M'Lady Witch
Christopher Stasheff
ISBN: 0-441-00113-0
CHAPTER 1
"My son," said the King, "thy mother and I have decided that 'tis time thou wert wed."
"As thou dost wish, my father and sovereign." Alain bowed. "I shall inform the lady straightaway."
And he turned and strode out of the solar, leaving his parents gaping after him.
Wooden-faced, the sentry closed the door behind the Prince. The sound jarred King Tuan and Queen Catharine out of their shock.
"Who can he mean?" he asked, round-eyed.
"Who but Gwendylon's daughter?" It was characteristic of Catharine that she didn't mention Rod Gallowglass, Cordelia's father.
"The High Warlock's daughter!" Tuan had the opposite problem. "He must be stopped!" He rose from his chair. But Catharine restrained him with a hand on his arm. "Let him be, husband. If he doth as I think he will do, he may learn a most signal lesson."
Much as she loved her son, Catharine knew him to be something of a conceited prig. Admittedly, the realization had only dawned on her this last year, when the boy had turned twenty-one and she had finally begun to think of him as a swain going a-wooing. Looking at him in that light, she had begun to realize that her son had some serious romantic defects. They all began with attitude, of course—but if she knew Cordelia, her son might soon have that attitude corrected.
Alain rode the high way toward the High Warlock's castle with a high heart, enjoying the lovely spring day, the cascades of birdsong, and the ribald chanting of his entourage—a dozen young knights in doublet and hose, their swords at their hips. He felt his whole being relaxing, surging upward in delight. It was grand to be young and courting on a day such as this—it even made him feel moderately good-looking.
Actually, he was a handsome young man, though he had been raised with so much emphasis on modesty that he denied it to himself, relying instead on his wardrobe. But he was well muscled, blond, with large blue eyes, a strong chin, and a straight nose; his face was open and ingenuous, though usually too serious.
On a day like this, though, he was perilously close to admitting that he was attractive. He certainly felt so, for all the world must love a lover. And it was such a relief to be away from Runnymede and his parents' court, from intrigue and the need to be formal and wary!
Alain didn't know it, of course, but the girl to whom he planned to propose was even more of a hot potato than a hot tomato. That wouldn't have stopped him—he was a trouble-magnet himself; crown princes always are. Assassins and conspirators lie in wait for them, ready to seduce them into plotting against their parents, or to kill them if they aren't seducible. That was why Alain travelled with a bodyguard of knights, and why his father had made sure he was well trained with sword and battle-axe.
Cordelia, on the other hand, wasn't apt to have any bodyguards around; her parents cultivated the simple and humble image, as much as you can when the King and Queen have insisted that you live in a castle. But she was easily more lethal than Alain could ever be, if she wanted to be—she was, in the eyes of the superstitious peasants, a witch, and a very powerful one.
Actually, she was an esper, a person born with powers of extrasensory perception and, in her case, extrasensory activity. She was a telepath, a projective, a telekinetic ... and the list went on. About all she couldn't do was teleport.
Of course, it was possible that she might run into something that even she couldn't handle—say, an army or two. If that happened, all she had to do was call for help from the Wee Folk, and a brigade or two of elves, pixies, and brownies would pop out of the woodwork to aid her. If anything stopped them—such as too much Cold Iron, which tends to accumulate around knights—she could always send out a mental call for the rest of her family, and her father would teleport to her, with her brothers right behind. Her mother would arrive a little later, by broomstick. The family had not yet encountered any enemy that could stand against them—provided, of course, that nothing kept them apart.
Rod Gallowglass wasn't quite as adept at using his ESP powers as his wife and children were, because he had spent half his life under the blithe impression that he was an ordinary mortal. Shortly after the birth of his fourth child, he had found out the hard way that he could work "magic," as the local superstitious peasants called the results of his ESP work. He had decided that magic was catching.
Rod Gallowglass's late development was understandable, considering that he hadn't even known there was a planet where there were so many espers, until he came there; he had been born and raised on a high-tech planetoid where the family business was the manufacturing of robots, and had run away from home to spend his twenties bumming around the civilized, modern planets, looking for wrongs to right. Sometimes he wondered how he had ever gotten into this situation. Then he would look at his wife, even now in her fifties, and decide it had just been good luck.
Being a little more honest with himself, he would admit that it had been a matter of needing a purpose in life. He had found one by becoming an agent for the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms, an organization dedicated to spreading democracy by sniffing out dictatorships and other forms of oppressive government, and steering their societies toward one of the many forms of democracy. Exploring the galaxy for new totalitarian governments to topple, he had stumbled across Gramarye. Now he was assigned here for the rest of his life—because SCENT knew how important Gramarye was going to be. Rod, on the other hand, had known how important the beautiful, voluptuous "witch" Gwendylon was going to be, and had married her, cleaving unto her forever—and therefore, of course, to her planet and people, too.
The planet of Gramarye was the only place in the Terran sphere of colonized planets where so many espers existed. All the rest of the Terran planets together had produced only a few rather weak telepaths—so Rod Gallowglass had a very important duty guarding the planet of Gramarye from invasion and subversion by the agents of dictatorship and anarchy.
SCENT believed that one of the prime factors in keeping a democracy alive was speed of communications. If it takes too long to get a message from the parliament to the frontier planets, the frontier planets will eventually set up their own governments and break away. The only way to prevent this is to do away with democracy and resort to some form of government that keeps such a tight hold over its colonies that they can't break away—and that tight hold always turns into oppression, in one form or another. So to keep democracy viable, the telepaths of Gramarye were going to be absolutely essential.
Unfortunately, the future totalitarians knew that, tooand so did the future anarchists. Each of them had its own time-travel organization, dedicated to fostering totalitarian governments (VETO) or to destroying governments altogether (SPITE)—and both were directly concerned with keeping Gramarye from becoming a democracy.
Which meant they were out to kill Rod Gallowglass, if they could—and his family. Especially his children. They had found out, over the last couple of decades, that they couldn't kill Rod—no matter how hard they tried, he always fought them off, and where he might have failed, his wife and her elf-friends and children had beaten off his enemies for him. Together, they were unstoppable—but the Futurians could, at least, make sure his influence didn't go on into future generations. They were bound and determined to kill his children if they could or, if they couldn't, to at least keep them from having children of their own.