The Way of Shadows
Page 83“Well, what are you supposed to do? Have another son?”
Agon looked queasy. “Sort of.”
The queen said, “We need someone who’s popular enough to win the people’s trust back to the throne, and whose claim to the crown would be beyond dispute.”
Logan looked at him and sudden understanding washed over him. Emotions warred on his face. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Yes, I do,” the queen said quietly. “Logan, has your father ever spoken of me?”
“Only in terms of highest praise, Your Majesty.”
“Your father and I were betrothed, Logan. For ten years, we knew we were going to marry. We fell in love. We named the children we would someday have. The king was dying without heirs, and our marriage was to have secured the throne for House Gyre. Then my father betrayed Regnus and broke his word to your grandfather by marrying me in secret to Aleine Gunder. There were only enough witnesses present to ensure the legality of the marriage. I wasn’t even allowed to send a message to your father beforehand. The king lived for another fourteen years, long enough for me to have children, long enough for your father to marry and have you, long enough for your father to take control of House Gyre. Long enough for House Gunder to fabricate some ridiculous history that supposedly gave Aleine the right to be called Aleine IX, as if he were a legitimate king. When King Davin died, your father could have gone to war to take the throne. He could have won it, but he didn’t, for my sake and the sake of my children.
“I was sold into a marriage I despised, Logan, to a man I never loved, and for whom I could never make love grow in my breast. I know what it is to be sold for politics. I even know my literal price in the lands and titles my family secured after the king’s death.” There was iron in her as she spoke, clearly, calmly, every inch the queen. “I still love your father, Logan. We’ve barely spoken in twenty-five years. He had to marry a Graesin after I married a Gunder, just to keep House Gyre from becoming isolated and wiped out like the Makells were. He accepted a marriage that I’ve heard had little love in it. So if you think it pleases me to do to you what was done to me, you couldn’t be more mistaken.”
“I have hope that your marriage will not be the agony mine has been,” Queen Gunder said.
Logan put his face in his hands. “Your Majesty, words can’t express the . . . fury I feel toward Serah. But I gave her father my word that I would marry her.”
“The king can legally dissolve such bonds for the good of the realm,” Agon said.
“The king can’t dissolve my honor!” Logan said. “I swore! And dammit! I still love Serah. I still love her. It’s all playacting, isn’t it? What’s the plan, that the king adopt me? That I be his heir until you bear him another son?”
“This playacting gets us through a crisis, son,” Agon said. “And it keeps your family from being destroyed. You have to stay alive if you want that to happen. It also happens to save you from disgrace and prison, even if we’re wrong about the plot.”
“Logan,” the queen said, her voice again quiet. “It isn’t playacting, but we’ve convinced the king that it is. He is a despicable man, and if it’s up to him, he will never let Regnus’s son take the throne.”
“Your Majesty,” Agon interrupted. “Logan doesn’t need to—”
He said nothing.
“Most men would leap at the chance for such power,” Agon said. “Of course, most men make terrible kings. We know you wouldn’t ask for this, but you aren’t only the right man for it; you’re the only man for it.”
“Logan was the name Regnus and I had decided on for our first son,” the queen said. “I know what I’m asking, Logan. And I’m asking.”
47
The game wasn’t going well. The pieces were spread out before Dorian like armies. Except that they weren’t like armies; they were armies, though in this game, few of the soldiers wore uniforms. Even those who did moved with reluctance. The Fool King shamed the Commander. The Reluctant King was kneeling somewhere at this moment. The Mage in Secret’s secret had split him from the King Who Might Have Been. The Shadow that Walks and the Courtesan couldn’t decide which side they were on. The Rent Boy was moving fast, but too slow, too slow. The Prince of Rats had marshaled his vermin, and they would rise from the Warrens, a tide of human filth. Even the Rogue Prince and the Blacksmith might play a part, if. . . .
Blast! It was hard enough, just envisioning the pieces as they were. From there, he could often focus on one piece and see the choices it faced: the Commander as a drunk king shouted in his face, the Shadow that Walks as he faced the Apprentice in a honeymoon chamber. But just as he was fixing the pieces in space, setting their relative positions, he’d start seeing one or more at a different time. Seeing where the Blacksmith would be in seventeen years, stooped over a forge, urging his son back to work, didn’t do him any good in figuring out how to keep Feir alive until that day.
He went back to work. Now where was the Kidnapped?
“Open the door, quick,” Dorian said.
Feir looked up from the little table where he was seated, dragging a whetstone across the face of his sword. They were in a little house they’d rented off Sidlin where Dorian said they would be left alone. Feir rose and opened the door.
A man was just disappearing past it, walking determinedly down the street. His hair and gait were familiar. He must have seen something out of the corner of his eye—of course, the blond mountain that was Feir was hard to miss—because he turned on his heel, his hand dropping to his sword.
“Feir?”
Feir looked almost as surprised as Solon was, so Dorian said, “Both of you, inside.”
They came in, Feir giving a customary grumble about how Dorian never told him anything, and Dorian just smiling. So much to see, so much to know. It was easy to miss things right under your nose.
“Dorian!” Solon said. He embraced his old friend. “I ought to wring your neck. Do you know how much trouble your little ‘Lord Gyre’ bit cost me?”