That was a difficult one. Prince Vuldimin, the shrewd and powerful cousin of King Falid of Yissou, was Nortekku’s most important client at the moment, and Nortekku’s whole professional relationship with him was an outgrowth of the marital negotiations. Vuldimin had come to Dawinno earlier in the year in search of an architect to design a new palace for him in the countryside outside Yissou, a palace that would favor the bright, airy, swooping look of modern Dawinnan architecture rather than the crabbed and somber style typical of Yissou.
That project fell to Nortekku because Vuldimin was distantly related to Silina’s father, who was, for all his lofty ancestry, an impoverished aristocrat eager to see Silina married off to a man of wealth and importance. He saw the job of designing Vuldimin’s palace as a useful step in the building of his future son-in-law’s career, and arranged a meeting between Nortekku and the prince. It went very welclass="underline" Vuldimin spelled out his ideas for the new palace, Nortekku dared to make some suggestions for bettering them, and Vuldimin showed what appeared to be unfeigned enthusiasm. And so two contracts were drawn up, one pledging the troth of Silina and Nortekku, the other engaging Nortekku as the architect of Vuldimin’s palace. The voiding of one contract now might well cause the other to be broken as well, with disastrous results for Nortekku’s career.
Well, there was no helping any of it. If his father refused to name him as his heir, if Vuldimin withdrew the commission for designing the palace, so be it. Nortekku wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life listening to the Princess Silina’s whinnying laughter and mindless girlish chatter.
The day he went to pay the ceremonial call on Silina’s family to explain his reluctance to undertake the mating, it happened, just to make everything worse, that Prince Vuldimin was there. But there was no turning back. Silina’s parents and brothers and cousins and uncles, perhaps anticipating what he was about to say, stood arrayed before him like a court of inquisition, every one of them glaring at him with those eerie crimson Beng eyes of theirs, while he lamely told them that he had looked into the depths of his soul in the past few weeks and seen how hastily, carried away by his infatuation with Silina’s great beauty and fascinating personality, he had allowed himself to plunge into the marriage contract.
He understood now how rash that decision had been, he said.
He did not see how the marriage could be a success.
He told them that he felt unready for mating, that he was too callow and flighty to be able to offer a splendid woman like Silina the sort of life she deserved, that he felt covered with shame and chagrin but saw no alternative but to withdraw from the contract. It was his hope, he said, that the Princess Silina would before long find a mate more worthy of her than he could possibly be.
This produced an immediate uproar, loud and intense. Nortekku considered the possibility that there might even be violence. Silina, sobbing, rushed from the room. Her parents puffed up in rage like infuriated adders. The brothers and cousins and uncles shook fists and shouted. Threats of legal action were uttered.
There was something almost comic about it, Nortekku thought, although he knew that the developments following upon his repudiation of Silina were not likely to be in any way amusing. He stood stock-still in the midst of the clamor, pondering how he was going to manage to make his escape.
In the end it was Prince Vuldimin, who had witnessed the whole scene from the side, who rescued him. The prince, a short, stocky older man of almost regal presence and authority, cut through the hub-bub with a few quick pacifying words, delivered in a tone that could not fail to gain attention, and in the moment of shocked calm that ensued took Nortekku by the elbow and led him swiftly from the room.
When they were outside, Nortekku saw that the prince was smiling, even choking back a giggle. A great flood of relief washed over him.
I have an ally here, he realized.
The prince, who must understand his kinsmen here as well as anyone, had plainly sized up the situation in a moment and his sympathies were all with Nortekku. Thanks be to all the gods for that, Nortekku told himself.
“What a pack of buffoons,” Vuldimin murmured. “How did you ever get entangled with them, anyway? Were you really so very infatuated with the princess?”
“Not for a second,” Nortekku said. “It was all my father’s doing. He arranged it and told me about it afterward.—But I’m in trouble now, aren’t I? What do you think will happen next?”
“Nothing that you’re going to like. If they’re wise, they’ll hush the whole thing up and try to find another husband for their girl before she gets branded as unmarriageable. But, as you see, they aren’t wise. So there’ll probably be a noisy lawsuit, breach of contract, defamation of character, the gods only know what else. They’ll want to portray you as a worthless adventurer, an evil seducer, a shameless social climber—”
“I seduced no one here. And if I’m such a shameless social climber, why would I back out of a mating with a Beng princess, however much of a ninny she may be? There’s no sense to any of that.”
“Maybe so. But there’d be plenty of sense to suing you if the real goal is to squeeze a couple of million units out of your father to settle the suit.”
Nortekku gasped. “He’s already threatened to disinherit me if I don’t go through with the wedding. He’s certainly not going to pay my legal bills. And I don’t have a unit of my own to my name.”
Vuldimin seemed to know that already. There was an almost fatherly warmth in his golden eyes as he looked up toward the much taller Nortekku and said, “Then the best thing for you is to get out of town for a while. Come up to Yissou; stay at my estate for a month or two. We’ll say that you need to begin surveying the site of the country palace. There’s truth in that, after all. And process servers from Dawinno have no jurisdiction up there, so the lawsuit will be stalled for however much time you’re out of town, and perhaps in your absence I can talk my kinsmen here into forgetting about the whole unfortunate event without making it even worse by suing. Once they realize that your father isn’t going to underwrite any settlement they may be willing to be rational about things. But in the meanwhile, get yourself to my place in Yissou and wait it out. What do you say?”
“I couldn’t be more grateful, your grace,” said Nortekku, and thought for one wild moment that he was about to burst into tears.
That night he left for Yissou, not aboard the regular evening train but—at Vuldimin’s suggestion—as a passenger on a freight caravan, where no Dawinno bailiff would be likely to look for him. In Yissou he was given lavish quarters at Vuldimin’s sprawling dark-walled palace just off an enormous square known as the Plaza of the Sun, and during the succeeding weeks was treated by the prince’s huge staff of servants as though he were a visiting member of some royal house. Vuldimin himself returned from Dawinno shortly, assured Nortekko that his problems with Silina’s family would in one way or another be overcome, and made it clear that his breaking of the marriage contract would in no way affect the commission to build the new palace.
Nortekku had never cared much for Yissou, which was far to the north of Dawinno and had a much colder climate, especially now, in winter. One’s first view of the city was utterly off-putting. Its entire core was surrounded by a colossal, brooding wall of black stone, a wall of enormous height and breadth that had been constructed nearly two centuries before by one of the earliest kings of the city, who feared all manner of enemies both real and unreal and had devoted a reign of many decades to raising that wall ever higher and higher, until its implacable shadow came to dominate almost the whole of the city within.