The Goblin Emperor (27 page)

“Serenity,” she said, and there was something in her voice he did not know how to name, “we would be both pleased and honored.”

It was but a small bulwark, but it was a bulwark nonetheless, one evening in seven when he did not have to meet the pale cold faces and glittering eyes of the court. And Arbelan Zhasanai, who owed him her gratitude, would not bear tales of the emperor’s gauche silences, his awkward efforts at conversation. Once she had taken his measure—once, he thought, she had determined that this was not some arcane and hideously subtle trap—she took over the conversation herself, with a power and ease that made him wonder what she had been like when she was Varenechibel’s empress, before her body and her husband had betrayed her. Although by tacit agreement they did not speak of Varenechibel himself, she told him stories of her youth, described the court of Varenechibel’s father, Varevesena. And those stories seemed always to lead her to speak of the modern court, of its petty wars and darker treacheries. He understood the worth of what she offered and listened intently, week after week, trying, even in this small way, to make up for the ignorance that was his inheritance.

He had learned the value of gossip from Setheris, from the differences, sometimes small, sometimes vast, between the official communiqués from the court and the letters Setheris received from Hesero. One never relied on gossip, Setheris had said more than once, but it did not do to discount it, either. Therefore, along with his lessons from Arbelan Zhasanai and Lord Berenar, Maia listened to the tidbits his household brought him, his edocharei, his nohecharei, Csevet: each of them heard different stories, different interpretations.

It was Arbelan Zhasanai who told him Sheveän continued to be discontented, Csevet who remarked that several courtiers seemed unnaturally interested in the laws of succession recently. But it was Nemer who, shyly, reluctance and indignation mixed, told him that people were beginning to say Nemolis’s son Idra should have taken the throne.

Maia was wearily unsurprised. There was no one in the Untheileneise Court, possibly no one in the whole of the Ethuveraz, who did not know Varenechibel would have preferred to see his grandson succeed him. If Idra had reached his majority before his grandfather’s death, he might well have raised his standard against his half uncle—and would almost certainly have defeated him.

But Idra was fourteen; he could not be a player in the machinations of the court, only a pawn. He was also, as things stood, Maia’s heir, and thus Maia’s instinctive desire to treat Sheveän as his father had treated all who had displeased him—let her see what life was like in Isvaroë or Edonomee or Cethoree—was untenable. He could do it, but either he relegated Sheveän’s children with her and did to Idra exactly what Varenechibel had done to Maia himself, or he separated Idra from his mother. And Idra’s little sisters—what would one do with them in that case? No, it was not possible. Edrehasivar was not and could not be Varenechibel.

He suffered the miserable certainty that nothing he could say to Sheveän would make the slightest difference. But he remembered that Idra had not seemed to resent him at the coronation, and so he summoned his heir to the garden of the Alcethmeret, where it had become the emperor’s custom to walk for half an hour each day, regardless of the weather. Even in the snow, or the miserable frozen rains of winter, he at least walked along the stoa that cradled the garden against the bulk of the palace.

Idra was punctual; if his mother had insisted on coming with him, as Maia had feared she might, the instructions he had left with his household had been effective, and Idra had been divested of her. Idra was perfectly dressed and groomed, his hair in the thick knot that befitted a child, while the amber that glinted warmly among his white braids signalled him to be a child of the ruling house. Like Maia, Idra had the Drazhadeise eyes, gray and pale and clear as water, and he met his emperor’s gaze unflinchingly when he straightened from his bow.

It was not a particularly nice day, but the sun shone fitfully through the clouds, and the wind had less bite than it had had the preceding day. Maia said, “Cousin, will you walk with us?”

“An it please you, cousin,” Idra said, meeting Maia on the level of formality he had chosen.

They walked in silence along the first broad curve of the path away from the Alcethmeret, and then Maia, having been able to think of no delicate or tactful way to put it, said simply, bluntly, “You are our heir.”

“Yes, cousin,” Idra said; Maia saw the wariness in his sideways glance, and hated it. But there was nothing he could do about it. He could not demand that Idra trust him.

“You must know, we imagine, that we are not on the best of terms with your mother.”

“Yes, cousin.”

“We regret this. Were it in our power, we would make amends.”

A silence, thoughtful. Idra said, “We believe you, cousin.”

“Do you? Good. Then perhaps you will believe us when we say we wish no enmity with you.”

“Yes, cousin.”

They were silent for another long sweeping curve of the path. Maia was painfully aware that Idra was only four years his junior—and that Idra was in some ways much older. Not for him the stammering embarrassment of an emperor who had never learned to dance or to choose jewels or to talk politely of nothing over a five-course dinner. He wished that he could unburden himself to Idra, ask his advice. But if they were not enemies, still they were not quite allies, and he could not ask Idra to choose his emperor over his mother.

Well, he
could,
but he did not want to, did not want to make loyalty and love enemies in Idra’s heart.

Yet he had to say something, had to reach out to Idra somehow. The Prince of the Untheileneise Court would reach his majority in two years, and unless Maia begot an heir, a thought from which he flinched as a horse shies at a threatening noise, Idra was going to be a fact of his political life until he had no political life left, no life at all. He said abruptly, “Do you grieve for your father, cousin?”

“Yes,” Idra said. “We do.”

And Maia, who had meant to say something about justice, about sympathy, heard himself say, “We do not grieve for ours.”

And Idra said, “Did you ever meet him?”

He had been braced for horror or disdain, a remark about goblin savages or an echo of Varenechibel’s cruel words about his “unnatural” child. But Idra’s voice was simply curious, and when Maia dared glance sidelong at his face, his pale eyes held nothing but a kind of wary sympathy.

“Once,” Maia said. “When we were eight. At our mother’s funeral. He … he did not have much interest in us.”

The damned whelp looks just like his mother.

“Our father spoke to us once of our grandfather,” Idra said, his voice still neutral. “When we were thirteen and expected to take our place in the court.”

As Maia should have done five years ago. He nodded to Idra to continue.

“He told us that above all other things, Varenechibel hated to make mistakes, and hated to be seen to have made mistakes. He said that was why Arbelan Drazharan was relegated to Cethoree instead of being allowed simply to return to her kin, and that was why you were … we remember how he put it: ‘pent at Edonomee.’ If our father had lived to succeed our grandfather, he would not have kept you prisoned there.”

“We are grateful to know that,” Maia said. And he was, although it was as much pain as gratitude that he felt.

“Our grandfather was very kind to us. But we are not so naïve that we did not see he was not thus to all. He did not care for our sisters as he did for us.”

“And you found this unworthy in him?”

“They were his grandchildren just as we were. And our father said it was good they were not sons, for too many sons—” He broke off, eyes widening.

“Confuse the succession,” Maia finished. “So also we were told.”

“By Varenechibel?”

“By our cousin Setheris, who was our guardian.”

“He had no right to say such a thing to you,” Idra said, with the same indignation with which he had championed his sisters’ right to be loved by their grandfather.

“At least Cousin Setheris was honest with us,” Maia said, and turned the conversation by asking Idra to tell him what it had been like to grow up at the Untheileneise Court. Idra complied, spoke charmingly and wittily, and Maia listened and smiled and thought,
He would be a better emperor than thee, hobgoblin.

But at least he stood on good terms with his heir. At least he had that bulwark to shelter behind, as he sheltered behind his dinners with Arbelan Zhasanai. Nurevis proved to be another bulwark, friendly, utterly uninterested in politics, cheerfully ready to explain things that Maia found confusing, forever appearing with invitations to one social event or another. Maia refused more of those than he accepted, but he could not refuse them all. Even if he had wished to, it would be foolish to alienate the only courtier who had offered friendship unencumbered with obligation. And he did not wish to. Nurevis made a particular point of mentioning when Min Vechin would be attending one of his soirées or informal luncheons, and Maia blushed miserably, never having learned how to be teased—but he went. He told himself it was foolish; he told himself it was inexcusable. He knew he was a laughing stock, the hobgoblin emperor, Edrehasivar Half-Tongue, dangling after the opera singer. But Min Vechin smiled at him, and would approach him when invited, and did not seem to mind his failure to make conversation.

He told himself he thought only of companionship and knew he lied.

He did not ask his nohecharei what they thought, and they did not tell him. But he knew Beshelar and Dazhis disapproved, and he thought Telimezh pitied him.
This is what thy life will be, Edrehasivar,
he told himself, and tried not to think about his now-fiancée.

It had taken almost a week for the terms of the marriage contract between Edrehasivar VII Drazhar and Dach’osmin Csethiro Ceredin to be agreed upon. Berenar told Maia that this was uncommonly quick work—“the Marquess Ceredel must fear that you will change your mind.”

“Why should we?” Maia said, and then, remembering a forgotten puzzle, “Why is he so afraid of us?”

Berenar snorted. “When the Empress Arbelan was put aside, her brother, the current marquess’s father, fell with her. He had traded much too heavily on being the brother of the empress, both financially and politically, and the late emperor your father did not, as it turned out, regard the Marquess Ceredel with any great favor—or, indeed, any favor at all. The Ceredada very nearly went bankrupt, and as the late marquess would never admit to any wrongdoing or flaw in his own person, the current marquess was raised in the belief that the emperor is terrible and capricious and persecutes the hapless House Ceredada. Also, we suspect he may be discomfited by the favor you have shown Arbelan Drazharan.”

“But she is his aunt!” Maia protested.

Berenar shook his head. “The Ceredada did not support her.”

It took a moment for Maia to assimilate his meaning. “Perhaps the marquess is right to fear us,” he said darkly.

“The current marquess, like his late father, is not notable for wisdom,” Berenar said dryly, and Maia knew it for a reminder that the emperor, being surrounded by it so much of the time, had to be patient with folly. He would have to hope that Dach’osmin Ceredin took after her mother’s line.

Certainly, there seemed to be nothing foolish about her when they met again, this time in the Untheileian to sign the marriage contract with all the court as their witnesses.

The marriage itself would not take place until spring, both for the auspices and because a wedding could not be thrown together at the last minute. Coronations, Csevet said, were much simpler, for there was nothing that had to be
negotiated,
nothing that was not mandated by five thousand years of tradition. Weddings, on the other hand, were nothing
but
negotiations, and—Csevet did not quite say but Maia could tell—the Ceredada were proving difficult to negotiate with.

Signing the contract, with its attendant exchange of oath rings, was a legal ceremony and could be treated purely as business. That was clearly how Dach’osmin Ceredin saw it; she was well, but not lavishly, dressed in pale brown velvet, and her greeting when she came up on the dais was polite and not unamiable, but brisk, like a woman who had a more important appointment to get to.

She signed the contract without histrionics or fuss. In contrast to the perfect, impersonal penmanship of the letter she had sent, her signature was dense and ferociously energetic; he saw that she used the barzhad, the old warrior’s alphabet, instead of the secretary’s hand favored by the court and thus perforce all of the Ethuveraz who did not have the freedom to be idiosyncratic. His own signature looked like an unformed scrawl next to hers, but he tried to put the comparison from his mind.

The ceremony of the oath rings, like the ceremony of signing, was one that required no spoken words. The iron rings, as plain for an emperor as for a cowherd, were themselves the oath. He was awkward, sliding the ring on Dach’osmin Ceredin’s thumb, but she helped, unobtrusively, and at least he did not drop the ring. She was much defter in her turn, and she was not afraid to take an uncompromising grip on his hand.

It was done and she curtsied and then was gone again. They had yet to exchange a total of more than fifty words.

He felt twisted up inside himself, intimidated by his empress, dreading the gossip that would inevitably begin to spread, wound about in self-contempt and the expectation of humiliation. Although he knew he ought to, knew he
needed
to, he could not meditate. Not with two other persons in the room, not with one. He was too self-conscious, too afraid of what would be said. Remembered, too painfully, that his nohecharei were not his friends. He could not bear the thought of their polite incomprehension any better than he could bear the thought of the court’s scorn. At night, he lay twisted among the sheets of his great bed and wished for the peace and cool darkness of the vigil-chapel.