The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman Page A

doesn’t like wizards and he doesn’t think much of their magic. Why isn’t he afraid of them, though? Because he isn’t, you can tell.”
    Crabbe’s honey-colored eyes narrowed to little sharp points. “I had no idea what an original mind you had, Blake. Go on; I’m fascinated.”
    As well be hung for a wolf as for a lamb, Justis thought, and forged on. “He’s more afraid of the king than of the wizards. Anselm curtailed their power. It’s one reason he’s called ‘the Wise.’ I think. Anyway, another leg of the stool is: Anselm enacted laws.”
    “Laws?” Crabbe sneered. “What do you know about laws, after two whole weeks studying history? Yesterday, you didn’t know the names of the first Inner Council of Lords, and now you’re an expert on Anselm’s laws!”
    “It was a monograph I found,” Justis went on doggedly. “About some documents to do with laws enacted to limit the wizards’ political role when Anselm came to the throne—”
    “ ‘Some documents’!” Crabbe threw up his hands. “There you have it! You turn your back on the great ones, on Fleming and the immortal Trevor, and go picking through moldy papers, and what happens?”
    “You get some remarkable insights.” The new voice came from over the heads of the ring of onlookers. Like rushes in the wind, everyone turned to face the speaker. He was a large, solid-looking man, with broad shoulders and springy dark hair escaping from its ribbon. To Blake’s country-bred eyes, there was something of the peasant about the way he stood, as if the Nest’s uneven floor were a ploughed field. But his green sleeves proclaimed him a Doctor of Humane Sciences. “You learn what lies behind the formal statements approved by the court censors for publication, for one.”
    “Ah!” said Leonard Rugg happily, as though finding Basil St Cloud at his usual table at the Blackbird’s Nest was the most unexpected of chances. “St Cloud! Going to set us all straight, are you?”
    “If you like,” Basil said mildly. “You, Rugg, of all people should admit that two-hundred-year-old gossip can still be valuable in evaluating historical data. Take the story about Placid dedicating On Thought to King Anselm. When Placid read the dedication out before the court, the king rewarded him with a purse of money and a writ of banishment.”
    Leonard Rugg blew what in a less distinguished personage would have been a raspberry of disgust. “Yes, yes, we all know that story—if it’s true.”
    Crabbe chopped at the air impatiently. “Of course it’s true, Rugg. Vespas reported it, and Trevor saw no reason to doubt the account.”
    While Crabbe and Rugg bickered, Justis Blake studied his rescuer. At a table by the window, Basil St Cloud stood surrounded by his students, the usual band of black-robed men of various shapes and sizes. But there was something about them all that reminded him of a team of kickball players from another village: they had the ball and they knew it. And right now their ball looked a lot more attractive than Rat-Catcher Crabbe’s. On that impulse, Justis Blake did something very simple that would change the course of the rest of his life: he got up from the bench and made for the table by the window.
    “Good idea,” Crabbe called after him, unwilling not to fire a parting shot. “Maybe St Cloud can knock some basic history into your thick skull. When you’ve learned what atrocities the kings committed when they came South, then you may be able to understand why they had to be deposed, and their performing wizards along with them.”
    But Justis wasn’t listening. St Cloud’s black-robed throng closed ranks around him, shutting him off from Crabbe’s table—and St Cloud invited him to explain himself. Smarting from Crabbe’s needling, Justis was inclined to stammer at first, but Basil St Cloud’s clear, intelligent eyes never left his face, and soon he was constructing the kind of argument that had inspired his teacher in