“Are you ready, Captain?”

  Princess Iyedraeka was standing in the courtyard of her house, surrounded by her caged birds and most of my garrison. My first thought was that it wasn’t very nice of her. Her presence meant that the guard had to stand at attention, and I could see the strain on their faces, as most of them are happy loungers at heart. Andraescav, of course, was standing as straight as a spear haft, and I’m fairly certain that he was flexing his muscles beneath his robes. But the princess hadn’t deigned to reward him with her notice.

  My second thought was that it would be better to talk to her in her chambers. A guard captain cannot speak publicly to those who have authority over him, not if he doesn’t want his own authority diminished in the eyes of his troops. What I mean is, once your average and not very bright foot soldier sees you kowtowing to a duke or earl he begins to think that maybe you’re not as big and impressive as you appeared to be when he first signed up. Always better to let a noble humble you in private. Only this time I would be humbling her, as I had to tell her about the king’s rearrangements of her day. And that was just as bad. Nobles rarely forgive you for making them look weak in front of other people.

  But it was clear that Iyedraeka was ready to go, and had been for quite some time. And that she had been planning a rather secretive visit. Her beautiful and talented maids-in-waiting were nowhere in evidence. Martiveht was the only one of her ladies who was with her, and Martiveht isn’t even a lady. She is as common as I am, although she is Sasturi, which gives her a certain luster. Only on that day she wasn’t dressed like one. She had abjured her white robes for very simple, dung colored traveling clothes, and the only sign of her status was the disc pendant that she wore at her throat and the little skein of thread that she twisted around her left index finger, its end disappearing up the sleeve of her robe, where she had hidden her hand loom. She and Iyedraeka were the same age, only Martiveht seemed old and the princess seemed young. I suppose that if you were to paint them you’d say that they were both beautiful. But Martiveht seemed to deny her beauty. Her clear skin and fine features conspired to repulse one’s admiration, not inspire it. The princess, who had a wide face and a blunt little nose, shouldn’t have been beautiful but was. You wanted to keep looking at her. And there was something open about her, a desire to be loved, that good people responded to. I did. So did Andraescav, if one could call him good, and even Vaenahma. It was amazing that Prince Dasuekoh had rejected her, and it didn’t speak well of him, but what did?

  “Your Highness,” I said, thrusting a false heartiness into my voice, “the king has decided to accompany you, and you are to go by the river, saving you an arduous journey through the city.”

  She blanched at this. She glanced at the position of the sun. “Does he await me on the river?”

  “No, Highness,” I said softly. “It will be some hours before we can depart.”

  “Then I must decline the king’s kind offer. Or rather, I choose to meet him at the Shrine. Surely that will be all right?”

  I glanced at my two lieutenants. Andraescav was glaring at me. Vaenahma, inured to royal squabbles after long and painful experience, was inspecting a green songbird with feigned interest.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  I stepped closer to Iyedraeka and spoke in an undertone. “Princess, what is this about?”

  It was Martiveht who answered me, and she spoke loudly, so that the entire guard could hear her. “The spirits of the ancestors appeared to me in a dream,” she said. “They summoned the princess to them at the fourteenth hour of the day. I can sense their impatience, even now.”

  I have never liked Sasturi. Old Yesaera and Manrie are fine as characters in the kind of stories that nursemaids tell to children, but the sect they founded is full of liars. I could tell that Martiveht was lying, even though this was close to being the first real conversation we’d ever had. I glanced again at my lieutenants. Andraescav was next to useless. He was struggling with a moral quandary. Should he obey the will of the king, his “boss,” or the will of the princess, whom he claimed to love? Vaenahma glanced from his bird to me and frowned.

  “First I’ve heard of it,” I said lightly. “It would have been useful to know, before I consulted with the King’s Guard.”

  “As we might have been told that the king intended to accompany us,” Martiveht said.

  “Captain,” Iyedraeka said, and there was a plea in her voice.

  I stepped even closer. “Listen, Princess, the city is dangerous today. Too many people coming in for the corvee. The river is the safest route by far.”

  She frowned, thinking. “Could we, perhaps, travel up it now? In some little boat?”

  I sighed. I turned to Vaenahma. “Send a runner back to the King’s Guard,” I told him. “Let Captain Slaedrin know that the Princess had already embarked when I arrived. I had to run along the quay and leap into her boat.”

  I turned to Andraescav. “Lieutenant, you will take the princess and her lady to the King’s Quay immediately. You will requisition the first suitable boat you see. You will let it move slowly up the river, and you will wait for me to come running along. Keep it close to the bank. I’m too old to leap very far.”

  Martiveht was smiling, and I found it disconcerting. I didn’t want her to like me. “It could just be a useful fiction,” she suggested.

  I shrugged. “It is a useful fiction. But a fat captain running and leaping will satisfy the king’s spies along the quay. You should leave now. I’ll follow soon after.” I turned back to Andraescav. “Lieutenant.”

  I will say this for him. He is never above a piece of well-planned skulduggery. A guardsman has to be very close to a thief, sometimes. The king’s law doesn’t always want to be enforced in a way that is simple, and you need self-righteous, pompous people at your side when you choose to act in a way that the clerks and seneschals might raise an eyebrow at. Or very cynical people, like Vaenahma. I had chosen my two lieutenants well, which was made evident by the speed with which the courtyard cleared. Off went the runner to Slaedrin. The guard formed ranks and marched out, the princess and the Sasturi between them. I cooled my heels, looking at a red and orange bird and tapping at the wires of its cage.

  After a few moments I followed, thinking that ‘King’s Quay’ sounded like something that a person with a speech impediment would say. When I was young I never thought about words, or poetry, or songs. If I had never adopted Thaeto and Nolio, I would probably have remained indifferent to anything but armor and weapons and the taste of a good glass of beer. Love has a way of deforming you, or at least of reshaping you, so that you might be unrecognizable to any younger version of yourself. Despite the influence of my sons, I still wasn’t much of a philosopher. If I had been, I might have wondered why I was thinking about love.