Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [117]
Lyonya, near Halveric Steading
Many days on the road had confirmed Jeddrin Count Andressat’s opinion that he did not like travel. He took no pleasure in novelty of place or person, and he was all too aware of duties he was not performing while he was gone. A ruler should stay at home, with his own people.
His thoughts ran on familiar lines. Foreigners were ill-bred; travel obliged one to mingle with such people, even traveling with one’s own servants and guards. He had never, in his entire life, been over the mountains to the north, a place of barbarians and those who gave themselves ridiculous titles. Only a few in the north held titles for which he had any regard; he knew their lineage as he knew his own. The new king of Tsaia—well enough, the best they could do, all things considered. But Fintha, with no nobility—ridiculous. Three of the Eight Kingdoms—Pargun and Kostandan and Dzordanya—had kings, but of no lineage that meant anything. He found no trace of ancient blood in them, no indication that their authority came from Old Aare.
He could respect, he had told himself, an honest merchant, if such existed, or a mercenary captain like Aliam Halveric or Jandelir Arcolin. Such men had expertise, and if they did not presume to consider themselves equals of their betters, he gave them the respect they deserved. That was the duty and responsibility of a noble, after all: to recognize worth and reward it.
But necessity demanded that he travel, and travel incognito at that. He must seek aid from someone he had misjudged as—to be honest—he had misjudged himself. He had bowed and scraped like any commoner—which, he reminded himself yet again, he was. He had slept in ordinary inns—hideous places in which he’d been forced to show coin before every mug of ale, let alone a bed for the night. Even in Valdaire, where, had he used his own name, the bowing and scraping would have gone the other way.
He huddled in his cloak as another autumn rain blew down from the mountains, roaring in the trees overhead. A horrible country, worse even than the pass over the mountains. Too many trees, blocking the view in every direction, closing him in. Mud and not rock under his horse’s hooves, storms in the air that could not be seen until they were upon him. Only a few villages and fields—unfamiliar crops in the fields, unfamiliar fruit trees instead of the neat terraces of vines and oilberries on his own land. Green everywhere, too much green.
If not for the vision of his own land and its fields and vineyards, his own people toiling there, the smell of the herbs strong under the sun, the clatter of goats’ hooves on the rocks … if not to save them, who had done no wrong and deserved no harm … he would not have stirred from Andressat, from those golden hills, those rocky bastions, summer’s heat that dried the creeks, winter rain that filled them. He ached in every bone and cursed the day he’d first heard the name of Duke Kieri Phelan.
Aliam Halveric listened to the rain drumming on the stable roof, breathed in the fragrance of horses, good hay, oiled leather, and a hint of ripening fruit from the trees trained along the inner court wall, and wondered when it was he’d become an old man. Estil insisted he wasn’t old, and she didn’t seem old—barring the silver strands in her dark hair—but he felt old, joints aching, responsibilities almost too heavy to bear. His grandchildren sprouted day by day, it seemed, rising up around him like saplings around an old storm-blasted tree.
And now he had to deal