Lioness Rampant (20 page)

The kitchen yard boiled with enemies. Where were his own people? He found another of his many concealed knives and faced a man with a hand-ax. This one bellowed and charged, but four arrows cut his voice off. He never completed his attack. Black arrows rained as rearing Bazhir warhorses cut off all
chances for escape. Within a second the only sound in the kitchen yard was that of the horses.

“You're lucky I was coming to visit,” Myles said as he rode up. Dismounting, he caught George as the thief staggered. “You need a healer!”

George shook his head, as much to clear it as to say “no.”

“Solom,” he muttered. Myles helped him into the Dancing Dove's kitchen. Just inside the door they found Old Solom and two serving girls, dead.

George was still recuperating in Myles's house two days later when a servant interrupted the knight at his lunch to say Dalil al Marganit awaited him in the library. Myles put down his knife and scrubbed at his face rapidly with a napkin. Al Marganit was the man he'd put to work seeking Claw's true identity. He'd used the little Sirajit agent before and could count on him to find out almost anything.

When Myles entered the library, the agent rose and bowed. He gestured to the bowl of fruit and the Tyran wine the servants had already brought him, saying, “I am treated like a noble in this house.”

Myles sat behind his desk with a smile. “You deserve that treatment, Dalil. Sit down, please. What have you learned for me?”

The little man took a notebook from inside his tunic and leafed through blotted pages. Nearsighted, he had to bring the pages so close to his eyes that they tickled his nose. He sneezed. “Regarding the matter of the thief Claw. Hm! Yes! Arrested by my Lord Provost's men two years ago. Charge of suspected robbery, released for lack of evidence. Our Provost is scrupulous in such matters, unlike many in his place, as your lordship knows. Arrested five months ago in the Dock Riots, escaped. He's now sought by Provost's men. They do not look as hard as they might; one assumes he has paid large bribes.

“I traced the subject Claw to Vedis in Galla, where he claims to originate. He is unknown in the cities Vedis, Nenet, and Jyotis in Galla, all having large communities of thieves. Going by my lord's guess that Claw's accent is that of the Lake Region in Tortall and that Claw was born of nobles either legitimately or illegitimately, I journeyed to the Lake Region with a good drawing of the subject Claw. Here is an accounting of my expenses.” He gave Myles a sheet of notepaper, which the knight barely glanced at.

Al Marganit closed the notebook and looked at Myles. “Claw is Ralon of Malven …”

Myles turned white. Another of Alanna's enemies! No one had seen or heard from him in years. While he'd thought Claw might be illegitimate and trained by his noble-born parents' teachers, he'd never considered the possibility that Claw was a true-born son of a noble family, hiding in the Court of the Rogue! He realized the agent was looking at him, worried. Forcing a smile, he said, “It's all right. Go on.”

The little man shrugged and continued. Obviously Sir Myles wasn't going to tell him why he looked as if he'd just stepped on a grave. “He is the third son of Viljo, Count of Malven, and his lady Gaylyah. He was disinherited after the attempted rape of the second daughter of the bailiff, Anala, a village in Eldorne hold. Eldorne is the neighbor of Malven.”
A connection between Claw and Delia?
Myles wondered. He scribbled a note to himself as Dalil continued. “The girl's maid threw acid in his face, thereby leaving the purple scars of which you spoke, and causing him to lose an eye. If I may refresh my lord's memory, Ralon of Malven left court at the age of fourteen, after months of feuding with the page Alan of Trebond. Or, if I may be so bold, in the matter of Alanna of Trebond and Olau.”

Myles gave an absent smile. “Though blessed few of us knew it, then. Ralon of Malven! How could I have forgotten?”

“He is well disguised, my lord. He came, as bad men will, to make his name among rogues. He battles the present King of Thieves for his throne, but he will not call for an open fight as the custom decrees. Instead, he fights with treachery. Unlike the legitimate Rogue, Ralon as Claw will hire to do murder or to ruin a good name. He will betray those who follow him.” The little man shook his head. “A noble gone bad, my lord. There's no stopping him, not at all. He will say that he is owed something, and he has come to collect.”

Myles sent al Marganit home with well-earned praise and a fat purse. The agent had never failed him, and this time he'd succeeded past Myles's greatest dreams. The knight considered every aspect of what he'd learned for an hour or so, then went to tell Eleni Cooper and her son.

Chance, and the first sunny day in more than a week, brought large numbers of people to the Corus marketplace that spring morning. Jonathan, after much persuasion, agreed to go riding—his first such outing
since the king's funeral. He was a commanding figure in mourning black, flanked by Roger and Sir Gary, both also in black. With them rode other knights and ladies, including Delia of Eldorne, Alex of Tirragen, and Princess Josiane of the Copper Isles.

The company was a beautiful sight, even in their mourning colors of black, lavender, and gray. A crowd soon gathered in the market to watch them pass. The men of the King's Own—many of them uniformed Bazhir, these days—exchanged wary looks and kept an eye on the people who closed in on the riding party. They were disturbed by the crowd's silence. No one called blessings on the king-to-be; many made the Sign against Evil when Roger passed them. There were no cheers. The usual audible and sometimes satiric comments on the nobles' dress and private lives were missing.

George Cooper watched. He'd risked reopening his wounds and being spotted by Claw's or the Provost's men to see how people received their new king. He scanned faces in the crowd, trying to find any feelings other than suspicion or wariness.

“That Conté Duke looks like a
king
,” someone muttered. “Against him Prince Jonathan's a boy.”

“I never heard bad of the prince,” someone else hissed. “I've heard plenty bad about his Grace! Ain't natural for a man t'live twice—”

“Th' prince be cursed,” came a third voice, cracked with age. “Th' Sweatin' Sickness when he was a lad, that took my Alish, and both his parents dead, and
him
, the sorcerer, come back—”

“He drove the evil from the Black City, away south,” a fourth voice argued. “He made peace with the Bazhir. The Old King, his grandda, couldn't even do that.”

“He helped a woman make herself a knight. If that ain't unnatural—”

“Hush! Crowds is full of spies, and you've a loose tongue in your head!”

The people stirred with interest as the Lord Provost rode up to change places with Gary. George's long-time enemy was blue-eyed and lean, his face leathery from years in the sun and framed by heavy silver hair and a short silver beard. The Tortall rogues called him “The Old Demon” and were intensely proud of him; foreign rogues made the Sign when he was mentioned.

The people in the crowd, the honest ones, liked the fierce old man. Someone applauded, then
someone else. A woman raised a cheer and was joined by others.

Jonathan smiled. Someone cried, “God bless you, Majesty!” This received a cheer from many, and George smiled at the fickle nature of the crowd.

A woman in front of the riding party held her child up to see, and shrieked when the toddler wriggled out of her hands and ran into the cluster of riders. Jon swung far to the right and down, seizing the child with one hand and scooping it up out of danger from the horses' hooves. Darkness reared and plunged at his rider's activity, but the king-to-be held him as the child wailed. The Provost gripped Darkness's bridle, forcing the stallion down.

Jonathan dismounted, carrying the squalling toddler. The mother ran forward under the glares of the King's Own, laughing and crying, to take her little one back. She hugged Jon in one arm and the child in the other, thanking the young man. Her words were inaudible against the cheer that went up as word circulated about what Jon had done. Uneasy for some reason, George left his niche and began to make his way through the crowd, heading for the group of nobles.

His intuition was good. A man near the party
drew a knife from his belt and ran for Jonathan while George was too far away to help. The attacker was screaming something. Later the Provost told Myles it sounded like “Death to the unlucky king!”

Jonathan was tangled in woman and child. His companions were hampered by the crowd and their own horses. It was Darkness who came to his master's defense, rearing to strike the assassin with his hooves. The man went down as other killers swathed in cloaks appeared out of the crowd.

George tackled one and knifed another. The Provost had dismounted and was fighting with knives, grinning fiercely as he caught one man on crossed blades and kneed him. Horses reared, ladies screamed, and the Great Market Riot had begun.

Of it all, George remembered only the moment when he and the Provost—for the first time in their long war—came face-to-face in the melee. Given a choice, he would have relinquished the honor. Now he froze, letting the assassin he'd targeted get away. The Provost looked at him, turned, and disappeared back into the crowd. Had he
winked
?

Accompanied by his most trusted people—the brothers Orem and Shem, the knife masters Ercole and Marek—George reached Jonathan's party to find the
king-to-be nursing a wounded arm. The King's Own closed in, forming a tight circle around Gary, Jonathan, and Josiane. Roger was nowhere to be seen, the thief noted. The Provost was mounting his horse, secure in the middle of a second ring of guards. George's shoulder wound had opened and was bleeding again.

He ignored it. “I know a way out!” he called to Jon. “If you'll trust me!”

The leader of the King's Own glanced at the prince, who nodded. George guided Jon's party into a side street and out of the riot, keeping an eye out for assassins. He and his people left the nobles on the Temple Way when others of the riding party arrived and a second company of the King's Own came riding down from the palace.

“It was Claw,” George told Eleni and Myles at House Olau soon after. He winced as his mother applied yet another poultice to his reopened shoulder. “The assassins were his, every one, and they wanted Jon.”

“What does
Claw
gain if anything happens to Jonathan?” Myles wanted to know. “He's not connected to anyone at the palace who would benefit—not as far as I've heard. Although
Delia—
”

“I find it interestin' that his Grace of Conté got
out so easy,” George drawled, propping his feet on a hassock. “But you're right, it still makes no sense. 'Twas too easy for the innocent to get hurt along with the guilty this mornin'. If he planned it, he ran as great a risk of bein' trampled as the rest of us.”

Eleni shook her head sadly. “I'm worried about those who got hurt in this madness. I'd best go see what I may do.” She stood, shaking out her skirts. “But isn't that always the way when folk plot to steal power? The innocent get hurt.”

The final toll of the Great Market Riot was fifteen dead, thirty-six hurt (including the king-to-be), and untold damages to shops and stalls. The atmosphere of suspicion and fear thickened. In spite of it, or perhaps because of it, Jonathan began to ride once a week through the capital and the surrounding countryside.