what she-creature bore him. His record of field warfare deserves your respect.’
As the double doors parted, Taskin did not immediately walk through. He pivoted instead, catching the petitioners short of their eager surge forward. ‘Go home! All of you. My guardsmen are capable. If your services are needed, I’d have you respond to the crown’s better interests well rested.’
Through a stirring of brocades, past the craning of necks in pleated collars, a persistent voice arose. ‘Is there crisis?’
Another chimed in, ‘Have you news?’
‘No news!’ Taskin’s bark cut off the rising hysteria. ‘Once the princess is found, the palace guard will send criers. Until then, collect your wives and retire!’
‘But Commander, you don’t understand,’ ventured the fox-haired merchant whose dissenting word rose the loudest. ‘Some of us wish to offer our house guards, even lend coin from our personal coffers to further the search for her Grace.’
Taskin raised his eyebrows. His drilling survey swept the gathering, no man dismissed, even the foreign ambassador from the east, with his bullion brocade and his pleated silk hat, hung with a star sapphire and tassel. ‘Very well. I’ll send out the seneschal. He’ll take down the list of names and offered services.’
Prepared for the ripple of dismayed consternation, Taskin’s lean mouth turned, perhaps in amusement. The rest of his bearing stayed glass-hard with irony. Now, no man dared to leave, lest he be the first to expose his underlying insincerity. Once each pledge of interest was committed to ink, the commander could winnow the truly loyal from the hypocrites at leisure.
Beyond the broad doors, the throne and gallery loomed empty. The bronze chandeliers hung dark on their chains, the only light burning in the small sconce by the privy chamber. Outside its thin radiance, the room’s rich appointments sank into gloom, the lion-foot chairs reduced to a whispered gleam of gold leaf, and the crystalline flares off the glass-beaded tassels a glimmer of ice on the curtain pulls.
Taskin’s brisk footsteps raised scarcely a sound as he passed, a fast-moving shadow against lead-paned windows, faintly burnished by starlight. By contrast, the clash of voices beyond the closed door raised echoes like muffled thunder.
Taskin acknowledged the six guardsmen, standing motionless duty, then wrenched the panel open without knocking. He sized up the tableau of three men beyond as he would have viewed the pieces on a chessboard.
In the company of the King of Sessalie and the seneschal, the High Prince of Devall claimed the eye first. He was a young man of striking good looks. The hair firmly tied at his nape with silk ribbon hung dishevelled now, honey strands tugged loose at the temples. Though he sat with his chin propped on laced hands, his presence yet reflected the lively intelligence that exhaustion had thrown into eclipse. He still wore banquet finery: a doublet of azure velvet edged in bronze, and studded with diamonds at the collar. His white shirt with its pearl-buttoned cuffs set off his shapely hands. The signet of Devall, worn by the heir apparent, flashed ruby fire as he straightened to the movement at the doorway.
Taskin bowed, but as usual, never lowered his head. While the seneschal’s ranting trailed into stiff silence, and the king’s prating quaver sawed on, Devall’s prince appraised the commander’s rapid entry with amber eyes, dark-printed with strain. ‘Lord Taskin, I trust you bring news?’
‘None, Highness. Every man I have in the guard is assigned. They are diligent.’
The seneschal shot the commander a scathing glance for such bluntness. ‘If you’ve heard about the herald dispatched to the lower keep, can I rely on your better sense to restore the realm’s decorum? We scarcely need to raise the garrison to track down an errant girl!’
Taskin disregarded both the glare and the sarcasm. He would have honesty above empty words and false assurances. Nor would he speak out of turn before his king, whose maundering trailed off in confusion.
‘Your Majesty,’ Taskin cracked, striking just the right tone. ‘I have no word as yet on your daughter.’
A blink from the King of Sessalie, whose gnarled hands tightened on his chair. His gaunt frame sagged beneath the massive state mantle with its marten fur edging, and the circlet of his rank that seemed too weighty for his eggshell head. Nonetheless, the trace of magnificence remained in the craggy architecture of his face; a reduced shadow of the vigorous man who had begotten two bright and comely children, and raised them to perpetuate a dynasty that had lasted for three thousand years.
An authoritative spark rekindled his glazed eyes. ‘Taskin. I’ve sent for Captain Mysh kael.’ Brief words, short sentences; the king’s speech of late had become wrenchingly laboured, a sorrow to those whose love was constant. ‘You’ll see soon enough. My seneschal objects.’
‘I find the choice commendable, your Majesty.’ Taskin kept tight watch on the foreign prince from Devall, and recorded the masked start of surprise. ‘Until we know what’s happened, we are well advised to call out every resource we can muster.’
The high prince slapped his flattened hands upon the tabletop, but snatched short of shoving to his feet. ‘Then you don’t feel her Grace has played a prank for my embarrassment?’
‘I don’t know, Highness. Her women don’t think so.’ Taskin’s shoulders lifted in the barest, sketched shrug. ‘But Princess Anja being something of a law unto herself, her ladies have been wrong as much as right when the girl played truant as a child.’
The seneschal thrust out his bony, hawk nose, his stick frame bristling with outrage. ‘Well, we don’t need a scandal buzzing through the lower citadel! Find the herald, do. Pull rank at the Highgate, and turn the captain back to mind his garrison.’
‘Too late.’ Already alerted by the sound of inbound footsteps, Taskin’s icy gaze fixed on the seneschal as he let fly his own sly dart. ‘In fact, your service is the one that’s needed elsewhere.’ Two crisp sentences explained the gist behind the courtiers held under the chamberlain’s watchful eye.
‘Your Majesty, have I leave?’ The seneschal bowed, shrewd enough to forgo his sour rivalry for opportunity. He thrust to his feet, his supple, scribe’s hands all but twitching for the chance to wring advantage from the merchants’ pledge of loyalty.
A short delay ensued, while King Isendon of Sessalie raised a palsied forearm and excused the gaunt official from his presence. As the seneschal stalked away, he peered in vague distress at the straight, stilled figure of his ranking guardsman, who now claimed the place left vacant at his right hand. ‘Commander. Do you honestly think we might be facing war?’
‘Your Majesty, that’s unlikely’ Taskin’s candour was forthright. What did Sessalie possess, that could be worth a vicious siege, a campaign supplier’s nightmare, destined to be broken by the early winter storms that howled, unforgiving, through the ranges? Only Anja posed the key to disarm such defences. Threat to her could unlock all three of the citadel’s moated gates without a fight.
Within the royal palace, her loss might break King Isendon’s fragile wits within a week, or a day, or an hour. Prince Kailen lacked the hardened maturity to rein in the fractious council nobles. The seneschal was clever with accounting, but too set in his ways to keep the young blood factions close at heel.
Sessalie needed the sea trade to sweeten the merchants and bolster a cash-poor council through the uncertainty of the coming succession.
Yet the petty slights and tangles spun by court dissension were not for Devall’s ears. Anja’s offered hand must not imply a bleeding weakness, or invite the licence to be annexed as a province.
Lest the pause give the opening to tread dangerous ground, the Commander of the Guard tossed a bone to divert the high prince’s agile perception. ‘The crown needs its eyes and ears in the sewers under Highgate. Captain Mysh kael may be a misbegotten southern mongrel, but he keeps the city garrison trimmed into fighting shape. Knows his job; I checked his background. We want him keen and watchful, and not hackled like a man who’s been insulted.’