Some time later, Lanius looked up from his exercises to find his mother standing there in place of the tutor. Queen Certhia smiled at him. “You’ve been working hard, sweetheart,” she said.
“I hope so,” Lanius answered seriously. “I need to work hard. Someone has to be able to rule Avornis the way it should be ruled, and Arch-Hallow Bucco doesn’t seem to be the man.”
Certhia’s mouth tightened. “No, he doesn’t,” she agreed. “I could do it better than he can.”
“Why, so you could, Mama!” Lanius exclaimed. “I was reading about Queen Astrild just the other day. She ruled Avornis all by herself for a while. I’m sure you could do the same thing. You ought to.”
“It’s not quite so simple, I’m afraid,” his mother said.
“Why not? You’re the queen, and Bucco’s only the arch-hallow.” Lanius was a learned child, a precociously learned child, but he was only a child. What lay under his words was, You’re my mother. You can do anything.
“But he’s the head of the Council of Regents, and I’m not,” Certhia said. “And the soldiers will follow him, and they won’t follow me. I’m only a woman, after all.” She didn’t try to hide her bitterness.
“You could make them follow you. Queen Astrild did,” Lanius said.
“I wish they were here to listen to you,” his mother told him. She sounded amused and proud at the same time.
“Here are some soldiers.” Lanius pointed to the doorway. Sure enough, in tramped four grim-faced troopers. Lanius raised his voice. “You men! Since the arch-hallow plainly has no idea what he’s doing, your duty to Avornis is to obey someone else. Here is the queen, who—”
“That will be quite enough of that.” Arch-Hallow Bucco followed the armed men into the room. He went on, “You see how Certhia seeks to corrupt the child. She can no longer be trusted around him. Seize her.”
“Yes, sir,” the soldiers chorused. They advanced on Queen Certhia.
“You stop that! You leave her alone!” Lanius cried, and sprang at them. It did him no good. One of them caught him and held him in spite of all his thrashing.
His mother kicked and cursed the soldiers. That did her no good. She cursed Arch-Hallow Bucco, too, at the top of her lungs. That did her no good, either. “Take her away,” Bucco told them.
“Don’t you do that! She’s my mother!” Lanius shouted.
“She is leading you in the ways of the Banished One,” Bucco said.
“She’s not doing any such thing,” Lanius said indignantly.
“She certainly is,” the arch-hallow replied. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be so disrespectful to your elders.”
“You’re making a mess of the kingdom,” Lanius said. “Is it disrespectful to tell you the truth?”
“I don’t need to argue with you. You’re only a little boy,” Bucco said. He nodded to the soldiers. “Away with the slut. I wish we could be rid of her bastard as easily.”
“I’m no bastard!” Lanius’ voice went high and shrill. “Don’t you call me one, either, or you’ll be sorry.”
“The whole kingdom is sorry because you’re the king,” Arch-Hallow Bucco said. “And your mother was a seventh wife. What else would you call yourself, Your Majesty?” He turned the royal title into one of scorn.
Yes, Lanius knew what being the son of a seventh wife meant, or what it ordinarily would have meant. But he said, “A priest married my mother and father, so that was all right. And Arch-Hallow Megadyptes said the priest didn’t do anything wrong when he made the marriage, so that was all right, too. So there.” He stuck out his tongue. He might have been educated beyond his years, but he had only nine of them, and sometimes it showed.
Bucco gave him a look full of loathing. “I don’t care what Megadyptes said. He shouldn’t have been arch-hallow then, and he isn’t arch-hallow anymore.” He didn’t say, So there, and stick out his tongue—he was, after all, a grown-up—but he looked as though he wanted to.
“He isn’t arch-hallow now,” Lanius said, “but he could be again, when I come of age.”
The look Bucco gave him this time didn’t hold just loathing. It held fear, too. “If you weren’t the last of your dynasty—” he began, but then broke off, shaking his head. He gave Lanius a bow much sharper and shorter than the King of Avornis deserved, and went off, shaking his head.
Not long after that, the meadows around the walls of the city of Avornis began filling up with soldiers. When Lanius went up to one of the taller towers in the royal palace, he could see tents stretching out across the grasslands. Tiny as ants in the distance, men marched and countermarched in lines and squares. “Now we’ll beat the Thervings,” he told his tutor. He’d read of the Avornan army suffering defeats, but that didn’t seem real to him.
His tutor, though, looked worried. “May you prove right, Your Majesty,” the man said, “but I’m not sure that army is even there to fight King Dagipert and his savages.”
“What do you mean?” Lanius asked.
“Well…” The tutor didn’t want to go on but finally did. “Duke Regulus is a very bold man; a very brave man. He’s also a man of very high blood, and a man who’s good friends with Arch-Hallow Bucco.”
Lanius hadn’t read lots of chronicles for nothing. “You think he means to steal the throne from me!”
“I don’t know whether he means to do it, or whether Bucco means for him to do it,” the tutor answered. “Regulus is very bold and very brave, but no one ever said he was very bright. Bucco could lead him the way you would lead an ox.”
Fear filled Lanius. “What do I do?” he whispered. He wasn’t asking his tutor. He might have been asking himself, or he might have been asking the world. Whatever he asked, he got an answer. He snapped his fingers. He’d just learned how to do that, and liked the noise it made. “I know!” he said.
“What?” his tutor asked.
“I won’t tell you,” Lanius said. “I won’t tell anybody.”
Grus was a mightily puzzled man. Any man who loves a woman—and, especially, any man who has children—will find himself puzzled now and again. But this was a different sort of puzzlement. The Osprey, flagship of his present flotilla, made her way upstream along the Stura. The rowers had to work hard; both current and wind were against them.
He stared south, into the lands the Menteshe held. All seemed quiet there. Avornis had handled the latest raid from Prince Ulash roughly enough to make Ulash—and, Grus supposed, the Banished One, too—thoughtful. That left the commodore only more puzzled than ever at being ordered to stay on the Stura.
“Do you think the Menteshe are likely to try anything any time soon?” he asked Captain Nicator.
“Never can tell what those gods-cursed bastards are up to, not for sure,” Nicator answered. “Anytime you think you know, that’s when they’ll up and kick you in the balls.”
“Well, yes,” Grus agreed. “But what are the odds?”
“Slim,” Nicator said. “That I grant you. They are slim. We put the fear of Olor into the nomads.”
Now if only, we could put it into the Banished One. Grus shook his head. That was neither here nor there. He made himself stick to what had been uppermost in his mind: “Arch-Hallow Bucco is arming for war against the Thervings, isn’t he?”
“He says he is,” Nicator allowed. “Duke Regulus thinks he is. An awful lot of soldiers think he is.”
“Just so.” Grus nodded. “Duke Regulus. An awful lot of soldiers. Has he done anything about getting river galleys or sailors ready for the fight?”