"Your lady mother waits to greet you in the solar after you've refreshed yourself, my lord," Romarec said.
Well, that's Mom, Odard thought wryly, nodding to several of the others and giving his old nanny a hug before heading for his private quarters.
His valet had come ahead by train from Todenangst with the baggage. Odard's own rooms were in the south east tower of the keep, four stacked one above the other. All of them were brightly lit, with fires crackling on their hearths, and had been for long enough to take the curse off the winter's day-not easy, in a structure made of thick mass concrete and in this climate, even when all the walls were paneled and hung with tapestry.
Alex Vinton was a small foxy-faced man with red hair and freckles, about six years older than Odard, wearing a soberly rich tunic of russet dyed linen, shoes with turned-up toes, and a gold-link belt. He did not wear the usual servant's tabard over it, and wore only a discreet livery badge clasped to the brim of his hat. He'd proved extremely useful in a number of ways.
"Hi, Alex," Odard said, lowering himself into the steaming lavender-scented water of the bath. "Christ, that feels good… Been busy?"
"Yes, my lord," he said, folding the clothes Odard had discarded. "I've been back two days now and there's quite a bit of gossip."
"Oh, God and His merciful saints"-Odard steepled his hands in mock prayer and rolled his eyes upward-" tell me she didn't have those assassins here at the castle!"
"No, no, my lord," the valet said. "The hunting lodge over at Fairfax."
"Ten miles away and in a swamp, that's something, " Odard said meditatively, scrubbing at his fingernails with a small brush; he was a fastidious man and bathed every day when he could. "When did she meet them?"
"She didn't, my lord. She had her younger brother Sir Guelf do it."
"That's also something. Not much, but something."
Alex held the towel for him as he stepped out on the mat, then helped him dress with foppish care in the latest fashion, just below the court-appearance standard-dark trousers cut closer than had been the custom in his father's time, tooled-leather shoes with little golden bells on the upturned toes and ceremonial gold spurs on the heels, a knee-length tunic of heavy indigo-dyed silk with silver embroidery on the square-cut neck and elbow-length sleeves whose flared points extended half way to his knees, and a white silk shirt beneath it. He added a ring or two and examined himself in the full-length mirror, smiling at what he saw.
"Not bad," he said, taking a belt of leather covered in worked-silver plates and buckling it around his waist.
It had a purse and a ten-inch poignard; the hilt had patterned silver and gold wire inlaid in the black stag horn grips, and a pommel in the shape of a silver cat's head. You didn't usually wear a sword inside in time of peace, but a gentleman didn't go unarmed outside his own chambers, either. Alex added the round hat with the roll around its brim and flicked the long silk tail from the side to lie over Odard's right shoulder. The badge at the fore was the mon arms of the House of Liu in a turquoise that set off his eyes.
"You're the pattern of chivalry, my lord," the valet said unctuously, then spoiled the effect with a grin.
"All right, I admit it, I like looking well," Odard said.
"Tell the comptroller when he has to pay the bills, my lord," Alex said, grinning still wider.
There was something to that. Barony Gervais was rich in anything grown or made within its boundaries or available in local trade, but the silk came from Burma or New Singapore or Hinduraj, and it cost-regular trade with the portions of Asia not irretrievably wrecked by the Change was just getting started again. The price of fashion was one reason he was just as happy to get away from court for a while.
"See if there are any details you could find," he said to the valet. "Talk to Guelf's men; maybe you can smoke out something."
Odard whistled a tune he liked as he walked through the corridors towards the solar, looking his usual cheerful self. Hearing it, someone within earshot began to sing the words-a woman's voice:
I forbid you maidens all
That wear gold in your hair
To come or go by Carter Hall
For young Tam Lin is there Inside, he was on edge; a little like the time just before a fight when you wondered which bush hid a man with a crossbow bolt ready to punch through your armor, or a hunt for a tiger or boar. Usually politics was something he enjoyed, even the junior jostling for position that heirs did, and he'd been getting more and more in volved in the real thing as he approached the magic age of twenty one. Having to play the game with your own mother was another kettle altogether.
It wouldn't do to let it all show. Instead he raised his own voice for a moment:
None come or go by Carter Hall
But they leave him a pledge Either your rings or green mantle
Or else your maidenhead…
And then laughed as he took the spiral staircase.
The castle solar was in the south-facing upper turret of the southwestern tower, the one nearest the hall; that height let it have real glazed windows all around the cir cumference of the big round room rather than arrow slits, though today more light came from lanterns of brass and mirrored glass. It glowed on the tapestries, the pale tile of the floor, on polished metal and bright rugs, on a big rood cross of black walnut inlaid with semiprecious stones.
The Dowager Baroness Liu was sitting there with her women-mostly sisters or daughters of knights who held land in fief from the barony-and his younger sister Yseult. Everyone stopped what they were doing and rose as he stood in the doorway, except his mother; as he turned to her the ladies-in-waiting curtsied, a wave of colored flowers in their cotte-hardis and headdresses.
"Ladies," he said, taking hat in hand and bowing in return with a sweeping gesture. "I'm enchanted to see you all again. Would you excuse my mother and me? We've a good deal to discuss, and I'll see you all in the hall at dinner."
He smiled charmingly as he said it. Some of the younger and prettier women smiled back invitingly, but he wasn't going to make a fool of himself in that direc tion, beyond a little light flirtation. They were all of a rank that could expect marriage, and he was the heir to the barony and a notable catch. Almost all of them also had male relatives equipped to resent misbehavior with edged metal; people of their generation were a lot stricter about such matters than their parents had been. Odard fancied himself with a sword, but he also disliked real fighting without a very good reason.
Yseult squealed and ran towards him and then-being just turned fourteen-slowed her pace and curtsied gravely. He reached out and tweaked her nose, which made her squeak again and got their mother frowning.
"Greetings, my lord brother," she said, kissing his extended hand, and then both his cheeks.
"My lady Yseult," he said, bowing in turn. "You're looking good, sis."
She was; she'd gotten their mother's blond hair, worn loose to her shoulders under a simple headdress in maiden's fashion, but more of their father's face, high cheekbones, blue eyes sharply slanted and nose a graceful tip-tilted snub, complexion like pale honey. He suspected that in a few years she'd be making the young gentlemen of the district do some real suffering to win the right to carry her handkerchief to a tourney.
"My lady mother," he went on, with a deeper bow.
She nodded and stuck her needle in the half-finished tapestry in its frame by the hearth. The women were working on yet another something with warriors and dragons and a very large wolf, probably from the cover of some trashy book his mother had liked when she was young-it seemed that every woman who'd been in the Society before the Change had that weakness, even Lady Sandra, and the others had all caught it, like some chastely ideational form of the clap.