“Incredible. What happened to the assassin?”
“Killed, right then and there.”
“As was right and proper,” Dinitak said.
Dekkeret smiled at that. Again and again Dinitak revealed himself as the ferocious moralist that he was. His judgments, driven by a powerful sense of right and wrong, were often severe and uncompromising, sometimes surprisingly so. Dekkeret had taken him to task for that, early in their friendship. Dinitak’s response was to ask Dekkeret whether he would prefer him to be more like his father in his ways, and Dekkeret did not pursue the issue after that. But often he thought that it must be painful for Dinitak, forever seeing sloth and error and corruption on all sides, even in those he loved.
“Prestimion was unharmed, of course. But the whole event was a tremendous embarrassment for Meglis, and he spent the rest of his days trying to live it down. Nobody outside Normork thinks about it at all, but here it’s been a blemish on the reputation of the entire city for almost twenty years. And even though it’s hardly likely that such a thing would happen again, I suppose that Considat wants to make absolutely certain that nobody waving a sharp object gets anywhere near the Coronal-designate while we’re here.”
“That’s imbecilic. Does he seriously think his city is a hotbed of crazed assassins? And what a damnable nuisance, having these troops marching around with us everywhere we go.”
“Agreed. But if he feels he has to bend over backwards in the name of caution, we’ll have to humor him. It would give needless offense if we objected.”
Dinitak shrugged and let the matter drop. Dekkeret was only too well aware of how little tolerance there was in his friend’s makeup for folly of any sort, and plainly this business of providing unneeded guards for the visitors from Castle Mount fell into that category. But Dinitak was able to see that having the guards around would be just a harmless annoyance. And he understood when to yield to Dekkeret in matters of official protocol.
They settled quickly into their hostelry, where Dekkeret was given the capacious set of rooms that was usually reserved for the Coronal, and Dinitak a lesser but comfortable apartment one floor below. In early afternoon they set out on their first call, a visit to Dekkeret’s mother, the
Lady Taliesme. Dekkeret had not seen her in many months. Although her son’s position as heir-designate to the throne entitled her to a suite of rooms at the Castle, she preferred to remain in Normork most of the time—still living, actually, in the same little dwelling in Old Town that their family had occupied when Dekkeret was a boy.
She lived there alone, now. Dekkeret’s father, a traveling merchant who had had indifferent success plodding to and fro with his satchels of goods amongst the Fifty Cities, had died a decade earlier, still fairly young but worn out, defeated, even, by the long laborious struggle that his life had been. He had never been able quite to make himself believe that his son Dekkeret had somehow attracted the attention of Lord Prestimion himself and had found his way into the circle of lordlings around the Coronal at the Castle. That Dekkeret had been made a knight-initiate was almost beyond his capacity to comprehend; and when the Coronal had raised him to the rank of prince, his father had taken the news merely as a bizarre joke.
Dekkeret often wondered what he would have done if he had come to him and announced, “I have been chosen to be the next Coronal, father.” Laughed in his son’s face, most likely. Or slapped him, even, for mocking his father with such nonsense. But he had not lived long enough for that.
Taliesme, though, had handled her son’s improbable ascent, and the stunning elevation of her own position that necessarily had accompanied it, with remarkable calmness. It was not that she had ever expected Dekkeret to become a knight of the Castle, let alone a prince. And undoubtedly not even in her dreams had she imagined him as Coronal. Nor was she the sort of doting mother who blandly accepted any success that came to her son as nothing more than his proper due, inevitable and well deserved.
But a simple and powerful faith in the Divine had been her guide throughout all her life. She did not quarrel with destiny. And so nothing ever surprised her; whatever came her way, be it pain and sorrow or glory beyond all measure, was something that had been preordained, something that one accepted without complaint on the one hand and without any show of astonishment on the other. Plainly it must have been intended from the beginning of time that Dekkeret would be Coronal someday—and therefore that she herself would finish her days as Lady of the Isle of Sleep, a Power of the Realm. The Coronal’s mother was always given that greatly auspicious post. Very welclass="underline" so be it.
She had not anticipated any such things, of course; but if they happened anyway, well, their happening had to be viewed in retrospect as something as natural and unsurprising as the rising of the sun in the east each day.
What surprised Dinitak was the meanness of the Lady Taliesme’s house, a lopsided little place with sagging window-frames amidst a jumble of small buildings that might have been five thousand years old, on a dark, crooked street of uneven gray-green cobbled pavement close to the center of Old Town. What sort of home was this for the mother of the next Coronal?
“Yes, I know,” Dekkeret said, grinning. “But she likes it here. She’s lived in this house for forty years and it means more to her than ten Castles ever could. I’ve bought new furniture for her that’s costlier than what was here before, and nowadays she wears clothing of a sort that my father could never have afforded for her, but otherwise nothing in the least has changed. Which is exactly as she wants it to be.”
“And the people around her? Don’t they know they’re living next door to the future Lady of the Isle? Doesn’t she know that herself?”
“I have no idea what the neighbors know. I suspect that to them she’s just Taliesme, the widow of the merchant Orvan Pettir. And as for herself—”
The door opened.
“Dekkeret,” said the Lady Taliesme. “Dinitak. How good to see you both again.”
Dekkeret embraced his mother lovingly and with great care, as though she were dainty and fragile, and might break if hugged too enthusiastically. In fact he knew she was not half so fragile as he fancied her to be; but none the less she was a small-framed woman, light-boned and petite. Dekkeret’s father had not been large either. From boyhood onward Dekkeret had always felt like some kind of gross overgrown monster who had unaccountably been deposited by prankish fate in the home of those two diminutive people.
Taliesme was wearing a gown of unadorned ivory silk, and her glistening silver hair was bound by a simple, slender gold circlet. Dekkeret had brought gifts for her that were of the same austere taste, a glossy little dragonbone pendant, and a cobweb-light shimmering headscarf made in distant Gabilorn, and a smooth little ring of purple jade from Vyrongimond, and two or three other things of that sort. She received them all with evident pleasure and gratitude, but put them away as swiftly as politeness would permit. Taliesme had never coveted treasures of that sort in the days when they had been poor, and she gave no sign of having more than a casual interest in them now.
They talked easily, over tea and biscuits, of life at the Castle; she inquired after Lord Prestimion and Lady Varaile and their children and—briefly, very briefly—mentioned the Lady Fulkari also; she spoke of Septach Melayn and other Council members, and asked about Dekkeret’s current duties at the court, very much as though she were of that court herself in every fiber of her body rather than the mere widow of an unimportant provincial merchant. She referred knowingly, too, to recent events at the palace in Normork, the dismissal of a minister who was overfond of his wine and the birth of Count Considat’s heir and other matters of that sort; twenty years ago she would have had no more knowledge of such things than she did of the private conversations of the Shapeshifter wizards in their wickerwork capital in distant Piurifayne.