Restoration (Rai Kirah) by Carol Berg

their foul game, I took Baron Gematos’ daughter to my bed and a slave girl or two—alt of them quite willing, you’ll be glad to know. You can well imagine how Lydia took to that. People thought the walls of Zhagad would fall at last. Then I put on my own display of temper. Three years wed with no heir ... everyone was expecting it long ago.” Someone would pay for forcing Aleksander into this. In only a few fatal instances had I heard his voice so soft and deadly. “I named my wife barren in front of half the nobility of Zhagad and dismissed her to her father in Avenkhar.”
    “Stars of night... and you didn’t tell her why?”
    “It’s safer this way. Her father can protect her better than I at the moment. Kiril is safe, too. My idiot cousin had a brush with a poisoned dagger and a maddened horse before he believed my warnings and contrived a public falling out with me. I ... persuaded ... Sovari to go with him, and they are now guests of some crone of a Fontezhi baroness who enjoys hearing them complain about my cruel humors. Yours is the first friendly voice I’ve heard in months, and you don’t sound too cheerful.”
    “They tried for me, too.”
    “Bloody Athos. Were you hurt?”
    “A good man was killed instead. And others ... it was a close thing.”
    Aleksander examined me carefully, and then his fists clenched and his cheeks flamed the color of his robes. “Your son ... ah gods, Seyonne. Not your son.” No one could read a man’s unspoken words as Aleksander could.
    “He’s safe for now, and the namhirra are dead.”
    “How in Druya’s fires did they find you? I’ll swear I told no one but Lydia, and no matter what she thinks of me, she would never betray you.”
    “I never thought it. I understand about palaces and servants, rumors and spies ... a messenger could have followed me when I picked up your message in Vayapol ... any number of slips.”
    “I’ll find him ... whoever it was. I’ll have him dead for it.”
    “What’s done is done. Blaise has hidden the boy so even I don’t know where he is now.” I leaned closer and dropped my voice. “But you ... this business of your father ... it’s part of it?”
    He closed his eyes and shook his head. “No. Not even the Hamraschi could be such fools. Why make me emperor when they are bent on undoing everything I’ve tried to accomplish?”
    So he didn’t see the truest danger. “My lord Prince, in the streets they are saying you commanded your father’s death. They’re saying the Twenty will—”
    “These matters are not settled in the streets. I am my father’s anointed heir. It will take more than peasants’ prattling to undo it.” Even on that dismal night, the Prince could not unmake himself. His scorn could wither a healthy oak.
    “But you quarreled.”
    Aleksander grimaced. “A month ago I was on the Suzaini border. Bandits—damned villains threatening ruin across the whole eastern Empire. Twenty villages already destroyed, granaries ravaged up and down the border, horses stolen or slaughtered. In the midst of the campaign, my father summons me back here to answer ‘unnamed charges.’ If I’d left right then—”
    “You refused an imperial summons?” No wonder Ivan had been furious with him.
    The Prince was twisting the hem of his mourning robe, a long red cloak, fastened about his neck with a band of silverwork. “We’d lost nineteen warriors already, chasing the cursed bandits. I wasn’t going to waste their deaths to answer some pissing accusations no one would explain.”
    And abandoning the mission would have left the Suzaini to starve. Their granaries and horses were their life. When Aleksander was twenty-two, he wouldn’t have considered that.
    “So I finished cleaning up the mess, then rode like a paraivo. Got here yesterday at dawn. Found the paraivo was already here.”
    “No doubt.” A god-raised desert sandstorm would be nothing to Ivan’s rage.
    Aleksander leaned forward, his face ruddy