Page 9 of Beyond

“We’ll see. I like where this is going, though,” Hakkon replied, and speared an apple with his knife. “Brianta is too good a squire to waste on a dolt, or worse, someone who would try to take advantage of the situation. And I do need a squire.”

“Then assign her to yourself. If her parents object, send them to me.”

Hakkon grinned. “They won’t. They prefer to think about Brianta as little as possible. Oh, they’ll be happy enough when she’s knighted, I am sure, since she’ll have a proper position in the world, but right now, she’s just the odd girl that isn’t much of a marriage prospect. Awkward for everyone. So am I correct in thinking you want Restil as Isla’s personal page?”

“Yes, sir, you are correct!” Kordas laughed, getting Isla’s side-glance. “It’s about time she had her own page.”

“It’s about time she had more than that, but your lady wife is the most difficult person I have ever met to get her to sit back and let other people do things for her,” Hakkon grumbled. “She’d be out there in the kitchen garden troweling herbs if I let her.”

The twinkle in Isla’s eyes told Kordas that she’d heard every word of that and was greatly amused by it, but she chose to turn back to her sister rather than address it.

Kordas and Hakkon continued to talk through the meal, though much of it was coded. It was fairly safe to talk openly here, but Kordas was not taking any chances that someone might decide to try Farseeing or a scrying spell on them as they ate. Unlikely—but possible. Besides, he and Hakkon had gotten used to phrasing their conversations with double-meanings, and in the Empire, that was a good habit to keep.

Although Kordas did not know Hakkon’s full story—that had died with Kordas’s mother, the Lady Lyantha, and Hakkon himself didn’t know most of it—he knew enough. Lyantha’s sister had run off with someone in a situation almost exactly like the popular song “Black Jack Davy.” Unfortunately their idyll had not lasted very long. She turned up with a toddler in tow about two years after Lyantha had married Lord Valdemar. She had come here, to the manor, knowing she was not welcome back home. Lord and Lady Valdemar would have taken her in, no questions asked, no shaming and no blaming, but she had merely begged them to take Hakkon into their household, and vanished again. Had she gone back to her lover, once she no longer had a child to worry about? No one knew; she had never been heard from again.

Lyantha had added Hakkon to the household pod of children, then taken him as her page. Lord Valdemar might have been considering legitimizing Hakkon as his heir, but while Hakkon was still among the pages, Kordas had been born.

And from that point, there had never been any question but that Hakkon was going to become Kordas’s protector and guide once the Emperor summoned him.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, as Hakkon carefully peeled his apple in one single strip, “I’ve never asked you if you resented being made my watchdog for all those years at Court.”

Hakkon snorted. “You could not pay me enough to put up with the never-ending stream of garbage that comes out of the Court,” he said immediately. “There is no title high enough to compensate for having to deal with that conniving toad on the Conquest Throne. Besides—”

He put the knife and the apple down, and half-turned to stare directly into Kordas’s eyes.

“—your sainted mother and your kind father took me in and treated me like their own. They never allowed anyone to shame me for what I was. Your father knighted me in secret, did you know that? When you knighted me, it was actually for the second time. When we came home because he was dying, he took me aside, and told me that if I wanted to stay at Valdemar, he’d order you to make me your Seneschal, but if I wanted to be on my own, he’d make a provision in his will to have the income from one of the manor farms and three of the Chargers, so I could go take up arms anywhere I cared to, or I could settle down with someone of my choice. And he said someone, not ‘a lady.’ So …you know, he knew.”

“He told me.”

“Well, I never knew for certain if he had or not.” Hakkon picked up the apple again, and started slicing bits off, eating them carefully. “We’re family, Kordas. You’re my brother. You’ve never treated me as anything less, not even when we were at the Court and you could have ingratiated yourself with those entitled brats and used me as your pet attack-dog.” He cracked a crooked smile. “Besides, this means that these days you get to stand between me and Imperial trouble. I call that fair.”

“Good point.” He finished the last oatcake and waved off the page offering more. “If you’re done murdering that apple with a thousand cuts, want to climb Jonaton’s tower with me?”

“But of course.” Hakkon got up first, but Kordas wasn’t far behind him. It was going to be a very long walk. Jonaton had his lair in the very top of the tallest of the Valdemar manor towers. And only those who were close enough to the Emperor’s favor were permitted the smaller, local Portals that would enable them to walk from the ground floor into the top of a tower.

There were three other mages in this tower, but Jonaton was the most powerful and had seniority, and got the set of rooms with the best view. That also meant there were two other mages between him and trouble, should trouble decide to come looking for him. He had been the first mage that Kordas had ever met as a child just out of the nursery, and he vividly recalled running into the man in a hallway and being startled half out of his wits by the apparition that had blown by him in a flurry of rufle and lace-trimmed, embroidered robes all in colors that had never been found in nature.

The staircase here was contained, to give the inhabitants of the tower as much privacy as possible. It was lit by day by tiny slit windows, and by night by mage-lights that came alight when the staircase darkened. They ran into the first tenant on the stairs themselves; the youngest mage in the manor and once Jonaton’s apprentice. The lad did not copy his mentor’s sartorial splendor; long gray half-robes, gray tunic, and gray hose. Pelias squeezed himself against the wall so they could pass. “Are there oatcakes for breakfast?” the teenager asked, hopefully.

“With clotted cream and jam,” Kordas told him, and the young man pelted down the stairs they had just taken with an energy and enthusiasm that made Hakkon sigh.

“If only youth could be bottled,” his cousin said. “No, wait, the Emperor can—”

“But would you want it at that price?” Kordas countered.

“Hrrm. Youth siphoned off young criminals? Depends on the criminal, I suppose,” Hakkon replied. “A murderer, I’d be fine with that. A pickpocket, not so much.”

“Sooner or later you run out of murderers,” Kordas pointed out, as they encountered the second inhabitant of the tower, who had paused at the entrance to the stairs. “Morning, Siman.”

“Good morning, my lord.” Siman was old, but still vigorous, and was dressed. “I intuit by the rapidly fading footsteps of young Pelias that there are oatcakes for breakfast.”

“Your intuition is correct, as ever.” Kordas made space for the elder mage to pass. “There were still plenty when we left.”

“Good. If the sounds I heard at an unholy hour this morning are anything to go by, I believe Jonaton has good news for you, and the rest of us are about to put your father’s plan into action.”

Kordas felt his eyes widen with surprise, and he put out a hand to stop Siman and ask him more, but the mage was already out of sight and reach around the turn of the stair.

“Do you know anything about this?” he demanded of Hakkon.