Orphans of the Stars
Another Fine Mess
I’m almost done with the sound track. I need a day or so to assemble albums, and then will put them on book funnel for you. - SAH
Orphans of the Stars, by Sarah A. Hoyt
Another Fine Mess
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My life seems to take turns to the absurd at regular intervals. Things happen to me that defy explanation and no one could predict: such as falling through a window into an undiscovered planet.
But of all those, possibly, the most absurd was having Brundar’s valet inform me – while I was wet from my bath and wearing only a towel -- that my… well, my brother in law at least two ways, the captain of my sworn’s guard meant to arrest me for kidnapping my sworn. My sworn who had left my presence only moments ago, under his own power, with his nose smudged with ink, and fearing nothing worse than a tedious meeting with his accountants.
Vayr stared at me, his lips trembling, and I stared back at him with I was sure was complete confusion. “I beg your pardon?” I said. Of course I tried to say it in English, and this would be one of the times that the translator nanos implanted in me for diplomatic duty translated me literally. Vayr blinked. “The—Ther—There is nothing to apologize for, my, my Lord. I don’t—” He stared at me, with the kind of look that were he a magician – he wasn’t – would mean he was trying to inspect my pattern. His eyes opened very wide. His lips trembled harder. “But—Lord Trohem…. Did you? You—We saw you!”
“You saw me what? What did you see me do?”
“Put a knife to the king’s neck and open a portal. And… And drag him through…”
“I was in my bath!”
He swallowed, then nodded. “I see. And—But Lord Almar wants you.”
I considered my options. I could strangle him easily enough. But I liked Vayr. Worse, Brund liked Vayr, they’d grown up together, bit each other in the nursery or something, and he’d never forgive me. Right. I could break both his arms and—
And what? Run out of the room to be caught by the door guards? And do all that in my towel. Which if I dropped it slightly and revealed my nipples would be the equivalent of running naked in public and cause a scandal for the ages. Of course I was being accused of kidnapping my spouse. Running around showing my nipples might be a lesser crime. Maybe. Elly is a weird place. I wouldn’t venture to guess a hierarchy of offenses.
I stopped. My brain tried to come up with a way to break the moment, but my mouth took the lead, as it tends to do. “I must dress before I go out to meet Lord Almar.”
His eyes did a wild jig left, right, up and down, as if he were trying to think of any escapes from the royal apartment that weren’t guarded. Since the windows were part of the old spaceship, unopenable and unbreakable, the only way out that he knew of would be turning into a worm and going down the drain with the cycling water. I knew that was beyond our magic, which didn’t turn people into anything else. And anyway, I was fairly sure what happened to the water would be unpleasant.
There was a way out of he didn’t know of course. I could run through the secret portal we’d made to visit Sam and into Aeris, my mother’s domain.
But if I did… If Brundar was really missing, if someone had impersonated me somehow – magic? – and kidnapped Brundar at knifepoint, my going to Britannia would be abandoning him in trouble. I suspected Mother wouldn’t let me come back into this situation and then the Queen would get involved and like as not charge Elly with trying to arrest a diplomat. No.
Of course, Vayr knew nothing of that portal, so it didn’t enter his calculations. At length he nodded. I walked into my room, and looked for clothes. I was about to put on one of the tunics I wore during the day, which tended to be loose to mid-thigh and very comfortable. Of course, because I could never rid myself of the idea they looked like dresses, I wore pants beneath, and a belt.
But as I reached for one I thought, no. There were no points of escape upstairs, but there were plenty downstairs. And if Brundar had been kidnapped I was going to find him. I put on a tunic and pants suitable for the outdoors, and my magician’s cloak. My hair, which I wore long, according to local fashion, got braided wet, in a single braid down my back, which was not the best thing for it, but it would do. At the last minute, I slipped daggers into my ankle holsters. If Lendir was serious about this madness, he would find them and remove them.
I must hope he wasn’t serious.
On second thought, because I’m not a total idiot, I slipped a zapper into a concealed holster beneath my left arm. Yes, Lendir would look for that too. I’d see how serious he was.
He looked very serious out in the hall. For one, he had two other guards with him, one his own half sibling, Malin who was short, dark and blue eyed, and the other a pimply faced but almost as tall as Lendir Brinarian, dark haired, dark eyed, around whose head burned a fourth circle pattern.
Fourth circle was justice. They… they were the closest the world had to a police force. They investigated crimes, including having some techniques that humans elsewhere would kill for, including the ability to “replay” the last several hours at the location of the crime. Sometimes. Of course if the criminal were a magician he often made sure that wouldn’t work. And there were locations in which you couldn’t do that also.
Lendir is not actually bad looking, in an Ellyan way which is something one needs to get used to. He stood close to seven feet and built like a well-built male, if perhaps a little slimmer. But his features were softer and, well, pretty. And he had some kind of love hate relationship with his hair and recently had had it cut short at great expense, which was only not a social scandal because no one was about to tell the giant commander of the royal guard that what he chose to do with his own hair was a scandal. But it was considered a little crazy as only manual laborers and ruffians wore their hair shorter than mid-back.
The result wasn’t even slightly intimidating – his hair looked fluffy and wavy – but I also wasn’t about to tell him that.
However his expression looked closed, unreadable. I stopped just short of him and said the first thing that came to mind, “I was in my bath.”
He scowled at me. “We have witnesses. Where is the King?”
“He said he was going to see his accountants.”
Lendir glared at me. I thought he was going to ask me if I’d believed him, but what he said was, “We have witnesses that you kidnapped him, and I have to interrogate you. Will you come peaceably, or do we have to restrain you?”
I noted he wasn’t patting me down. Lendir Almar was not stupid. He had to know I had weapons. But he didn’t even ask me if I had weapons. Interesting.
“Oh,” I said. “I’ll come peaceably. I want to know where my sworn is.”
Something in Lendir’s gaze went panicky. “We all do.”
So I followed him peaceably, down five flights of stairs to the lower level of the palace. We emerged into the entrance hall of the palace which isn’t as simple as it might seem, since the entrance hall was the size of a large cathedral and hosted a semi-permanent combination fair and symposium. Not by design. It just did.
What I mean by that is that the front hall was always full. Always. Night and day. Some of the people in it were ambassadors of various clans. Clans were… associations of Line-name relations, and could run to thousands of people. They were also the closest thing to a spontaneous and representative association among Ellyans. Some were representatives of villages or hamlets come to look for some sort of justice or boon. And some were representatives – they said – of whole divisions, the closest Elly had to provinces, come to complain about their ruler. Some of them were traders coming to show their wares to various functionaries in the palace who might buy them and often, accidentally or perhaps on purpose ending up selling them to various clan ambassadors or others. And then there were people who had some problem they thought the king could solve. This could be anything from a land dispute, a paternity – or maternity – dispute or even wanting to divorce your dead spouse which was a completely valid problem in Elly, it just wasn’t one the king could solve. Not that this stopped people trying. It drove Brundar nuts.
When we emerged into the hall, the babble of sound stopped and – I’m not making this up – everyone turned to stare at me. The stares were not friendly. They were the sort of stare where you expect someone to blurt out “crucify the bastard” and everyone else to agree. Lendir must have felt it too, because he stepped so close to my side he might have melded, and grabbed my arm in an iron grip. The pimply kid did the same on the other side. Malin led the way. The way was into a small hallway I didn’t even remember ever having got into – to be fair there were a lot of hallways radiating from the entrance hall – and which had the look of a storage area. About which I must have been wrong, because Malin opened the door to one of the rooms and waited while the other two walked in with me, to show a room that had four chairs. Just four chairs in the middle of an otherwise featureless white washed room.
They sat me in one of the chairs, but didn’t avail themselves of the others.
Lendir made a gesture I didn’t understand, but his underlings obviously did. They looked at me, as though evaluating my pattern, then nodded to Lendir and left. At which point Lendir dropped onto the chair facing mine, and put his head in his hands.
I cleared my throat. “Lendir?” I said. I wasn’t sure about calling him by his first name while he was in his official capacity. Elly is funny about that too. Honestly, Elly is funny about a lot of things, and though I was getting used to them, and had reason to know Elly from the inside, there were subtleties I swear must be drunk with mother’s – er… parent’s – milk to be understood. “I wouldn’t hurt Brundar. And I … are you sure he’s missing?
”
