"I know Grandmother loved the Dowager-House and retired there because she found too many memories in these halls, but that won't be the case for you. I couldn't care for anyone who drove you out of your own home, so I rely on you to find me someone sensible. I will be happy with safety, sense, and intelligence, in that order. Now," he continued, seeing the light in her eyes and deciding to take advantage of the situation, "Gel and I want to stage another holiday-battle, and we thought we'd have a siege of the Dowager-House instead of the usual woods-battle or field-melee. Do you think we could arrange that?"
As surely as if he had the human magic for reading thoughts, he knew she was engrossed in running over the various matrimonial possibilities in her mind, and that the moment he had said Gel's name, she dismissed the rest of the sentence as irrelevant to the all-important task of matchmaking. "Oh, certainly," she said absently, allowing the servant to take away her soup and serve her a portion of baked eel, a dish she normally never touched. She ate it, too, taking dainty but rapid bites, all of her thoughts occupied with more important things than food.
He grinned to himself, and devoured his own portion without further comment, congratulating himself on his clever maneu-
ver. He'd gotten her approval of the siege—which she would belatedly remember, some time late tonight as she went over the dinner conversation in her mind. By that time it would be too late to retract the approval. And it hadn't cost him anything other than something he'd already made up his mind to do. Satisfaction gave him a hearty appetite, and he enjoyed every bite of his dinner.
Down below the balcony, the lawn stretched out in a plush, velvety slope for some distance before it flattened out and became the village green shared by all of the human servants who had earned cottages in the manor-village. Surrounded by lanterns suspended from stands plunged into the turf, it was brilliantly and festively illuminated. The green served as fairgrounds, dance-floor, and feast-table in fine weather, and it served the latter two purposes tonight. The warriors, victorious and defeated both, celebrated at long wooden tables that had been carried out from their barracks. Other servants and field-workers, their dinners long over, slowly came by groups of two and three to join the fun. Festive torches burned brightly at either end of each table, and a little band of musicians had set up at the far end and played raucous dancing-tunes that were unlike anything ever heard at an Elven celebration. Kyrtian rather liked human music, himself, and he knew his mother was amused by it—but to compare human to Elven music would be like comparing a noisy forest stream to an illuminated water-sculpture. They were both made of moving water, but with that all resemblance ended.
Gel and a dozen others had already finished their dinner and found themselves partners, and were dancing with great enthusiasm and abandon, if not skill. From the rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes of the girls, none of the partners were inclined to complain if their toes got trodden on, occasionally. Kyrtian finished his meal in silence, and settled back in his chair with a glass of wine, watching the swirl and chaos of the ever-increasing crowd of dancers.
"About your obnoxious cousin—" Lydiell murmured unexpectedly, startling him.
"What about him?" Kyrtian replied, glancing at her. "He
doesn't want to visit again, does he? I thought we'd managed to cure him of that after the last time."
Lydiell winced. "It almost cured me of wanting to stay here," she said, shuddering. "If I'd had to sit through one more evening of youJroning in that flat voice—! You'd have made erotic poetry unbearably dull with that voice!"
Kyrtian grinned. "I thought the monotone went with the subject matter. You can thank Gel for that, by the way. I had no idea he knew so much about the tactical importance of camp supply and sanitation; by the time he was done filling my head with the information, I could have written a monograph on the subject."
"Remind me to have him served a nice dish of live scorpions," she said, with a touch of exasperation. "He might have taken care to recall that I was going to have to endure that evening too! But, to go back to the subject—no, your cousin Ael-markin has no intention of visiting. Evidently, however, he does want to make up for trying to disinherit you."
"Oh, really?" Kyrtian felt his eyebrows rising in an imitation of his mother's most sardonic expression. "How fraternal of him. What, exactly, does he want?"
Lydiell's face gave no hint of her feelings. "He wants you to visit. He's invited you to a—a gathering, of sorts. Lord Marthien and Lord Wyvarna are settling their dispute at his estate."
Kyrtian was unpleasantly surprised. "Two Great Lords are settling a feud and Aelmarkin wants me there? Whatever for?"
Lydiell shook her head. "I don't know," she replied, sounding honestly perplexed. "Perhaps he has decided he should change his behavior, in the hope you'll forget his petition. Or forgive it, at least."
Kyrtian made a sour face. "Perhaps he just wants to show the Great Lords that I'm as crazed as my father. After all, I have the same obsession with the past that father did. He's probably hoping I'll start droning about Evelon history, or asking if any of them have ancient books in their libraries that I could have copied."
"Darthenian wasn't crazed," Lydiell said softly. "And neither are you. It isn't madness to be concerned about the past—it's madness to try and pretend it never happened. Look at the situ-
ation the Great Lords have created—at war with their own sons! If they had remembered the past, and the feuds that sent us fleeing Evelon in the first place, they might have avoided this tragedy."
"I sometimes wonder if it isn't a little mad to pursue the past so relentlessly," Kyrtian replied, his mood suddenly shadowed. "Why else would father have disappeared?"
Lydiell's cheeks flushed delicately with anger, but she did not give rein to it. "Why else?" she asked, and answered the question herself, forcefully. "A combination of dedication and bad luck—or, perhaps, the acquisition of a ruthless enemy. I don't know what Darthenian was hunting when he vanished, my love, for he kept it a secret even from me, but I do know that it was important and potentially very powerful. That made the secret a dangerous one, and that was why he kept it from me. It is possible that he met with an accident. It is also possible that someone besides me took him seriously—and wished to learn what he knew, or prevent him from discovering anything that might have given him an edge in the endless jostling for power."
"Are you suggesting that he was—murdered?" Kyrtian asked slowly. It was something that had never occurred to him.
Lydiell sighed. "I don't know. It is possible—but I cannot even guess at how likely it is. I have never seen or heard anything to allow me to dismiss the idea, or that confirmed it." Her expression was haunted by that very uncertainty. "Nevertheless, let others remember him as an unstable dabbler for delving into the oldest of our records—I know better, and so should you."
Kyrtian immediately felt ashamed, and bent his head in mute apology. "And I should not allow the views of V'kel Aelmarkin er-Lord Tornal to shade my opinion of even so trivial a question as wine selection, much less anything important." He frowned. "I've half a mind to turn his invitation down. It's come too quickly on the Council's decision, and Aelmarkin is nothing if not persistent. He surely has something planned as an attempt to embarrass me."
But Lydiell shook her head. "That, you mustn't do. He has more political power than you, and he could make things diffi-
cult if you offend him. Do you really want to waste your time countering his petty nastiness with the Council, when you could avoid having to do so by attending his gathering?"
Kyrtian sighed, knowing with resignation that he was going to have to go and play the fool to keep Aelmarkin happy. "Not really. When is this farce scheduled?"
"In three days," Lydiell told him, and patted his hand comfortingly. "Cheer up," she offered. "It's only for an afternoon. How hard can it be to maintain your composure for an afternoon?"
How hard can it be to maintain my composure for an afternoon? Kyrtian asked himself savagely, as he glared down at the sands of the arena to avoid meeting any more contemptuous or amused glances. Harder than getting the better of Gel in a sword-bout, that's how!
From the moment he'd stepped out of the Portal into Ael-markin's manor, he'd realized two things. The first: Lydiell had been absolutely right; if he hadn't shown his face—and his sanity—at this function, Aelmarkin would have been able to say whatever he liked and be believed. The second: it was going to stress his patience and his acting ability to the limit to put up with the attitude of every other guest that Aelmarkin had invited. He had never felt so utterly out-of-place in his life. Why, he had more in common with the humans of his estate than he did these strange creatures of his own race!
A great many of them were approximately his age—much younger than Aelmarkin—the idle offspring of Great Lords who didn't care to attend this particular challenge-fight themselves, but wanted to send representatives. Of course this meant that he was surrounded by those with little to do except chatter about others of their set, current fads, useless pastimes, and new fashions. The people of their social set were people he didn't know anything about, and the pursuits they found so important—well, he couldn't imagine why anyone would waste time on such things. But in their eyes, he was clearly impossibly backward, out-of-step, and provincial.
None of them knew anything about any of the subjects he cared about, which made him sound both a bore and a boor.
And after he'd shown a flicker of startlement at statements he considered outrageous, they probably put him down as callow and a prig.
Well, by their standards, I am a prig. I don't consider an afternoon spent in having my jaded appetites aroused by poor human girls who only exist to serve as my concubines to be particularly amusing.
After the first hour, they snubbed him openly, and with unveiled contempt.
This, strangely enough, made him very uncomfortable. He hadn't expected them to make him feel that way. He could try to tell himself that these people didn't matter, that all he had to do was remain polite and comport himself like a gentleman and nothing they reported back to their fathers would do any harm—but that didn't make the sneers and the sniggering any easier to bear. He didn't like them, but they were many and he was one; it was all too easy to feel the hurt of the scorned outsider. He truly hadn't anticipated that sort of reaction from himself, and he wished there was a way he could gracefully extricate himself and go home.
As he stared fixedly down at the wooden-walled arena below him, he heard whispers behind him, and snickering, and felt the back of his neck grow hot. He was just glad that Gel was here with him, in the role of bodyguard; somehow it was easier to stay composed with Gel's stone-faced example to copy.
I'm on their choice of ground; the best I can hope to do is get out of this without making any major blunders. Mother couldn 't possibly have known how slippery this situation could become. He was acutely aware that they had far more experience than he at the maneuvering of intrigue and politics. He felt horribly young, shallow, and naive; these people had drunk machination with their first milk, and he had no idea how to deal with situations they wouldn't even hesitate over.
Kyrtian had taken a seat in the first row to avoid meeting their eyes any longer, but they continued to speak to each other in voices pitched for him to overhear, taunting him to respond.
"Who, exactly, is this fellow?" asked an arrogant young male a little to Kyrtian's left.
"My cousin Kyrtian," Aelmarkin said lightly. "Son of the late Lord Darthenian, my uncle."
"Lord Darthenian..." someone murmured behind him. "That name sounds familiar. Don't I know it from some old story or other?"
"Try coupling the name with daft," drawled another, sounding so smug that it was all Kyrtian could do to keep from standing up and going for the fellow's throat. "Daft Darthenian, pot-hunter, excavator of things better left buried, and pursuer of useless old manuscripts. Missing in pursuit of same, and presumed dead, oh, decades ago."