Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:02:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Kris Gibbons <bookwyrm6@yahoo.com>
Subject: SongSpell-47

I am back.

This story is a work of fiction. It contains descriptions of, and expressions
of, physical affection without regard for affectional orientation. 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 on any other site without the direct consent of the
author.

My thanks to Dr. Grant for his prodding and encouragement.

I can be contacted at Bookwyrm6@yahoo.com

Copyright 2009 Kristopher R. Gibbons All rights reserved by the author.


                              Chapter 47

Menenius: Do not cry havoc, where you should but hunt with modest warrant.

                                                  Coriolanus Act III, Sc. 1


     The King sat and waited, choosing not to leave the room until he saw
Ddronhelim more comfortably ensconced.
     As some of the royal companions watched, Karondeo strode down the steps
of the dais, walked to a tubular extrusion along one of the walls and studied
it. Up close, the 'accent' resembled a mound such as those made by a mole the
width of two fingers burrowing in dirt. The seaman pressed his hand to a
runnel of unyielding stone, then quickly jerked back cold-stung fingers.
"M'Alismogh?"
     "Come away,...beloved," the King bade. "Whatever is afoot is now the
purview of Kul, or Anlota Oseidh."
     Counter to the King's expressed desires, Karondeo stood and waited,
choosing not to leave this curiosity unexamined.
     "Is there ought I can do to assuage your concern?" Evendal ald'Menam's
expression moulted not a feather, gave no sign of amusement or displeasure.
     The mariner was beginning to dislike his King's gambler's grin.(302) "I
wonder at the purpose of these...cocoons. And so ask what it is you know that
makes you evoke two disparate powers in your ascription?"
     M'Alismogh replied, after a fashion. "Though We did not note their every
emergence, We have no doubt Our song provoked these...alterations, along with
a consequence to them that We cannot yet see. Until We are informed to the
contrary, We do not name these ephemera hazard."
     Evendal's aberrant tone of indifference irritated Drussilikh. "And you
have no concern what might harbour within these additions? Or what they might
bode for a much trafficked room?"
     The King leaned forward as if to reply, but then relaxed back,
perversely resistant. He had said all he would to the Matron for the moment
as regards the chamber.
     Exuding her usual sober intensity, Drussilikh approached the dais. "Your
Majesty?"
     Evendal barely declined his head -- wary permission for his ally to
approach -- but said naught.
     Drussilikh chose to treat her liege's silence as opportunity. "Your
Majesty assesses with a certainty not shared. Might Your Majesty resolve a
confusion I struggle with? One well within Your Majesty's purview?"
     The glowing skin about his lids tensed, but the King nodded.
     The Matron paused in reflection, working her perturbation into honeyed
words; being most cautious where it mattered least. "Your Majesty's authority
is singular, broaching areas of congress I never thought accessible. You have
adapted lyric with consequence that no one could have prepared for: Fearsome
figures out of cautionary tales have erupted from the aether responding to
you. You have forced truth from those whom it would ill serve. To my
everlasting joy you compelled memories into phantasms and beleaguered the
senses of a stonehearted dastard, rescuing my brother from a slow and ignoble
death."
     Feeling a strong urge to back away though seated against solid stone,
Evendal spoke in a tone higher than usual, querulous even to his ears. "I
mistrust effusions of gratitude, Mistress."
     Karondeo rolled his eyes at the understatement, even as he made note of
m'Alismogh's forbearance. He knew of no one who suffered a listing of their
own accomplishments less charitably.
     "They shall not season my petition, Your Majesty." Drussilikh smirked,
amused at the idea of her gushing out thanks. "Prior to each spelling that I
did attend, Your Majesty's semblance was that of someone innocent of his
capacities but willing for whatever might result in their exercise. Yet in
the rowen,(303) Your Majesty was the very mould for the phlegmatic. Your
countenance bore no tincture of curiosity or surprise; you offered no
uncertainty or awe or wonderment. What passion I witnessed from you, the
Singer, was in this hall, when your Song subdued Kernost. Wherefore?"
     Though to all appearances still engaged by his curiosity, Karondeo's re-
examining of the wall nearest him was pure and poor pretence. He knew where
this woman's peregrination could wander to, having been there before with
m'Alismogh. He had told Evendal, when they were aboard Swan Song, that
deciding whether or not to return to the Thronelands had been their only
divisive argument; that had been a grand simplification on Karondeo's part.
     Prior to his self-exile, whenever he felt frustrated by his father or a
crewmember, Karondeo addressed them directly and forthrightly. Likewise when
he felt any degree or combination of the five emotions,(304) he voiced it
promptly. That any honourable life might legitimately call for the hiding of
feelings or ignorance had seemed a perilous path to the brash seaman; a
seaman's fellows had to know him well or someone died overestimating him.
     Evendal and Alta had required he adapt.
     A man of the sea, Karondeo faced mysteries daily, learning early from
Alekrond's example how to let them be. The sea was a repository with the
might and right to keep her wonders unmolested. But when m'Alismogh became
more than an acquaintance, Karondeo had difficulty granting him the same
dignity as he did the ocean. Karondeo eventually realised it was a simple
habit of thought of no inherent virtue for him to ignore the mysteries he met
daily, and quite a different matter to live every day as one.
     In the wake of this odd epiphany, Karondeo yet allowed for change
grudgingly. One old plaint of Karondeo's, old in his overuse of it the first
year of their greater acquaintance, was his insistence that m'Alismogh should
leave off pretending to human innocence and simply Sing the obedience and
love he desired of his subject humans.
     After an explosive series of short 'discussions,' and some unpleasant,
dwoemer-laced confrontations between m'Alismogh and crew, Karondeo came to
recognise that what he took as the prince's policy -- a pretence of
possessing the same limitations and perceptions as those around him -- though
indeed pretence, was not policy.
     Evendal's thoughts and feelings (those that eventuated into the royal
disposition Drussilikh so baulked against) were, too often, labyrinthine for
Karondeo.
     M'Alismogh did not know how to knot rope, and despite obvious and
repeated effort on his part, never learned. He could cook but could not start
a fire. He treated with everyone as with an equal or as with someone of
higher station, but his anger, his hurt, and his unadmitted times of self-
doubt, came out in arrogant speech and hauteur. In the face of other people's
hurt or sorrow, he kept silent. When someone got angry with him, he kept
silent. If asked his opinion, he gave it as if giving the definitive truth.
But when someone challenged him, he kept silent. He preferred to work alone,
whether it was scraping barnacles or tarring sections of the hull, and worked
without comment or complaint once he knew what was expected. But he worked
well, if silently and single-mindedly, with others. He would wake crew up in
the darker bells of the night or morning to talk about frivolities, and not
grasp the cause for their ire. He would sit for bells fascinated by the
infants and toddlers aboard ship, but vehemently refused to tend them. He
would eat what was given him, with comment but without protest, whether his
body could suffer it or not. Unless given direct permission, m'Alismogh could
not bear sitting in comfort were anyone in the same space standing.
     Except in matters that Karondeo later learned touched on some intimate
fear or worry, m'Alismogh's habit was to defer to others, more particularly
to Karondeo. After three separate melees against aggressive Altan families, a
wounded m'Alismogh tended crew and ship until he collapsed. The reason he
gave for not desisting was that they claimed Karondeo's love and were,
therefore, m'Alismogh's primary responsibility. This was how m'Alismogh
behaved at first: give every gust of his life's breath for those he saw as in
his care, but not hobnob with them or admit his care for them.
     With his crew alternating between complaining and divulging, Karondeo
began to perceive some of what m'Alismogh was afraid to admit and some of
what the prince did not even know he was ignorant of. In turn, Karondeo
struggled quietly to permit Evendal his private uncertainties and public
eccentricities. The mariner also struggled with a great impotent fury toward
the late Menam of Osedys.
     Karondeo used to joke that he was amazed m'Alismogh knew how to greet
someone properly, so ignorant was he of social protocol beneath his royal
estate; and even the crew knew the mariner was both jesting and in earnest.
     Evendal heard the Matron's talk as so much babble. Had the guild-
mistress not been in this very room during the first Council of his reign?
Had she not been a passenger on the same ship he had sailed on today? She had
witnessed his rage and grief and fear. Amply. "Perhaps I,...We, do not ken
the question."
     The Matron prepared to cast again. "Your Majesty. Do your songs throw
you into an ecstasy? Do they impose this...dispassion upon you?"
     Evendal's wits turned dull with the reiteration; his mind, commonly
steady and quick, for the moment ran short.(305) "An ecstasy?" he asked. The
phrase stood out. "I don't know that any genius but Grief has ever unmanned
me, Mistress."
     Drussilikh briefly frowned at what she saw as a poor attempt to foil
her. "Such dissembling does not guide me to what I seek, Your Majesty. Except
to suggest that you ever bear a free heart. And that in turn tells me your
silence and stolid mien are deliberate. But are they genuine nonetheless?"
     Sygkorrin turned from testing Ddronhelim to stare in surprise at the
Kohermarthen. Gwl-lethry likewise bent Drussilikh's way, his head bowed to
hide his sudden concern for her. The Majesty of Osedys, however green, was
not someone a guild-mistress took to task.
     Urhlysha gave every appearance of dozing outright in Innocents' Row, but
his utter stillness betrayed him.
     Aldul, from the more oligarchic South, did not recognise what could
qualify as effrontery toward a monarch absolute. He alone sat in genuine
ease, eyes slitted, seemingly content to muse by the restored fire.
     The humming of blood in Evendal's ears spoke of a passion such as the
guildmistress might want evidence for, but he did not delineate it. Fear?
Fury? Sorrow? Whatever the emotion or admixture, it commanded more of Evendal
than his public goodwill did and roused his obduracy. The Matron's repeated
querying was drawing a blank.(306) What did she truly need of him? "We have no
other answer We can give. We would advise you to confer with Her Eminence,
Matron, or Master Aldul."
     Oblivious to her lord's perturbation, Drussilikh gave no thought to
relenting. "Even an assay at clarity from you would help to reassure me, Your
Majesty."
     Reassure her? He had just executed the royal who had tried to raise and
overshadow him, adjudicated between self-involved landowners, and barely
managed to not kill one of his own who had come to him in need. Surely this
pedestrian concern could wait. "Why are the seasons of Our countenance so
vital to your own, good Matron? Can we not defer this complexity?"
     But the Matron had suffered five years under a prevaricator
extraordinaire; the urge to pursue, engendered in her by Polgern's plots,
lingered. "What complexity? I do not know how to make the mountain rivulet of
my humble importunity any clearer. Will you not speak to the point, and allay
my worry?"
     Urhlysha lost the struggle to keep his lips from pursing in a smirk of
admiration -- and gloating -- over the brass his office's traditional gadfly
was displaying. The aged magistrate remained immobile, with eyes shut;
prepared to maintain his somnolent fiction against any chance that the King
might involve him in this converse. The magistrate could ill afford even
rumour implicating him in a guild-mistress's shaming. The notorious ill will
between the guilds and the mediators of the King's Law needed no excuses,
flaring into conflict sempiternally.
     The King looked to Kri-estaul, but his son was talking sotto voce with
Ierwbae.
     Danlienn, with Lialityne, intently counted sheaves and examined nubs.
     Karondeo alone, ravenous of mien, had taken to staring at the Throne but
Evendal felt diffident about engaging him.
     For all his occasional egalitarian behaviours, Evendal did not notice
the shock or loyal dismay on the faces of Lin-kaelug, Par-shetope or Ierwbae.
     With no other entreaties or supplicants to interrupt them, or intercede
for him, the King yet hoped to check the Matron's spurious enquiry. He
enlarged on an implication from the woman's diatribe so that she would
believe him mindfully attentive, rather than dull-witted from weariness and
hurt. "When have I ever been silent or...indifferent?"
     Herself alert, the Matron of the Scriveners had noted her King's
meandering eye. To watch her liege scrounge so blatantly for a distraction
offended. Sorely. His Majesty's inexplicable evasions served only to
frustrate her, so Drussilikh abandoned any further attempts at delicacy. His
Majesty's last bit of pabulum did not warrant acknowledgement. "Each time
after you sing, your face and speech admit no affect, as if you have already
anticipated all ensuing consequences. Have you? Do you?"
     Foundering in the thickets of honesty, Evendal stubbornly refused the
Matron's drag hunt.(307)
     "I, We, do not follow."
     It was a denial, the setting of a boundary, not a request for clarity.
The words spoke themselves, and Evendal knew they could be misapprehended but
let them stand.
     For Drussilikh the King's sentence had no freight. She kept a calm and
steady gaze assuming, blithely, that she possessed the King's ear and with it
the royal forbearance.(308) "Is your manner before each glamour your true face?
Or do you ken well beforehand not only the lyric to sing but how each song
will provide? Was your labour with Lialityne this past bell nothing but a
dumb show?"
     It seemed Gwl-lethry was not half as ready as the Matron in the use of
hyperbole.
     Evendal did not know what to say, whether to be gracious. A 'friend of
the King' was now asking, indirectly, if he knew what would come to pass. His
own future. Her's. Did she think him a liar after some fashion? Did she truly
think he would have allowed Kri-estaul on the dais during that first Court
had he any hint of Kernost's treason?
     No. Most likely, Drussilikh had no thought of what the answer to her
question might suggest.
     No. They had been of one mind in the immediate aftermath of Kernost's
knifing. She had grieved with him at his most vulnerable. Surely she
remembered that. How his 'Songmastery' -- lacking rhyme, rhythm or scan in
the midst of his fury and pain -- had worked against Kernost. He thought the
latest effort over Darhelmir had demonstrated clearly enough for any witness
that his heart must be engaged, that he must know some passion, or his song-
spells would provide nothing but expelled wind. Had no one else gleaned that?
     To Evendal's gratification, Aldul, Sygkorrin, Ierwbae and Karondeo were
now eyeing the noverint.(309) What had drawn their attentions, Evendal did not
know, but they had, for the moment, quit pretending at other occupation.
Ierwbae indeed looked the most troubled.
     The King sensed an undertone of anxiety from his companions that
actually eased his own. Looking on Drussilikh stirred a bundle of impulses
and, over them all, an anger that came to buoy him.
     "I, We, do not follow. We have offered you Our honest recommendation,
Matron. We advised you to speak with Her Eminence, or Master Aldul, if your
own memory is failing you so. And We shall say no more to you on the
subject."
     Evendal maintained sense enough to know embarrassment for both
Drussilikh's treatment of him and his of her. The Mistress of Scriveners
would see his refusal to confide or enlighten as a poor return for the gift
of a son and heir wrenched from her newly-softened heart. But the prospect of
engaging this oak-skulled woman to no good purpose niggled, added to the
spark of anger she had ignited in him.
     The darkly amusing aspect -- in this contest that the Matron pressed on
him -- was that his advice to her was pertinent. Were Drussilikh to counsel
with Sygkorrin, or with Aldul who knew him best, she might nose out the
clarity she claimed to want. But he himself refused to help her gain those
ends toward which her insecurities sent her hopping.
    That 'scribe within' that Anlota had once alluded to struck Evendal with
foreboding and dread, warned him against cosseting Drussilikh on this. He
would find himself striving to justify a personal ritual, one that had
fashioned itself out of his need to face down that faceless enormity -- his
Song-mastery. Such behaviours justified themselves in a person's life or
dissolved, forgotten. What Drussilikh wanted flushed from its covert was
m'Alismogh's halidom for coping in times when his fear of his Songmastery was
equal to his need for it. It wanted no interpreter to fathom the Matron's
motives, but Evendal refused to think on those.
     The multiplicity of tasks that this day had hoisted on him was
staggering. And he had wards and nobles still to settle.(310) Evendal m'Alismogh
felt excessively tired; too slug-like to really worry over his stranger
privileges as Drussilikh demanded he do.
     Instead, Evendal considered the company he surrounded himself with.
     Ierwbae and Kri-estaul aside, expectations had been met. Dan-lienn, his
royal brother willing, would continue to quietly prosper here; likewise
Sygkorrin, with the Temple now free from praetorial threat. Urhlysha could
contentedly adjudicate within his domain, once Evendal winnowed the
magisterium. Bruddbana would soon be an absurdly happy and demonstrative
father, Haemon was engrossed in labour that completed him, and the twins
would rediscover life's joy soon enough. The Dowager need fear no man now and
Aldul...Evendal could not think what satisfaction the Kwo-edan gathered from
living in a realm that became a wintery torture-chamber, but Aldul seemed to
find some nonetheless.
     One worry stilled Evendal's brief impulse to burrow into an illusion of
bonhomie and complicity with the few around him: Would these recipients of
his trust and magnanimity follow Drussilikh's example and 'suddenly' cry
havoc over some aspect of their fey King's constitution? Did they already
question his fitness?
     For Menam's heir the concern was cogent and history-freighted.

     His father had ruled, regularly beset by merchants and guildmasters
tearing at his sovereignty. Or so Evendal remembered matters. The compagnies
and guilds of the city plagued Menam over tariffs and market-tolls; taxes and
fees agreed upon six reigns past that the merchants yet brought before each
ruler since, in vain hope of a different decision. As kings before him had
done, Menam oversaw the dissemination of the liberties particular to the
portus and vicus(311) with a miser's eye and hand.
     The mercatus countered -- as they always had -- with hoary broadsides
and block-book pamphlets printed anonymously and distributed generously.
Efforts meant to incite, not convince. Pressed on cheap rag were almost
perennial phrases full of injured merit against the despotism of an un-named
regnant king: Attacks on the royal's suitability. That he wasted the
thesaurus on unspecified frivolities. That he had refused his assent to laws,
ones 'wholesome and necessary for the public good.' That he had forbidden the
Council to pass laws of evident importance, unless suspended in their
operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, had
utterly neglected them. The plaints did not fit any situation then current.
The language in most of the works was genuinely archaic.
     A few sturdier pamphlets, however, deviated from the traditional
republican plaints with more contemporary fare, boldly naming the objects of
their despite: mock-poetic attacks on King Menam's virility, specifically the
paternity of his heir. And complaints that, by his marriage, he colluded to
annex Osedys to Arkedda.
     Unlike the verbal arrows more accurately released by his despising
bride, the anonymous barbs against Menam's manhood tore at the King's sang-
froid. Evendal never learned the wherefore. And when Menam got mood-wracked,
unmanned by a melancholy, he would sit comfortless in the unlit Council
Chamber, brooding and drinking. These solitary considerations occurred once
or twice a year and lasted three to six days. The Prince either heeded their
warning signs and found occupation outside the Palace or found himself
volunteered to act as his father's shadow; as silent as his father, seeming
empathetic, and never more than arm's length away.
     Menam stayed morose during the ascendancy of these humours, pitiless
with intruders and uncaring toward his own person. Even so, a few courtiers
would choose those times to all but trespass the Circle of Presence in order
to accost the King over foolishness. It was as if they wanted to make sure
the King saw them and marked them his friends -- which he never did(312) -- or
they enjoyed the spectacle of the King in his wretchedness. Their obsequium
grated, their battening condescension soured Evendal's stomach, especially as
he suspected that the same courtiers were in some way responsible for those
catalytic leaflets.
     Only in the last two years of his father's life did Evendal's awareness
maintain anything like an adult's maturity; feel something beyond self-
absorption. Evendal did not understand the source of his father's turmoil at
all, but during the forced sittings with Menam in the last seasons before
Mausna, he came to respect his father's pain. Seeing misery so whelm this
violent, self-serving aenigma frustrated Evendal, kept him from the easy
luxury of hating his sire. Sitting in dimness, with no book at hand or person
to converse with, Evendal had many bells to study the father he yet judged as
backward and limited. In the enforced silence, with no one to chastise him
for a contrary thought of his own, he had privately acknowledged an old,
child's misjudgement: His father was not, solely, a windbag of fury and
dissatisfaction.
     Menam sat overtaken but fully aware of what motivated those courtiers
who visited him like parvenus ogling the vagaries of the Palace. To Evendal's
adolescent heart, the Court his father guided and presided over seemed
nothing but a skulk of foxes. While he recalled the flush of shame he felt --
that these shade-traders(313) would play his father so -- what Evendal did not
recognise was how those evenings playing Menam's barnacle sowed a fierce if
inconsistent sensitivity in him towards the royal dignity.

     Regardless of its origin, Evendal's anxiety abided, ever ready to beget
others and pile them one atop another:
     How quickly would the uncertainties of his companions speed to the
predatory?
     If he professed the extent of his mystification and ignorance, how could
they not think him a dangerous fool?
     How soon before fear of him and rage at him replaced trust and honour?
     Four times Drussilikh had prettily asked a question of him and he had
not granted her an answer. The motive for his silence would not matter; word
of it would outrun the wind to every ear in her manour and craft. The urge to
dissemble was strong, though his heart baulked at lying openly merely for the
Matron's comfort.
     Evendal had worked to keep himself honest when dealing with people. He
chose to offer intrinsic rewards to others rather than titles and honours --
because the intangibles mattered more to him. He refused to lie outright to
those he spoke with, and left no one uncertain of their standing with him.
     But 'memory grows short with food in the belly,' or once needs are met.
     Different worries chased each other's tails with escalating fervour,
each one more sad. When the confusion became all that his mind reverberated
with, like the spoor of too many animals crossing his line, Evendal closed
his eyes and pretended to deafness. The gesture helped him -- however briefly
-- to subsume the pricking demands and uncertainties he felt surrounding him.
One sharp surprise of perception and he swallowed the petty worries of rule
in the trust he knew others had in him.
     Savouring the bronze dimness behind his eyelids, he forced three slow
breaths. And nearly escaped into a doze.
     With one exception, the King's companions had returned to their poses of
interrupted pre-occupation. Blatantly watchful since Drussilikh first accused
Evendal of dissembling, Karondeo had waited to see what his beloved might do
or refuse to do; what -- if anything -- the young ruler had retained of their
purportedly forgotten past, apropos of Drussilikh's demands and escalation.
He did not doubt m'Alismogh. And he had been a seaman long enough to witness
wound-caused amnesia in others, and long enough to see memory re-emerge in
unanticipated ways. The sanguine Nikraan happily acknowledged that
m'Alismogh's annoying patience toward people had survived to the present.
     For the Matron, her King's arbitrary decision goaded her into contumacy.
The King would answer her, and straightly! "Then what can we expect from Your
Majesty? Shall each of us find ourselves encompassed in stone or ice before
this day is passed?" Her assayal rang out, the Chamber was still good
acoustically, but it also rang out defensive, shrewish.
     The urge to submit, to obey, to respond to her want was insidious. It
spoke to him as a radical impulse, 'second nature,' the thing that was most
right, for him, to do. Almost, Evendal spoke to assuage her alarm. Almost.
But the lie stung in the royal mouth and died aborning. He kept his lips
clamped and his teeth clenched; the second easiest path for him to take. As
well, it was becoming more difficult to ignore his own distress and the
insult in Drussilikh's voice and in her repeated challenges. He had worried
at the Matron and her contentment too exclusively, only peripherally aware of
another teeth-clenched personage in his boon companion.
     Softly, ever so softly, a wry bit of jocundity employing Karondeo's
voice touched the royal ears.
     "M'Alismogh. Do not suffer this feral rabbit further."
     Startled, Evendal glanced around again. His company had paused from
their varied occupations, but not to look Karondeo's way. All eyes had fixed
on the Scrivener Matron. Even Urhlysha had stirred, sitting up and shaking
his head at the woman. It seemed that no one else had heard what Evendal
m'Alismogh had.
     After a moment equivocating he dared a question of his own, "What was
your last speech, Kar...K-Karondeo?" No titles, endearments, or genteel
descriptives.
     Drussilikh, thinking herself ignored or dismissed, blushed with anger.
     Eyes cast down, Evendal idly noted how, while his left hand posed steady
just above the throne armrest, his right hand shook and swayed as in an ague.
He lowered the betraying hand onto the armrest and gripped the stone hard. It
helped. The solid feel of chill Kul-stone provided comfort.
     Alekrond's son answered in a gentle timbre. "What I said...loud enough
so that any might hear who would...was 'what is it you know that you blithely
consign this stonework to Kul and your midwife?' Or something very like.
Other goads followed, not even murmured, meant for private solace." He
pointedly did not remark whose comfort his private words were for. The look
Karondeo gave bespoke a complicity; he knew the reasons for the King's
apparent non sequitur and was willing to keep their counsel inviolate.
     Karondeo's response momentarily melted the wax of Evendal's façade. The
fountains of his eyes threatened to flood and he strove to keep his once-
loved in sight despite their blur and ache. Against his will he blinked, only
to find Karondeo on the dais and kneeling before him. The young Counsellor
gently enveloped the frozen royal hands with his own, cupped, as one offering
aid and solace. The touch of palm to palm brought a measure of calm to the
King.
     Par-shetope moved to intervene, but Ierwbae waved at him to forebear.
     "I do not ken...what I am about...at all!" m'Alismogh huffed. "I am not
as anyone I know. Such a confusion, 'Deo! So much of me says I am here to
aid, to heal myself and my people! As well I know an errant compulsion...to
act the harem-bitch.(314) I want her happy, but I will not act the minor child
pacifying the mother! I will not! What am I about?"
     "Shhh," Karondeo sounded. "Do not fash about it so. Few enough deign to
ask such questions, or to interrogate their whims. You have five limbs and a
skull, like nearly every man I have heard of." The jest passed unremarked.
"As for the moles and blights that trouble you, track them to the earth of
those years you cannot remember. Whether handily or desperately, you yet
command yourself. Quite a feat for anyone."
     "I do not know you," Evendal began baldly, wretched. "Your face disturbs
me as one I might have seen and remarked out of a sea of faces. Vaguely,
annoyingly familiar. But no more than that." He hoped, by this confession, to
discourage false expectations in the man. At the same time he wondered, and
thought he knew, what a fierce, hungry embrace would feel like from those
sun-seared arms.
     The air around Evendal's face grew warmer as the image tarried.
     The bloom to Evendal's cheeks elicited a sweet grin and defiance from
the dark seaman. "You know me," he refuted. "And I hope I continue to perturb
you for as long as you hold thought or heart."
     "You can speak to me? Without employing breath?" Evendal had netted
people's foremost thoughts or intentions before, so 'hearing' Karondeo's was
no surprise. This was, however, the first time he felt safe mentioning the
occasions to another.
     Karondeo's grin revived, but as he spoke, his slow and earnest speech
declined into the lower register. "Rather, I learned how well you hear me --
no matter how softly I speak. M'Alismogh. And I learned to rely on you doing
so. Sister to your son or no, this woman is testing you to no purpose. Be rid
of her for the day."
     Tired and tempted, Evendal yet chuckled at the idea. "She cannot know me
as you do. And so I suffer her, indulge her maybe."
     Turned away from the King, Karondeo's grin lost all mirth; a lupine
stretching of the lips that greatly troubled Drussilikh. "Give over her shell
and crown, Your Majesty, this lapwing hatched long ago. Or if you must, lend
me an attent ear and I will ease a few of...her...recurrent fears with the
succour of my vast experience and many years."
     The mariner dragged his gaze briefly toward the Matron, and then waited
on Evendal's nod. Throughout the interview, Karondeo's unwavering attitude in
relation to the Throne preserved the fiction that he addressed only the King.
But for the Master Scrivener the night-black pools of Karondeo's scorn flowed
over her so ferociously that Drussilikh felt she countered a current just by
standing in place.
     The derision Drussilikh sensed was her own construct. The dozen people
currently mortised about the Throne hummed as gnats in Karondeo's reckoning.
Like an infant in the presence of his mother, Karondeo found he could not fix
his attention for long on any figure other than m'Alismogh. Gazing upon
Evendal brought a pain to his chest. His beloved filled his awareness so that
looking away, very much aware of his truant lover's proximity, also made his
chest hurt. The only difference in the two conditions seemed to be the
sweetness of the ache. The pathetically typical tenor to his feelings did not
weaken their veridicality.
     The force of Karondeo's regard translated into an earnest, unvarnished
manner that made it impossible for Evendal to ignore or deny the certainty in
the man's speech. "My honoured lord is not moonstruck. Your Majesty is not
some daemon or genius miming Hramal."
     Kri-estaul started on hearing, from this huge and suddenly intent man, a
terrible fear he harboured about himself.
     "I never knew for how long you were cleped 'm'Alismogh,' but there was
no day -- since we first shared drink in Alta -- that you imposed on us any
pretence as to your accidents or essence."
     The Matron tried to rebuff. "His Majesty does not admit to such
outright, but his manner..."
     Unheeding, Karondeo continued over the interruption, summoning the
assent of Urhlysha, Ierwbae, Parshetope and Aldul with a glance. "The Matron
is mistaken. We who love Your Majesty find no cause for doubt, before or
after any coda. What your heart distils fuels the lamps of your face, whether
you are singing or mute. Whoever rests their eyes on you or peers beyond
their own need, may readily see this. That stillness you try to assume fools
only the single-minded, such as the Matron."
     The Scrivener bristled.
     "Such a trait does not diminish your authority, or the respect due Your
Majesty," Karondeo both assured and warned. His lip twisted upward on one
side in a deprecating grin. "It but distinguishes the portraiture of a true
king."
     Drussilikh took umbrage. "Does Karondeo lin'Alekrond impugn my loyalty?"
The courtier's use of the patronymic was meant to put the mongrel Nikraan in
her sense of his place.
     Karondeo shook his head, the smirk again discernible at the corner of
his lip. "I'll not impugn what I have not seen. I defy the Matron to
demonstrate wisdom and perception. She has evinced her lack of trust in Your
Majesty four times this bell. As for her honour..." He released his grip on
the King and motioned as if shoving some irrelevancy aside. "I wonder what
did she hope for from this graceless interrogation?"
     It took Drussilikh an extended moment of her own hard breaths to find
sufficient equanimity to give answer. "I would know which face is my liege's.
An innocent as to Your dwoemer's limits? Or invulnerable and fey. A
stranger."
     Spoken thus, without even the most commonplace floriation, the words
indicted. But Drussilikh, autocratic in temper and confirmed in it by her
premature ascension to Scrivener governance, did not recognise any
presumption in her words. She stood in the hectic poise of the honest, all
impatience to be quit of the buzzing fly that was Karondeo so she might
return to her query.
     Having forged herself into the Scriveners' shield against blatant
attacks from the duumvirate, the Matron dared admit no errors or retreats,
and disdained any subtleties pointed out to her as feints or fruitless
diversions -- evils best ignored, not countered. Drussilikh, by dint of her
natural disposition as well as six years' rough survival in an usurper's
court, could not long see a person of puissance and authority as aught but an
adversary; even were they presented to her on a platter with 'friend' on the
nameplate atop.
     Drussilikh's wounds became suddenly plain to the Maritime Counsellor's
heir, along with the reason for his beloved's care.
     M'Alismogh, Karondeo thought ruefully, was wrong to be patient with this
noblewoman. The Matron knew sigils, runes, fonts and inks, and probably loved
the epic cycles for their clearly defined good and evil. No doubt she learned
to rule her guild by miming the ruthless nobles of those songs. But
Drussilikh would need to be weaned from her habitude, not simply indulged
hence. It might be that she loved Evendal but, without correction, 'the King'
would repeatedly evoke twinges of distrust in a woman who constantly needed
to demonstrate her primacy over guild-members.
     With no justice to be found in provoking Drussilikh, Karondeo calmed,
and spoke to her pursuit. "Does Drussilikh inflict the face of the Matron,
that ilip-huloee(315) of iron and oak, on her brother? No, for him her façade is
all oatmeal, hugs and whispers; an ilip-huloee of a different hue. Neither
bloom is like the other, yet they both stem from her. So it is with every
man, including kings. You must be weary, Mistress, hewing at what is best not
divided."
     "I do not understand." Drussilikh protested, her voice finally honest
with frustration.
     Karondeo turned blunt, eschewing protocol in his own frustration. "Speak
with Sygkorrin, as our ruler suggested. The King is not a simple man, yet you
demand of him a simple resolve. And you have no privilege to the answer you
seek." His lips no longer displayed any hint of mirth.
     "But I would have it, and quiet my doubts."
     "My apologies, Your Majesty," Sygkorrin had had her fill of this hunt.
"Matron, did you interrogate your peers and fellow witnesses before
assaulting Osedys?"
     "Voice fears about the Saviour of the Os-te? To people eager for my
office? And what would I ask them?"
     The Priestess shook her head in dismay. Karondeo, Ierwbae and now
Sygkorrin made it clear to Evendal that Drussilikh's provocation was not only
personally objectionable, but unacceptable to others.
     Her Eminence did not feel particularly genteel. "Berating and brow-
beating your puissant sovereign is a signal of stupidity, not strength.
Asking Master Aldul did the King seem distract is a safe enough path. But
what you might have learnt would have humbled you."
     "Why would I question one who saw the same sights as I?"
     Sygkorrin scowled. "You are acting obtuse deliberately." The Priestess
raised a hand suddenly aflame and shook a blazing finger at the Matron. "You
try my patience, child."
     Drussilikh swallowed hard.
     Sygkorrin stood with a groan and strode to the edge of the dais. "What
do you see, Kohermarthen's-daughter, that has you so wan?"
     The King's brow creased in puzzlement.
     "Your hand. It burns."
     "I feel no fire. My hands look as they always have. To me. They feel
hale and as strong as my age allows them to. To me." Sygkorrin glanced at the
silent assemblage. "What does the Majesty of the Thronelands see? Or His
Royal Highness? Or Shipmaster Karondeo?"
     Evendal cleared his throat before attempting to speak again. "I see your
hands, Priestess. One hand adorned as always with the signet of your offices,
the other bare but for an armlet."
     When, after a pause Kri-estaul had not responded, Sygkorrin prodded.
"Your Highness? How do my hands appear to you?"
     Kri-estaul glanced at his father. When Evendal nodded his encouragement,
the child struggled a bit to give a clear answer. "As...cuffed in shadows.
Your Eminence. Is that how to say it, Papa? I see their outlines only. Is
everyone upset with Drussie again? Why?"
     The King lifted his index finger to his lip, and Kri-estaul subsided.
     Karondeo stared the Priestess in the eye while he spoke. "How Her
Eminence wishes me to see her hands is how I see them." The mariner's eyes
strayed back to the King.
     Sygkorrin blinked at the simple humour and smiled. The hieratic's smile
was not in evidence when her gaze returned to Drussilikh.
     "Do you understand yet, fool of a child? No one. No one sees, hears,
remembers, the same as you. Each person here can tell you somewhat of our
King that you do not know. And assuage any genuine worries. For His Royal
Highness, my hand is shrouded in mystery, and the ignorance he feels keenly.
For you, my hand is aflame with your fury and worries."
     Softly, Drussilikh protested, "I but sought out Your Majesty in order
that I might quiet those fears..."
     "In this instance," Karondeo reproved gruffly, "your doubts are for you
to wrestle with. And among your peers, not before your King. His Majesty is
not subject to you, except in the manner His Majesty is accountable to us
all."
     Having satisfied Kri-estaul as to Metthendoenn's condition, only to be
alarmed by the Matron's burgeoning audacity, Ierwbae had bent his ear to the
argument. Hearing comforts and truths pour out from a man made citizen by
deceit(316) surprised the Guard. When Sygkorrin asked her riddle, Ierwbae looked
and saw movement on her arm. To the Guard's distraction, a snake lifted its
head from the Priestess's wrist and gazed toward Ierwbae. The Guard thought
nothing of this as the High Priestess was known for her eccentricities, and a
serpent was an image of wisdom.
     The impassive regard of the serpent, which Ierwbae continued to see,
emboldened him to speak up. "The Majesty of m'Os-te rests like a set of
scales, assuring equity and justice. Is my speech fair?" The Guard gazed upon
no one in particular and so caught Karondeo's brief grin, approval for his
defying of protocol.
     Drussilikh, further annoyed, nodded sharply. "You know it is, as does
all Kelotta."
     Unabashed, Karondeo continued with the simile. "But what happens to a
set of scales resting atop a set of scales? Shall we anticipate balance
then?"
     Feeling tutored, the guild-mistress growled, "No."
     "Anything of reliability or clarity?"
     "No."
     Again, Ierwbae spoke up; part of the hedge surrounding His Roseate
Majesty so newly returned. "Yet you ask He who is the incarnate ambition of
our kingdom to pronounce judgement upon himself. You ask that he scan his
reflection and tell you what he sees." As the King's main, whom His Majesty
may either lean on or deputise, Ierwbae had only so much license in argument
with non-belligerent members of the guilds.
     As a quasi-citizen, and with more liberties than most, Karondeo did not
ken or share Ierwbae's limitations, and so was free to finish what the Guard
dared not.
     "No. You demand it. To satisfy a whim of your distrust. Her Eminence
spoke true. Had you but asked directly of us your fellows, we could have told
you. But approach His Majesty -- whose genius fathoms motives -- to parse his
numen's motives and you foment confusion. He will see...a slough of
uncertainty; multitudinous empty 'I could haves' for every decision he makes.
And you will subject him to a new inquisition with every worry that swims
through your head and out of your mouth."
     Evendal interrupted. "It is clear nothing more will get done until we
end this mad hunt properly. Something more is engaged in Matron Drussilikh's
persistence," he began.
     The seaman bit back an expletive. "No doubt. Yet just as I, though your
beloved, do not need notification of every lustful pang that might sail
through your day, so Your Majesty's subjects do not need an itinerarium for
your heart and mind."
     Evendal m'Alismogh essayed a laugh; a cluster of forced hiccoughs by
which he tried to sluice away the whelming hurt of betrayal. He had first
heard the Matron's discontent in her questioning his decision to let the
Chamber manifest as it chose. The senses and wit that had dulled in order to
deny Drussilikh's unadmitted purposes, and to delay Drussilikh's end, now
dulled in anger and pain with that end so near.
     Everyone in the room looked to the Throne in surprise. Urhlysha sat up,
and Kri-estaul rolled closer to his Papa. The Priestess turned completely
about, and watched for a clearer hint as to her King's disposition. Karondeo
again knelt and gripped his King's hands, awaiting clarification or command.
     The King took a deep breath to steady his nerves; he had heard enough,
endured enough.
     "I agree." The eyes of the King pinned their glow on the orphaned
daughter of a heroic woman. "But you dance around what's foremost in
'Drussie's' purposes. The Matron wishes to find cause so that she might
separate herself from Us."
     Stunned, Ierwbae asked, "Wherefore?" To his added amazement, the Guard
saw Sygkorrin nod in comprehension.
     Evendal shrugged, his gaze fixed on the owl-eyed courtier. "Her brother
is found, her guild cleansed and its building restored. By Our grant is her
livelihood assured. What more does she need Us for? We trouble her. From our
first meeting We troubled her. She does not want Us a friend to her, only a
friend to her guild."

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(302) ~Oxymoronic descriptor. A gambler doesn't dare grin while
gambling. The Hramal equivalent of the phrase 'a poker face'.
(303) the aftermath; see
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aftermath #1
(304) Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Awe.
(305) A hunted hare, tired from the chase, is said to 'run short' when it
increasingly twists and turns in an effort to escape.
http://nwhsa.redblackandgreen.net/hunting_terms.htm
(306) To search a hedge or thicket without finding your prey.
(307) A hunt where an artificial scent is laid and followed. ~In Arkedda &
the Thronelands, a pastime of foppish, bored courtiers. With no live
quarry, and so no element of surprise, most hunters consider drag hunts an
insult to the sport.
(308) Likely because of the conversation from Ch. 14. Beginning with
Evendal's query, "Would it help if We documented your status as sole
embassy for the Scriveners to the Throne?"
(309) The term "Noverint "was applied to lawyers & clerks because in
Elizabeth's time most legal documents were in Latin, and began "Noverint
universi per presentes." "know all men by these presents that..."
(310) Shontrekh, Kieralametth & Eletthrha of Siara'keb, Ierowen.
(311) The Necessity For Ruins; J. B. Jackson; Univ. Mass. Press, 1980;
pg.56-59. ~In Osedys the two words meant different elements of the
mercantile 'realm'. In the vicus, the king upheld the regula appropriate to
citizens and bughers, the localized market occasions, The portus signified
the chaos of the harbour, the regula for visitors, the law for both the
visiting merchant ships & the native; itinerant merchant-citizens with
storage and headquarters near the water. And there were the rules for fairs
and market-time, when both elements involved themselves.
(312) ~His father had laboured to create his own gentry, the Sixty-six, to
stand between himself and the guilds & some of the manourlords, to be a
multitude that could drown out any voices raising obscene requests(like
demands for a governing device by which the merchants could parley with
King & nobles). That no one else existed of the royal family to displace
Menam did not deter his entrenched detractors.
(313) From old folklore. A courtier of the ___ kingdom sought promotion so
avidly, he bartered his shadow to the king for a ring. Without his shade,
the courtier could not wear the ring, he did not have sufficient
substance. So the shade executed the courtier and - with the king's
permission - replaced him.
(314) ~A tasteless term from the time of the Nikraan Advent. An utterly
submissive man or woman.
(315) ~Lantana or Queen's Lace Hydrangea. The Hramal have a flower language
of sorts, though a plant protocol might be more accurate. For instance;
gifts of seedlings are almost always welcome(except in the first few days
of mourning). Type & genus matter more than cost, quantity or difficulty of
acquisition. Never send a friend -- or an ascendant enemy -- Anagallis
arvensis. The behaviour of the primrose is that of a coward or a sycophant,
and so the gifting would be an insult.
(316) Ierwbae told the story to Evendal in ch.6