With some amusement, Grus listened to his wife and his father going back and forth. Because he was away from the city of Avornis so much, he didn’t bother keeping track of which priests here were holy men and which weren’t. But Estrilda and Crex hashed them over endlessly.
“Ortalis!” Crex yelled. “Your mother told you not to do that. D’you want your backside heated up?”
“No, Grandpa.” When Ortalis said that, he was, no doubt, telling the truth.
“Hasn’t Bucco been dickering with the Thervings?” Grus said. “What’s King Dagipert going to do when he has to talk to somebody else?”
“If he doesn’t like it, Mergus can give him a good kick in the ribs, too,” Crex said.
“It’s not that simple,” Grus said. When it came to the Thervings, he knew what he was talking about. “The way things are nowadays, Dagipert’s about as likely to give us a kick in the ribs as the other way round. And he wants to give us one, too.”
“He spent some time here in the city of Avornis when he was a youth, didn’t he?” Estrilda asked.
Crex nodded. “That’s right. Mergus’ father thought it would make him admire us too much to want to bother us. We were stronger in those days, too, and Thervingia weaker. Ortalis!”
“He admires us, all right—just enough to want what we’ve got,” Grus said. “And you never can quite tell. Is that his greed… or is the Banished One looking out through his eyes, too?” They all made a sign against the coming of evil, but Grus wondered how much good it would do.
Something was wrong in the palace. Lanius was only five, but he knew that. People bustled back and forth, all of them with worried looks on their faces. No one had any time for him. He noticed that, most of all. He had been everyone’s darling. He’d gotten used to being everyone’s darling, too, and he’d liked it. Now nobody paid any attention to him. He might as well not have been there.
“Mama—” he said one day.
But not even his mother had any time for him. “Not now,” Certhia said, impatience and anger in her voice.
He tried again. “But, Mama—”
“Not now!” his mother said again, and swatted him on the bottom. He burst into tears. She didn’t pat him and comfort him, the way she usually did. She just went off and left him to cry till he stopped.
And he couldn’t see his father. They wouldn’t let him. All sorts of strange people got to see his father—priests and wizards and men wearing green gowns, like the fellow who took his pulse and looked at his teeth and gave him nasty potions when he didn’t feel good. But Lanius couldn’t.
“It’s not fair!” he wailed. That didn’t get him what he wanted, either. Nothing did. Nothing could.
Once, his father’s chamber lit up as bright as noon in the middle of the night. Loud voices spoke from the ceiling, or so it seemed to Lanius, whose own room was nearby. The light and the voices woke him up. They didn’t frighten him—they sounded like nice voices—but they did annoy him, because he wanted to sleep. Before long, though, the chamber went dark and the voices fell silent.
Lanius’ mother and a man walked down the corridor in front of his room. “Nothing more to do, if that failed,” the man said. Lanius’ mother began to weep, quietly and without hope. “I’m sorry, Your Highness,” the man told her, “but it’s only a matter of time now.”
Two days later, everybody in the royal palace began to weep and wail. Nobody would tell Lanius why, which made him start crying, too. No one even bothered to wipe his nose for him. Wet, slimy snot dribbled down his chin.
And then Uncle Scolopax strode into his room. Lanius didn’t like Scolopax. He never had. Scolopax didn’t like him, either, and hardly bothered hiding it. He didn’t hide it now. “Shut up, you little bastard,” he snarled. “Your old man’s dead, so I’m the king now. You’re too young, no one will support you. And if I’m the king, you’d best believe you are a bastard.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Wine!” King Scolopax shouted. Servants rushed to obey. When the wine cup was in his hands, Scolopax threw back his head and roared laughter. It echoed from the ceiling of the throne room. He gulped down the wine, then thrust the cup at the closest servant. A moment later, it was full again. Scolopax drank it dry once more.
He’d never imagined life could be so sweet. It wasn’t that he hadn’t drunk before. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been drunk before. As the younger brother of the king—as the despised, distrusted younger brother of the king—what else did he have to do? But now what he did wasn’t what a despised, distrusted younger brother did. Now what he did was what the king did. And that made all the difference in the world.
“Avornis is mine!” he chortled. “Mine, I tell you!”
If he’d ever said anything like that before, the servants would have made sure Mergus knew about it. Scolopax was in many ways a fool, but he knew what his brother would have done to him. That had been especially true after Lanius was born. If the brat hadn’t been on the sickly side, Mergus might have done it anyway. Scolopax had therefore never even let himself think such thoughts, for fear they would come out when he was drunk. Now he didn’t have to run away from them. He didn’t have to hide them. He could come right out and say them. And they were true.
All the servants in the throne room bowed very low. “Yes, Your Majesty,” they chorused. Scolopax laughed again. Only a couple of weeks before, they’d hardly bothered hiding their scorn for him. These days, they had to be hoping he’d been too sodden to remember. Oh, life was sweet!
He sat on the Diamond Throne, drinking, looking out across the chamber at the heart of the palace. It seemed bigger, grander, even brighter from here than it had before. He hated Mergus all the more for holding him away from this delight for so long.
Presently, one of Mergus’ ministers—Scolopax, in his cheerful drunkenness, couldn’t be bothered recalling the man’s name—approached the throne and bowed even lower than the servants had. “Your Majesty, how shall we deal with the Thervings?” he asked.
“Give ’em a good swift kick in the ass and send ’em to bed without supper,” Scolopax answered—the first words that popped into his head. He laughed again, loudly and raucously. So did the nearby servants.
Mergus’ minister— my minister now, Scolopax thought—did not laugh. He said, “King Dagipert will be looking to see what kind of example you set, Your Majesty. So will all the princes of the Menteshe, down in the south.” He lowered his voice. “And so will the Banished One, behind them.”
Scolopax didn’t want to think about the Banished One. He didn’t want to think about anything except being King Scolopax. “So will the Chernagors, on their islands in the Northern Sea, and the barbarians beyond the mountains,” he said.
Mergus’ minister looked pleased. “That’s true, Your Majesty. They will. Everyone will. What sort of example do you intend to set?”
“Wine!” King Scolopax shouted. “Some for me, some for him.” He pointed to the minister.
“No, thank you, Your Majesty,” the fellow said. “The healers forbid it. My liver…”
“You won’t drink with me?” Scolopax said ominously. “I ask no man twice. I need ask no man twice. You are dismissed. Get out of my sight. Get out of the palace. Get out of the city of Avornis.”
With immense dignity, Mergus’ minister bowed before departing. Scolopax wondered for a moment with whom he should replace him. Then he shrugged and laughed. The fellow was plainly useless. Why bother replacing him at all?