The Cutting Edge (9 page)

At times she would catch the eye of one of the other diners and read the contempt in it and the hatred. Peasant go home! She was glad to see that Emshandar was having one of his better days-on a bad day he looked as if he had been dead a month. Tonight, maybe a week. He nibbled listlessly and sipped sparingly. His teeth were all gone, so that his nose and chin almost met. There was nothing at all between his bones and his skin, and he could not recognize a face at arm's length. His eyes lurked in tunnels and twisted around erratically as he struggled to follow the talk.

She almost liked the old man. He was the only person in the court who said whatever he liked. She was perhaps the only person in the court who did not fear him. She was loyal to the Impire and did her duty, and her conscience was clear.

To her immediate right, the old senator was flushed and raucous, his white hair tousled and his face shiny. He welcomed all the innuendoes and topped them, laughing loudly at his own vulgarity.

Opposite him, his lovely young wife was flirting with everyone-even the imperor, which was no mean feat-enchanting the men and infuriating the women. Ashia had mastered fashion, or thought she had. No one commented when she mispronounced a word or misunderstood an allusion, especially not her besotted husband. No one asked her what the old fool's grandchildren thought of her.

How could two sisters be so unalike? Ashia was the real beauty of the family. Eshiala had always known that. She was taciturn and timid, Ashia vivacious and voluptuous.

Eshiala was being quiet, as was her way. She responded courteously to her neighbors' conversation and was careful to use the tableware exactly as the true aristocrats did. She did not let her words wander onto dangerous topics or reprimand her sister for behaving like a trollop. She projected calm and reticence, raising her voice only when addressing the deaf old mummy across the table from her, and everyone had to yell for the imperor.

None of them would know how her head throbbed, or how terrified she was that she might throw up. She detested being on display. At the moment she was supposed to be eating some tiny bird-thing concealed in a rich sauce, dissecting it like a surgeon, when she could not even see it properly. Everyone else seemed to be managing. The imperor had been given something he could eat with a spoon.

She watched her ebullient sister perform like a one-woman circus in her gems and silks and could think only that the two of them had done very well, for the daughters of a provincial grocer.

Marriage with commoners had become a tradition in the dynasty. Emshandar himself had married the daughter of a humble scholar at some small-town university and his son Emthoro a soldier's daughter, whom the court had dismissed as a camp follower. Shandie had chosen the younger daughter of a grocer.

"And how is Uomaya the First?" her left-hand neighbor inquired.

Her left-hand neighbor was Prince Emthoro, Shandie's cousin. He was a dark man, gaunt and saturnine, with a sharp nose that twitched when he was being malicious. He frightened her. His brown eyes were restless and shiny, and oddly slanted. She feared the ambition behind them, for he was third in line to the throne, after her child. Somehow she had come to believe that Emthoro, more than anyone, was likely to rip away her disguise and denounce her as the fraud she was.

But he was third in line; she granted him her fourth smile of the evening. "Maya is very well, thank you."

"Growing like a troll, I suppose?"

"Growing as fast as a troll."

The prince chuckled. "I did not mean to imply that she was growing to look like a troll. I'm sure that would be sedition. How soon will you join Shandie in Qoble?"

Her stomach knotted. "That is entirely up to his Majesty to decide. He knows how Shandie and I feel."

Eshiala was by nature a recluse. Six weeks after their wedding, Shandie had gone off to the wars, and at times now she thought she had forgotten what he looked like. She had nightmares of being reunited with him and curtseying to the wrong man. Fortunately he had left her pregnant, and a princess was allowed to disappear from view during her confinement. Even after that excuse had been exhausted, she had continued to refuse as many invitations as she dared. After two years she was still a stranger at court.

The last ten months she had spent blissfully rearing her baby. Although she had been forbidden to nurse her, she doted on little Maya. She would cheerfully just sit and hold her for hours. But now Shandie had been appointed proconsul in Qoble and he wanted her to join him there. Maya would have to stay behind in Hub. She was too young, too vulnerable, too important, to go journeying.

Emthoro must be reading her thoughts. "A woman's place is with her husband, surely?" he asked in his silkiest voice.

"Of course," she lied. Why, why must she give up her baby to go and live with a man she hardly knew?

"Eh?" the imperor bellowed. "What's that you're saying?" The rest of the table fell absolutely silent.

The prince rolled his eyes almost imperceptibly, just enough that the other diners would see, but not Emshandar, of course. He raised his voice to a bellow. "We were talking about Eshiala going to join her husband, Sire! In Qoble. "

"Shandie?" The old man worked his mouth for a moment. "He'll survive, I'm sure. Lots of pretty girls in Qoble! A mother's place is with her child! "

Emthoro's nose twitched. "That's exactly what I was telling Eshiala, Sire!" he shouted back, and without a blush.

Then the imperor pulled something out of his mouth and turned to the servants to demand that they take away this plate of unchewable tasteless rubbish and bring him another bowl of soup, with more spice in it this time. The other diners, deciding that he had nothing else to say, picked up their conversations again.

Emthoro had not finished with Eshiala. "Have you ever visited the Imperial Library, Cousin? "

She could not recall. The Opal Palace was so huge that she could not remember what parts she had been shown and what not. "I don't know," she admitted miserably.

"Oh, I think you would have remembered. There's a great hall with rows and rows of balconies and a huge rose window at one end. "

"Then I'm sure that I've never been there."

Emthoro smiled mysteriously. "You haven't heard of the Puin'lyn statues?"

"Should I have?" He was obviously going to talk to her at length, so she would have to try to listen and eat at the same time. She resumed her attack on the lark, or whatever it was.

"The Imperor Umpily III wanted some statues," the prince explained, expertly dissecting a slice of flesh from the tiny carcass before him. "For somewhere public ... I forget where ... and commissioned the greatest sculptor of the day, Puin'lyn. That's an elvish name. "

She knew that, of course, but she merely nodded.

"There were to be five male and five female figures," Emthoro continued, with the air of someone coming to a humorous part of a story. "Umpily's five immediate predecessors and their wives, carved in Tewper marble, which is a sort of pinkishbrown color and fine-grained. It gives a statue a very lifelike texture. Apparently there was some disagreement about terms ... I forget the details. And the contract had not said how the figures were to be garbed. At any rate, when Puin'lyn delivered her promised statues, they were ten nudes and . . ." He chuckled. ". . . not the sort of nudes that could be left around in public, either! "

Eshiala smiled politely, not sure what the point of all this could possibly be. Emthoro laid down his knife and fork, and a footman whipped away his plate.

"Great art, of course, but erotic as you could imagine. Perhaps more so, mm? So the Puin'lyn statues were hastily moved to the Imperial Library and there they have been hidden ever since. Fortunately most of the scholars who work there are too old and decrepit to be distracted from their studies."

"You are warning me to avoid the library, then, lest they bring a blush to my cheek?"

"Oh, I wasn't suggesting that. Their real appeal is to adolescent boys, of course. When Ralp and I were kids, we used to come to Hub once or twice a year and the statues in the Imperial Library were the highlight of the trip. Shandie knew a way to get in without the curator knowing. We always had plans to take paints along and touch up some of the details, but fortunately we never quite found the courage. "

She had no idea why he was telling her all this, or what sort of reaction was expected of her. Everyone else had finished this course and she had barely started. She laid down her knife and fork in defeat. The plate mercifully vanished.

Emthoro chuckled. "They raised hopes in us that time failed to satisfy-males and females both."

"I fail to see . . . " She was supposed to fail to see whatever was coming.

"Shandie," the prince said, with a twitch of his nose, "was especially enamored of the central figure among the females. He told us on several occasions that he would marry a woman as beautiful as that."

What had she ever done to Emthoro that he should seek to wound her like this? She had produced an heir, of course, and thereby demoted Emthoro from second in line to third. She knew her face was burning and that others were noticing and listening; and enjoying.

"Are you telling me that I remind you of a statue, my lord?"

"A little. There is certainly a facial resemblance. Mayhap we could visit the library some time and see? Shandie must have ... but perhaps it is just my imagination." He smiled meanly. "Statues," Eshiala said icily, "do not produce babies."

Emthoro showed his teeth in surprise. "True," he said, and turned to speak to the marquise.

Eshiala relaxed with a sigh of relief that she hoped was inaudible. Another gold plate was laid before her.

Across the table, Ashia was howling with mirth at some quip she could not possibly understand.

Eshiala wondered if perhaps Prince Emthoro was closer to the truth than he knew. She was a fraud. She was here only because she had told Shandie that she loved him and she didn't.

One day she had been slicing ham in her father's store, back in Thumble, when a group of soldiers had wandered in, all sweaty and smelling of horse. She had noticed one of them staring at her oddly. Of course she could not remember a time when men had not tried to flirt with her, but she had sensed the difference in Shandie's attention even then, that first day. On his way home from the battle, a month later, he had stopped in Thumble again and stayed a whole week. On the third day he had told her he loved her. On the fifth, he had proposed.

Her mother had told her not to be a fool; she would never make a better match than an imperial legate. Her father had insisted that to decline a proposal from a high imperial officer was close to treason. Ashia had turned purple and screamed that she owed it to her family.

Eshiala had asked her suitor for more time to think and get to know him. On the seventh day, her mother had discovered who he really was. That had settled the matter, of course. All imps were loyal to the Impire and the imperor.

She did not think she loved her husband. She suspected she was incapable of loving any man. She did not dislike him. She was grateful for Maya. She disliked Hub and the court, but she had consented to those. She detested pomp and public displays and ceremony. She had consented to those, also.

She did her duty, as a loyal subject of the Impire, and as a wife. And as a statue? And very soon she was going to find herself being hailed as impress.

At Krasnegar, the brief northern summer drew to its close. Wagons rolled on the causeway, bringing in the harvest. Old Foronod the factor was still official tallier. He sat in his office every day, throwing papers around and shouting at his clerks and generally making a confounded nuisance of himself. The real work of creating order out of chaos was done by the king himself in the great annual rush, when twelve months' supply of crops and meat and peat must be collected and transported and stored in two or three weeks' continuous toil. Krasnegar had many very hungry mouths to feed now, sixteen years after being struck by a wave of babies.

This year Rap noticed an astonishing improvement. Things rushed along at a great pace; the harvest almost seemed to gather itself, and the job was complete a week before he had expected it to be. That great crop of youngsters had suddenly grown up enough to become useful and they were all available to help, giving him about four times as many hands as he had ever had before. They were inexperienced and often clumsy, but they were willing and cheerful and so convinced they were adults now and having fun that everyone around them had fun, also.

So all went well and when the Big One arrived, the first blizzard of the winter, Krasnegar was well prepared. The shutters were closed, the boats safe, and the gates barred against bears. Now there was little to do except eat and drink, dance and party, study and teach, brawl and make love. And give birth.

"I won't drop this, you know," the king said firmly, but his hands were unsteady as the midwife passed him the precious bundle. He was always astonished how incredibly tiny these fragile miracles were when they first appeared. Tucking the babe in the crook of his left elbow, he adjusted the edge of the blanket around its face and headed for the door.

Of course this was the middle of the night-when else did babies arrive? Lamplight reflected like a halo from the flood of rich gold hair on the pillow. Inos was paler than usual and her lower lip was swollen, but she was smiling proudly, as indeed she should.

Two of each, now.

Rap knelt by the bed, leaned very carefully over his new son, and kissed her. "Clever girl," he murmured.

"I had some very expert help."

"It was a pleasure. Nice of you to put it that way, though."

"I didn't mean at the beginning. A frantic roughhouse, I expect. . ." She smiled knowingly. "I mean at the end."

"We all do what we can," he said softly.

"Thanks anyway, love."

"Don't mention it." The midwife would gossip, of course. Nothing he could do to stop gossip. He chuckled and changed the subject. "This is the finest Winterfest present a man ever received. "