“Have you hired a mage to fireproof your shutters yet?” the merchant asked quietly.
Braundlae frowned at him. “What? Why d’you prattle on about…” She fell silent, looking troubled.
“As you said,” Rhauligan said in a low voice, “once one noble takes the crown, what’s to stop another from trying for it? We’ll have daggers in the alleys and then swords in the streets, until armies are riding into Suzail to make this noble or that one our sovereign! And the court is right across the flaming road from here, Brauna! Where do you think the wars’ll be fought?”
“Oh, gods,” the hostess whispered, her face gone pale, her apron bunched up to cover her lips.
“It could go on for years, with young hotheads riding around the realm declaring for this family or that, tearing the realm apart, with no crops to take in and no laws to shelter us. You’d better hope old Azoun doesn’t die!”
“‘Young hotheads’? Oh, some noble sons are like that, to be sure, but this Dauneth, now, was perfectly nice!”
“Yes, and his family has been so disloyal to the Obarskyrs that the Royal Magician’s probably measuring out dungeon manacles for him right this minute.”
“Him?”
“Indeed. His family’s rebelled against the crown a time or two, forgot to pay their fair handfuls of coins in tax to the throne… and rode with bloodied sword at the orders of Salember the Serpent!”
“And they kept their heads? How does he dare come here at all?”
“Why do you think young noblemen like him are coming here now, with the king dying? They say he was poisoned. Anyone like this Dauneth who’s been here a month or so could have done it, or known it was going to happen and hovered like a vulture to seize whatever power came loose for the taking. Soon the city’ll be full of all the other young noble sons, come to join the circling cloud around the king-to-be-corpse. You won’t be able to ladle sauce fast enough to keep up, Brauna!”
The hostess looked at him grimly, and then said sourly, “You make the days ahead seem dark indeed! Finished your eels yet, Doomtongue?”
Rhauligan grinned at her in answer and opened his mouth wide. A last eel quivered and wriggled on his tongue, seeking freedom.
Braundlae shuddered despite herself and flung out a pointing hand. “Get you gone!” she ordered. “Up into the Dragon-with a fresh tankard for that nice young man!”
The Roving Dragon, as Rhauligan had informed Dauneth earlier, was currently the most popular bun-and-ale for working Suzailans to stop in at, once a day or so. For years, it had seemed there was no room left on the Promenade for a relaxed, reasonably priced establishment that could serve food quickly, where people could sit at tables and talk-gossip, business, court politics, or whatever.
Caladarea Ithbeck had changed all that. Newly arrived from Chessenta a season ago, she saw the lack of the sort of place she liked to eat at, its windows overlooking somewhere busy and important, and saw something much brighter: If one rented out the upper floor apartments of a row of shops, and then joined them into one long series of private little rooms by knocking doorways through the connecting walls, one suddenly had a large new dining hall right on the Promenade. Add a few very exclusive guest apartments for visiting nobles or rich merchants, make peace with a tavern or two by letting them take the lion’s share of the low-bottle drinking trade and in return getting their stairs to serve as entrances, make sure that the food was simple and good-and the Roving Dragon was a sure success. It was seldom, even in the slow midmorning and waning noon hour periods, that the rooms with the best views had fewer than a dozen patrons lazily sipping at cider and making meat tarts or soup last as long as they could.
There were a dozen in the Snout Room-the sunny chamber at the east end of the Dragon, with its view of the royal gardens past the end of the sprawling court buildings-right now.
Two merchants were chuckling together at one table, a veritable forest of tankards rising from around their elbows. Another, leaner merchant sat with a smoothly amorous lady who was probably getting paid for her caresses. A table of six priests of Tymora were leaning noses together, speaking in low and excited tones-no doubt about how deliciously risky, and therefore favored by the Goddess of Luck, the present time was in Cormyr, with the king’s life hanging by a magical (none doubted) thread. A mercenary captain sat silently at a small corner table, his booted feet occupying its only other chair, obviously waiting for someone. His breast badge was a wolf leaping into view between two trees.
And there was Dauneth Marliir. He’d been staring at the mercenary’s badge from time to time, and at other times gazing at the head of the stair that led down to Braundlae’s Best, and devoting the rest of his time to the huge tankard, which seemed all but empty now. The ale had a rough-edged, smoky taste, but it was good. He licked his lips in consideration. The best thing about this day so far, in fact. For all his patience, he had not yet had a chance to see the dying Azoun in the flesh, his progress in the long lines halted at the next-to-last chamber.
He could still remember the only time he’d seen the king, as bright and as clear as if it had happened only yesterday and not over a dozen summers ago when he took Arabel from Gondegal’s forces. A bearded, laughing man, standing tall in his saddle in a leather forester’s jerkin with his hands spread wide to acknowledge the cheers of his people. Power and grace and surging vitality, the sense that all the might of Cormyr was flowing into that man as he rode past, every inch the rightful and natural king of the Forest Kingdom.
And a young, excited Dauneth had roared out Azoun’s name and waved his hands and wept along with all the rest, there in the streets of Arabel, and felt at one with men he’d never met in his life before. Old warriors who walked slowly and proudly toward the sunset of that day as if they wanted it never to come, while they told and retold, almost reverently, tales of when they’d knelt to Azoun or talked with him or fought under him, and they stood unashamed while tears ran down their wrinkled cheeks and dripped from their mustaches. He’d known from their voices and the way they all looked from time to time down the road where the king had gone, hours before, that they shared the same heart-light feeling that he had, touched with wonder.
“Warmed by the reflected fire of the crown,” he’d heard a minstrel describe that feeling once. Whatever. To Dauneth, that laughing man spurring past on the magnificent horse would always be King Azoun, no matter what passing years and the poison or disease or whatever it was had done to the man now, and he would fight, even die if need be, in Azoun’s name because of that bright memory Let Cormyr always have such men riding across it, laughing and exultant, the Purple Dragon bright on their breasts, the sun smiling down, the- “Drunk already, lad? Should I let you have this second one, or ‘twould it be an act of kind charity to drink it all myself?”
Dauneth jerked back from that jovial voice to blink at Rhauligan, for a moment measuring one laughing man against another… and then surging Azoun on his horse was gone, and the loud, living, and very boisterous merchant was thunking two tankards as tall and as cold as the first pair down on the table and following them to a seat on the other side of the table, while calls came from across the room of, “Rhauly!” “You old snake!” “Where’re the two tankards you owe me?” and “So who’s your friend, Old Rolling-guts?”
Glarasteer Rhauligan grinned at the room in general and bellowed, “Ho, Tessara! Got a kiss for me yet?”
The amorous lady untwined herself from the merchant enough to lift a slim, black-scabbarded longsword into view and say, not unkindly, “In here, Old Shortcoin!”