Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [68]
A wish-tale … but a better wish-tale than Siniava’s, or Alured’s, who wanted only to rule.
His eyes burned; his back ached. Far to the east, the first dull red of false dawn showed below the stars. He was too old to read the night through and then work all day. He shuffled the papers together, retied the ribbons carefully, and carried the stack indoors, to put safely on a table, away from any morning breeze that might scatter the pages. A few watch lamps burned to show the way. A sleepy servant woke at the sound of his step, jumping up.
“Never mind,” Jeddrin said; he could not scold servants anymore, he but a stonemason’s get. “I read too late; I will sleep late as well. Tell the cook, if you will.”
In his bedroom, the curtains had been pulled back, as he preferred on summer nights; he drew them, put the documents on his table, and then undressed and washed himself before sliding between cool sheets. His mind produced scenes from Mikeli’s account, a city filling with sand and refugees struggling to get away, carrying their tools or a few days’ food … not the nobles riding away on horseback he had imagined before.
When he woke and dealt with the day’s work and then once more delved into the archives, he found more. Some were but fragments: “A man came to the shores of the lake and being thirsty, he drank, and in with the water he swallowed a seed, as it seemed, a seed small and eager to be swallowed, and therein began the ruin of the towers and the land.” Others, also attributed to Mikeli, were longer, parts of a journal describing years of struggle to make a new Aare in a land unlike the old.
“The keys are gone,” Mikeli wrote in one entry.
It took days to figure out what the “keys” were and what had happened, or what Mikeli thought had happened. Days in which a message from Alured, Duke of Immer, arrived, along with a squad of stern-faced soldiers and a man who claimed to be a scribe, demanding access to Andressat’s archives, from which he hoped to prove Alured’s right to the kingship.
“I will gladly show you the archives,” Jeddrin said, “but we do not allow anyone to remove materials or to shuffle them about. I received the duke’s earlier request and have been searching.”
“But you are a busy man, Count Andressat,” said the squad’s commander, who named himself Captain Nerits. “The Duke is pleased to lend you a scholar to assist in the search.”
“I have archivists of my own,” Jeddrin said. “It is not our custom to let strangers poke and pry.”
“It is not the Duke’s custom to have his vassals disobedient,” the captain said. He did not draw a weapon—Andressat had his own guards in the room—but the threat was clear.
“Duke Alured’s domain lies in the Immer valley,” Jeddrin said. “Mine was never part of it.”
“I would not be too sure,” the captain said. “And all the more reason for the duke’s scholar to study in your archives, as it would be in your interest to conceal evidence to the contrary. Nor should you miscall him Duke Alured now; he has chosen a new name to fit his new status, an ancestor’s name from records he found in Cortes Immer. He is Duke Visla Vaskronin: remember that. As the duke means to rule, it would also be in your interest to show your submission now.”
Cortes Immer was far from Cortes Andres: leagues and leagues lay between, forest and vale. Cortes Andres had never been breached, not even by Siniava, and in the aftermath of that war, Alured, Vaskronin, or whatever he chose to call himself could not have raised a large enough army to invade Andressat.
“Surely your duke has enough to do without bothering a poor stony land far from his own,” Jeddrin said. “I mean no discourtesy, but I will not see my hospitality abused, either. If your duke’s claim is proved true, I will accept his