“I wish I could! But, no, I’ll stay safe within the palace walls. I just want to-walk around the grounds a bit without anyone knowing who I am.”
“Then let’s go.”
It was relatively easy for Cammon to get them out of the building unseen. He didn’t have Ellynor’s trick of concealment, of course, but he had no trouble sensing when the rooms and hallways ahead of them were clear of people and safe to traverse. More than once he had to whisk them into an unoccupied room to avoid a contingent of servants, and on these occasions he and Amalie plastered themselves against the wall and tried to keep from laughing.
Finally they had ducked through a side door to avoid all the cooks in the kitchen and found themselves outside in the cold afternoon sun. “Where to?” Cammon asked.
“The training yard,” she answered without hesitation. “I want to watch the Riders working out.”
She wasn’t the only one. A dozen or so spectators gathered around the fence rails surrounding the yard, watching in fascination as the Riders practiced their swings and blows. The rest of them looked like tourists in the royal city for a special visit-wealthy merchants and their well-dressed wives, their envious sons, their teenage daughters who sighed and giggled over the Riders’ splendid physiques. None of them paid any attention to Amalie.
She climbed up the bottom rung of the fence and hung over the top, absorbed in the mock combat. “Tell me who is who,” she commanded, so Cammon stepped up beside her and gave a running commentary.
“That’s Tir, the oldest of the Riders. Tayse’s father. See how he wields the sword? He’s not as powerful as he used to be, but he’s tricky. Almost no one can beat him. Over there is Wen. She’s small and she’s not as strong as some of the men, but she’s fast. And she can outshoot any of them with a bow. She’s fighting with Justin, so she’s going to go down in about a minute.”
“Does Justin always win?”
“Just about.”
“Who’s the best? Of all the Riders?”
“Tayse,” he answered without hesitation.
“And nobody can beat him?”
“Oh, sure. Now and then someone brings him down-usually Tir or Coeval, and sometimes Justin. But not very often. And never twice in a row.”
For a moment she stood in silence, watching over the rims of her spectacles. “I’m supposed to know them all,” she said. “My father does. He knows their names and their stories and whether they’re married and whether they’ve been injured and-and-what they’re like. Who they are. I only know a few of them, especially those who were with us last summer-Tayse and Justin and Coeval and Hammond. And Senneth.”
“Well,” Cammon said, “Senneth isn’t exactly a Rider.”
Amalie pointed to where Senneth was trading blows with Hammond. “She’s training with them.”
“I’ve trained with the Riders, too, and that doesn’t make me one of them.”
She gave him a quick appraising glance out of those lively brown eyes. “Are you any good?”
He laughed. “Not really. But Tayse says I’m getting better.”
She returned her attention to the field. “I should get to know them all.”
“I’m sure they’d welcome that. I’ll ask Tayse to arrange it.”
She nodded and then lapsed into silence again. Cammon could feel her intense interest in the activities on the field. Her mind swooped with the swing of a sword blade, dove to the wrestlers in the mud, lifted with the arrows being shot at targets on the other edge of the yard. She was pleased and excited and absorbed and impressed; she saw the activity before her as a combination of poetry and practicality. She missed neither the sheer beauty of the physical motion nor the deadly necessity behind the exercise.
For a moment Cammon’s hands tightened on the top rail of the fence. He could sense Amalie. He could read her. Valri’s cloaking magic had been lifted and Amalie was like a sunlit golden room he could simply stroll inside. He stood at the open doorway, dazzled by what he could glimpse from the threshold. Bright intelligence, swift comprehension, limitless fascination with the world around her. Her mind was like a darting bird too delighted with the bounty before it to want to settle. He could see it, flashing from window to window inside the illuminated chamber of her skull.
He closed his eyes and willed himself to walk away.
This was what Valri was protecting Amalie from, nasty intrusive strangers who would stomp all over those unmarred golden vistas, who would peer inside her and try to read her or try to rearrange her. Valri was protecting Amalie from him, from people like him, anyway, readers or, no-people who wanted to invade or dismantle that alluring, untouched space. Amalie was too open, too impressionable, and Valri knew it, and that was why Valri had been so afraid when Amalie could hear the words that Cammon sent her way. What other influences would Amalie succumb to, how could she ever be safe?
Cammon turned his head and put walls up around his own mind and felt himself hunker down behind their shadows.
Amalie touched his arm. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her face was creased with concern.
He made himself smile and shake his head. “Nothing. I’m just hoping Tayse doesn’t see me, or he’ll want to drag me over the fence and make me practice swordplay. He thinks I don’t work out nearly as often as I should.”
She smiled, but a trace of worry lingered, as if she knew he was lying. “If that happens, I’ll have to throw off my disguise and play the haughty princess. ‘I have commanded this man to wait on me, Rider, and you will not drag him from my side.’ ”
“Oh, yes, that tone of voice would make even Tayse back down.”
When she had had her fill of watching warfare, they promenaded through a few of the gardens. Despite the sunshine, the cold had chased everyone else inside; they had every path and enclosure to themselves. All the flowers were dead, of course, but some of the hedges retained their color, and the naked trees offered a variety of fantastical shapes with their trailing limbs and supplicating, upraised branches. Cammon and Amalie wandered through the sculpture park, where past kings and queens of Gillengaria struck marble poses and gazed down with forbidding, displeased expressions.
“If I ever have my statue done, it’s going to show me smiling,” Amalie said. She paused beside a representation of some former queen, whose face could hardly have been more grim, and stretched her arms wide in a welcome gesture. She had taken off her father’s glasses so her face was completely bare, completely open, covered only with a smile. “I’m going to be bending down a little, like I’m getting ready to kiss a child on the cheek. I’m going to look happy. People will want to come visit my statue, and maybe leave offerings for birds and squirrels at my feet.”
Cammon couldn’t help smiling at that. He was recovering some of his usual insouciance, though he was still being careful to keep his curious mind in check. “Maybe by the time you’re old, and you’ve been ruling for fifty years, you’ll be feeling a little more grumpy.”
She laughed. “So maybe I should commission my statue now.”
Before the war comes, he thought. While there is still a hope that you will take the throne.
“I will,” she said calmly. “The Riders and the mystics will keep me safe.”
He stared at her, completely nonplussed, for it was not a thought he had intended her to overhear. “Majesty-” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She placed her fingertips against the smooth bole of a skinny birch, as if feeling for a pulse in its narrow trunk. “Sorry for what? For worrying that war might snatch the crown from my family? You’re hardly the only one.”
“I shouldn’t-I didn’t mean-I’m sorry that I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself.”