Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [4]
All they ever thought about was the Court. Who was advancing, who was declining, who was allied with whom, and what that meant for the tiny, tiny circle of “those in the know.” They never looked past the boundaries of the magical barrier around the Palace grounds to the greater and far more dangerous world of the open sea, much less to the Dry Land. Most of them didn’t even know the names of the countries that bordered this Kingdom, if they weren’t also Sea Kingdoms.
They didn’t think twice about the very powerful and, at the same time, very delicate magic that kept the water warm, those without gills breathing, and predators peaceful. This was the only place in the Kingdom where a seal could swim with an orca and the orca wouldn’t even think of harming it.
Sea Kings many generations ago had bargained for that spell. Up above the surface, storms might rage and winter snow might pepper the waves; here it was pleasant enough that tropical fish and other creatures of warmer climes played among corals.
And it was the day that Katya caught one of her would-be suitors trying to use some unauthorized magic here—magic that might well upset that finely tuned balance—that she realized that the young men of her father’s Court were either empty-headed idiots or one of Mischa’s warriors. There just was no middle ground.
Perhaps that was because any young man even remotely useful to his parents was either sent to the Royal Guard or kept at home to manage the business or estates. But when you had an ornamental dunce sitting around doing nothing but making idle trouble, your only real solution for what to do with him was to send him to court and hope he could make a good marriage alliance. If he could snare a Princess, all the better.
If there was one thing the various peoples of the Sea were, it was prolific. The Royal family was by no means the only one with an entire shoal of offspring. The Sea was dangerous; outside the protections of the Palace there were killing storms, giant octopi and squid, and an entire bestiary of monsters. There were undersea quakes, volcanoes, whirlpools, and landslides. And then there were the wars between Kingdoms, and the inevitable appearances of SeaHags and other evil magicians whenever things threatened to remain peaceful for a while. The Tradition might not rule beneath the waves with quite so firm a hand as it did on Dry Land, but it was powerful enough to stir up trouble, and plenty of it.
Now, the North Sea Kingdom had been peaceful since Katya’s father—who, according to her sources, people were starting to call “Vladislav the Merry”—had fought his way to the throne over the bodies of several would-be rulers who’d tried to keep him from taking it. Vladislav wanted to keep things that way. Although he was an awe-inspiring fighter, he hated conflict—but he was very, very good at handling people, at politics, and at history.
The result was that his reign so far had been so peaceful that the various Noble families had seen a great many sons survive, who would in previous reigns have made fatal errors of judgment.
That was what, in this generation, had been sent off to Court.
When Katya had reasoned all that out, she had vowed that she was not going to even think about courtship unless the young man in question was at least as skilled and clever as she. He didn’t have to be skilled in the same ways—she’d be perfectly happy with a highly intelligent scholar, for instance—but he had to be a match for her.
So far, the crop of young fellows swarming her had failed miserably in producing someone of that order.
She had the sense that her sisters, and perhaps her brothers, too, felt the same way. Certainly Tasha was not showing any signs of welcome to the few who dared approach her. In a lot of ways, Katya envied her. She might not look intimidating, but the fact that she was a sorceress-in-training scared the scales off most of those poor fish.
Whereas the essence of what made Katya just as dangerous was