‘Spare me.’
‘Why did you call her that, grandfather?’ Gelane asked. ‘ “Your Grace,” I mean?’
‘Secrets again, Pol?’ father sighed. ‘You and your secrets.’ Then he looked appraisingly at Gelane, obviously remembering the young man’s self-adulatory speech at the bonfire. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said with orotund formality, ‘may I present her Grace, the Duchess of Erat?’
Gelane blinked and then stared at me. ‘You’re not!’ he exclaimed.
‘Well, I was, dear. That was a long time ago, though.’
‘You’re the most famous person in Sendarian history!’
‘It’s nice to be noticed.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? My manners were terrible, Aunt Pol. You should have told me.’
‘So you could bow and scrape to me in public? You’ve got a long way to go, Gelane. We don’t want to be special, remember? That’s why you’re a cooper instead of a magistrate or a country squire.’ I saw an opening there, so I jumped on it. ‘There are two sides to nobility, Gelane. Most people only see the fine houses, the fancy clothes, and all the bowing and scraping by lesser nobles. The other side’s more important, though, and much simpler. Duty, Gelane, duty. Keep that in front of your eyes every waking moment. You are – or could be – the Rivan King. That’d involve some very complicated duties, but the way things stand right now, your only duty is to the line of succession. You perform that duty by staying alive, and there are a large number of people in the world who want to kill you before you have a son.’
‘I guess I lost sight of that, Aunt Pol,’ he confessed. ‘When that Chamdar fellow called me the Rivan King, it went to my head. I thought I was important.’
‘You are important, Gelane,’ I told him very firmly. ‘You and your wife are probably the most important people in the world right now. That means that you’ve got the heaviest burden of duty in the world, and it can all be boiled down to one word. “Hide.” Wherever you go, hide. Stay out of sight. The best way to do that is to be ordinary.’
‘You’d better listen to her, Gelane,’ father said. ‘Oh, and one word of advice from a professional – and I am, you know, – a professional, I mean. Don’t let that “I’ve got a secret” look start getting the best of you. Pretend to be stupid, if you have to.’ Then the old fraud gave me a sly look. ‘Would you like to have me give him some acting lessons, Pol?’
‘Now that you mention it, I think you should, father.’
The look of consternation that crossed his face was the high point of my entire evening.
Father came up with all sorts of lame justifications for what was probably his spur-of-the-moment decision to move us all to Cherek. That’s another indication of the difference between men and women. A man always feels the need to justify his decisions with logic, and logic, in a formal sense, usually has nothing to do with an important decision. Our minds are far too complex to make choices that way. Women know that, but men appear to have skipped school on the day the subject was discussed.
Enalla and I circulated the usual ‘family emergency’ fiction, identifying our ancestral home as Muros this time. Then Gelane sold his shop, gathered up his tools, and bought a wagon and a team of horses.
We traveled southeasterly for about ten leagues to further the ruse that we were bound for Muros, but then we turned off the imperial highway and. followed a back road to the capital at Sendar. While father was down at the harbor looking for a Cherek sea-captain who was bound for Val Alorn, I went to King Ormik’s palace to visit my money. I was a little startled by how much my hoard had grown since the last time I’d made a withdrawal. If you leave money alone, if reproduces itself almost as fast as rabbits do. Anyway, I took some thirty-five pounds or so of gold coins out of my ‘contingency fund’ and then rejoined Gelane, Enalla, and Aravina at the sedate inn where we’d taken rooms. I didn’t make an issue of what I’d been doing. The presence of money does strange things to people sometimes.
Father had located a burly, bearded, and probably unreliable Cherek sea-captain, and the next morning we sailed for Val Alorn.
The key to the prosperity of Cherek and Drasnia has always been the existence of the Cherek Bore, that intimidating tidal maelstrom that blocks the narrow strait between the northern tip of Sendaria and the southern tip of the Cherek peninsula. Chereks find a passage through the Bore exhilarating. I don’t. Why don’t we leave it at that?
It was autumn by the time we reached the harbor at Val Alorn, and father put us up in a substantial inn far enough back from the harbor to avoid the rowdier parts of the city along the waterfront. After we’d settled in, he drew me off to one side. ‘I’ll go talk to Eldrig,’ he told me. ‘Let’s keep Gelane away from the palace this time. He seems to be settling down now, but just to be on the safe side, let’s not expose him to throne-rooms and other regal trappings.’
‘Well put,’ I murmured.
Father never told me what sort of threats he used to brow-beat King Eldrig into permitting his royal visitor to leave Val Alorn for the back country without making his presence in Cherek a matter of public record. Eldrig himself needed to know that we were here, but nobody else did.
We left Val Alorn the following morning and followed a poorly maintained road up into the foothills of the Cherek mountains to the village of Emgaard several leagues to the west of the capital.
‘Have you ever done much fishing, Gelane?’ father asked casually once we were underway.
‘A few times, grandfather,’ Gelane replied. ‘Seline’s right on the lakeshore, after all, but I never saw much point to it, personally. If I want fish for supper, I can buy some at the market. Sitting in the rain in a leaky boat waiting for some fish to get hungry isn’t very exciting, and I did have a business to run, after all.’
‘There’s a world of difference between lake-fishing and stream fishing, Gelane,’ father told him. ‘You’re right about how boring lake fishing can be. Fishing a mountain stream’s altogether different. When we get to Emgaard, we’ll have a try at it. I think you might like it.’ What was father up to now?
The village of Emgaard was one of those picturesque mountain towns with houses that looked as if they’d come straight out of a cookie-cutter. It had steep roofs, ornamentally scrolled eaves, and neatly kept yards, each closely cropped by the resident goat. Goats make excellent pets in a land where garbage disposal is rudimentary at best.