The Goblin Emperor (52 page)

“Captain?”

“Serenity.” Vizhenka saluted. “We know that you cannot be happy about having a foreign army posted in your court.”

“It is a very small army,” Maia said.

Vizhenka ignored that. “We wished to assure you that we have no orders except to safeguard your person—and this
dav
—in the event of there being,” he coughed politely, “any excitement.”

“We thank you, Captain,” Maia said, understanding that Vizhenka was pushing very near the edge of his maneuvering room as a Hezhethoreise captain to make that assurance. “We understand that our grandfather is concerned for our safety. We think it unnecessary, yet we admit we are…” He stopped, for he could not find the word he wanted, and finally settled, lamely, on “grateful.”

“Serenity.” Vizhenka saluted again. “It will be an honor to serve you.”

And Maia had the odd feeling that he meant it, that somehow Vizhenka approved of him.

Grateful,
he thought. It was not the right word, but it would have to do. He said, “We hope that we may be allowed to invite you and Merrem Vizhenka to an occasional, er, family gathering? Would that be inappropriate?”

“Not at all, Serenity,” Vizhenka said. “We will be very pleased—and we know that we may safely say the same for Merrem Vizhenka.”

“Good,” Maia said.

And then Vizhenka was called away, and Maia was approached by one of the Barizheise merchants who lived in Cetho, who wished to know if it was true that the emperor was planning to bridge the Istandaärtha.

“The idea has been presented to the Corazhas,” Maia said and, barely half a minute later, found himself surrounded by goblin merchants, eagerly telling him what a boon and a blessing such a bridge would be, and he could not free himself until the great tumult of the Avar’s departure.

They progressed once again to Parmeno Square, where the Avar’s traveling coach waited. The Avar exchanged salutes with Vizhenka, kissed his daughter’s hands, and thumped Maia on the shoulders hard enough to stagger him. Then he heaved himself into his coach; the coachman touched his cockaded hat in the direction of the emperor and cried, “Hai!” to the ten black horses.

In the center of his own private thunderstorm, the Great Avar departed.

PART FIVE

Edrehasivar the Bridge-Builder

34

Building Bridges

The first two months of the new year were consumed in the trials of the Princess Sheveän, Lord Chavar, the Duke Tethimel, Dach’osmer Ubezhar, Mer Shulivar, Mer Bralchenar, Min Narchanezhen, and a dizzying host of other persons associated with one or the other of the attempts to remove Edrehasivar VII from the throne. Maia was unable to decide if it was a relief or a further burden that no one could be charged in both attempts. Sheveän and Chavar had apparently been entirely unaware of Tethimar’s machinations and vice versa. What
was
a relief was the fact that the specter of Eshevis Tethimar made it acceptable, and even reasonable, for the emperor to show clemency to Sheveän and Chavar. They had, after all, sincerely believed that what they did was for the good of the Ethuveraz and faithful to the wishes of Varenechibel IV. The Tethimadeise Conspiracy, as it came quickly to be called, had had no interest in the good of the empire, and its members had seen the emperor merely as an inconvenience to be removed from their path.

The executions were public and horrible and gave Maia nightmares.

He had refused flatly to command Eshevis Tethimar’s sisters to attend, as some members of his government seemed to think he should. They were guilty of nothing except their birth, and he could think of no surer way to teach them that their brother and father had been correct in their resentment. It had given him a private, defiant sense of satisfaction to give the girls into Prince Orchenis’s keeping before the Tethimadeise trial was even completed and see them off to Amalo on the
Loyalty of Lohaiso
—a name so appropriate as to be painful, for Orchenis’s loyalty proved to be as solid as the mountains that were his home. He began his audience with the emperor by offering revethvoran, and Maia had seen in his grim face, heard in his flat voice, that he would do it if ordered and think it no more than he deserved.

But Orchenis had known nothing of the Tethimada’s schemes—from what he said, Maia gathered that in fact the conspirators had been very careful to keep even discussions of their discontent away from him. And his wife, pretty and colorless and obviously, shyly, worshipful of her husband: whether she would have sympathized with her brother and father’s aims was immaterial, for she was never told of them.

With the Tethimadeise girls taken care of, Maia had to decide what was to be done with the members of the first conspiracy. Chavar was comparatively easy; the Chavada had a country estate in the corner of Thu-Athamar between the Tetara and the Tetareise border, and the Viscount Chavel had accepted the responsibility for the terms of his brother’s confinement there.

Maia had done everything he could to prevent the Chavada being dragged down with the Lord Chancellor; he believed without reservation that Chavar, a widower and not close to either his son or his brother, had taken none of his family into his confidence. Certainly, the Viscount Chavel, when he appeared before the emperor some three days after the failed coup and offered revethvoran—which was more than Chavar had bothered to do—had had no idea. And if Nurevis had known, there would have been no need for the dramatic assault on the Alcethmeret; Maia could simply have been waylaid in the Chavadeise apartments.

But even so, there were penalties Maia could not gainsay. Chavar’s extensive properties were forfeit, and without them, the Chavada returned to the ranks of the shabby patch-pocket nobility with the Nelada and the Danivada and all the rest of them. And Nurevis didn’t even have that. He was not his uncle’s heir.

Dissuaded from revethvoran, the Viscount Chavel had offered to stay at court, so that the emperor might keep an eye on him and be sure he was not plotting treason. The idea clearly revolted him. Maia had declined that offer as well, and the Viscount Chavel had gratefully begun the long and ugly process of putting the Chavadeise court apartments into mothballs. Most of the furnishing were going straight to an auction house in Cetho, where Maia hoped, perhaps a little viciously, that they would be bought by the goblin merchants Chavar so despised.

The work was not finished by Winternight, and Maia did not blame Chavel for the panic-stricken declarations of innocence he sent by hourly pneumatic until he got an answer with the emperor’s own signet. Nor did he blame Chavel for wanting to avoid a second audience; the first had been nerve-racking enough on both sides. But it seemed like cruelty to send Nurevis, of all people, to inform the emperor that the Chavada were finally leaving the Untheileneise Court.

Perhaps it
was
cruelty. The Viscount Chavel was honest and loyal, but that was no guarantee he was not like his brother in other ways.

Nurevis was haggard, his ears low, and he was dressed in clothes nearly as shabby as those in which Maia had first come to court. His own wardrobe would also have gone to the auction house; Maia remembered Setheris, in their first weeks at Edonomee, poring gloomily over the invoices from the sale of his wardrobe.

Nurevis recited the formulas of leave-taking quickly, stiltedly, and then fell silent. For the first time in Maia’s acquaintance with him, he seemed awkward, his poise gone along with his father’s power.

Out of his own grief and regret, Maia blurted, “We are sorry.” He knew it was the wrong thing to say before the words were entirely out of his mouth. It sounded as if he were apologizing to Nurevis, and even a backwards goblin emperor knew that the emperor did not apologize for someone else’s attempted treason.

Nurevis’s ears flattened even further and he said, “Serenity, you should not be.”

“But we are,” Maia said with mulish truthfulness and added, “We did like you.”

Nurevis gaped, thrown into a momentary resemblance to his father by the shock. Finally, he said slowly, “You are the only person still willing to admit to having been our friend. Thank you, Serenity.”

“They are frightened,” Maia said, thinking of the bright, laughing crowds in the Chavada’s salon, the young men who spoke of nothing but hunting.

“So are we,” said Nurevis, his voice no more than a whisper.

Any comfort Maia offered would be false, and therefore unkind. They were both trapped—anything either of them said would merely make this painful audience worse—and Maia did the only thing he could. He dismissed Nurevis, who bowed his head and left, shoulders slumped and ears down, looking more like a beaten dog than a courtier, and Maia hated Chavar for it. Hated him and was glad he was going to a poverty-stricken country estate where he would be the Chavada’s problem.

But Sheveän was the problem of the House Drazhada, both to house and to guard. With Csevet’s help, Maia made a list of all the Drazhadeise estates and considered each one in turn. He rejected Isvaroë and Edonomee out of hand, and decided that Cethoree was too close to the capital, and to the principal estate of the Rohethada. Varenechibel, he thought dourly, had been lucky that Arbelan was loyal.

The Drazhada had estates scattered throughout the Ethuveraz; Maia could send Sheveän almost anywhere he wanted to. In the end, he chose the manor of Bakhoree in northern Thu-Cethor—not for spite, although Bakhoree was very close to the monastery where Chavar and Sheveän had planned to send him, but because it was a long way from the nearest town, and the estate was almost entirely self-sufficient. Any strangers, as Maia knew from Edonomee, would be noticed, and Sheveän would be able neither to escape nor to send clandestine messages. She would undoubtably consider it primitive and uncomfortable, but Maia could not find it in himself to care.

He cared more about how her children would take the news. He brought a map to the nursery of the Alcethmeret and showed Idra exactly where Bakhoree was. “She will be well treated,” he said awkwardly. “The people of the manor are accustomed to relegated nobles—there was a series of them there during my father’s reign—and she will have Osmin Bazhevin for company.”

“Osmin Bazhevin did not take part in the conspiracy,” Idra said.

“She did nothing to stop it, either,” Maia said. “Your mother bullied her into silence and she let herself be bullied.”

“As it has ever been with our mother’s companions,” Idra said wearily. “Our father asked her once if she wouldn’t prefer an actual sheep, for at least she would get the benefit of the wool. Mother was not amused.”

“I am sorry I never got the chance to know your father,” Maia said cautiously.

Idra smiled at him. “I am, too. Although it is a little strange to say, I think you would have liked each other.”

“Of
course
Papa would have liked Cousin Maia,” Mireän said indignantly. “Show me where Mama’s going to live, Cousin Maia?”

He pointed out Bakhoree again. Mireän touched her finger to the delicately drawn keep and sounded out the syllables written beneath it. “It’s in the mountains,” she said. “Are there ogres?”

“None at Bakhoree,” Maia said promptly.

“Good,” Mireän said.

“But what if they come out of the mountains?” Ino said. Ino, Maia had learned, was a worrier. “Will they eat Mama?”

“No,” Maia said. “Bakhoree is an old house, like a tiny castle. And your mother will have soldiers to protect her.”

Idra gave Maia a sardonic look, but was far too kind a brother to say anything. And Ino was comforted.

Maia was glad that none of them asked to be allowed to say good-bye to their mother, for if they’d asked, he thought he would have had to agree, and he did not trust Sheveän not to attempt to capitalize on the pathos of being separated from her children. He himself did get up at dawn to see her off from the court’s mooring mast, mostly so that he would be certain, beyond any shadow of tortured midnight imaginings, that she was gone. Sheveän was unimpressed by the emperor’s condescension; she barely bent her knees at all when she curtsied, and her gaze was fixed on something beyond him. Stano Bazhevin could not meet his eyes at all. He felt sorry for her, but that was nothing compared to the great wash of relief he felt when the
Honor of Csedo
cast off and carried Sheveän away from the Untheileneise Court.

He tried not to let his relief show that evening, when he told Idra privately that his mother had left the court, but Idra said, “You must be glad.”

There was no accusation in his tone, but Maia knew it was a test, even if not one Idra had planned. He said, “Not
glad.
I would have been
glad
if she would have accepted me, even if she never liked me. But, yes, I am relieved. I was afraid she would do…” He trailed off and shrugged; he already knew his imagination wasn’t as good as Sheveän’s. “Something.”

“My father—” Idra’s voice cracked, but he continued doggedly: “My father said once that Mother should have been a soldier. She was very offended, but my father said that she would have been a general by the time she was forty, and that pleased her. It is true. She is very fierce.”

“Yes,” Maia said, having been on the other end of that ferocity.

“And she…” He stared at his hands as if they displeased him, then looked up and met Maia’s eyes. “I want better for my sisters. Mother would not be…”

There was no good word, and Maia knew it. “What she is,” he offered.

“Yes, thank you. She would not be what she is if she had ever had something given her that was a burden equal to her strength. One hears people say it all the time—‘she should have been a son to her father’—but it is
true.
If she had been a son, she would have had a duty that went beyond children. And that duty is not congenial to everyone.”

Maia tried to protest, but Idra shook his head. “I saw the look on thy face when thou realized my sisters love their nurse more than their mother.”

Apologetically, Maia said, “I loved my mother very much.”

“I try to have compassion for mine,” Idra said wryly.