by the fountain of thirst chapter 2

[figureofdismay]

*

When Prince Kendall was thirteen, and Prince Roman was eleven years old, and Princess Siobhan was ten, their mother Queen Caroline took her leave of King Logan’s noble court for the last time. She and her departing train were armed with a dispensation of divorce, citing her father the King of Angla’s failure to uphold his side of their trade agreement and, more quietly, Logan’s own cessations of attentions toward the Queen. Caroline called all her children to the Queen’s Apartments, a rare occasion that only boded very well or very ill.

It was a chilly, brilliantly shining day early in the spring, and the high shutters and casements of the huge rooms were flung wide to let in the sunshine and the fresh, damp air. Servants with the queen’s livery bustled and bundled with cloths and trunks. Roman had noticed that many of the walls of the Queen’s chambers were bare, the tapestries woven and embroidered with the Angla colors and the Queen’s emblems, the white doe and the trio of hydrangea blossoms, had been taken down.

Caroline lined them up on the well-stuffed divan before the unlit hearth and stood before them in her heavy silver dress and dark gray, fur-trimmed velvet surcoat, jewel studded silver net snood glittering in the cool daylight as she paced slowly up and down, making Roman think of an icicle or a puff of fog. She told them that their father the King had no more use to her and she was going away for good, but had too much use for his royal children so they must stay behind and make the most of what their father could give them. That she would be leaving early the next morning, with the tide.

Kendall sat stiff and remotely stricken as a plank of wood or a gargoyle to one side of him, and Siobhan seemed to vibrate with suppressed emotion, fisting and twisting folds of her over-gown in her small hands. Her pale complexion showed her emotion, her cheeks blotching red as she struggled to master the tears that sprung to her eyes. Roman reached out to take one of his sister’s clammy fists, to still her, or comfort her, but Siobhan jabbed a small, sharp elbow into his side making him wince and yelp and shove her back.

Caroline scolded them for acting like stable boys fighting. Then, with brittle, urgently soothing cheer, she told them that surely, when the tides and seasons allowed it, their father would allow the three of them, or Roman and Siobhan at least if not the Crown Prince, to visit her in her home court of Angla, where they did indeed have their connections and titles they would one day inherit. She gave each one of them a rare kiss on the forehead and sent them off back to their household minders, so that her people could finish packing.

“She might have at least shed a tear over leaving us,” hissed Siobhan as the three of them trudged numbly out of the Queen’s apartments together.

“I think she didn’t want to distress us even more,” said Kendall, his voice wooly and thick, “Roman wouldn’t have survived it, seeing Mother cry.”

“I would so,” Roman protested, but he had to bite his lip to stop it wobbling. He felt sick and cold and shaky, as if gripped by auge.

Queen Caroline’s children had been separated from her before often enough, sometimes for most of a season if their father called for them, or more likely she was sent for by Logan and left them behind at the Summer Palace or Wheaton House, her two favorite places, where the children had mostly been raised. The Crown Prince for the last few years been expected to live more and more at the Sea Palace and study and observe as the King’s heir, so he of all of them was most used to living away from their mother and away from the childhood comforts of play and schoolroom. However it was one thing to part from one’s mother for a month or two, and another to learn she was moving to another country, across a blowy channel sea, no matter how narrow, and would no longer call their homeland her own. For good, for certain, upon the morning tide.

Their father the King called the royal children to dine with him that evening in his personal apartments away from the prying eyes at High Table in the great hall, where he could retell the news of their mother and the dissolution of the royal marriage that Caroline had already broken. Roman’s attendants dressed him well to meet his kingly father, that even in this time of grief he should make a proud showing or be a disgrace. A forest green velvet skirted doublet quilted slantwise in gold thread, thick sleeves tapered to points at his narrow wrists, and shoulder-capped and peplumed in cloth-of-gold, and thick true-black hose of the best new wool, and soft dark green leather slippers beaded with the royal crest and lined in silk, made by Kyburnian craftswomen from over the mountains. His attendant parted his hair neatly with a brisk scrape against his scalp with the comb and brushed it with rosewater. Roman was used enough to this ritual for these visitations to the King that the scent of rosewater started a ball of anticipatory dread and wonder deep in his gut.

He faced himself in the wide looking glass that graced his rooms at the Sea Palace, seeing his soft, white, pointed face floating ghostlike and bloodless above his dark, narrow trunk, amid the spangles of candle-light. He tried to tell himself that only this strange, tepid prince across the glass in mirror-land had to see his father and accept his decisions about their future without disgracing himself, but it didn’t work.

Roman didn’t eat that dinner, though the smell of roast meat and early summer squashes, butter and spices hung heavy on the air and stuck in the back of his throat. He sat opposite the King, his brother and his sister taking his right and left hand places of greater precedence, with Logan’s Chancellor of Laws, Baird Kellman the Duke of Beleister and his wife, Lady Geraldine the Mistress Of Prophecy filling the other two seats. The Duke wore somber black and a pleated jacquard robe the color of ink, perhaps due to his sober nature or perhaps to set off the King’s reds and golds to greater effect. Lady Geraldine wore a stiff-bodiced gown of pale blue-gray, in the new style from the Mainland, cut low and straight to show the fine whitework lace and linen shoulders of her undergown. Lady Geraldine watched the three Royal children carefully with her wide, dark-sea colored eyes, only lowered slightly in deference. In the eyes of the gods she is outranked only by the king, remembered Roman, so he had been reminded furiously many times as a child after he had made that one incautious approach. Her frank appraisal of the three of them unnerved him just as much as the news hanging over them that night.

The King was not unnerved, though. Roman thought his spirits were good for a man who had finished with a second wife, bold, in good voice, and smoothly smiling his courtly smile. He watched his father’s careless and easy manners, the broad gestures he made. He saw the way he looked with care and a seeking smile at little Siobhan, who slowly let go of her sullenness. The way Logan gamboled between courtesy and teasing to keep Lady Geraldine smiling and entertained, graciously charmed, and made Lord Kellman proud of his company, loosened enough to joke in return.

After the meal was done and the food was cleared, the Chancellor of Law and Ministress of Prophecy withdrew with practiced courtesy. Lady Geraldine looked back, just for a moment, making a last study of the Princes and Princess, the good humor faded from her face, her soft mouth pinched. Roman met her eyes, unwittingly transfixed, and found warning there, as she withdrew behind her husband.

When they were alone, Logan instructed the porter to pour both princes measures of unwatered wine from the King’s own carafe in their silver goblets. He directed the royal children to seats of comfort before the comfortably glowing hearth. Roman watched his sister’s gleaming braid shift against her shoulder as she sat and fidgeted, and thought how both of his parents knew too well how to set a scene. Logan told them, in a kindly kingly pantomime voice, over top an absoluteness like unyielding stone, the news they had already absorbed. The royal marriage was ended. Lady Caroline, who would no longer be known as Queen but as the King’s honored sister, was going back to the Angla court and the comforts of her family. She believed she could be happier among her own people, and that the princes and princess would be happiest staying here with him.

“But you sent her away!” protested Siobhan in a small piping reed voice, her upset just overmastering her awe of the great King.

“I assure you, she’ll be much better off. You know how unhappy she’s been, Pinky,” said the King, smooth and solemn. He stood over them looking broad and grand, the thick claret velvet gown over his gold silk doublet made his shoulders look so wide. His dark hair gleamed smoothly in the firelight like a seal pelt. “I know you wish your good mother every happiness, hmm?”

Roman took a large mouthful of the bright, spicy wine and felt it warm the back of his nose, the cold pit in his stomach. He put his goblet aside on the floor, and slowly stood on trembling, creaking knees. “Your Majesty, Father, I want to go with her. Please, I’m not needed here, I’m not the heir or the princess. If I went with Que- Lady Caroline, I’d be no more trouble. Please. Let me go with her.” Roman found that he was crying. Great fat tears ran down his cheeks and his ribs rattled though he tried to control himself.

“No more trouble, eh?” said Logan, cold and rough, his temper turning in a flash. His eyes glinted like steel as he turned to face Roman directly. “You know what you are, is an ungrateful son. After you see all the greatness and glory life at my Court and at my side can offer you, you want to throw it back in my face and run off with that ungrateful bitch for her rose garden and tea party life.”

“No, sir, I’m not ungrateful. I’m not, I promise. Court is… is great, good, and everything you said. But won’t Mummy be lonely without any of us? I just. I just want to.” Roman clutched his arms across his stomach, unable to continue. It took all his effort trying not to sob.

“The great dry stick of a woman wouldn’t be lonely if she wasn’t always running away from her husband, would she,” Logan snarled, the thicker accent of his boyhood coming through.

“But she didn’t run, you sent her away!” cried Roman, picking up Siobhan’s refrain in a heartfelt wail.

“Roman, no,” hiss Kendall, standing up behind him, “Your Majesty, he is overwrought, he’s never tasted unwatered wine before, he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” he groveled obediently through his tears, but still with desperate hope he continued, “But please. Please, can’t I?” He took a shivering step forward, and the pointed toe of his Kyburnian slipper knocked his goblet over and spilled the remainder of the wine across the floor and the edge of a thick Juttish hearthrug.

“Now look what you’ve done, you heartless boy,” roared Logan, loosed to his furies by this last small thing. The king swung a heavy arm and a thick hand clouted him around the head and ear before Roman had time to duck.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll clean it,” Roman yelped as Kendall tried to pull him away.

“It’s not the wine, you lackwhit child. You know what’s the matter with you, Prince Roman,” he sneered the title like a taunt, “You’re too soft. I won’t be sending you off to let your mother make you into one of her ladies in waiting. When I was your age, I was learning at my father’s side how to make war upon any coast or sea we saw. It’s time you learned the same, boy. But we are civilized now, aren’t we, so you will have to make due with joining the other noble Pages in the Royal Barracks. And you and your mother can still start your new lives together, hmm?” Logan nodded decisively, once, told the children to withdraw, and then turned away to call for the porter to clean up the spill as if he hadn’t turned his third prince’s life upside down at a stroke.

*

So that spring, Roman left his princely quarters and began life as one noble boy among many, learning to run and fight and ride and hunt. How to dig ditches and mend shirts and stop drafts and brace walls in crumbling fortifications. How to skin a rabbit and wax an oilskin and make a lean-to of fallen branches in the wilderness. How to wield a wooden practice sword of slowly increasing weights until the knights in training could be trusted with the real ones. He surprised everyone, this petted and sheltered boy, in his training, how fleet, how strong, how supple and resilient he was, and how little he chaffed or puffed up with arrogance when faced with hard words or disciplining blows.

Roman distinguished himself not just as a Prince dutifully learning how the knights of the land worked and fought, but as an able young man in his own right. He was naturally strong, and quick on his feet. He thought ahead and was cunning, ready to use shortcuts when it saved him toil and ready to plot and map with his senior knights on their campaigning. He was thrifty, with both human risk and effort, and with the pomp and frippery that the Royal Regiment was used to in their endeavors, even as a trainee knight.

Over the years of his youth, he sat through his history and language lessons with his fellow pages. He fetched and carried, mended and carted freight for his senior knight. In his later years as a half-trained and new knight himself, he withstood the long, hot progresses of the spring and summer patrols through the westerly farm country and the Southern Territories, observing country trials under the provinces of local Earls as a representative of his father and learning their regional customs and obscure penalties. Hoping his presence alone was enough to dissuade the vengeance that Noah and Logan had outlawed but knowing that anything could happen when the regiment moved on and his back was turned.

He shivered through a patrol of the North Lands in a freezing autumn when he was twenty. It was his third Autumn up north in his second year as a Royal Knight, huddling with hot rocks wrapped flannel in his bunk in his private Royal tent and listening to the boisterous jollity of the real soldiers around the cook fire. Roman knew by then, after having tried to join in for years with varying degrees of success, that his title and his rank had a dampening effect on the group spirits.

He had tried to absorb the savage beauty of the great hills and rivers and piles of rock that pushed up from the earth, the wool, cattle and dairy lands where shepherds and cowherds lived and worked and held their many festivals, but the landscape seemed hostile to him. He had tried to ape his fellow knights as they made merry at wayside inns with small ale and the company of charming young women who would laugh and dance and maybe go to bed with them for the hope of a Sir for a husband, or for the fun of difference, or for coins of the mint, rare in those lands of barter, but Roman wasn’t suited to these games. He could drink and laugh but he was shy of dancing, and when it came to it, he flinched at a small, perfumed hand leading him away to a private corner or a strange bed for a tumble. He tried not to let the regiment see these hesitations, but quarters were tight and long nights made for talk. Rumors and snickers of the king’s last little son’s apparent fear of the fairer sex had whispered and slithered along no matter how fouly he spoke or how carefully he balked and refused.

That year, as every year since he’d been sent to train, Logan summoned him home as the winter loomed near, for the solstice festivities and to keep him home in the Sea Palace during the darkest precinct of the year rather than risk a royal son to frostbite and winter fever at the Barracks. Roman boarded the huge dragon-prowed royal flagship Logan sent for him, as he did every year just before the winter cold and storms closed in and accepted his role as honored passenger among the Navy men as they sailed and rowed along the coast back to the capital and Sea Palace.

The royal quarters were small but grand, and built without drafts in the aft beside the captain’s quarters with a small sandpit brazer where his page buried bricks heated over the cooking pit at intervals, and for the first time in two months, Roman fully thawed. There were glazed windows to overlook the ocean and the midship deck, allowing enough light in the short days to read the dispatches from home, and in the long nights he slept, barring the mealtimes with the Captain, which courtesy forbid he snub. The passage hung on him like slow, muffled, hesitant plodding.

The first of his letters from Logan told him in brief command that his career as a desultory knight errant was over, that Logan had better plans for him back at Court, where he would remain even after the icy season. It was the news Roman had been hoping for in the secret heart of his heart that still thrilled with the idea that Logan might favor him one day if he struck exactly the right note of obedience and boldness. Now that he had heard it, or had expectation that he would hear it soon, that he’d finally earned his father’s attention, what he felt wasn’t elation. It was too muddled to be hopeful. Roman remembered, some of those sea-top nights in his sleep, the wide storm-blue eyes of his father’s Selkie that had met his nine years ago, and the word of warning they’d spoken to him clear as a bell-toll.

*
Late Autumn, 1461, the 33rd year of Logan’s Reign


The curious crowds at the wharf when they sailed in flying royal colors gave him a good natured welcome. The palace attendants were ready to slot him back into his old place at the Sea Palace, and the halls and bustling society of the castle were even more grand than he remembered.

Roman shed his sea-brined and mud splattered traveling woolens in humble drabs and washed with fine, perfumed soap and clean hot water ferried by royal servants to the large imported copper bath in his quarters, a convenience that Logan had granted each of his children in a show of wealth. The road and the sea melted from his lean, fit body, leaving only the callouses from sword practice, riding and all the other various manual labor expected by a company of knights that even his rank didn’t excuse him from. When he was dressed in new warm russet-brown velvets and soft hose, with the ceremonial short sword, that he had rightfully earned, with its scabbard jeweled in royal red stones hooked onto his gold-clasped belt, he felt almost ready to face the King and the nest of vultures that were his courtiers.

Before he went down to the public levels of the castle, however, Kendall appeared at his door. Kendall was looking so much more like an adult at 23 than he, Roman, did at almost 21, with his narrow face and his solemn mouth and dark, unreadable eyes. Kendall had been to the proud new Asterravian University of Oakenbridge in his teens, and then to the far more ancient institution of the Royal Anglan University at Lady Caroline’s urging, and to give a gloss of civilization to the Crown prince in the eyes of the Mainlander powers. He’d been home with Logan since the start of the previous summer, and seemed, to Roman, to have settled in at Court as if he’d never been away. At least, he wasn’t any more awkward than he’d always been, and now strode about with a confidence and boisterousness that he’d never had when they were children.

At Kendall’s side was a young man of his height with perfectly smooth dark olive skin and raven black hair brushed back from his forehead, and a neat, close-trimmed goatee in the Mainlander style. Kendall introduced him as Stewart Hosseini, a Prince of the Anytabian royal family that Kendall had met and roomed with at University. Kendall and Hosseini chivvied him along, telling him all the while the many reasons why Logan might have called him to Court. Siobhan was now over nineteen and Logan had started to mount ambitions to ally himself to one of the mainlander powers through his daughter’s marriage. Ambassadors had begun to find places at court this last year and a parade of special envoys had come during the fair seasons, hoping to find Logan’s ear. Asterravia was a new rogue power on the world stage and Logan was apparently trying to hint favor to all while waiting for just the right deal to be offered, and was keeping only his own council to what the right deal was.

“The other reason,” Kendall said, “and don’t let on that we told you because he’ll want to make a meal of the news, but you should know so that you’ll be ready, is that the King is courting again.”

“What? Why? Hasn’t he heirs enough in us? What does he want, an army of princes like the Ottorian Emperor? As if that’s working out for him so pleasantly.”

“You think he explains himself to me?” scoffed Kendall, “All we can hope is not to end up like Connor. Not that I think he’d do that to us. Not to us.”

“Are you certain of that?” Roman countered, only partly joking, and ducked lightly when Kendall reched to give him a brotherly smack on the back of the head.

“She might be too old for getting heirs on, anyway,” offered Hosseini smoothly, “They say the lady is already 36. Was married once but ran him off for a shiftless drunk and a thick-headed money waster. That was some years back, long enough for the dust to settle, but the union produced no issue.”

“Though maybe she simply never let him near enough to manage it,” said Kendall gloomily, “Our father found an excuse to bring him to court to look at the disgraced man so he could see what kind of man she had consented to marry and then refused. He must have impressed her with his money because he was a bulldog looking thing with a low brown like an Ibellan cutthroat.”

“Good gods, how do you know all this already? Why didn’t you send word?” he hissed at Kendall, alarmed and annoyed, “And you, Lord Hosseini, how can you know so much of this business, being so newly arrived from Angla?”

“I know what everyone knows,” said Hosseini with a careless shrug, “It’s all anyone talks about in this backwater court, the wheat harvest was poor, the fishing season was bountiful, the king wants a divorced common lady of only middling beauty for reasons no mortal men can fathom.”

“Stewart, that isn’t fair, Asterravia isn’t a backwater. We have as much power as any nation, more even, than those that bend the knee to the Promanus Emperor or the Ottoria.”

“That’s as may be, but you can’t honestly claim that your nobles and your government aren’t insular. The rest of us never know what to make of you from the outside. Imagine my surprise learning that the fabled Star court, home of a famous prophetess, mainly talks about fish.”

“Excuse me, we are getting entirely off the point,” Roman cut in between the banter of his brother and his friend, thinking, my father the King is 56, what business has he seeking a wife, whether he intends to expand the royal nursery or not? But of course such thoughts would be treason if voiced, and Roman felt guilty and slow witted for even thinking them. Logan seemed made of stuff that was not quite human, magnetic and commanding and certainly not willing to bend to the passage of time. Last winter home, he’d seemed as robust and filled up with energy as when Roman had been a small child who had barely understood that the man in the crown, jeweled chain and fine gleaming gown was his father. Last winter home, though, he’d been talking about how to renegotiate with Angla, not about a new wife. “Who is this woman?”

“Her name is Sarah Anne Miller,” said Kendall, “Father calls her Sally, and you mustn't make that face about it when he does it in front of you, Roman. Her people made a fortune in barley and rye. Father saw fit to make Lady Miller’s old father a viscount in gratitude for his grain growing, so that she may style herself baroness.”

“And apparently she plays the harp,” added Hosseini, exchanging dour glances with Kendall.

*

The new Baroness did indeed play the harp. King Logan held a private party in honor of his youngest son’s homecoming, ostensibly, in his private rooms that very night. Roman, Kendall and Princess Siobhan were all in attendance, and even Lord Connor, their elder half brother, who had been moved out of the line of succession at eleven when his mother’s sanity failed them and Logan had had the marriage annulled, who was most often off in his own countrified establishment where he oversaw a vineyard and small herd of well bred dairy cows for cheesemaking, had been summoned to court. Beleister, Lord Kellman and Lady Geraldine were also in attendance, as well as Leeland, Lord Vernon and his wife Duchess Joan, and Lord Muller, with his young wife Diana – the daughter of a merchant, plucked from obscurity on some of Karl Muller’s travels, and possible inspiration for his father’s decision to break social strata and bring up his own grateful middle class lady to rank and power – Duke Bridgeworth, Jamie Laird of the Mint and his wife Lady Margaret, and a handful of the hangers on, Colin Terwell Logan’s factorum, Karolina Novotney and Mary Rochford, Siobhan’s ladies, Steward Hosseini, and a few others he doesn’t know by sight. And of course, the guest of honor, Lady Sarah Ann, Baroness Geldham, and her beautifully painted and carved standing harp, gift of Logan Roy.

Logan had also commissioned a proscenium arch like a white Promanan colonnade wound around with silk vines and roses, with a swept back curtain of shimmering silk gauze the color of heliotrope blooms. Lady Sarah sat in the center of it, in a narrow carved chair and strummed and plucked and sang, backed by a court fiddler and piper who were half hidden by the stage curtains. Roman sat in the second row of chairs that had been set up in the King’s reception room, between Stewart Hosseini and Lady Kellman. On the other side of Hosseini, Roman could sense Kendall’s foot tapping and tapping, not in time with the music but from some inner vibration or manic metronome of his brothers. It made him want to fidget as well, slouch and trace the edges of the smooth flags – the royal apartments were kept clean and bare, and graced with ornamental carpets, not spread with rushes like the common places of the palace – with the toe of his soft leather slippers like when he was a child. Lady Sarah Anne played very well, but her voice was reedy, sweet but not blessed with entirely perfect pitch. It was not a painful concert, but it was clearly an effort of practice and enthusiasm ahead of inborn skill, and Roman tried to think ahead to how he would compliment it to his father, when inevitably asked at dinner.

During the third ballad Lady Sarah played, about a young sailor separated from his love while lost at sea, Lady Geraldine beside him tapped the top of his knee sharply with her be-ringed forefinger and made his foot twitch. He looked over and saw her raised brows and significant glance at his subtle sprawl and noticed that his foot had wandered over and in his restlessness and had crept just on the hem of her long, lapis blue silken kirtle, the very tip of his shoe hitting her heel. Roman blushed and cleared his throat, drawing himself up sharply. He tugged his doublet down flat to cover his shifting and wondered if the chilly sea-Lady thought he’d been making an inappropriate advance.

As the fourth song got underway, Roman was sitting as still and self contained as a statue of a heavenly virgin, he thought, when Lady Geraldine leaned over under the pretense of adjusting her half-veil, a sheer, snow white linen that draped in a soft fall over the roll of her chestnut colored hair and behind her shoulders, held in place by a simple pearl diadem. “Be easy, highness,” she said softly in a wry voice, “You needn’t hold yourself as if I carry plague. I won’t hold you to it. It simply seemed you were in danger of falling from your chair.”

“Well, thank you, then,” he murmured back, “Though a little percussive commotion might improve the evening. Perhaps you should have let me.”

Lady Geraldine’s mouth twitched in a wicked smile before she turned to face properly forwards again. The edge of her veil fell behind her shoulder now, baring the curve of her jaw and the soft column of her throat, the line of her cheekbone, the rosy gleam of candlelight and warmth upon her skin. The large creamy pearl at her ear trembled on its fine chain as she shifted her head minutely. A human woman, he thought with distantly echoing epiphany, curiosity, surprise, maybe not so remote and alabaster hewn, impossible and all seeing as he’d thought in his youth.

She caught his stare, jolting him with some unnamable emotion at being perceived, and returned it with equal curiosity for a moment before nodding in the direction of the stage. The Lady Sarah’s concert was wrapping up, content with four melancholy songs. The assembled nobles were applauding politely and Logan had risen from his seat of honor in the front to take his new beloved’s hand and kiss her finger tips with courtly feeling, making her blush and drop her gaze as she sketched a curtsey.

“Oh, gods above,” muttered Roman, unused to and unsettled by this version of his father.

“Indeed,” agreed Lady Geraldine drily.

Lord Kellman had sidled up to the king and was clearly engaged with him in some serious conversation in undertone when Logan’s attention could be turned away from Lady Sarah, so Lady Geraldine turned again to Roman, taking his arm with an air of command and instructing him to walk with her in to dinner instead of her husband, who would likely be some time. The King’s dinning room was a little ways down the hall from the reception room, to be nearer the kitchen stairs and cut down on the cooling of the food on the way to the royal table. It was a slow shuffle amid the 20-odd guests, and then a little time milling at the broad doors, waiting for the staff to finish setting out the settings, as apparently the concert had ended early.

“There is always some matter that needs attending,” she said, clearly used to this state of affairs, “Or he finds a matter if none comes to his hand. The details, it’s what the King appreciates in his service.”

“So Kendall tells me. He complains that he’s spent all these years on his good education and my father still prefers your husband’s cunning.”

“Ah, but your brother isn’t meant to fill the office of Chancellor of Law. He’ll have his own man to do that one day.”

“I guess that’s true,” realized Roman, “Someday far away, though.”

“But what of your education, Prince Roman? The King tells me that you have accomplished all that you can as a knight in peacetime, have you intentions for the next stage of your career?”

Roman made a face of refusal and dismissal and shook his head. “I’m taking the winter to think about things,” he bluffed, knowing that Logan would tell him what decision he had made soon enough but not wanting to admit to Lady Geraldine how little power in his course he truly had. “Never mind that, I want to know, are these concerts a regular thing now? Has the Court become musical?”

“Yes, in fact, all this autumn. The King has embraced the spirit of music most entirely, and we have embraced him in turn,” said Lady Geraldine with the kind of glassy over-sincerity that showed her real boredom with the pastime. “It makes a change, certainly. All summer the two of them embraced a mania for hunting. Now that the weather is bad they stay indoors and this is the worthy substitute. At least,” she said consideringly, “this pursuit doesn’t require bouncing along perched on a horse.”

“You are not fond of horses, then, Lady Geraldine?”

“Nothing against them. But it isn't how I prefer to take in the countryside.”

“No, you’re right. My father hunts with a vengeance, doesn’t he. Though I suppose if Baroness Geldham can keep up with him in that, that’s one for her.”

Lady Geraldine hummed in soft agreement and did not offer further opinion.

The doors to the King’s dining room opened, but Roman stopped Lady Geraldine from stepping forward by laying his hand briefly on hers on his arm. “I just have to ask, My Lady,” he said haltingly, face turned away from the guests filing past, “Do you know if– My father– If the Lady Sarah… Isn’t it your role to. With your hallowed office, surely you know more than we, than I, about what might be coming– if it is right?”

Lady Geraldine regarded him steadily, her wry humor softening to something more serious, maybe even concerned. Regretful. She bit her lip thoughtfully and then shook her head, making her soft gauzy veil flutter. “Almost certainly I do know more, Highness,” Lady Geraldine said in a gentle undertone, “But I think not in the way that you mean.” Then she let go of his arm with one more light pat, and went ahead of him to join her husband, who had come in the private side door with the King and was summoning her over with a distracted gesture.