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- Herausgeber: Titan Books
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
The long-awaited founding of Valdemar comes to life in this new series from a New York Times bestselling author and beloved fantasist.Within the Eastern Empire, Duke Kordas Valdemar rules a tiny, bucolic Duchy that focuses mostly on horse breeding. Anticipating the day when the Empire's exploitative and militant leaders would not be content to leave them alone, Korda's father set out to gather magicians in the hopes of one day finding a way to escape and protect the people of the Duchy from tyranny.Kordas has lived his life looking over his shoulder. The signs in the Empire are increasingly dire. Under the direction of the Emperor, mages have begun to harness the power of dark magics, including blood magic, the powers of the Abyssal Planes, and the binding and "milking" of Elemental creatures. But then one of the Duchy's mages has a breakthrough. There is a way to place a Gate at a distance so far from the Empire that it is unlikely the Emperor can find or follow them as they evacuate everyone that is willing to leave.But time is running out, and Kordas has been summoned to the Emperor's Court.Can his reputation as a country bumpkin and his acting skills buy him and his people the time they need to flee? Or will the Emperor lose patience, invade to strip Valdemar of everything of worth, and send its conscripted people into the front lines of the Imperial wars?
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CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Mercedes Lackey and available from Titan Books
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Mercedes Lackey and available from Titan Books
FAMILY SPIES
The Hills Have Spies
Eye Spy
Spy, Spy Again
THE HERALD SPY
Closer to Home
Closer to the Heart
Closer to the Chest
THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES
Foundation
Intrigues
Changes
Redoubt
Bastion
VALDEMAR OMNIBUSES
THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS
LEAVE US A REVIEW
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Beyond
Hardback edition ISBN: 9781789099164
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789099171
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First Titan hardback edition: November 2021
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© Mercedes Lackey 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Mercedes Lackey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Dedication:
This work is dedicated to the people that we all have loved and lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the people they have left behind who must cope with their loss. Colleagues, family, friends, you are missed so very much. There are holes left in our lives, and we grieve over who and what you were to us. We do not suffer only the sting of your absence, we feel the pain that you were removed from our futures, too.
This work is dedicated to the medical professionals and volunteers who labored through unthinkable conditions to aid those they didn’t even know. Nurses, virologists, critical care units, ambulance crews, doctors, admin, Makers, and everyone who offered aid—you fought so hard to do what was right, enduring true horrors in terrible conditions. ‘Hero’ is too small a word for what you are to us all.
And finally, this work is also dedicated in furious disgust to ridding our world of the influence of everyone complicit in using the pandemic as a tool for their own power, profits, and political maneuvering. You pushed hateful agendas while the bodies were stacked up. We all lost people dear to our hearts because of you parasitic, heartless creatures. If you had souls, you’d be damned.
elp them through, whenever you can,” muttered Kordas, Duke of Valdemar, in a horse-box that felt stifling for the stark, dirty work to be done. He had latched onto that as his personal guide to life when he’d begun equine husbandry, and he must have repeated it to himself twenty times in the past candlemark, to maintain his focus.
The Duke was nearly beside himself over the state of his favorite mare, but no grinding of teeth nor fretting would take the place of skilled hands in a time like this. The mare in question was in the throes of foaling, and it was not going well. Knowing that she was very close to dropping, Kordas had ordered her put up in her loose-box just before sunset, and it was a good thing that he had. It was, as these things always were, the middle of the night.
On the plus side, Kordas was an educated mage, so at least he had mage-lights to see by, and a panel of mage-fire to keep him and the sweating mare warm. And, fortunately, this wasn’t out inthe pouring rain. Because it was raining—of course it was. Not all of the rumbling was thunder. There had been tremors all across the Empire of late. This mare and most of the other animals in the area were on edge, and those tremors could be why she went into birthing so suddenly—an instinctive impulse to birth now, in case danger was coming. The stable smelled of sweaty horse, damp and dry hay and straw, rain, the reek of Kordas’s own sweat, the mare’s waters, and a truly notable amount of the mare’s digestive gas.
This was especially notable because Kordas was trying to get the foal positioned correctly and his arm was deeply engaged.
They never tell you that giving birth makes the mother gassy, until you’re well-committed to the program …
Kordas had stripped off tunic and shirt a candlemark or so ago. His trews were probably ruined, his hair was plastered to his head with sweat, more sweat ran down into his eyes and down his back, and the pain in his right arm and shoulder was indescribable. I don’t think I’ve ever been more miserable in my life.
On the minus side …
The mare grunted with a contraction. Her vaginal muscles clamped down on his arm, he lost the miniature hoof he’d been groping for, and he thought his head was going to explode from the compression of those muscles around his arm. And then, she farted in his face.
As soon as the muscles relaxed, he pulled his arm out, another contraction started, and the foal popped into view again. One tiny hoof, and the nose, and no further.
He stared at the sight of his failure and cursed. “Futtering breech birth,” he murmured, as his Healer, Cestin, soothed the mare and stroked her nose.
“Neither Arial nor her foal are up to much more of this,” Cestin warned him, which of course he was well aware of. Arial’s flanks were soaked with so much sweat that it had begun to foam, and her head hung limply. She was on her feet purely because Cestin was keeping her there. “That foal has to come out soon, alive or dead, or you’re going to lose both of them.”
“I came to help,” called his sister-in-law Fidelia from the doorway. A moment later Delia herself came to the open door of the loose-box, shaking the water off her waxed-canvas cape as she took it off and slung it over the loose-box wall. As always, Delia was dressed to suit the occasion—in this case, in a pair of old worn breeches, a snagged and darned knitted tunic, and knee-high boots. She held up an unneeded lantern and blew the wick out.
“I’m not sure what you can—” he began.
“I’ve got the Fetching Gift,” she reminded him. “I also brought you the boiled strap you forgot.”
“Because I didn’t know it was going to be a breech birth,” he retorted. Then, aware of how ungrateful he sounded, he flushed. “You’re a star.”
“Well, when you didn’t come back, I assumed the worst, and the worst is always a breech birth. I’ve learned an awful lot about foaling since I moved in with you and Isla.” She hung the lantern up and handed him a pail holding a steaming strap made of boiled bandage. “Now let’s get this poor creature out of her misery.”
As he took the strap, she moved to the mare’s side and began feeling her swollen flank. The mare barely registered her presence with a flick of her ear.
Relief settled over him like a warm cloak. Now he could concentrate on getting this thing done properly.
Arial had presented a breech birth with one leg folded back, which was not the worst that could have happened, but was a difficult proposition with only two people, especially when one of them had to keep the mare on her feet, leaving only Kordas to do the work of trying to get the foal into a proper position for birth. When the mare began pushing the foal through the birth canal, as she was now, only one leg, instead of two, was protruding, and that meant the second leg was turned back and stuck at the shoulder. As he well knew, if he had made the mistake of grasping the first leg at this point to try tugging, serious damage could have resulted to the mare.
To solve the problem, he had to get the fetus pushed back out of the vagina so that the forelimbs could be repositioned. This was more easily done if the mare was on her feet rather than on her side straining. That was why Cestin was at her nose, giving her strength and keeping her upright. The problem he’d had was that he needed to keep track of the leg that was correctly positioned, and each time he’d pushed the foal back, that leg had gotten away from him. To make certain the free leg wasn’t “lost” in the process, he should have placed some boiled rope or other sterilized strap around the protruding leg before the repulsion began. And because he’d run out of the manor so fast, purely not thinking, he’d left things like that behind. There were plenty of supplies here in the stable, but Cestin didn’t know where they were, and to be honest, neither did he. Arial wasn’t the only mare foaling tonight, and the stablemaster and both stableboys were somewhere out in the storm attending to a mare who’d hidden herself at the bottom of the pasture.
You could always be in their shoes right now.
He quickly passed the soft strap around the tiny ankle, loosely twisted it once to hold it in place, and began shoving the foal back up into the mare’s uterus. She responded with a contraction that felt like she was about to break his arm, but he got the foal back up where she didn’t want it to go, inserted his other arm, and began feeling for the mis-positioned leg.
And barely got the tip of his finger on the knee, when another contraction moved it out of his grasp. He and the mare groaned together.
“Got it,” Delia said quietly from beside him. He spared a glance at her; both her hands were on the mare’s side and her eyes were closed in concentration, bits of her hair already coming loose from the fat brown braid curled around her neck.
A moment after that, he felt the foal’s other foot fit itself into his hand. “Don’t let her start a contraction!” he said sharply to Cestin. He shoved his other hand up inside his poor mare, got the strap around the second hoof by feel, then slid his hands out, pulling the strap just barely taut as he removed his arms from her insides.
“All right, let her lie down,” he told the Healer. Arial responded to the Healer’s release by folding her legs beneath her and going straight down into the straw, as he kept the tension up on that strap. Tension only. Just enough to keep both little feet where he wanted them, in the birth canal. He did not want to pull the foal out. All he wanted to do was to keep both legs positioned as if the foal was diving—
The mare’s flanks shuddered with a contraction, and just like that, as easily as if Arial hadn’t been struggling for the past half-candlemark, the foal slipped out onto the straw, rupturing the membrane around it as it did so.
A filly!
Moving slowly, and making soothing sounds, Kordas picked up a waiting piece of toweling and gently toweled off the foal’s nose. She lifted and shook her head, and sneezed, and his heart sang. She’s fine. She’s just fine.
Another moment later, the foal rolled from her side into a normal “lying” position, and sneezed again. He put a finger in her mouth and she sucked at it vigorously. She was going to be more than fine.
Now it was Arial’s turn to move; Cestin backed up as she gave indications she was about to stand. When she rolled to her feet and did, the cord broke, and Kordas reached for it carefully and tied a loose knot in it to make sure she didn’t step on it and pull out the afterbirth prematurely.
She sniffed at the birth fluids in the straw, then, as if that scent reminded her that there ought to be a foal somewhere about, she turned, and spotted her new daughter. This was her third foal, and she was an old hand at this by now. She immediately began licking her foal, starting at the head. Kordas moved back and let her have her way.
He looked over at Delia, who was watching the foal with a thoroughly infatuated little smile on her face. The half-formed idea he’d had when he knew Arial had “caught” hardened into a decision. “Delia, I couldn’t have turned her without your help.”
Delia looked up from the foal to him. “Her? Oh! It’s a filly?”
“More to the point, she’s your filly now,” he said warmly.
“I—what?” He chuckled. Delia looked as if he’d awakened her from a dead sleep, she was so startled.
“She’s yours. Your sister had Arial’s first foal, my cousin got her second. And the way you’re watching that little girl, I’m afraid your heart would break if I gave her to anyone else.” No mention of selling the foal; he would never sell a foal of Arial’s bloodline.
Delia’s expression went from stunned to joyful, with a hint of tears in her eyes. “It just might.” She might have said something else, but just then the afterbirth fell into the straw with a dull thud—a good sign, that Arial had passed it so early. Delia moved out of the way so that he and Cestin could examine it.
No tears, no holes, and no toughening. He sighed with relief, and just then the stablemaster and two of the stableboys came in, the entire little parade soaking wet, one of the boys leading the mare that had been down at the end of the pasture, the stablemaster carrying the foal in his arms.
“Any problems?” he and the stablemaster asked simultaneously. And they both laughed.
“If I’d asked the gods for a perfect, easy birth, I couldn’t have gotten better,” the stablemaster said, as the boy led the mare into the loose-box. “But then, it did have to be in the middle of a howling thunderstorm and a groundshaker.”
“Arial was breech, but Cestin and Delia helped me right her,” Kordas replied.
The stablemaster put the foal down beside the mare; the foal immediately shoved his nose under his dam’s belly and began rooting for the nipple. “Delia, eh?” The stablemaster eyed Delia with some speculation. “Never thought of using Fetching Gift for a breech birth. You could be right handy; if you think you could turn a foal that was presenting tail-first, you’re worth your weight in gold.”
Delia made a little bow. “Call on me at your will,” she said.
“I shall. Boys, go into Arial’s box and clean up the dirty straw. Thank all the gods it was a warm rain, or we’d all be perishing.” The stablemaster stretched and yawned as Cestin and Delia got out of the loose-box so the stableboys could get in, moving slowly and carefully, to fork out all the contaminated straw and the placenta, replacing it with clean straw. Arial didn’t care; her concentration was entirely on her foal, and mares generally didn’t eat their placentas. “You can go back to bed now, my lord Duke. I’ll keep an eye on things here.”
Kordas took that as the dismissal it was, plucked his shirt and tunic off the side of the loose-box, and gestured to Delia and Cestin to follow him. “We’ve been given our walking orders,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s get out before he chases us out with a broom.”
“I wouldn’t do that, my lord,” the stablemaster countered, as they left—leaving behind the mage-lights, which would naturally fade and then vanish on their own as dawn approached. “I’d just set the dogs on you.”
Only Delia had a rain cape, which made Cestin grumble under his breath, but Kordas was actually grateful for the downpour. His trews were already probably ruined, so a little rain wasn’t going to make any difference, but the unusually warm rain was doing wonders for rinsing the sticky birth-fluids away. “Hold this, would you?” he asked Delia, handing her his shirt and tunic so he could “wash” his hair as they walked.
It wasn’t that far to the manor, a fanciful piece of architecture sprouting delicate towers and elegant domes that was perfectly capable of holding the population of the entire Dukedom at a pinch, and was about as defensible as a sand castle. This, of course, was exactly how the Emperor wanted things; he did not want his landholders to be able to mount any kind of effective defense of their realms. He wanted to be able to march in and take everything if he pleased, and he wanted his nobles to be aware of that every single moment.
“Why is this storm so warm?” Delia asked, through the downpour. There wasn’t much lightning and thunder, but the amount of rain coming down was almost enough to drown out her words.
“There’s a war out on the frontier,” Kordas reminded her. “The Emperor never stops trying to conquer someone. I’m told there are lots of mages in those two armies, and it’s messing with the weather. I wouldn’t in the least be surprised to have this turn into a blizzard by morning.”
“I hope not!” Delia replied with alarm. “That would be a disaster!”
Kordas shrugged, then, aware that she couldn’t see him in the dark and downpour, added, “Not much we can do about it without tipping our hand to the Emperor that I have more mages living here than he is aware of.” Now, that was an advantage to having that enormous pile of a manor—he could have as many mages as he cared to host here, and unless they made themselves “visible,” no one would be the wiser.
And since at least a third of his mages were busy full time masking the presence of the others, he was as certain as he dared to be that the Emperor had no idea so many had come to him for protection. He glanced up at the tops of the towers overhead. There were lights in the windows of all of them. His mages were hard at work tonight—perhaps. Of course they could also be curled up next to their fires with cats (or dogs, but mages seemed to prefer cats), mulled ale, and a good book.
Cats, mulled ale, and a good book sounded very attractive right now, but his bed sounded even more attractive. At least he’d washed all the muck off. Though if Isla had ordered him a hot bath … I wouldn’t turn it down.
The nearest entrance to the stables was the kitchen, which at this hour was dark and fragrant with the scent of the herbs in the cleaning water and a slight yeasty scent of the dough left to rise overnight for the first baking in the morning.
No one slept in the kitchens at Valdemar except, perhaps, the kitchen cats. With a superfluity of rooms, even the lowliest scullion had a little cot of his own tucked away in the warren of servants’ cells next to the kitchen. They were too small to be called rooms, in Kordas’s opinion, but they were private, comfortable, and each contained a proper bed, which was far more than most servants ever got. That had not been something that had been built into the structure. It was an innovation Kordas’s grandfather had made, converting a single large room next to the kitchen into twenty little kitchen servants’ rooms, each one with a door to allow the privacy that servants were so seldom accorded.
Kordas paused just inside the kitchen, next to the banked fire, to drip for a few moments. Cestin wrung out the hems of his robes at the hearth. “If you have no further need of me, my lord—?” he said, making it a question.
Kordas clapped him on the back. “Not tonight. There’s probably cakes in the larder.”
Cestin brightened at that. “I am a bit peckish,” he admitted, and went for a rummage, returning with a napkin full of tea-cakes. “It was a good night’s work, my lord.”
“And a success, thanks to both of you.” He clapped Cestin on the back again, and noticed as he did so that a cold draft was coming from the crack under the kitchen door. The temperature had dropped while they waited, just as he had predicted. Good work on Stafngrimr’s part, getting that mare and her foal up to the stables when he did. Wretched mageweather! It just might blizzard by morning!
Cestin noticed too. “I believe I will get back to my room and enjoy these in bed with a cup of tea. I fear the weather is turning. Good night, my lord.”
“Good night, my friend,” Kordas responded with a smile.
When Cestin had gone, Delia made no move to leave. Instead she peered through the gloom at her brother-in-law. “Did you really mean that? About giving me the filly?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I hadn’t meant it. I’d been thinking about it for a while. I might not have if it had been a colt, because I want to put any colts back into the breeding program, but you ought to have a horse you’ve personally trained, and I can’t think of anyone else who deserves one of Arial’s foals more than you do.”
Delia made a little sound he recognized as a sigh of pleasure. “Thank you, brother. This means a lot.”
“It does,” he agreed, with a half smile. “It means a lot of work. And that work will start immediately. You need to get the little one used to you from the beginning, and used to the idea of a little light weight on her back every single day. Not much. Just enough for her to notice, like resting your hand on her back while she moves about. Grim will teach you, and you’ll teach her, and it needs to be every day. There’s nothing like working with a horse from the moment it’s foaled to get an extraordinary mount. What are you going to name her?”
“I don’t know yet,” Delia replied. “I need to think about it. Is she going to be a Gold, like Arial?”
“Definitely. Another Valdemar Gold.” He had plenty of experience in telling what color a horse was going to be even when soaking wet, and the filly was going to be within a shade of Arial’s glorious autumnal color.
“Something about sun, then, maybe,” Delia mused, and stretched. “Well, I’m dry enough now I won’t leave drips all over the hallway. I’m heading for bed and maybe a small cup of mead.”
“I think I’ll be doing the same,” he agreed.
They parted company at the kitchen door, Delia going off to her own suite in a quiet part of the manor, and he to his tower, though before he got there he became aware that his shirtless state was getting uncomfortable as the temperature dropped.
Of course, he could have had all those mages he sheltered do something about keeping the manor warm by magic, but that would be a dead giveaway that he had all those mages. Only the Emperor and the Emperor’s favorite cronies were supposed to have enough mages on hand to do trivial things like keep their dwellings warm or cool.
He draped the damp tunic and shirt over his shoulders, and hurried his slightly squishy steps.
His tower was just off the seldom-used audience chamber, and he sighed with relief as he opened the door to the bottom level and his night-guard saluted him. There was a good fire down here; it had been banked when he’d left for the stables, and it looked like the night-guard had taken it upon himself to build it up again. He saluted back, and began to climb.
* * *
Delia was glad to get out of sight of her brother-in-law the Duke, and even gladder to get back to the privacy of her spacious suite—which was not in a tower, something this manor had a superfluity of. She didn’t care for towers, except to occasionally go up one to look at the view. She didn’t like the way they swayed a little in a high wind, she didn’t like the eerie sounds the wind made up there, and she preferred the feeling of being on the ground.
It was not that she didn’t enjoy Kordas’s company. Quite the contrary, she enjoyed it just a little too much. But his generous gift had come perilously close to causing her to crack the mask she always wore around him and her sister.
Every gift he had ever given her was generous, as far as that went. Take this suite, just as a for-instance. Granted, there was no shortage of room in this manor; in fact, she doubted that it was more than half occupied. But still, even by those standards, this was extraordinary.
The first room alone was the size of the suite she’d had as a child. This was the “public” room, the one where she would have brought guests, if she ever had guests. She could have hosted twenty people here with no crowding. It had a fine fireplace, comfortable padded furnishings upholstered in a dark brown leather, and walls lined with bookshelves. There were two windows with cushioned window-seats, and sheepskins scattered over the polished wooden floor. The next rooms were her bedroom, a closet so big her clothing barely took up a quarter of it, a bathing room, and a shielded magic room she never used at all because she wasn’t a mage. Everything matched: gleaming dark wood and shining dark leather, exactly the way she liked it. The bed was big enough for four, and had mage-lights in little cages mounted on the headboard, which had a little bookcase built into it.
Delia didn’t know the story of how Duke Valdemar—Kordas’s great-grandfather—had gotten a mage-built manor as a “gift” from the Emperor, but she knew why it had happened. It was all part of how the Emperor kept control over his nobles. You couldn’t safely refuse his offer to have his mages construct such a place for you, after all. But everything about the enormous piles they would make for you was calculated. It would be the height of luxury, setting you apart from your people immediately. Especially in a relatively poor Duchy like this one. It would also be utterly indefensible, which tended to discourage thoughts of rebellion. And, of course, since the layouts were exactly alike, you could not boast of having a better manor than someone else. The Emperor’s gifts always had many sticky threads attached.
Instead of seeking her bed, she stripped off her cape and draped it over a drying stand, and went to the window. Pressing her hand against the glass to check the temperature outside, she judged that it probably wasn’t going to snow, but it wasn’t going to be warm until whatever had caused the weather fluctuations passed them by. There was always war at the borders of the Empire, but this was the first time to her knowledge that what went on out at the frontier was actually affecting the Empire itself.
And what is the Emperor going to make of that? Probably nothing, as long as it didn’t inconvenience him.
Thinking about the Emperor got her mind off Kordas for a moment, which was a good thing.
It was fine to love your brother-in-law, just don’t be in love with your brother-in-law.
A fact of which she reminded herself on a daily basis.
She turned away from the window and went to the table against the wall where wine and mead waited, poured herself a generous portion of the latter in a pewter cup, and turned to the fire.
She’d left the fire well stoked when she’d gone down to the stables, and it only needed another log put on it. That was just a matter of a moment.
She didn’t bother raising the shades over the mage-lights; the light from the fire was enough.
Cup in hand, fire going well, she slumped down into her favorite high-backed chair on the hearth, pivoted so her legs hung over the right-side arm and and her back was up against the left-side arm, leaned her head against the padded back, and contemplated the ironic comedy that was her life.
The first irony was that Kordas and Isla liked each other very much, were indeed the best of friends, but theirs had been an arranged marriage (as nearly every marriage among the nobility of the Empire was), and they weren’t in love with each other. Not even after three children. And Delia? Delia wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the fact that she and Isla had no brothers. When their father had died, the Emperor had swooped in, assigned the Baronial title and estates to one of his sycophants, and cut Delia out completely. She’d been lucky to be allowed to take her personal belongings with her when he unceremoniously threw her out.
Could be worse. I could’ve been forced to marry the Emperor’s puppy to cement his position. Fortunately for her, he already had a wife and was disinclined to divorce her or otherwise put her away, in order to marry someone who was in many ways that woman’s inferior. Delia had gotten a good look at her while she was packing; there was no doubt she was beautiful, and probably had been the Emperor’s mistress at some point or other. She was also tall, willowy, graceful, and wealthy in her own right, all things Delia was not. The perfect trophy of a wife, a living display of the Emperor’s favor.
“You’ll be moving out, of course, girl,” the wife had said. She could still hear that distant, dulcet voice in her mind. It hadn’t been more than a moment after she had been introduced to the new Baron of Sterngal and his wife. The wife hadn’t even bothered giving Delia her proper name; she’d just stared down her nose at Delia, and said, “You’ll be moving out, of course, girl,” in tones that suggested Delia should do so on the instant.
Delia had been at her wits’ end. Her father was barely in his tomb by a day, she was still in grief and shock at his sudden passing, and at the very least she had expected that she would be allowed to move to the dowager house or at worst the gatehouse on the grounds. She’d have been perfectly happy in either place. Her needs were few, and she’d still have been home.
But no.
They had shown up out of the blue, parading through the activated Portal with their entire household, which had included enough armed men that she had felt utterly intimidated.
And as she had stood on the steps of what was no longer her own home, wondering what the hell she was going to do, with the Ice Queen glaring down at her from one side, and the Ice Queen’s husband looking everyplace except at Delia, she had been tempted to run inside, flee up the stairs to the highest tower, and fling herself off it in despair to land messy and dead at their feet. Not being one of the Emperor’s mage-built edifices, that tower wasn’t that tall and she wouldn’t have splattered their lovely garments when she hit, but she’d at least have made an inconvenient mess for them to clean up and explain.
And that was when there had been a flurry of trumpets above as the two Heralds announced yet another group approaching the manor. She’d stopped herself—because it might have been the Emperor’s people coming to fetch her to the Capital, and while that was far from ideal, if the Emperor was fetching her, it meant he would probably make sure she wasn’t stripped of everything.
But it hadn’t been the Emperor’s representative.
It had been Kordas.
Riding in on one of his beautiful Valdemar Gold horses for which he was famed—she knew now it had been Arial, the mare she had just helped—and trailed by three empty wagons, he had come trotting up to the steps of Sterngal Manor as if he were the owner, not this trumped-up Emperor’s lapdog. And he didn’t even bother to greet the new owner and his wife; he came down off his horse and went straight to Delia, and embraced her as if he had known her all his life instead of meeting her no more than a handful of times at best. “Delia, my dear, I am so sorry,” he said, as she involuntarily responded to the kindness in his eyes and the warmth of his embrace by burying her face in his tunic with a mufled sob. “I’ve come to take you home to Valdemar, of course,” he continued. “You can’t possibly go anywhere else, I won’t have it.”
Then, and only then, did he look up at the usurper. “Ah, good, you’re here. That’s convenient. See that your servants pack up Delia’s things and load them in the wagons, will you? I’m going to take her up to her rooms so we can make sure that anything breakable is properly protected.”
And just like that, he put his arm around her shoulder and urged her up to her rooms, while the new Baron and his wife stared at them in slack-jawed astonishment.
They’d done what he’d asked too, probably assuming the Emperor had sent him, and not daring to do anything to contradict him. Or, more to the point, to interfere with what Delia said was hers. Which, among other things, were all the items that Isla had left behind when she’d married, and all the books in the library.
So instead of having to fight that gorgeous, rapacious harpy over every single possession that wasn’t an article of clothing, with Kordas’s help she had managed to make off with enough valuables to count as a decent legacy.
Kordas had actually done far more than she had in that regard. After her rooms had been packed up—not the furnishings; he’d taken one look at them and said “We’ve got better” and instructed the servants to leave them—he’d taken her around the manor, pointing to this and that, and saying “Your father left you that, right?” and she had just nodded. He had an uncanny eye for small, extremely valuable objects, and they kept well ahead of the new Baron and most especially his wife, snatching up treasure after family treasure before the interlopers even laid eyes on the pieces to know what they were losing.
Then he’d ordered her horse—pony, really, she had only been thirteen at the time—put her up on it, and led the whole cavalcade back to the Gate at the edge of the manor grounds, and through it, straight to the matching Gate here at Valdemar.
She had been in almost as much of a daze at the end of the sweep as the usurper and his wife had been. It was only when she was within sight of the manor of Valdemar that it hit home for her.
She had been saved, literally, by a knight on a shining horse.
She’d managed to be fervently grateful, but the second she laid eyes on her sister, she’d broken down and started crying her eyes out. Isla had taken her to these rooms, let her cry until she couldn’t cry anymore, then put her to bed.
And when she’d awakened, every one of the treasures that had been carried away had been lovingly installed here. Her clothing had been put away in the wardrobe. The family heirlooms Kordas had helped her abscond with were on prominent display in a suite of rooms that was easily a match for the ones her father had occupied. Where, in fact, those treasures were now. If she looked up from contemplating her mead-cup, she could see them all over the room. Here the gleam of the arm of a delicate statue, there the sparkle of gemstones in an ornamented cup, yonder the glint of gilding on the spine of a book. It was all still here, and all hers.
The only things that weren’t still here were all the books on magic. She wasn’t a mage and couldn’t use them, so she had given them to Kordas and Isla.
Now that she thought about it, that moment when she had looked up at the Duke of Valdemar and realized he had come to save her out of the kindness of his heart was probably the moment she had fallen in love with him.
She hadn’t realized that, of course. She’d only been thirteen. All she’d known then was that she worshipped him like a god, and would have done anything he asked of her.
And I still would, she admitted to herself. Then shook her head. She was just ridiculously lucky; she had a sister who loved her, she had a brother-in-law who could not have been more unlike most of the Emperor’s nobles, she was fed and housed in ridiculous comfort and had the freedom to do practically anything she wanted.
And I need to start concentrating on all the good things I have, and not on the things I can’t have.
Good things, like that adorable little filly. A Valdemar Gold! Never in a million years would she have imagined she’d ever own a Gold!
The memory of the darling little beastie being thoroughly cleaned by her dam made Delia smile with incredulous delight. And she’s mine! Which means that rather than sitting here in my cups feeling sorry for myself because my brother-in-law regards me as a sister, I should be thinking of a name for her.
She glanced down at the cup in her hand—one of a set of six she and Kordas had made off with. Something to do with honey or mead? Isla’s mount was “Sundrop,” after Isla’s favorite flower.
I know! she decided, swallowing the last of her drink. Daystar. Star for short. It had a nice sound to it.
And on that positive note, and feeling better just thinking about that lovely creature who was now her very own, she went to bed.
ell, at least this time you don’t stink,” Isla said, as Kordas entered their suite. She was sitting by the fire, and had clearly been prepared to wait as long as it took for him to get back from his errand. “Something to be said for the rain.”
“More to be said for it staying warm until we were just about back inside,” Kordas replied. “Is that a hot toddy?” he added, staring hopefully at a steaming pitcher on the table beside her.
She laughed. “It is. Go strip off and get into the robe I’ve left out for you, and you can have some.”
“Yes, oh most benevolent of mistresses,” he responded, and did as he had been ordered. This did require going up two floors—suites in the towers were made up of vertical sets of rooms rather than horizontal ones, with a staircase going up along one wall—but the prospect of a lovely fire and a cup of spiced and spiked mead was enough to carry him up to the wardrobe floor, where Isla had, indeed, left out a nice warm (and thankfully dry) robe for him. He left his possibly ruined clothing in the proper place; Isla would have given him a piece of her mind about making extra work for the servants if he’d just left it on the floor. Isla was imperious in her own way, but there was nobody Kordas would have rather been ordered around by.
As he padded back down the stairs in bare feet, he saw Isla had already poured two cups and was holding one out to him.
“Are you in need of a bath?” she asked, sitting back down in her chair by the fire. This was diplomacy on her part; she could have leaned over and obviously sniffed him, then given him a Look. Isla was so skilled in projecting her meaning by precise expressions that it was nearly an entire language of its own.
“Thankfully the rain took care of the mess.” He took his seat across from her and sipped at the drink, sighing gratefully. “It was a breech birth and I needed three hands when I had only two; I’m just grateful that Delia turned up and sorted it out. I had no idea the Fetching Gift could be used to maneuver a stubborn foal inside its mother. I gave her the filly afterward.”
“She doesn’t give herself enough credit for how useful her Mind-magic is,” Isla mused. “That was tremendously kind of you, since it’s Arial’s foal.”
“I can’t think of anyone I would trust more with Arial’s foal. She’s more than old enough to learn how to train her own mount from the beginning,” he pointed out, and relaxed into the padded back of his chair, blinking at his wife a little sleepily. “If she’s going to be a Valdemar, even by marriage, she needs to learn every aspect of horsemanship.”
These Imperial manors were meant to be detrimental to their owners. They were supposed to impress upon you how all-powerful the Emperor’s mages were. And their very impracticality was supposed to make you squander resources. You were supposed to look at this gorgeous piece of architecture, realize that nothing you owned would look anything other than shabby within its imposing walls, and spend money you didn’t have to fill all the enchanting empty rooms with suitable furnishings. The more you spent on show, the less you had to spend on anything else. And if you overspent on show, the Emperor could use the fact as proof that you were not fit to be in charge, and replace you with someone else.
They were quite lovely poisons wrapped in attractive sugary coatings.
But when Kordas’s grandfather had been “gifted” this thing, he hadn’t actually moved into it immediately. Instead, he and his people had studied it, and instead of doing what the Emperor assumed they would do, they adapted the manor to how people in this Duchy lived, rather than “living up to” the manor. The result was that entire sections had been given over to storage—there was enough food alone here to feed the entire human population of the Duchy for two years at this point. There were plenty of other things in storage too; the Emperor would probably not approve of the “other” armory hidden here. Kordas adored his grandfather’s cunning, and he built up odd skills and cultivated his own versions of the canny old man’s resourcefulness. A summer’s spare time was spent creating secret caches inside everyday settings, to impress Grandfather. Bump-out hidden drawers, hatches disguised in mosaic that revealed tubes to drop items to other rooms, even hollowed chambers in saddles. Grandfather heartily approved.
It wasn’t a secret that rooms were being used for storage—but only Kordas, his cousin, Isla, and a few choice servants under his cousin knew just how much was stored here. He and his father had had a plan …and with every year that passed, the feeling never left any of them that the need to implement that plan became ever more urgent.
Well, they had an idea, rather than a plan. They still didn’t have every part of the idea figured out. And when (not if) they did see that idea through—it had to be iron-clad and foolproof. They would never get a second chance, and the repercussions for failure did not bear thinking about.
Isla stirred a little, interrupting his thoughts, and he smiled at her. She was staring at the fire, and he wondered what she was thinking.
If he had not known that Isla and Delia were sisters, he never would have suspected it. Isla was gifted with a lush figure and a cascade of red-tinted brown hair; Delia was small, thin, and dark, and did not look sixteen at all. Isla had wide, luminous green eyes and a perpetual expression of pleasant welcome; Delia had dark gray eyes and a constant look of brooding, even when nothing was wrong. Neither were conventionally beautiful, though Isla had an edge over her sister. The place where both sisters were a match was in their heads; both of them were smart and very clever. Smarter than he was, he often thought, and blessed the fact that neither of them had ever turned their formidable intellects against him.
“So you have undoubtedly given the Emperor’s little bird something to sing about again,” Isla observed with amusement. He had to laugh aloud at that.
“I’m going to enjoy reading that particular dispatch, though I confess it would have been even more amusing if I could have somehow coerced him into being there for the foaling,” he replied, the thought sweeter than the mead. “Arial was particularly gassy.”
She laughed at that. “You will never get him near the stable after Delia’s old pony nearly savaged him.”
“Delia’s pony is a good judge of character.”
She chuckled, and fell silent. There really wasn’t much to say, and he was enjoying the peace and comfort after the ordeal of the foaling. He was perfectly content to sit and sip in the quiet.
The “Emperor’s little bird” she referred to was the lord of one of the fourteen manors in his Duchy, a man who had been there as long as he could remember, although he was not in any way related to the original lord who had held that land and title. Whether Lord Merrin had been specifically planted there during Kordas’s father’s tenure, or had volunteered for the position of “Emperor’s ‘secret’ informant” after taking over the property, was a mystery he wasn’t particularly concerned with solving. Getting rid of the man was the last thing on Kordas’s mind. Much better to know who all the informants were, so he knew exactly what the Emperor was being told at all times.
The fellow actually thought he had a foolproof method of sending his reports to his master; he wrote them by hand and placed them in a box on his desk. The box had a spell on it that caused anything placed in it to travel to an identical box somewhere in the Emperor’s Palace. Probably not directly to the Emperor’s private office; Lord Merrin was a very small bird, and Kordas was an equally small fish.
Merrin, however, is absolutely sure that he has the ear of the Emperor himself. His attitude of smug “I know something you don’t know” was a dead giveaway. If Kordas hadn’t already known Merrin was the resident spy, that attitude alone would have told him.
What Merrin didn’t know was that the magnificent desk he had in his private office also had a spell on it. Anything that he wrote on it was reproduced in Kordas’s study, on stacks of paper kept in a drawer in Kordas’s desk for just that purpose. The drawer and Merrin’s desk were made from the same tree, which had made the spells trivially easy for a competent mage to create. Kordas had done it himself as one of the first pieces of magical business after his father had died and he had been confirmed as the Duke.
It had also been trivially easy for him to get Merrin to want that desk. It had taken the sacrifice of one of the Duchy’s most magnificent deramon elm trees, a tree which featured amazing grain and spectacular color. And it had taken the best cabinetmaker in the Duchy most of a year to produce the beautifully carved, ornamented, and polished desk. After that, all it had taken was for Merrin to see the desk, and hear the sad and entirely fictitious story that the cabinetmaker had hoped to sell the desk to Kordas, but that Kordas had laughed and said, “What do I need with a desk when I already have one?” That piqued Merrin’s curiosity, and the low-but-not-suspiciously-low price for it, coupled with the cabinetmaker’s eagerness for more work, had cemented Merrin’s avarice.
This had also enabled Merrin to flatter himself that he had infinitely better taste than “that bumpkin” Duke Kordas, and that was that. One look had been all that it took to seal the deal. And within days, Kordas knew every letter of every word that Merrin sent to the Emperor.
I do regret losing that desk, a little.
“I can just see the dispatch,” Isla said, breaking the silence. “After all the bowing and scraping and sucking up, the next words will be that bumpkin Kordas spent all night in his stable personally attending to the birth of a horse.”
“If ‘that bumpkin’ is what they both think of me, we can all live with that,” Kordas replied. “Better to be inconsequential in the Emperor’s eyes. I am grateful to be small and poor.”
That was not quite true, although it was true that Valdemar was by far the smallest Duchy in all of the vast Empire. In fact, truth to tell, Valdemar was smaller than many Baronies. And Valdemar was not precisely poor; it just was not rich. They produced enough from the farms to feed the Duchy and store back a bit against bad years, but not more than that. The real wealth of Valdemar was in its horses, all the more especially because the Ducal lands were more suited to grazing and mowing than tilling and farming. Money from the sale of those horses was what had gone into filling all those storage rooms here at the manor.
And it was going to be a good year in the Valdemar meadows, as long as there were no problem births. Every mare above the age of four and below the age of sixteen was in foal. There were five different lines that Kordas sold outside of the Duchy—the Valdemar Golds (rarely), the Charger line (which were heavy horses favored by knights for tourneys), the Tow-Beasts that pulled the barges along the vast Imperial network of canals that handled almost all of the cargo of the Empire, the Sweetfoot palfreys, and the Fleetfoot racehorses. Valdemar paid its tribute to the Emperor in horses, all of them as four-year-old, tamed and trained beasts. And until now, none of those had ever been Valdemar Golds. The Golds were the rarest, in part because of the color, but mostly because he was so careful about his breeding and bloodlines.
“Are the Emperor’s fake Golds ready?” Isla asked. “Because if he actually reads the dispatch, being told about a Gold foaling is going to make him want the ones you promised him.”
“All this year’s tribute horses are ready,” he assured her. “The two I earmarked for him as Chargers have shed their coats four times, and each time, they grew back gold. At four, I know they won’t change their coat-color. The magical work Cestin and I put in on them when their mothers ‘caught’ took hold perfectly. Ridiculously detailed spell—takes forever. But it would take a mage with expert knowledge of horse anatomy to even think to look for it, much less find signs of it.”
“And it won’t matter if they don’t breed true?” she asked anxiously.
“He doesn’t have any Golds to breed to,” Kordas pointed out. “He won’t be able to determine if they breed true or not. Not,” he added, “that he’ll care. He pays no attention to his stud book, or to his breeding farms, much less anyone else’s. All he knows is that when there’s a parade, he has the most impressive horse in the Empire to ride, and a bonus if it’s rare. And even better if he has a pair of them that can pull a carriage three times as big as anything anyone else has. There’s nothing in the Empire rarer than a Valdemar Gold, and nothing more impressive than one of my Chargers. Combine the color with an impressive horse, and he’ll be happy. Chances are he’ll keep them in the Imperial stables at the Capital, and never breed them at all. After all, if he wants another, he knows where he can get it. We’ve made sure I have more Chargers in that color coming up.”
“But you’re giving him a warhorse,” she objected. “And you have no idea whether or not he can handle it.”
Now he laughed, and tossed down the last of his drink. “Actually I have a very good idea of what he can handle as a rider. Remember, I was a hostage at the Imperial Court until I was eighteen. He’s a terrible rider. And the two Chargers are from an entirely new line I started for my farmers here, crossed with Tow-Beasts. They have the looks, strength, and stamina of the warhorses, but they have the tempers of a good, steady dog, and their preferred gait is a walk. He’ll probably have a new, gaudy carriage built, one with gilding everywhere, and he’ll have them pull it rather than riding them.”
“When did you start that line? And why didn’t you tell me about them?” Isla asked, a little surprised.
“They’re not all that interesting, and I didn’t think you’d care,” he admitted, and gave her a pointed look. “The number of times you’ve put on that expression of ‘yes, dear, I am listening to you’ when I’m droning on about the horses has not been lost on me.”
She shrugged apologetically. “Well …why another line? I should think that five are enough to handle.”
“I’m breeding them as an alternative to oxen, for heavy plowing. Thick hides, broad feet, smart enough to read what’s around them. Won’t win any races, but could pull for a week. The first lot is trained and waiting in the Westfields, ready to be loaned out any time.”
“Loaned?” she said. “Why ‘loaned’?”
“Because it’s unlikely any of my farmers could afford one,” he said frankly. “And they’re horses, not oxen. They need more particular care than an ox or a mule. So I’ll be loaning them out with a drover who will also act as groom and keeper, and we’ll see how that goes. One horse, one drover, to a village in each sort of terrain. It’s early days yet, and I don’t have so many of them that I can’t absorb them all into the Duchy farms, then sell the rest to my lords and end the experiment, except for the ones I’ll keep around to send to the Emperor.”
This was all small talk, really. He was not asking the question he really wanted her to answer, which was “How are the children?”
It was a question fraught with pitfalls, because officially, he and Isla were childless.
Neither of them had been prepared to surrender one or more of their children into the Emperor’s household where they would become, as Kordas himself had been, hostages for their parents’ behavior. So all three of Isla’s pregnancies and births had been conducted in absolute secrecy, with only three people being aware of the truth: Cestin, Delia, and Kordas’s cousin, Hakkon Indal. The last was a necessity because the children were supposed to be Hakkon’s bastards. And they were being raised not by Isla and Kordas, but (officially) by a nursemaid, a tutor, and a body-servant hired by Kordas to tend to all of the children in the manor. There was quite a little pod of those children, and Kordas was doing as his father and grandfather and all those who had come before had done: rearing all the children in the Ducal household with the same education, whether they were the offspring of servants or those with nobler blood, with the eye to putting them in training for positions of responsibility in the Duchy when they were old enough.
Mind, he and Isla were not absent from the boys’ lives. He saw them often, and made a point to visit the nursery where they all lived. Isla spent some time with all of the children, every day.
She probably spends more time with them than the parents of other nobles spend with their offspring.
But he knew it hurt her that she couldn’t be their mother. She knew this was how things had to be in order to safeguard them, but she didn’t want to be like the parents of other noble children. She wanted, sometimes so much that it drove her to tears, to be as closely involved in their growing up as any ordinary farmwife. There were so many things she had never gotten to experience. She had not seen their first steps, nor heard their first words.
They had never called her “Mama.”
But doing that …would only end in her losing them. They both knew that. And so he hesitated to ever bring them up before she did, for fear that mentioning them would make her unhappy.
“Hakkon wants to know if we’re ready for Restil to take his place with the pages,” she said, as if she had read his mind.
He was about to say “Isn’t that really Hakkon’s decision to make?” but he stopped himself before he did. This wasn’t the lady of the manor speaking. This was the mother of his child, and Hakkon had been exactly right to ask her. Instead, he thought about it for a moment, recalling his own childhood. “I was only a little older than Restil when I was made a page, and Hakkon was younger.” He pulled on his beard a moment while he thought. “You know, Restil could be assigned as your page …”
