that bright morning, when the knights and footmen of Poyn and Kyliand milled in wonder around the empty castle and fields of Trelaninth, proved to be the first day of the long peace.
It cast the army into confusion. To fight they had been ready. They had been prepared to die, or to retreat. They had hardly dared to hope for outright victory against so greatly superior a foe, yet their leaders had at least known that victory was conventionally regarded as one of the possible outcomes of a military engagement. But how were they to deal with this, the terrible shadow vanishing away like a bad dream? Crislaird was dumbfounded. Having read the letter once aloud, he seemed to understand nothing until he read it silently to himself for perhaps a minute, perhaps several minutes. Around him stood Lord Athenrin of Fallasbring, Jasquiar the foreign minister, two other high nobles, and ten or fifteen towering specimens of the royal guard, and some younger soldiers and pages who perhaps shouldn't have been there. Already the surprise of finding Trelaninth empty had caused a breakdown of order and not all the men and boys were with their companies.
Crislaird gave his first order: let no one in the army know of this for the time being. "Wisely spoken," said Jasquiar, "it may be a ruse." What kind of ruse, Jasquiar had no idea. He was as amazed as everyone else. But it was too late. No less than nine men, including four scions of noble houses, claimed to be the man who had broken the news of Vandiruk's change of heart to the army, and two at least of them were certainly lying, being definitely proved afterwards by eyewitnesses to have been elsewhere. By that afternoon, every man from the highest commander to the lowest page knew of Vandiruk's letter. Whatever suspicions they might have had were disarmed by the enemy's compliment: "why shed the blood of heroes?" they kept repeating to one another. Indeed, if the letter had been a ruse it might have worked, for it took the sternest orders from Crislaird to restore discipline to the army.
Among Crislaird and his council, who occupied the ducal bed-chamber as a headquarters, the mood of grim resolution hich they had sustained for weeks turned to mingled joy and panic. In their hearts, they had begun to believe that Vandiruk had really withdrawn. At the same time, they searched desperately for darker possibilities that they feared had eluded them. Had Vandiruk somehow gone around them? They sent dozens of scouts in all directions. They sent messengers south and east. Six days passed in suspense, the Poynese army encamped in the fields around the castle of Trelaninth. Billowy clouds moved across the blue sky. The pigsties were emptied-- the Tuvelains had not even plundered the castle, it seemed-- and the air was full of smoke and the smell of roasted pork. In early morning, the forests roundabout resounded with birdsongs. Men noticed the change in the leaves, as leaves that still retained a little of their springtime tenderness matured into full summer foliage. There was nothing to do but wait.
It was on the second day that they noticed the mounds of earth, that covered the graves where the dead of the Third Battle of Trelaninth lay buried. The Tuvelains had left no markers upon the graves of their enemies. Some guessed that there lay the dead of a battle, but then why had there been no word of it? And who could have fought? More likely, said others, the Tuvelains had simply massacred the local inhabitants and buried them in mass graves, though that would be even more barbarous than their usual practice of enslavement, and would make an odd contrast with the chivalry of Vandiruk's letter.
On the third day a nine-year-old urchin who said his name was Tom Lingle came out of the forest with birds' eggs and nuts from the forest that he hoped to sell to the soldiers. When they questioned him, he claimed to have been eye-witness to a great battle. Though he had clearly been impressed by the spectacle-- not grieved: he had lost no family in it, being an orphan who had run away from an aunt-guardian a few months before, and she had fled weeks before the Tuvelain army had arrived (though some thought a little grief might have been appropriate nonetheless)-- he told the story matter-of-factly enough, yet to the soldiers it sounded fantastic. Why was the battle so brief? For it seemed to have begun and ended during sunrise. Why did such an inferior force initiate a frontal attack? If Tom's story was true, it must have been a few hundreds against tens of thousands. And could there really have been no survivors on the Poynese side? Tom was brought before King Crislaird himself, where he repeated the story and was rewarded with an apple and a bowl of honey, and Crislaird ordered that he be kept with the army until a guardian could be found. True, Tom's story would explain why Vandiruk was so impressed by Poynese bravery. Still, no one gave much credit to the tale.
(There were, in fact, some survivors on the Poynese side. Precisely, six. When ten soldiers were found unconscious on the field of battle, someone asked Vandiruk what to do with them. He said to keep them and tend to their wounds, and see that they were fed and taken care of. This turned out to be one of the few cases where Vandiruk forgot his own orders. Four of the men were lost, but the other six recovered. Unusually, Vandiruk seems to have forgotten his orders, and he was surprised when, four months later, he was told that the Poynese prisoners requested permission to return home. They had enjoyed a luxurious captivity in a remote corner of the imperial palace in Tuvel, tended to by slaves who had somehow got the impression that these men enjoyed His Divinity's special favor. Of the six men, five farmers and a blacksmith by trade, none spoke Tuvelain, and it was almost a year after their first captivity when they arrived in Little Poyn. There, once they had told their story, they were greeted with amazement, and told that they ought to have an audience with the king, and this is how the king's court first heard the story of the Third Battle of Trelaninth from participants, and also the first time he heard of Sir Tarl's historic address to the peasant-soldiers the night before they died to save Poyn; though he heard a better account of that later, from Dessa. The farmers returned at long last to their families and farms, finding them safe and sound; but the blacksmith, a bachelor, stayed in Poyn to exploit his fame, and it is said that he turned his conquest of the Tuvelains to advantage in another kind of conquests.)
After about a week, the army began to realize at last that Vandiruk had really withdrawn. There was no enemy upon Poynese soil. There was no bloody doom awaiting them at the end of any fearful road. The thousand times they had steeled their wills, had imagined the inevitable battle and hoarded their anger and their courage, were irrelevant. A great door had been opened onto a future of freedom. The flags and the fields, the towns and the towers they loved and remembered, were not about to pass away. Bonded by a shared fear, the men were bound now for a moment by a joyous communion of relief and renewed hope, which passed with a strange swiftness. What they had loved so intensely when it was almost lost it was oddly easy to take for granted again. On Jasquiar's advice, Crislaird gave the order to dismiss the volunteers, who dispersed, and returned to their towns and farms. The king himself stayed at Trelaninth, as did the army, as the abandoned town came back to life.
By the end of the summer a treaty had been signed and the rest of the army marched back to Poyn, leaving behind a garrison.
On his way back to Poyn, Crislaird stopped at the castle of Ganimy, which, under the terms of his probation after his treason during the late war, the count of Ganimy shared with a garrison of royal soldiers. Hoping to be released from the sanctions he had suffered, the count fawned upon the new king, which did not have quite the desired effect: too generous a man to be disgusted, Crislaird merely felt uncomfortable, but sufficiently so to decide to leave Ganimy two days early than he had planned. On the night before he was going to depart, however, as the king returned through a corridor to the room Ganimy had provided for him, he was accosted.
"Your Majesty!" cried the voice of a woman who spoke Poynese with a Tuvelain accent. The king's attendants, who were servants of Ganimy, flinched with chagrin at the familiar voice, for they had strict orders not to allow her to meet him. The speaker was invisible but immediately appeared from where she had been hiding in a doorway: she was a woman of bewitching beauty, small and slender with long black hair and a dark complexion. She walked boldly up to the king and then prostrated herself at his feet, her black hair falling upon the slippers that he wore after his bath. "I beg Your Majesty to tell me the truth," she said, without raising her face. "They tell me that my lord is dead. I am the wife of the Duke Drannon of Trelaninth. Do they deceive me or not?"
Crislaird stared in amazement. "Noble lady..." he said vaguely. Whether he was addressing her or musing to himself was not clear. "I think... I think that Drannon is dead... I am sorry..." he stammered.
"I thank you, Your Majesty," she said. "These people so despise me that they would think nothing of telling me a lie. It is terrible to lose a husband who was a man of such great heart, but not to know is even worse. Now I can begin to grieve."
To eyewitnesses, she did not seem to be fittingly saddened by the news. And yet Crislaird saw such grief in her that he began to weep himself. "Noble lady... I am sorry... forgive me..." he murmured many such phrases, scarcely hearing himself, "if there were only anything that I could do. I never knew your husband, but I knew his nephew, and I can only imagine how great your loss must be..."
Ganimy's men were relieved that Crislaird seemed not to have noticed her words about how "these people despise me."
"... but what is your name?" asked the king at last.
"I am Dessa. It is an honor to meet Your Majesty. I am the widow of his late Excellency, Duke Drannon of Trelaninth, and I am carrying his child."
And so the king prolonged his stay for a week, and when he departed, the Duchess Dessa of Trelaninth went with him. She had fled from Trelaninth on the very morning of the battle, the last to depart, she and her son Jamail and an old, trusted servant. They made haste along the roads, pushing the horses as hard as they dared, believing that the armies of Tuvel were close behind. They stopped at the first great castle they saw, and that was Ganimy. The country was full of refugees in those days. For weeks, people with carts filled with a few worldly possessions had been passing by along the roads, and some had knocked on the door of Ganimy and begged for shelter. Had the count had his way, probably not a soul would have been accommodated there, but the captain of the royal guards decided that who should be allowed to stay was a military question on which he could override the count. Before Dessa, the captain had allowed only those families to stay which included men able to bear arms. But when he heard Dessa's claim that she was the wife of the duke of Trelaninth he declared that it was the guards' responsibility to protect such a personage if she should request it. He recommended, however, that she travel on, and that she would be safest in Poyn.
"My lord has ordered me to seek safety in a fortified place," she answered. "I am obedient to him. But my own wish is to be as near to him as possible. Had he allowed it, I would have stayed at Trelaninth. As it is, this is the nearest I can be to my lord without disobeying him. I will stay here."
The count of Ganimy did not at all like the idea of such a character as Dessa living under his roof. He warned the captain that she might be lying. Most likely, she was a Tuvelain spy, who was taking advantage of the fact that Duke Drannon was known to have married a Tuvelain girl, a whore and former slave, to gain admission to a strategically important castle. Has anyone here actually seen Dessa? he asked. The count urged him to send her away.
The captain commended the count for his shrewd thinking. The captain agreed that it might well be so, but said that he could not risk sending away such a personage when she had requested his protection, at least not unless there were more basis for the suspicion. He gave the count leave to watch her closely.
And so in that spring and until the late summer, Dessa and Jamail became almost the prisoners of the count of Ganimy. They were not permitted to leave the castle, to go near the battlements, to talk to the guards, scarcely even to walk in the courtyard. They were not invited to eat with the family, and the fare the servants brought them in their dungeonlike room was scarcely better than bread and water. They were constantly trailed by attendants and guards, forever imposing arbitrary restrictions merely to irritate her. Poor Jamail began to long to be out in the sunlight, which was allowed only a few hours a week.
For the count had many reasons to hate Dessa. She was a former whore and slave who had had the impudence to enter, after a fashion, the ranks of the Poynese nobility. It was bad enough that a merchant like Drannon had become a duke. It was intolerable that a person like Dessa should be a duchess. Moreover, it was Drannon's nephew, Anduir, who had made a remark about "restamping the coins" which seemed to imply-- for what else could it mean?-- that he, the count of Ganimy, was unworthy to be a count and ought to be deposed. This remark had done much to damage his reputation with the Poynese street, to thwart his father-in-law's attempt to save him from the consequences of his treason, and perhaps to convince parliament to pass the special motion that had left Ganimy garrisoned by a royal guard, and him, the count of Ganimy, with the indignity of not being master in his own castle. The count had never noticed that the captain of the royal guards treated him with deference and never gave the slightest sign of contempt for the man who had for three years sold out his king and country and allied himself with the Tuvelain occupation. He saw an insult in everything the captain did, and was full of anger at the shame to which he had been subjected. On Dessa and Jamail, he sought revenge.
It was fortunate for the count that, when Crislaird heard how Dessa and Jamail were treated at Ganimy, although he immediately resolved that Dessa should stay there no longer, it never seems to have occurred to him to punish Ganimy.
Dessa rode with the army, tall and straight in the saddle alongside the men, with her son in front of her. Crislaird, always shy around women, and having, now that he was betrothed, a new reason not to associate with any woman but his bride, never spoke to Dessa as they traveled back to Poyn. But he worried about her. Now he ordered that she and her son be fed the first and best portions. Now he ordered that she be given a tent, a blanket, a pillow. There were always gestures of consideration, perhaps only fitting for a gentleman who knew that a woman was riding with men, yet indicative, too, perhaps, of a special feeling, of pity or admiration of chivalrous gallantry. If Crislaird felt that the the whole air of the camp was changed by Dessa's exotic feminine presence, he was not the only one. Other men talked about her more than he did. Yet it seemed to some that he felt it most acutely.
When the army, the volunteers long since released and many of the soldiers and knights left as garrisons along the road or sent elsewhere, yet still twelve thousand strong, arrived in Poyn, the populace greeted them with a jubilation and festival greater, if anything, even than its celebration four years before, the first time that Crislaird, then king of Kyliand only, ahd returned from a victory against Tuvel. Flowers were thrown upon the streets before them, and upon their heads as they passed. The air resounded with bells and trumpets. Spectators thronged the sides of the road, the windows, the rooftops, shouting, singing, dancing, cheering, leaping and waving their hands in gestures of triumph, and releasing flocks of doves into the air as symbols of the new peace. And this time they were celebrating not only victory but a royal wedding, the same indeed that they had anticipated four years before. This time it would not be denied them, and it was not. It took place in Indian summer, when the trees along the streets of Poyn were still green but those on the slopes of the mountains had turned golden. The capital's darling, Emilicia, was finally given to the only man in the world who could possibly deserve her, and King Crislaird of Kyliand, the noble, brave, gentle giant, pure of heart, wise and just, became King Crislaird of Poyn and Brunnan as well. Such a beautiful royal couple, so popular, and so young! They would reign, the people told one another with extravagant satisfaction, for fifty years!
And then the mood was spoiled by a scandal swirling around Dessa.
Dessa did not march into Poyn with the army but entered quietly the night before. She did not enter by the main gate, where an unknown Tuvelain might not have been admitted, but was ferried in by a boatman who had worked for Drannon for many years managing Drannon's warehouse at the south docks. As the light of a full moon flooded the streets of the strange, sleeping city, she and Jamail walked alone to the old villa facing Fleet Canal in the garden district of the southeast. The rooms that faced the street were let out to artisans, as before, who paid their rent each month to Drannon's faithful steward. But for two years the wooden double doors at the top of steps, the doors that led in to the courtyard, the atrium, and the inner chambers, had been shut, locked, until the people of the district almost forgot that there had ever been any traffic there. At the top of those steps, Dessa pulled from a pocket of her gown a great black key which Drannon had entrusted her the day before his death. And from then on, Dessa and Jamail lived in the villa that for so many years had buzzed with Drannon's business, the villa where young Anduir had dallied over his studies and dreamed of knighthood, the villa where a disguised king had once stumbled into a lair of beggars. For a month, amidst the excitement of the coronation, no one in the capital seemed to hear of her. She lived quietly, visiting the marketplace at first but soon hiring a few servants, looking after her son, becoming more and more visibly pregnant.
Then one day, along with a lawyer who had long handled commercial cases for Drannon, Dessa walked into the office of the notary of the Poynese parliament and said that she wanted to secure the inheritance of Trelaninth for herself and her two children, Jamail and the child she was expecting. She produced a document, bearing Drannon's signature, which she said was the last will and testament of the late Duke of Trelaninth. The notary was amazed and pleaded ignorance of how to handle the case (despite twenty years of experience) and asked to be given time to consult about the matter. He asked for the document to peruse in the meantime, which she refused. Within days, the capital exploded with the rumors of the strange foreign woman claiming to be duchess of Trelaninth.
Drannon was still in ill repute in the capital. The testimony of the farmers and blacksmith about his heroic last stand in the Third Battle of Trelaninth was yet to appear, but even when it did, the whisperers and gossipers who comprised the opinion of the best society never quite credited it. Few had known of Dessa, for after his disgrace Drannon had been little talked of; those who said anything had said he had "taken a mistress." Now that it seemed Drannon had bestowed one of the proudest names in Poynese nobility on a Tuvelain whore-- that detail of Dessa's life gave set tongues buzzing most of all-- his name stank worse than ever. In the chambers of parliament and in the best houses, Dessa's name became a byword and a curse. The circumstances were suspicious. The witnesses to the will were dead. All the same, everyone knew her case was cruelly plausible, as far as the law went. But surely there must be a way to prevent it. Hopes were placed in the king.
And then came the real shock: King Crislaird not only took her side, but even championed her cause! He seemed, at first, surprised that any objections should be raised. Once or twice, he was caught in unguarded expressions of open admiration for her. As he met more and more resistance, he lost his self-assurance and took on a bewildered and desperate air, yet he pressed on, making his case in private conversations, even once visiting the urban estate of Count Charles of Chestler to make a personal appeal. Opinion in the capital was at first stunned by the king's advocacy, then hardened into hostility. Somehow the story began to be told of how Dessa had fallen at his feet in Ganimy castle and begged for his help. No doubt that did indeed have something to do with it, but unfortunately, Crislaird was not credited for chivalry; he was said to have been bewitched by her beauty, to have fallen in love with her. Illicit liaisons were hinted at.
Now for subjects to impugn the character of their king with such slanders, especially a king as worthy as Crislaird, is profoundly reprehensible. Yet it must be admitted, even by the most sympathetic to that illustrious house, that the case made against Dessa's succession by the conservative faction in parliament. The dukedom of Trelaninth lay on the border with Tuvel and was of strategic importance. Dessa was a Tuvelain woman with a shadowy past. Her loyalties were decidedly suspect. They said that to put Trelaninth in her charge would put the whole kingdom in danger. With remarkable discipline, the noblemen of parliament said nothing about the stain on the honor of their class that they felt to a man that Dessa's succession would represent. (Though Count Charles was the leader of the faction, as usual, a shrewd and ambitious young count from a minor estate near Little Poyn, Tyrone of Benaverdi, seems to have been instrumental in the politicking that surrounded the scandal, and the tactic was said to be his idea.)
To allow or disallow the succession was traditionally up to the courts and ultimately to the king, and lawyers for Count Charles of Chestler privately told him that though some expedients could be attempted, the legal grounds for a parliamentary intervention in the succession were shaky. So instead, Count Charles proposed a "Detention Law" that would forbid Dessa to set foot outside of the capital and ordering the Constable of the City and his officers to watch her movements. Crislaird was mortified when he heard of it; witnesses said that he even wept. Whether the law could be enforced against the king's will was unclear. At this point, Count Charles took a bold bit of advice from the young Count Tyrone: he invited the king to address parliament and express his objections. He was not sure it was wise. "Will anyone dare to defy the king in person?" worried Count Charles. "Will they dare to resist a direct appeal?"
"In a battle of many wills against one," said Tyrone of Benaverdi, "the many will win out."
And indeed, Crislaird's appeal to parliament-- his first address to parliament as king-- was a failure, if not a humiliation. His speech hardly deserved the name: it was little more than a series of irrelevant episodes. He discussed the two visits of Anduir to his court at Castence. He spoke of how the army had arrived at Trelaninth and of the battle that had taken place there. He spoke of gratitude for peace, of respect for the dead, and finally stumbled into a clumsy appeal "to the generosity of all you... all the... honorable gentlemen..." and trailed off. The response was speech after thunderous speech, praising the king but turning his every point against him, endlessly returning to the theme of danger, of the hazardous folly of allowing Dessa's succession. Crislaird listened and looked a broken man. Already the rumors had reached his ears that he was suspected of liaisons with his beautiful protege, and he was hag-ridden by fear that Emilicia might think he had betrayed her. Now he felt as if his new Poynese subjects believed to a man that he was recklessly gambling away their security. A vote was taken, in favor, and he was given a chance to answer. He asked parliament to vote a second time, this time to ratify Dessa's succession if he would sign the detention law. A conversation in whispers began; and it emerged later that Tyrone of Benaverdi had counseled that the compromise be accepted. The vote passed.
Dessa and Jamail were not admitted to parliament but waited outside the chamber, and it so happened that Crislaird met her as he walked out. He looked at her feebly. "I'm sorry..." he murmured with pleading eyes.
"Your Majesty," said Dessa, who was gaining a reputation for the paucity but elegance of her words, and bowed. "Justice is the virtue most needful in a king. You have stood against the will of the whole city for the sake of the right. You have defended the widow and the orphan against the plots of the proud. Your justice is known throughout the world, but I learned today that men's praises fall short. Your justice shines like the sun. I am in awe, and forever in your debt."
And so it came to pass that Jamail-- Jamail Half-Elven, as he came to be called-- and the boy who was born to Dessa early the following spring, whom she named Devmir, grew up much as Anduir had grown up. Heirs to a great name and a dukedom, they grew up in exile in Poyn. They lived in the same house where Anduir had once studied and dreamed, amidst the same hubbub of commerce (for Dessa quickly took over the remnants Drannon's business affairs and restored and expanded them, impressing the merchants of Poyn by her enterprise and judgment). They spent their days dreaming of knighthood and adventures. They lived amidst great expectations, of which they seemed half aware. Dessa, ambitious for her sons, wanted them to learn to act their rank, but they showed little interest in it, and regarded themselves as the equals of all men.
They were not liked by the noblemen, who were their peers, and whatever their blood-- or at least, whatever Devmir's blood, for Jamail had no noble blood, really-- they enjoyed a certain celebrity in the street. For who had not heard the tales of Sir Anduir? And everyone knew that these two boys (Jamail's adopted status seemed to be forgotten by the commoners) were the last representatives of Anduir's line, of the famous House of Trelaninth, the theme of so much heroic legend, even more than Donbold himself, who had founded a line of kings! It was natural that the boys enjoyed the company of the commoners, who liked and admired them, more than the haughty company of their noble peers. What is more noteworthy is that the attentions did not make them proud, but rather, it gave them something to live up to. They practiced fighting with wooden swords. They hungered for tales of adventure. And they idolized the hero of so many of the tales-- their "uncle," Sir Anduir.
Dessa undertook to educate them, and for that purpose she hired, as it turned out, the same Cornelius, now with white hair rather than brown, who had once been exasperated by the listless young Anduir. Now retired from the university, he came every morning to the villa by Fleet Canal, sometimes carrying new books, sometimes... something else. Sometimes he brought gifts. Sometimes he brought invitations to the palace, to eat sweets in the gardens with the queen's maids, or to ride the king's horses or practice shooting with the king's archers. It turned out that Devmir and Jamail Half-Elven would enjoy, throughout their youth, special attention from both members of the royal couple, but independently and even furtively, and Cornelius was made, by no particular desire of his own but only because of his frequent association with the boys, a sort of confidential intermediary of these attentions.
The reason for the furtiveness was touching and even comic.
The king and the queen admired one another with painful intensity, and each was haunted by shame at undeserved good fortune. Crislaird thought that his patrimony was the poorer of the two, felt rustic in great Poyn after humble Castence, and always felt his wife had a beauty and charm he could not hope to match. Emilicia, for her part, remembered that she had once left Crislaird's offer of marriage unanswered and that he had suffered for four years in chaste, constant, hopeless devotion to her, and she burned with regret at the myriad flirtations of her own youth, and was ashamed that she had not had the simplicity of her first love to offer him. And so, deep down, each smoldered with quiet desperation to be worthy of the other.
Each of the royal couple also knew that rumor connected them, in different ways, to the mistress and young masters of the villa by Fleet Canal. Crislaird recalled with pain how his clumsy intervention on behalf of Dessa had set tongues talking rumors of romance. Feeling unworthy of Emilicia as it was, he was desperate not to exacerbate it by fueling the rumors. And Emilicia knew that all the bards and storytellers of the realm, in their tales of Sir Anduir, told tales of the love of Anduir and Emilicia, innuendoes and intrigues, longings and liaisons, and hinted that he was the man she really loved. It was, inconveniently, quite true that Emilicia had consented to marry Crislaird only after Anduir's death. If she were known to take an interest in Anduir's "nephews," it would be interpreted as a lingering interest in her lost lover.
Yet for all their anxiety not to spur rumor or provoke the other's jealousy, the king and queen felt bound by ties of obligation. Even if the capital never gave Drannon credit for his eleventh-hour conversion to courage, Crislaird did. He was haunted by the memory of that heroism and that sacrifice, of the man who had fought the last battle that Crislaird had never had to fight, of how the peace of his realm, which he considered a sacred trust and worried about day and night, really depended less on all his labors of statesmanship than on what happened that morning long ago, when a few hundred men faced certain death to defy the swords of Tuvel, and among them that quixotic, redemptive figure, the merchant-duke, Drannon. And yet while he, Crislaird, sat upon a throne amidst endless honor, Drannon's widow and sons were exiled from their rightful estate, prisoners in the capital. What royal hospitality he could offer was his way of quietly, inadequately, repaying that debt.
Meanwhile, Emilicia remembered the night in Thaplin when Anduir, his eyes bloodshot with fever, had asked her to run away with him to faraway Owenlin, that night when madness had seemed sense, when she had been ready, almost, to forsake the princess and sail away without a name and take her chances on the high seas... how she had seen in his eyes that he was a hunted man... how she had turned away and, somehow, set in motion a fate that she did not understand, that ended with him riding a thousand miles to save her from surrendering to Vandiruk and dying between the portcullises. She, too, was paying a debt, but a debt she did not understand. Or seeking something. In truth, she herself did not know why she felt more at peace in her heart when she watched through the window as Jamail and Devmir, to whom the name of Anduir meant only glory and adventure, practiced jousting with the royal guards, in their boyish ardor, in their innocence.
And so, by a strange conspiracy of the king and queen, Jamail and Devmir found themselves forever welcome in the palace, though they rarely saw the king and queen themselves. They made friends with everyone as they were wont to do, made no effort to learn protocol, and came to treat the palace almost as their home, until the liberties they took puzzled and bemused the palace. They did not understand that there was anything unusual about these favors. Alone, perhaps, in all Poyn, they were equally welcome in the palace, the mercantile houses, the streets and the docks, and moved freely everywhere. Whether because of their peculiar circumstances or their peculiar natures, they seemed not to understand the differences of rank between a prince and a peddler, a baron and a boatman and a beggar. The princes, younger than they, regarded Jamail and Devmir, before they knew better, almost as older brothers, then as windows on an outside world from which their royalty excluded them. The streets treated them as equals and friends, but also felt that with the blood of the House of Trelaninth in their veins, they were honorary heroes, and were destined, in due course, to do the deeds to deserve the name.
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