“I don’t know that, either.” Grus shrugged. “You’re just full of inconvenient questions today, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think Commodore Grus is coming to the palace,” Lanius remarked to Lepturus.
“I don’t think he is, either,” the commander of the royal bodyguards replied. “If I were him, I don’t think I would have.”
“But doesn’t that turn him into a traitor?” Lanius asked. “Mother heads the regency council, after all. Till I come of age, she rules Avornis.”
Lepturus coughed. “If your mother goes and pushes things, she can probably make Commodore Grus into a traitor, make him a rebel. If she doesn’t, he’s just an officer who had a quarrel with another officer and fears the other fellow has more clout than he does.”
“What’s the difference?” Lanius asked.
“I’ll tell you what the difference is, Your Majesty. If he’s somebody who’s had a quarrel with another officer, he’ll go on obeying any orders he gets that don’t put him straight into danger from his own side. If he’s a traitor, he won’t. He’ll rebel. What with King Dagipert and the Thervings marching on us, we don’t really want to have to fight a rebel, too.”
“Oh.” Lanius pondered that, and then reluctantly nodded. “Yes, I suppose you make sense there.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Lepturus said. “I’m not good for much—especially these days, on account of I’m getting old.” His eyebrows waggled. Sure enough, those hairy caterpillars had gray in them that hadn’t been there a couple of years earlier. “But I’ve always had pretty fair luck at making sense, and I’m glad you think I do even yet.”
King Lanius eyed him. “That’s the oddest sort of modesty I think I’ve ever heard.” Lepturus snorted and spluttered. The king went on, “How well will Count Corvus do—how well can Count Corvus do—fighting the Thervings without Corax and this army of Heruls that was supposed to attack them from the rear?”
“We drove them back last summer, you know,” Lepturus said.
“Yes, but Corvus wasn’t commanding our army then. You were,” Lanius said.
“Count Corvus has his connections with the Heruls, and he makes a pretty fair soldier, when he pays attention to what’s going on around him,” the guards commander said. “And now, Your Majesty, if you’ll excuse me—” He left before King Lanius could ask him how often Corvus paid attention and how often he didn’t.
With a sigh, Lanius got to his feet and walked through the hallways of the palace. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He should have been doing his lessons, but writing verses wasn’t his favorite part of them. He would sooner have poked around in the archives. He would have gotten his shirt and breeches dusty, which would have annoyed his mother, but so what? But his tutor was a conscientious man, and would insist that he do the verses.
Later, Lanius thought, and kept on wandering.
When he went by, servants bowed if they were men, curtsied if they were women. “Your Majesty,” they would murmur. It was almost as though he really ruled Avornis—almost, but not quite.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” a serving girl said. She smiled at him.
“Oh. Good morning, Marila,” Lanius answered. He smiled, too. Marila was a couple of years older than Lanius. But she didn’t smile at him as though he were just a little boy, as so many of the servants did.
“Where were you going, Your Majesty?” she asked. “What were you doing?”
“Nowhere much,” he said. “Nothing in particular.” He took a deep breath. “Would you… ?” he began, and then stopped. His ears felt as though they were on fire. Try as he would, he couldn’t go on.
Marila curtsied. “Would I what, Your Majesty?” she said, and gave him another smile.
That encouraged Lanius to try again. “Would you… like to come with me?” The last few words came out in a rush.
Her eyes got big. They were very blue—not as blue as his mother’s, which would have alarmed him, but very blue even so. “All right, Your Majesty,” she said. “Where will we go?”
Panic rolled over him. “I—I—I don’t know,” he whispered.
Marila laughed. Had she laughed at him, he would have run away. But she didn’t—or he didn’t think she did. She asked, “Well, where would you go if I wasn’t coming along?”
That, he could answer. “To the archives,” he said at once.
The serving girl blinked. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. She nodded, though, and then brushed back a lock of hair—somewhere between brown and auburn—that had fallen down in front of her face. “All right, Your Majesty, we’ll go to the archives.”
They weren’t far. Lanius’ feet might have been leading him there even when the rest of him had no idea that was where he planned to go. He opened the door, then stood aside to let Marila go in ahead of him.
.She looked at him as though he were utterly mad. “You’re the king!” she exclaimed.
“Well,” he said. Feeling foolish, he walked in. She followed. He closed the door.
They were the only ones in there. He would have been surprised had it been otherwise. The room was surprisingly large. Halfhearted sunshine filtered in through a skylight and a couple of windows high up on the southern wall that hadn’t been washed for a long time. Books and ledgers and scrolls and maps—some a few months old, some a few years old, some a few centuries old, and a few even older than that—were piled, stacked, or sometimes just thrown on or into tables and chests and trunks and cases. The air smelled of leather and parchment and ink and dust. Motes danced in pale sunbeams.
“What a funny place!” Marila said. “What do you do here? Uh, Your Majesty?”
“I come here to look through things,” Lanius answered. “When I go through these parchments, I never know what’ll be on them. Sometimes it’s interesting—things nobody’s seen for years and years. Sometimes it’s boring.”
“What do you do then?” the serving girl asked.
Lanius shrugged. “Then I look at another one.”
“How funny,” Marila said. If she’d laughed then, he would have taken her out of the room and that would have been that. But she didn’t. In the dim light, her eyes seemed enormous. Her voice dropped. “It’s so quiet here.”
“I know. That’s one of the reasons I like this place,” Lanius answered. “It’s just me and… whatever I can find. I’ve seen parchments in here that go back to the days before the Banished One was banished. I could show you.” He ought to do something with the girl besides stand there and gab at her.
“If you want to.” Now Marila shrugged—a motion more complex and interesting to look at than Lanius’ simple gesture had been. She giggled. “I thought you brought me in here for something else.”
“You did?” he said. “What?”
“I could show you.” More than half to herself, Marila added, “You’ll need some showing, won’t you?” She giggled again.
“What are you talking ab—?” Lanius began. That changed to a sudden, startled bleat. “What are you doing?”
Marila pulled her tunic off over her head. She slid out of her long wool skirt, then eased off her breastband and let her drawers fall to the floor. She stood before Lanius, naked and smiling. “I could show you, if you like,” she said again.
Lanius stared. He’d started to notice girls, yes, but hardly more than theoretically. In that same theoretical way, he knew what went on between men and women. But it was all theory. “Are—are—are you sure?” he quavered.
“You’re the king. You can do whatever you want,” Marila answered. “Besides, I think you’ll like it.”