“Well…” Lanius wondered how to answer that and stay truthful and polite at the same time. Truth won. He said, “If you don’t count Crex and Pitta, yes.”
Limosa stared at him, then giggled. “All right, that’s fair enough. Who doesn’t think their children are the most wonderful ones in the world?”
“I can’t think of anybody,” Lanius said. “That’s what keeps us from feeding our children to the hunting hounds, I suppose.”
Limosa’s eyes got even wider than they had been before. She hugged Capella a little tighter and hurried away as though she feared Lanius had some dreadful, contagious disease. He wondered why. He hadn’t said he wanted to feed Capella—or any other children—to hunting hounds. He sighed. Some people just didn’t listen.
He’d just started searching through the spots likeliest to hold the missing documents when somebody began banging on the door to the archives. The king said something pungent. The servants knew they weren’t supposed to do things like that. Bubulcus, the one who’d been most likely to “forget” such warnings, was dead. Either someone was making a dreadful mistake or something dreadful, something he really needed to know about, had just happened. Adding a few more choice phrases under his breath, he went to see who was bothering him in his sanctum.
“Sosia!” he said in astonishment. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“I was going to ask you the same question,” his wife answered. “What on earth did you say to Limosa? Queen Quelea’s mercy, it’s frightened the life out of her, whatever it was.”
“Oh, by the gods!” Lanius clapped a hand to his forehead in exasperation altogether unfeigned. “She really doesn’t listen.” He spelled out exactly what he’d said to Limosa.
Even before he got halfway through, one of Sosia’s eyebrows started climbing. Lanius had seen that expression more often on Grus than on his wife. He liked it no better on her. Once he’d finished, she said, “Well, I don’t blame Limosa a bit. Poor thing! Hunting dogs, indeed! You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“You weren’t listening, either,” Lanius complained. “I didn’t say that was what we did with children. I didn’t say it was what we should do. I said it was what we would do if the people who had them didn’t think they were wonderful. Don’t you see the difference?”
“What I see is that nobody’s got any business talking about feeding babies to any hounds.” Sosia spoke with impressive certainty. “And that goes double for talking about babies and hounds to somebody who’s just had one. Had a baby, I mean.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’re not going to make me sound foolish. This is important.”
“I wasn’t. This is already nothing but foolishness,” Lanius said.
“It certainly is— your foolishness. Next time you see Limosa, you apologize to her, do you hear me?” Sosia didn’t wait for an answer. She stared past Lanius into the cavernous archives. “So this is where you spend all your time. I feel as though I’m looking at the other woman.”
“Don’t be silly,” Lanius said, although that comparison made much more sense to him than the other one had. “And I still don’t see why you want me to apologize to Limosa when I didn’t say anything bad to begin with.”
“Yes, you did. You’re just too—too logical to know it.” Sosia turned her back and stalked off. Over her shoulder, she added, “And if you think people run on logic all the time, you’d better think again.”
“I don’t think anything of the sort. People cured me of it a long time ago,” Lanius said plaintively. Sosia didn’t even slow down. She went around a corner and disappeared. The king almost chased after her to go on explaining. But he realized—logically—that it wouldn’t do him any good, and so he stayed where he was.
When he could no longer hear Sosia’s angry footsteps, he shut the door to the archives once more. For good measure, he barred it behind him. Then he went back to looking for the parchments from Durdevatz.
He searched on and off for four days, and finally found them by accident. If he had told Sosia about that, she would either have laughed at him or rolled her eyes in despair. He’d forgotten he’d put the parchments in a stout wooden box to keep them safe. How many times had he walked past it without paying it any mind? More than he wanted to think about—he was sure of that. If he hadn’t barked his knuckles on a corner of the box, he might never have found the documents at all.
That moment of sudden, unexpected pain made him take a long, reproachful look at the box. When he recognized it, he still felt reproachful—self-reproachful. After all that searching—and after its ludicrous end—he was almost afraid to look at the parchments. If they turned out to be worthless or dull, how could he stand it?
Of course, if he didn’t look at them, why had he gone to all the trouble of finding them? After rubbing his hand, he carried the box over to the table where he’d written most of How to Be a King. When he opened the box, he started to laugh. The Chernagors had made him happy with some of the cheapest presents ever given to a King of Avornis—a pair of moncats, a pair of monkeys, and a pile of documents dug out of a decrepit cathedral. For all he knew, merchants in the north country laughed whenever they heard his name.
He didn’t care. Happiness and having enough money weren’t the same thing. He’d been happy enough even at times when Grus squeezed him hardest. That money and happiness weren’t the same thing didn’t mean happiness had nothing to do with money. Lanius’ intuition, though, didn’t reach that far.
The first few parchments he unrolled and read had to do with the cathedral, not with anything that went on inside it. They included a letter from the yellow-robed high-hallow then presiding in the building asking a long-dead King of Avornis for funds to repair it and add to its mosaic decoration. The letter had come to the capital and gone back to what was then Argithea, not Durdevatz, with the king’s scribbled comment and signature below it. We are not made of silver, the sovereign had written. If the projects are worthy, surely your townsfolk will support them. If they are not, all the silver in the world will not make them so.
Lanius studied that with considerable admiration, “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he murmured. He studied the response until he’d memorized it. He could think of so many places to use it.…
Other documents told him more about the history of Argithea than he’d ever known before. Some of them talked about the Chernagors as sea raiders. Up until then, he’d seen only a couple of parchments like that. They proved Argithea hadn’t been the first town along the coast of the Northern Sea to fall to the Chernagors. Lanius tried to remember whether he’d known that before. Try as he would, he couldn’t be sure.
More appeals—for money and for aid—to the capital followed, from the city governor and from the high-ranking priest at the cathedral. Only one of them had any sort of reply. A relieving force is on the way, the answer said. Hold out until it arrives.
There were no more letters in Avornan after the date of that one. The messenger bringing the answer must have managed to slip through the besieging Chernagors; Lanius had read elsewhere that they hadn’t been polished at the art of taking cities. Polished or not, though, they’d surely taken Argithea before the promised relieving force arrived. They must have kept the Avornans from recapturing the town, too. From then on, the history of Argithea ended and that of Durdevatz began.
One parchment still sat at the bottom of the box. Lanius pulled it out as much from a sense of duty as for any other reason. Since he was going through the documents, he thought he ought to go through all of them. He didn’t expect anything more interesting or exciting than what he’d already found.