This story is a work of fiction. It contains references to both sexual and violent behaviour, along with expressions of physical affection. If you find this type of story offensive, or if you are underage and it is illegal for you to read it, please exit now. All characters are fictional and in no way related to any persons living or deceased. Any such similarity is purely coincidental and uncanny.
This work is copyrighted by the author and may not be reproduced in any form without the specific written consent of the author. It is assigned to the Nifty Archives under the provisions of their submission guidelines but it may not be copied or archived onto any other site without the direct consent of the author.
I do not know how well-received these chapters are. The only clues I get are in emails from readers. Do you like the story? Hate it? Have liked it since its emergence? Feel it is getting too obsessive? Not Tarantino enough? Think Evendal should take a vow of silence? Let me know.
I can be contacted at Bookwyrm6@yahoo.com
Special thanks to Rob for editing.
Copyright 2003 Kristopher R. Gibbons. All rights reserved by the author.
35 Amazement & Admiration
Rosencrantz: Then thus she says: your behaviour
hath struck her into amazement and admiration.
Hamlet: O wonderful son, that can so astonish a mother!
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2, lines 333-335
Thinking himself foolish for fashioning trawlers of trouble out of seaweed, Evendal disregarded decorum and shouted out to the hall, "Mother, it matters to no one but yourself. Just enter, please."
At seven span and a palm, and mayhap seven stone(151) to Bruddbana's eight span and a hand, at fifteen stone(152), Wytthenroeg(153) resembled a starveling child as the Commander of the Guard 'escorted' her to the King. The escort, as Evendal could plainly see, was all that kept her mobile and erect. A linen-coloured wool overtunic weighted down layer after layer of winter garb, masking the true thinness of her frame. The canny, hawk-like tilt of Wytthenroeg's brows challenged anyone to comment on the milky overlay to her eyes. Tendrils of her white hair pointed everywhere, the result of her head covering's mischief. With the hood of her tunic pulled back, Evendal noted a much-healed scalp as he stood to greet the woman and forestall the deep curtsey he knew she would attempt.
As Bruddbana bowed, Evendal stepped forward and held her free hand gingerly in both of his. "Whether you entered through your own main, or entered through another's agency, all that matters is that you are here."
"It is an insult to..."
Evendal m'Alismogh shook his head. "Mistress Must-do, gone are the days when weakness drew predators like blood draws sharks. And this is not Court." He turned his head briefly toward Danlienn and continued. "Naught but family and friends here. The habits of ten years may be difficult to shed, but do so for your own sake."
"Evre, I fear that in my weariness I persisted against your better wisdom..."
"You speak of Onkira's attempts at intercourse?"
Though startled at the blunt query, Wytthenroeg gamely answered with a plain "Yes." No excuse and no vacillation.
"Inasmuch as anyone can, I have taken steps to provide a remedy and contain her influence again. But this is not my greeting to the woman I love most in the land." Wanting desperately to hold her in a fierce embrace and somehow banish the gifts and curses that ten hard years had given her, Evendal contented himself with a kiss for each cheek and a second steady arm for her to grip.
"Come. Sit here with us and share what passes for a day's work." So saying he and Bruddbana guided Wytthenroeg to a rug-draped chair beside the bed.
The woman acquiesced.
"Metheglyn? Kumys? Cider? Tea? Hippocras?"
Wytthenroeg grinned fondly and requested, "Stop hovering." She glanced up into her son's luminous face, then quickly away.
Chastised, Evendal took two deep breaths and sat. "Is there ought I can do for your immediate comfort?"
"Some mulled cider would help immensely."
Aldul quirked an eyebrow at Evendal, who almost chided him for the implied offer of serving, and thus aggravating his aches, but caught himself and nodded back.
"Wytthenroeg olm'Haedroeg, beloved of Menam, Manorlady of the Ülistrien Marshes, Mistress of Paludiers(154), I would present Aldul mek Alinda, formerly of the Kwo-eda Paramenate, now Archate emissary to the Throne. Likewise, I present Danlienn ald'Muirek, Heir Presumptive to Arkedda, covert witness in Osedys for his half-brother, and Master Scrivener."
Wytthenroeg's brows bunched as she blinked, uncertain if she heard correctly. An espier(155) harboured deliberately? Heir Presumptive?
"I present Lady Sygkorrin, Prince of the Temple Archate, already known to you. Your aide and escort hights Bruddbana megdh Borindurl, and serves as Commander of the King's Guard. Most vital to my well-being, and so last to be presented, my son and heir, His Serene Highness Kri-estaul agd'Émmas-dawyl Ïnosien y Kohermarthen, pier'Vendal, Master of the Palace Under-grounds."
"Evendal!" Wytthenroeg remonstrated. "Do not even joke of that!"
Kri-estaul glanced from father to grandmother and back, uncertain of what to do or say.
"I do not, or not completely," the King rejoined. "Let me," he stopped and began again. "Let us apprise you of my doughty son's remarkable history. You are familiar with his antecedents?"
"The Kohermarthen was a dear friend and peer. We seldom disagreed in the Game(156), but when we did it was amicable. I had heard that her only son had vanished while at the Palace. For the surviving families, that means he died. Such a bald nabbing marked it as the Beast's crude work, but that is all we knew. I wish now that I had offered her some comfort or sanctuary, but I was, myself, grieving still."
"Over Rw-adruann?"
Wytthenroeg nodded.
Wanting to hold his own questions for a more private moment, Evendal continued, "The Quillmaster's daughter, Drussilikh, pleaded with me for some word of her brother's true fate. I learned that the child yet lived, and surmised that the duumvirate had chosen to use the under-grounds as a place of punition. You were correct in your assumption. Abduram did take him, annoyed that a child should run into him, should show such disregard for his dignity."
Kri-estaul took over. "The Terrible Lord burned the back of my knees, and ploughed me real bad. He told me my mother had sold me to him for being bad. But he lied. Papa said. He killed my mother. And he gave me to a Guard to teach me to be good. Their idea of good, I guess. They both promised to let me go if I did what they wanted, but they lied! Papa said so. They lied about everything!"
Evendal sat stupefied. Kri-estaul had summarised his experience, truncated it almost to a trifle. The child who had laboured to verbalise precise memories of his imprisonment had changed. Somewhen he had come to feel secure enough with current circumstance that his past horror had grown a thin patina of distance -- had lost some of its immediacy. Considering Kri-estaul's simple declarations, Evendal also learned that his own efforts had borne fruit: his son relied on him for an understanding of right and wrong. He had uncovered another way in which Kri-estaul had come to trust him. He dared not disclose the fragile progress, lest he damage it.
Wytthenroeg was staring at Evendal, waiting for either a confirmation or correction of the boy's assertions.
"It is as I wrote you. Kri-estaul but offers a tame detail or two. Abduram took him, terrified and tortured him, hamstrung him several times, buggered him, and then gave him over to a Guard whose spleen served for a heart. For two years..." Evendal flashed Wytthenroeg a look as if to say, 'We both know it was longer.' "...this my son awaited rescue in the under-grounds."
The elderly woman looked down at the young amputee, up at her son, and back again. She did not say what was first in her thoughts, how just knowing him to be alive would have invigorated his mother, might have kept her from the fey recklessness that had doomed her. Such a 'what if' only added a burden on the child to no purpose. Wytthenroeg told herself she would have to be content finding what she could of her dead friend in her living children. "My apologies, my boy, you titled him aptly." She looked back down into the child's earnest stare. "The Beast was an evil man. You are a fortunate little boy. How did you survive?"
"I made friends with the rats, who warmed me as they could, and I waited for my Papa to come. He says I was down in the under-grounds for two years!"
"You hoped to be rescued?"
Though lying down, Kri-estaul approximated a shrug. "I dreamt he would come for me. He came."
The older woman chose not to pursue the meandering pathways of a child's reasoning. Trusting that the boy would not see a slight in the question, Wytthenroeg inquired, "How long has it been since your legs were taken?"
"Forever!" Kri-estaul exclaimed. "I have been in this bed forever!"
"Almost a fortnight, Mother."
"That is a long time," Wytthenroeg commiserated. "You seem to be recovering well. For as serious a cutting as you had, you show amazing vitality after only a fortnight's rest."
Kri-estaul waded through the woman's words, at first expecting she hid something cruel behind her talk, but then replied excitedly, "It's because of Papa. Papa and Uncle Aldul! Uncle Aldul made me sleep through the worst pain with his drinks. Nasty junk! And Papa sang the bad scabs away."
There was no ignoring that snow-white ralur in the nest of sables, no pretending their survival and reunion merely the result of a sourceless good chance. Wytthenroeg took an uncertain breath and forced herself to stare into Evendal's glowing gaze. "Tell me of yourself," she asked with studied calm made possible by the brevity of her request.
"What would you first?"
The mistress of the late King wet her throat before answering. "If you would start with the obvious. The luminance to your eyes."
"When Drussilikh first made the existence of her brother known to me, the need for his rescue evoked this glow. It has remained ever since and does not impair how I see what is around me. It waxes and wanes in accord with some of my felt passions, and has been the source of jests and jibes. I do not understand the mechanism of it. It just is."
"And did Kri-estaul dream of you? Or simply dream of rescue?"
"Of me, with my eyes aglow."
Wytthenroeg nodded her head, expressionless. "And what of these 'scabs'?"
"Blood clots that threatened to take him from me." Evendal would not elaborate. Now he understood his own reticence in communicating with his mother. No talk or missive of any depth or honesty could leave the changes to his particulars unexplored. That he was unique in nature as well as estate blazed forth from his eyes of molten amber; it did not incite comfort or trust, it did not invite familiarity.
"And you learned some way of banishing or devastating them?"
Evendal practically leaped to the answer. "Yes."
Wytthenroeg had had enough. "Evendal, I shall not sit here, only barely recovered from a flu, and drag words from you like some toddler netting a sea lion. I will not waste my patience or my nerve. Tell me!"
The King abandoned all equivocation. "I don't know where I have been, Mistress Mu..." Evendal swallowed hard against a sob he had not anticipated. "Little hints here and there. Aldul found me in Kul-Ger, lying over a crate, back in Dru-stal.(157) He hitched me over his horse and carried me out of there, without knowing what manner of man I might be." He pulled in a harsh breath and barrelled on. "When I awoke I had no memory, no true one at least. I called myself m'Alismogh. Aldul had to name the provinces for me before I could guess where I came from."
"I should think your speech would reveal your origins," Wytthenroeg interjected tartly.
As Evendal laughed nervously, Aldul responded. "At the first he showed no betraying speech habits. After a day or two with me, I could have been speaking to a Kwo-edan. Until we arrived in Osedys."
Evendal stared at his friend, surprised and slightly embarrassed.
Aldul merely grinned and added, "I have met such people before, who mimic their companions' speech habits unawares. As you had intended no mockery, I saw no cause for comment.
"Danlienn echoed nothing of Kwo-eda. But likewise nothing of Osedys, when sitting among Thronelanders. 'Tis how I knew him for a tale-spinner."
"My next concern," Wytthenroeg cited. "You harbour the half-brother of Arkedda as a scribe? You name him spy, and permit him the freedom of your Presence."
Evendal shrugged, still shaken. "What would you?" he challenged. "Detain him? He was keen to poison himself ere he be made an embarrassment to his brother, and thus would leave a wife and children to grieve. Whenever Court convenes, Alta, Donnath-luin and Kwo-eda are there, casting shadows, twisting and moulding Oseidh power through legitimate Thronelander merchants and guilds. Murlesnad is simply more honest, or less skilled, than the others."
"And what shall Murlesnad make of your executing his aunt?"
Now, Evendal knew, they had come to one of Wytthenroeg's real reasons for this interrogation. "He has granted Us his sanction. In writing. Onkira made herself most unwelcome during her exile to Arkedda."
"Am I to understand that you intend to asperse her?"
"Yes," he answered neatly.
"Even the priests are anxious to attend the fetes your announcement has incited. Did you intend a spectacle? For that is what you shall have."
"Mistress Must-do," Evendal murmured. "You are no longer correcting some brooding, defiant princeling. I will not be lessoned in statecraft when the lessons are not apt. You have kept yourself to yourself for over two winters, according to Matron Drussilikh. And while you could no doubt instruct me in the nine-year history of Osedys's degeneration, it would be a history of semblances only. The matter of root causes would remain unaddressed."
"But you have plumbed and marked your way among those causes?"
"Well enough to act. So I do. Now, what else have you in your list compiled from rumours reaching your ears?"
"Thunders! I am acting the harridan! In truth... it is because I do not know what to say to my son. I never thought to see you again. And it broke my heart as badly as the loss of Rw."
Evendal closed his eyes to keep from crying. "I... have questions. And confessions to continue as well. I am become such as you may wish had not been birthed."
"Continue," Wytthenroeg bade. "What? Decisions you regret? Deaths you've caused? 'Tis the wage of rule."
"Powers and arts I've exercised." The King stared at his son, unseeing. "The first Council of my reign was achieved against the timidity of the manorlords and the majority of the guilds and fellowships. I had detained Polgern, and Abduram had died by my hand my first night home. Emial of Kernost stood in Council and began to fashion me a despot of the worst character, in his defence of himself and Polgern. Kri-estaul sat at my side, in a wheeled chair of Pohul-halik's construction. He saw a man with a blade emerge from the under-grounds entry in the Council Chamber, intent on regicide. Being nearer than the Guard, he shouted and charged the man, and received the knife in his chest for his efforts. Guard Ierwbae killed what we found was Emial's heir. But Kri-estaul was dead."
Wytthenroeg laid a hand on her own chest and whispered, "Do you hear what you are saying?"
Evendal nodded, and snorted over a thought. "Though I abandoned my home for nine missing years, I myself do not take abandonment well. I went mad. I am still not completely secured of mind. All those courtiers had watched as Emial's son approached, and none gave warning. In that moment I hated them with a strength not felt since. I sealed the Chamber against their escape and set fire to the stone. And I held Emial's breath from him, kept it from him until he died. Aldul tried to reach me, to calm me, to no avail. Finally Sygkorrin managed to breach my ward and damp my fury."
"That must have taken a number of Guard and much preparation. Did no one challenge you?"
"No. When I say, 'I did such,' I mean I alone. I sat holding Kri-estaul and sang the stones to burn, the doors to immobility, and Kernost to suffocate. What I sing, eventuates.
"I cried for Kri-estaul to not be dead. I willed him to live and grow to adulthood, begging him in my grief. Though I did not sing it, he spat out blood and breathed, complaining that he felt unwell. Priestess Sygkorrin examined him and found no knife wound to explain all the blood he had shed."
"Master Aldul...?" The late King's beloved sought confirmation.
The Kwo-edan nodded. "Both the Priestess and I can attest, as can the Chamber walls and ceiling that are yet soot-grimed and heat-cracked, to the truth of Lord Evendal's account. Kernost has, in the main, become an annex of the Cinqet."
"So," the King murmured. "That fee-grant has survived untampered with?"
"Yes, my friend."
"Thank you, Kri," Evendal blurted.
"For what, Papa?"
"For being a good and obedient son. It would have destroyed your Papa's heart had you not obeyed and come back alive."
Shaken more by the occasion Evendal described than by the power it demonstrated, Wytthenroeg waited. When her son said nothing further, she stirred. "Is this what so troubled you? Grant me time to consider all that your gift means. Do you expect me to treat with you as some deadly stranger?"
"I did not know what to expect, but I would be a fool to assume blithe acceptance or indifference."
"Again, grant me a period of consideration. Your son is wonder enough."
"True."
"You indeed intend his advancement?"
"Let me answer with a question. Of what mettle and mould are my siblings?"
Wytthenroeg smiled. "As their mother I think them of form most excellent. Of modest seeming and temperate, teachable and with demonstrable humility."
"Have I ever chanced upon any of them?"
"You have met with one that I know of. I bespoke him a neighbour's son when we travelled to my cottage on a holiday from the city. You had eleven years."
"And he?"
Wytthenroeg hesitated. "Nine and a half years ago you left an unhappy man-child, waiting for some unconfessed mystery. Everything about you was hidden. By then I was a year absent from the City and Court life. Then came the time to see our fighters off to battle. You spoke little but for inanities with me then, so I thought you still angry at my self-exile. But there was more. You had a quiet, a centre, a gut full of secrets that separated you from everyone, not just from me. In that you resembled your father and myself."
"Mother, what secrets I now contain are such as even I do not know them. All I know of, I ever lay bare."
"So your manner affirms. I cannot match you in that."
"But do try. How many years had he?" Somehow he knew what his mother would say were she to unburden herself.
"Evendal, do not badger me, the answer serves no one."
"And yet a third time I ask: Mother, how many years had he?"
Wytthenroeg found her mouth responding, "He claimed nineteen years then," and groaned in horror. With a shudder bone deep, she buried her head in her hands.
Evendal was kneeling before her in the next instant, pulling her hands away to shine his gaze into hers. "I knew ere you prevaricated, dearest mother. It changes naught, excepting you or he wish it to."
"Oh, Evendal. Listen before I lose all strength and fail in nerve again. He, Melloregh, is but the second born of your father." Wytthenroeg rushed through her profession, rasping at the end.
"And the eldest?" Evendal felt his insides quiver, uncertain how he felt from these revelations.
"Wtthanyl, owning thirty-six years."
Evendal nodded absently. "A blight-year baby." Thirty-seven years before, a typhus epidemic had killed his father's parents and effectively ended the bloody rivalry between Osedys and Arkedda. Children born out of that dreadful time were accounted wonders, precious.
Wytthenroeg looked up from contemplation of her fingers. "Yes." She waited for some indication of her third-born's frame of mind, but the glow rendered him alien, more unfamiliar than the passage of nine years could make him.
"And how does he feel? Does he know of his father?"
"Yes," the woman whispered. "I told him before he sought answers on his own. I told him."
"And Melloregh?"
"Yes, he knows too."
"How do they feel toward this intelligence? Have they complaint?"
"Only in my treatment of them. And of you."
Evendal brushed the comment aside in his pursuit. "To the point, as sons of the late King, do any feel graced less than they merit?"
"No. Wtthanyl has taken to the business of the manor and marshes, enjoying its challenges. Melloregh..." She paused, choosing her words carefully. "Melloregh hurt the most from my comings and goings, from the secrecy, from having a brother serving as his parent. He runs from his unhappiness. He is my factor to the markets in other provinces."
"So..." Evendal drew a weighty breath to ask, "Did you love Menam, Mother?"
"I still do, my son." M'Alismogh heard truth.
"Then you and I, and my brothers, have paid a heavy price for that." He lifted Wytthenroeg's hand and kissed the back of it. "But, for myself, the alternative would have been too steep a cost."
Caught up in the bindings of regret, Wytthenroeg did not follow. "What alternative?"
"Being Onkira's get."
Wytthenroeg shuddered again. "Loathsome child, that one."
Evendal grinned lightly for, though the two women were of an age, the appellative was apt. "How were you able to keep up the fiction of virtuous widowhood?"
The Altan grinned to herself, and Evendal saw a glimmer of the mischievous charm she must have once held with men. "It was a total fabrication, you know?"
"What?"
"The dead husband I left Alta to forget. He never existed. Had I arrived as an unwed virgin of wealth and property, I would have been fenced in by protocol and expectations that a widow has already satisfied."
"True."
"I had no desire to spend my subsequent two-score years saying 'no' to legions of suitors. As it was, my widow's weeds deterred only a percentage of the mongrels. So I employed another fable, one that served me well later on, too."
"What was that?" Kri-estaul asked, reminding Evendal that he had an audience.
"I let it be known that I had suffered from scarlet fever as a girl. Which is true, by the by."
"How did that help?" Kri puzzled.
Aldul answered. "Many people believe that those who have managed to survive scarletina are rendered barren or sterile."
The lady nodded. "So those hoping for heirs invested their hope in others, leaving me free to prosper without harassment. Although intending nothing more than to keep myself comfortable, within ten years I became the wealthiest woman in the Thronelands, and still am."
"How?" the child asked, engrossed.
"Salt," the Mistress of Paludiers replied. "Livestock need it, as do travellers, cohorts, mercenaries, ships, and fleets. Every householder depends on it in too many ways to name. The Temple is yet my most demanding customer. Osedys bay-salt was one of the few exports that all provinces were comfortable accepting from us during the interregnum. Perhaps the only reason the whole city did not starve during the last five years."
Evendal grinned wider. "And you not only own the salt marshes, but the most efficient method of salt production is one of your royal grants."
"After Mausna. After the masks came off, Polgern all but salivated whenever he saw me. 'Twas almost the only satisfaction I knew then." She looked up, braving the King's glowing gaze. "I'd rather have been poor and vulnerable, with Menam and Rw still breathing."
Rw-adruann was another cipher; but Evendal left him for later. "When did you first become... Menam's lover?"
But Wytthenroeg was telling the tale her way. She pulled out a pouch from within her garb and tendered it to Evendal. He opened it carefully, as though the contents might escape with ruinous results. "We became friends, and remain friends. Your father was a haunted man of both virility and discipline. Bull-headed. Infuriating. And crafty. I first permitted him to pay court to me six years after I arrived. He knew, and I knew, he would win me.
"The seventh year began the typhus scare, when your father's father and mother succumbed. Our love and our... trust in each other hardened like cooling Kul-stone and, proven in that turmoil, showed themselves impermeable. And it was then, also, I knew that he would wed and bed another."
"I do not understand," Kri-estaul exclaimed. "Didn't he love you?"
"He did." Wytthenroeg halted, took a rough and weak breath, and explained, "The Temple had asserted the plague to be the wages of ongoing skirmishes between Arkedda and Osedys. With no war declared, the common behaviour among the publicly unsanctioned combatants was to abandon their dead where they fell as a nuisance for the other side."
"Ewww! They must have stunk up everything!"
"And fed the influences that spread the sickness. So, before he fell ill, King Mellanthar proposed the union of his only son to the sister of King Mukh'r-sidhe of Arkedda."
"Why? What would that do?"
Sygkorrin clarified. "It made common cause with Arkedda, rendering a strike against any of Arkedda's commerce an assault against Osedys."
"Why not just banish the groups fighting?"
"That had been tried," Wytthenroeg answered. "Other guilds and manorlords discovered 'markets of contention' with their own Arkeddan counterparts. Again and again. I saw clearly and quickly that he could not wed where he wanted. That did not stop me from foolishly hoping, regardless."
Evendal stared dumbstruck at two collections of documents. "The whole marriage, a tissue of lies!"
"He called it 'countering one legal fiction with another.' After the troops had mustered out, I recovered that bag, left by him in the cottage you found me in. Our sometime home."
"He knew he would not return?" Sygkorrin enquired.
Wytthenroeg shrugged. "I have resigned myself to not knowing what he knew, suspected, or just feared."
"What are those papers?" Kri asked.
"A Confirmation of a Household," the King replied, still scanning the parchments. The phrase referred to a royal grant issued when two members of the gentry are permitted to merge their houses in marriage. "Without ceremony, but in the eyes of the Throne and the Judex, you were married to Menam.
"And this," Evendal continued, hefting another leaf but sparing it only a glance, "is an enumeration of the children sired from the legally recorded union of civis Menam ald'Mellanthar and civis Wytthenroeg olm'Haedroeg formerly of Alta. A list of the legal issue of Menam. Heirs presumptive."
Unconcerned, Evendal returned to his perusal of the first document. "Mother, this Confirma is dated the seventeenth year of Mellanthar's reign."
"What?"
"That would be... the sixth year of your residence here. You did not know of this?"
Ashen, Wytthenroeg shook her head. "Once I saw what its argument was, I could not bear to look at it. And with both of you dead at Mausna, I hadn't the stomach to make one of my surviving sons an assassin's target. I assumed it would be dated the twenty-eighth and last year of Menam's own reign. I saw it as an empty, sentimental gesture to legitimise all of you."
"Far from empty, now. This would signify that you are not merely the late King's fecund mistress, but his wife and the legitimate Dowager. Did Menam secure some land or chattel for you in that year?"
"My fifth year... Yes, the Triés peninsula. It gave me a place to construct a port of my own. He insisted it had nothing but chiggers and foul water and made a gift of it."
Evendal coughed. "A gift? It must have been part of his own demesne he gave over, validating this Confirma."
"We had only just begun to banter and flirt, then. I did not know my own heart until the next year, when the plague struck the City itself." She chuckled, but with sadness in her face. "But, of course, he did... He knew."
Kri-estaul pursued his own line of thought. "Does this mean that Arkedda is not our friend?"
The King considered for a moment. "No, it does not... Although in all verity I cannot be sure. I would say the nuptials served their purpose... We are now bound by commercial accords, a shared abhorrence for the vulpine excesses of the past, and a narrow escape from the anarchy that Onkira invited. Murlesnad, as I remember him, was no puppet prince and might be of a different mind."
"What are the other papers?"
Evendal answered, "An incomplete Dissolution of a Household."
"I do not understand," Kri complained.
"It lacks your sign and seal, Mother, and a date. In case you wished to wed another?"
Wytthenroeg nodded. "In the same bundle you will also find another Confirma, with all the proper royal imprimatur, but only my name given and without my signet or my seal. That script is indeed dated the twenty-eighth year of Menam's reign. For just such an option."
Evendal nodded his understanding, then changed topics. "Mother, for what were you alone in that housing I took you from? Why were you not south, tending your enterprise? Where were Melloregh, Wytthanyl, and..." He glanced at the second of the papers. "...Llanthyr?"
Here Wytthenroeg blushed, a hint of colour finally touching her face. "Llanthyr, after fierce ear-bending and under protest, became my Arkeddan factor. Ten years ago. Almost, I called him back after Mausna was razed. Almost." The King noted how his mother failed to answer his query.
"What made it so urgent that he root himself in Arkedda?" Aldul asked.
To which Evendal answered, "Arkedda sent no citizen to the conflict, and pressed no visitors to serve in it either."
"Do you fault me for that, Evendal?"
"No, Mother. No veteran of that debacle could honestly chastise you or your... other sons for staying clear of it." Uncomfortable with the melancholic look on his mother's face, Evendal returned to his questions. "How did you come to bear four sons by Menam with no one suspecting you even capable? And how came you to sire children by Rw-adruann as well?"
"As a survivor of the blight, and known for having suffered scarlet fever before that, no one was surprised when I would succumb to periodic weaknesses that left me confined or isolated for months. I never showed all that much until the last few months, with each child. No one discovered the deception, until your birthing time approached."
"Onkira," Evendal whispered, chagrined.
Wytthenroeg nodded. "To this day I know not how she learned of it. But when she did, she let me know that I had permission to visit with her. I then suffered a series of 'private teas' with Onkira wherein, I would wager, I learned more from her than she did from me. She had immediately assumed you were my first. That I kept it secret to preserve my reputation. Jealous of just that repute and awe, she wanted me back in Alta, and expected Menam to oblige. Then when her child emerged only to die, she had me brought to her and demanded you. And you were yet to be born! She thought I would give her you in exchange for continued residence and privilege in Osedys, and her leave to continue relations with the man she decided was my child's unprofessed father -- Rw-adruann. As if those graces were hers to keep or bestow. Onkira did not care if you should prove boy or girl, so long as no one thought her a sickly womb or the nurturer of less-than-hale heirs.
"Then passed several fortnights of travail for all of us. Many were the nights I came to hate your father. The haranguing between him and Onkira was almost constant. His wheedling and bartering for every consideration and benefit he could get horrified me. And living in close quarters with Onkira, watching how she treated those around her, learning what mattered to her, was just as tortuous."
The King sat and considered. The tale Wytthenroeg sang cohered: a woman in love with a man who refused to sacrifice his love and well-being for the good of the commonweal. Doubtless Menam saw no conflict beyond convention's mindless demands. But Evendal's mother had never been a victim in her life, had never allowed herself to be.
"Why the pretence at chastity?"
"It was not an effort, and so not a pretence. Menam never asked it of me. As only three, no, four people knew of us, and as I showed no deep familiarity with anyone in public events, my reputation engendered itself."
"Then what of Edrionwytt?"
"There you touch on matters that yet trouble me."
Kri-estaul interjected, "I like him."
Wytthenroeg smiled at her grandson. "I am glad. In my keeping him safe, he has had no chance for friends. Mayhap you will be one for him. That was what I thought Rw-adruann was to me, Evendal. A friend. A friend to both Menam and myself. And so he was. But... he loved me. And I learned to love him - almost as dearly as your father."
"Enough to bed him?"
The Mistress of Paludiers ignored the goad. "There was nothing he baulked at for us. He nearly died from Onkira's frustrated anger once, when he defied her in Court."
"I think I recall hearing of it," Evendal mused, connecting the time of that rumour's circuit with a series of frightening nights being the object of Onkira's seemingly causeless furors. "She wanted rights or jurisdiction over the Cinqet."
"Yes. What she wanted, unprofessed but subsequent to that admitted ambition, was her own cadre -- a niche of influence and authority in the Court, but separate from the King's. That was when Rw-adruann professed both his love and his knowledge to the two of us."
Evendal's eyes widened. "He admitted his feelings and his knowledge of Menam's infidelity in front of you both?"
"He had remained a satellite about me for so long, Onkira's presumption might have been shared by any observer. I had not seen his attention for the admiration that it was. How he lived weighed mightily on him. And he felt his haviour and motives fell within the purview of his oaths to stay honest to his Liege. Menam seemed to understand, better than I, truth be told. Rw-adruann became our confidante, our support. That Confirma could have been his idea, for he always treated me as foremost Menam's wife. Then, later, his true widow."
Evendal felt confused, and a trifle irritated. "But 'tis a far league from counsellor to bed mate."
Hurting from the recapitulation of pains and losses, Wytthenroeg snapped peevishly, "I taught you numbers! And, I thought, something of the human heart. Edrionwytt has twelve years. Your father has been dead but nine years. And though I did not know of this document then, I yet treated our love as I felt it to be... I quickened by no one but Menam!"
The King sat flummoxed as the eighth bell sounded. "But whence the rumour? And Edrionwytt's own accounting?"
Wytthenroeg scowled. "Initially Onkira, of course. Having uncovered one kindling, she knew of each subsequent. But, it seems, she never plumbed to the sire. And despite her circulated hopes, I did not die in giving birth. So she contented herself with spurious absurdities, hoping her bait of provoking slander might catch a carp of truth. So Rw-adruann, in disgust, offered to grant her a counterfeit satisfaction. He joked that report of his having been granted the rose and bloom of my favours could only raise the estimate of his worth and potency in the eyes of the ladies at court. I could not convince him to part with the fiction."
She paused a moment, her anger at this forced march through the past submerged by sadness. "Edrionwytt's birthing, like the one previous, had turned difficult. Edrionwytt was a gamble on my part. In a gesture of remorse for the peril I and our baby passed through, Menam voiced no protest to my raising this, our last child. Menam dared not be but a family friend to the boy. We agreed for him to call Rw his father, as -- in all ways significant -- Rw was. It was Rw-adruann who saw to the fashioning of the child's medallion." Wytthenroeg grinned slightly. "No one was unmannerly enough to ask the unproffered name of the child's mother, they but assumed she was of lowly birth and means, or dead. Rw and I had no inkling that Edrionwytt possessed a slower mind than his siblings until after Mausna. And it changed nothing for Rw. Edrionwytt was his wonder, simple or not. He insisted that the child's heart was what mattered, not his mind. Thunders! That such a man was laid low by those maggot-loving rabbits."
Gently, Evendal prodded. "You had another child after me, but before Edrionwytt."
Though she had woven uneasy fancies of this rapprochement with her son, they had never taken such a strange form as this steady relentless round of questions. A dread understanding gradually dawned on Wytthenroeg that she was under interview by two personae with distinct motives: her compassionate but aggrieved son Evendal, and the ruthless Majesty of Osedys. "I... I tried," the lady grated. "She would have been my only daughter."
Evendal wished the ground would swallow him in that moment. Nonetheless, he refused to fill the awkwardness with empty speech, preferring to let time pass in silence and Wytthenroeg recover herself. The King now had a basic abstract of matters he, as a child, would not have understood, nor accepted had he understood. Indeed, there was much he yet found hard to stomach.
"Back when Onkira first had ambitions for me... did Menam grant you no freedom from your... ordeal? Were you under threat from her and only conditionally protected by him? Could you not have left and had me as you doubtless birthed the others? Surrounded by your household? Then delivered me to unsurveilled allies and thus freed yourself of even the trappings of any offence?"
Wytthenroeg opened her mouth to answer but no words emerged at first. "If we had done nothing in that cardinal moment -- if I had fled -- Onkira could have rallied royal and private militia from her brother Arkedda and resumed the plague-bearing method of warfare against Osedys. That she put horns on Menam as well would mean nothing."
Evendal nodded slowly. "So from the moment you heard her demands, you prepared to barter me to Onkira."
"Tell me what else we could have done?" the woman insisted.
"Nothing else would have served," Evendal agreed. When Wytthenroeg relaxed her expression of outrage, he added, "If the purpose was freedom to continue cuckolding Onkira."
Wytthenroeg opened her mouth to counter, but Evendal waved her protest aside. "No, I care not overmuch how desperately in love you two were, or how ungovernable Onkira was. Let me present her case to you, as she would not have the cast of thought to do so."
"To what end?"
"Thus is some measure of equity provided." Evendal stared out at his mother from a face turned downward, his glow slightly occluded by the fall of his hair. "She will die, and not well. Let her have her moments. You know, as do many, that Arkedda allows no woman sovereignty outright. So Onkira, headstrong and ungainly of mien and so maiden still in her generative years, an indulged yet powerless sister of an autarch, learns she is to be consort in a land that permits women advancement. It takes no savant to perceive what fancies must have ruled her. Lo, her young, virile and vigorous groom even escorts her to her new haven. She stands as willing as an arranged spouse can be, only to find herself in worse straits than in her home: married to a man who patently cannot love her and has no patience for her, imprisoned -- still bereft of autonomy and dignity -- among a people who mirror her husband's unforgiving façade. Yes, she is summary in her decisions, ruthless and reckless: she has been cosseted -- it is a royal's consolation when denied advancement." Evendal stopped abruptly, giving Danlienn opportunity to finish inscribing and to stare unseeing out the doorway, soberly meditative.
"Almost I would indeed pity such a woman," Wytthenroeg averred. "But that is not the whole of her or of her tale."
"No. 'Tis true for you, for me, and for her that the ends do not justify the means. Rather do the means inform the ends. And thus did I become an oblate."
"Was it so dreadful that your father raised you?"
Evendal's head shot up as he stared in shock at Wytthenroeg. "Earth and skies witness that he did no such thing. I was nothing to him until my majority, whereupon I became his disappointment." And that statement, for the watchful Aldul, clarified the tenor of Evendal's relations with Kri-estaul.
The Manorlady of the Ülistrien Marshes stared back at her son in like shock, for the first time utterly oblivious of his incandescence. "How came you to that presumption?"
Bitterness dripping from each syllable, Evendal tabulated for his mother. "It could be from such valueless goading as, 'The next time I expect you to have killed twenty enemies in all-out melee -- and to clean your blade after each mortal stroke -- all within a quarter bell.' 'That was fair but why did you not do better?' Or the habitually qualified praise, 'Could you not have done better?' It could be his telling me ad nauseum how I shamed him, an embarrassment of a son. It could be how he heeded the reports of others, repeatedly. And the single occasion in which he asked me as to the verity or falsity of such report, 'twas a rhetorical query he did not want my answer to."
"Who? What intelligences?" Wytthenroeg breathed.
"Gres-lauri's, and that of his underlings'. At issue here is the truth that he trusted everyone around him before his own son. Had he 'raised me,' and so learned for himself whether he could trust me, he might be alive today."
"You exaggerate, Evendal. Gres-lauri was the head of your father's militia; he had to be ruthless..."
"Mother, Gres-lauri made certain I was nowhere near my father at Mausna. He ensured that Menam's personal guard was nowhere near your beloved, in order that Abduram could skewer him in the back and then kick up dust for Kwo-eda and home. It was deliberate, he admitted as much before I executed him."
Wytthenroeg beloved of Menam sat frozen in distress, her mind racing through selected memories while also struggling with this news. She had thought it simply a mother's heart that had directed her exiling the most hot-headed of her sons to sanctuary. Now she was not so sanguine. She tallied up Anlota's vague reassurances when asked on Evendal's welfare, Menam's odd silences, Onkira's ubiquity, and did not like the sum.
Evendal unknowingly echoed the very conclusion she had come to, his voice conveying the sharpness of memory's pain. "Golden eyes notwithstanding, he presumed my worthlessness, he did not invest any effort in my training or moulding, he did not seek to know his Heir Apparent, because he had the freedom of other candidates who, untried, had thus never disappointed him -- my brothers."
"Thunders, they were right!" she hissed, her breath turning quick and shallow in her anxiety.
Puzzled by the reaction, Evendal faltered. "Who?"
"My... your brothers. They misliked what they saw when visiting the Palace."
"They have been here?" Evendal could not credit the audacity.
"As my messengers to Menam. No one looks twice at couriers, unless the message borne be of consequence to them."
"All three?"
The mother shook her head. "Wtthanyl and Melloregh. Llanthyr could not be trusted to take a direct route to his own bed when he was young."
"And they grew disturbed, concerned with the conditions of my parole?"
Wytthenroeg winced at the choice of words. "They said -- each at different times and in their own manner - that you acted most haughty, as one with some grievous and wondrous secret. Not cruel, but alternating gleeful, then lonely and oppressed, enjoined to silence but suffering for it. They saw most keenly how you could be in a room with Men... the King and it would be as though you had fled behind a wall hanging. You disappeared in plain view. No one acknowledged you, no one addressed His Majesty concerning you. You sat or stood soundless and immobile. Waiting with more dolour than the criminals in a Court Magisterial. This is a summation, of course. I ascribed their plaints to the petty sarcasm of their youthful insecurities."
"And thus, only now, have you been led to what has jangled bells and shouted 'Ware!' since I had eight years?!"
A thread of prudence in his mind suggested that his passion of fury was not what he had wanted of their reunion. But beside him lay a son as haunted by ghosts bred of indifference and wilful ignorance as he was. It was idiocy to have a whale blocking your boat only to harp and carp over its cleaner fish.
"Evendal, must we speak so... openly?"
The son of Menam was intransigent. "Yes."
"Then I begin with that plaint I loathe the most whenever it spills from the lips of others," Wytthenroeg's voice held a strange timbre, not wholly sorrow, nor fully anger or weariness, but some mixture of all three. "I did the best I could for you, within the limits of the circumstances. It was not for me, a tutor, to espy into the mechanism of the Royal Family. Had I done more, I would have been Onkira's target then and there. As it was, I stood under threat of her for years in order that I might watch as close to you as I was. I jeopardised the lives of my other children, and the King's repute, for that."
"I do not know what to say but that, if you found her presence so unbearable for so brief a time, how could you countenance leaving me to her for years?"
"I did not leave you to her! I nursed you myself, as her paps had been too long unused after her miscarriage. After that I could think of no excuse by which I might attach myself to her retinue. She could hardly endure me as a reminder of her failure. Then, as arranged before your birth, I had the instructing of you. For six years I was there, for six years I did all I could for you."
"Mother, I love you. You were my rescue, in many ways. But did you not know? Or did you not dare to know?"
"Who can answer that without sounding self-serving? It does not matter. If I did not know of her depravity, I am blameless. If I knew, yet again I am blameless."
"How do you assert that?"
"To whom could I have turned to safeguard you had I known? The King?"
Evendal nodded at the point made, and considered matters a second time. He had made a serious misapprehension. "It is no wonder to me now that Osedys found itself with a glut of claimants to its authority of the likes of Polgern, Abduram, and Pylan-drest(158). It had such a condition foreshadowed in the manoeuvres and dispositions of you, Anlota, Onkira, and Menam."
"I cannot determine if you accuse or not."
"Neither can I," Evendal replied tiredly.
"So what mean you?"
"Did you never learn how Pylan-drest's dreams of empire were the motive power behind Mausna, Polgern's ambition, and thusly, Father's demise? Or that Onkira, so eager for the sceptre of Osedys, had me use an oiled wooden copy on her in the late hours? Or how Onkira's 'miscarried' get survived and thrived, thanks to Anlota's royal mockery? It seems everyone wanted to play at king-in-judgement. Poor father."
"What? Anlota? That autocratic bitch! How? Why?"
"Peace, Mother. I have made my peace with Anlota, well as any can. And now as I speak with you I see my errors."
"What errors?"
"First, the simplest, most basic failure of imagination. Discounting the value of others' agon(159) because it is not as immediate to me as mine own. My heart feels pain, feels betrayal, demands redress, and twists my judgement accordingly. Having the luxury of hindsight, actions that you would have found impossible, my heart would claim as obvious or inevitable -- to the purpose of avoiding my own pain and feeling of betrayal. It only now occurs to me that I am letting the past I know dictate my actions and ambitions."
Thinking his speech too abstract and tautological, Evendal tried again. "Forgive me, Mother. I could not be my father's heir and have been a son of your household. Insisting otherwise is selfish of me and dismisses the pain and struggle of others, as though mine were the only or greatest infamy. Your love for Menam and his honour, and for your whole family, left you no compassionate choice but the one you made. I only hope that the purity of your determination proves the means that informed these ends now, and that your children forgive me for drawing your care so excessively.
Wytthenroeg had anticipated just such an anxiety over her other children's kind regard. "Don't think on it so, Evre-lindal. Summon your siblings from the five winds and I doubt they harbour any but the most childlike of regrets or resentments. What I did is what I chose freely to do, for peace in my own heart more than for Menam or you. And what I saw I acted on with the best will, and fought to do well by everyone I dealt with to the last sinew in my body."
Again Evendal felt like crying. "Oh, Mother! I do not seek to judge or sentence you. The past of my childhood is not for me to pass sentence on -- except as deeds recalled prove criminal in intent or effect. Certainly my past is for me to judge, but not of necessity to pass sentence on. I only want as few illusions and delusions as possible regarding the road-marks of our pasts that are shared.
"You thought me well settled in my life and training for the manly arts, secure in my worth and my father's regard. You now know that to be comforting illusion. By what I learned in the beginnings of our talks, I feared that you had eschewed constancy, from despair of such an impossible and perilous triune. Instead, my pity has been displaced with awe at your steadfastness and ingenuity.
"You knew a Menam who was loving and wise and tender toward yourself, with infants, and those same children whom he perforce dealt with fitfully and distantly. I knew a Menam who refused to countenance children in the common passage of his days, who abandoned his son to an emasculating devourer rather than suffer the boy's errors and confusions and needs. Our two perceptions are hardly conflicting, Mother. Had he not been so embattled, perhaps he might have allowed himself to love me."
The lady seemed in harmony with Evendal until the last. A second time her cheeks flushed, and she stamped her cane on the floor. "Thunders, you are a dense child! He loved you, Evendal! He loved you. If he kept himself at a distance it was because he loved you."
The King glared at his mother, torn between disbelief and pain. "What do you... Why? Why?"
"Blood and swash! I did not expect to have such a talk with even this small an audience. And I do not want to scare my grandson. Can we not delay this?"
"No!" Evendal ignored the incongruous nautical swearing.
"Very well." She took a few breaths before continuing. "I got to meet your grandparents, Evendal. With Menam's help I tended them in their illness because no one else -- besides Temple staff -- dared the typhus. With me they were cordial, despite their discomfort and distress. But his wife seemed accident-prone, with bruises showing signs of age, keloids, and bone-aches that suggested poorly healed bone fractures. Your father, after they died, explained this to me, and showed me further proofs. A history of his father's manic fury and ungoverned temper, etched on his and his mother's flesh and in their family's history."
"What? Fear kept him away?"
"Evendal, if Onkira had not existed, he would have found some other cause. Had you proven the most brawn-laden, conflict-crazed brute ever born he would have loved you, but not gently."
Menam's son looked doubtful, though every sense told him he heard truth.
Wytthenroeg persisted. "You would not recall, but I do. Up until you had six years he would often take you on processions that 'just happened' to bring both of you to our cottage. And I would 'just happen' to be there -- sometimes with Rw-adruann. You would hide, and I would try to find you. Then I would hide, and you would seek me out. That was the only game he could join us in. He could not play, Evendal. Everything he knew had winning as its purpose, being invulnerable and ruthless. But when it was time for your nap, he would kiss you and watch over you until you fell asleep. And sometimes, often with me he could be sweet and genuinely tender. With no one else did he dare."
The Lady of Paludiers sighed. "I shall speak of this, even so. This is what he feared, Evendal. Look carefully at my face, my son, the left side."
The King obeyed, bewildered. Poorly concealed by a shaky application of rice powder, Evendal saw a scar, and an odd rearrangement of bone and muscle.
"That is the most visible consequence of my refusing to cook what Menam wanted during a surprise visit from him, of my arguing vehemently with him. I have bled more from cut lips, gashes and objects thrown at me in the midst of his rages than from all of my birthings."
The light to Evendal's eyes grew brighter as Wytthenroeg began to speak. It dimmed abruptly as Evendal ald'Menam again knelt, closing his eyes, to again gingerly hold and kiss the woman's hands. "Oh, Mother!"
"No!" Wytthenroeg barked. "Do not feel sorry for me. Nor turn your anger on your father. We all had our choices, and continued to make them." She looked about, momentarily nonplussed. "There are so many things I never thought... I never thought needed to be laid out, clarified, about your father. About us. For instance -- he would have permitted me to quit of him at any time. He made that clear whenever he feared some crisis nearing, or in remorse when he had so abused me. You know me in this, Evendal: I am neither meek nor submissive, nor was I ever so with your father. And he never demanded I be pliant and passable, though it would have been easier on his nerves and my body had I been such a lover to him. We were two stubborn, sometimes obdurate, wills, but respect infused all our congress.
"I told you such...personal matters because you need to accept what love he had for you and your brothers. He was, by all accounts, gentler with me than his father ever was toward his mother. But he could not bear the thought of passing on his violent heritage, of hurting any of you to even a tenth of the degree he had known. He convinced himself that there was only one practical way of ensuring that you did not remember him as incarnate rage and evil."
"If I did not get close, I could not get hurt," Evendal whispered, chastened and sad to his very marrow.
"Just so," Wytthenroeg confirmed. "I know not whether he saw you as competent to rule after him. Oft a father will tell himself and others that he but wants his son to follow his own heart. Yet all his actions, his will, those feelings unexposed to anyone, will put the lie to such sentiments; and what that man in truth wants is a younger manikin of himself. I fear that was your father, Evendal."
"Not a simple man, Mother. I yet loved him more than I hated him."
"Then his most private fear did not come to pass."
Evendal hesitated. "Mother, regardless of your and Menam's intention, harm was done."
"To whom?"
"Onkira and myself. And less directly, to my siblings. Arkedda, as certainly as Onkira, was played for a fool."
Wytthenroeg gaped. "How can you assert that?"
"Your marriage invalidates the Thronelands' covenant with the House of Mulhassoir. A covenant entered into in good faith by Arkedda, but in what evinced as bad faith by Osedys through Menam's machinations. Ambitious or not, Onkira was a sacrifice, one trebly unwelcome."
"Nonsense! She made herself unwelcome."
Evendal shook his head. "Her personality, her cavalier treatment of everyone, did not endear her, true. But personality is irrelevant in this. Menam did not want her; he insulted her and her family by going through the rites of marriage while already bound to you. He never accepted responsibility for the ramifications of his deception, offered no consolations and no consideration. And Osedys had no use for her except as Arkedda's sacrifice, the lone representative of a people we narrow-mindedly and short-sightedly consider narrow-minded and short-sighted.
"Danlienn, have you all that?"
The rotund scribe did not immediately answer, marking and blotting industriously. "Aye, Your Majesty."
With a start, Wytthenroeg scowled in examination of the young man. "Your Majesty, have I your grace to converse with your scribe?"
"Mother, you have Our leave to speak freely with whomever you need."
"Master Danlienn, or do you hight Your Serene Highness Prince Danlienn?"
The man winced. "I acknowledge no such dignities here, Your Grace. 'Master Danlienn' is ample honour."
That the fellow returned volley without moulting a feather augured well. "Master Danlienn, how do you see the matter? Do you know aught of the lady under discussion?"
Danlienn responded promptly, with a veneer of calm belied only by telltale dampness on his tunic. "I recall my uncle and father often toasted Her Royal Highness's health, but always with a comment of relief included, such as 'health and life to her -- as she's not here to trouble ours.' She was just a name to me, growing up."
"And would that have been true for your brother?"
"Of course. But Your Grace knows that what His Majesty said is the vital truth. The Royal Highness Princess Onkira, in that moment and treaty, was Arkedda. What she has or has not accomplished since will not lessen the ignominy. Prodigal redress offered before it is demanded would be wise, Your Majesty... Your Grace."
Wytthenroeg conceded. "However much I would it were otherwise, your advice is sound, Master Danlienn."
"I concur, Mother." Evendal's glow dimmed. "Master Danlienn?"
"Your Majesty?"
"In your notes to your august liege, include the details of this discourse. Cap the tale off with Our assessment of Osedys' culpability. It may be that your brother knows some means by which We could atone. We would not insult Our brother Prince with a cask of pearls where bread for his vassals would better serve."
Danlienn opened his mouth, then reconsidered and bent his head to his task.
"Speak, Master Scribe."
Clearly expecting censure to follow, Danlienn obeyed. "Her Grace's very presence inspires the reminder of one measure that Arkedda might welcome without debate."
Evendal smirked. "Fine, course, grey, or white?"
Relieved, Danlienn mirrored the smirk and countered with a daringly inclusive "Yes."
Wytthenroeg baulked at her concession being presumed. "The labour is done by my people. The product is mine to sell or gift, under that constraint."
"Before we apportion resources that may not be asked of us, let Us commune with the Majesty of Arkedda. We shall wait on his pleasure."
The Temple rang out the ninth bell of day.
(151) 5 ft. 6 in. and 98 lbs. (152) 6 ft. 4 in. and 210 lbs. (153) Chapter 14 (154) Swamp workers, salt farmers. (155) http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/SOU_STE/SPY_from_to_spy_or_espy_0_Fr_e.html (156) The Game of Court: The playing of chess with living people and groups. (157) ~Approximates the month of October in the northern hemisphere.~ (158) The Late Militia Comptroller; chapter 10. (159) Grk. - Contest, conflict, personal trial or psychomachia.