One Good Knight Read Free Page A

things of her own here, and now she collected them: a blanket, a cushion, and a basket containing a book and her own lunch. Short of being able to sneak down into the city itself, which, on a day when the port was full of foreign ships was simply not going to happen, this was the best place for her to spend the afternoon. Not even her friends in the Guard would let her slip out of the Palace when the city was full of foreigners. They might be anything in the guise of common merchants—kidnappers, assassins, spies. Whereas up here, no one was going to be able to get to her without going through several sets of Guards—and even then, she’d see whoever it was coming up the stairs in plenty of time to take refuge with Thesus.
    Not that anything that adventurous was likely to happen. No one ever attacked Ethanos. No onewanted to. You’d first have to get past the harbor town and its regiment of Guards, then up the cliff to the city itself, where the City Watch would greet you with a hail of arrows and missiles. Then you’d have to fight your way through the streets, all of which twisted and turned like a tangled ball of yarn, to get to the Palace, which had its own walls and the Royal Guard to protect it. It was like a sea urchin; maybe the meat inside was sweet, but to get to it, you had to get past a thousand spines, all sharp, and all poisoned.
    She spread out her blanket and flopped down on it, stomach against the warm stone, with arms crossed and her chin resting on her forearms as she stared down at the city.
    It rankled that, once again, Cassiopeia had refused even to consider her presence at these meetings—and after she had gone to such pains to study the latest reports on every single merchant in the domestic fleet! She could quote import and export figures, tax revenues, profit margins and losses for the past ten years! Or—well, not exactly quote them, but she had all of it noted down and within moments could put her finger on any figure needed. And all she’d asked was that she be allowed to observe—not to participate, merely to watch and listen! After all, she was nineteen, and she still had very little notion of what it meant to rule. The only time she ever saw the Queen exercising her authority was in formal audiences that required the attendance of the entire Court. Those were as scriptedas any play, and gave her no idea of just how Cassiopeia employed diplomacy, strategy and negotiation. The Queen wasn’t going to live forever (even if sometimes it seemed as if she might) and when she was gone, Andie did not want to find herself at the mercy of “advisers” and “councilors” who did the actual ruling, while she served only as a figurehead on the throne.
    It was all terribly frustrating. Maybe everything she knew was out of a book rather than real life, but at least she knew something. Her mother’s Chief Adviser, Solon Adacritus, didn’t even bother with that much; he depended on his secretaries to find out everything for him. That, by Andie’s reckoning, was cheating.
    Solon had been Cassiopeia’s right-hand forever, though Andie could not imagine what her mother ever saw in him. Oh, he was handsome enough, in a rather limp and languid way, but he was the butt of a hundred jokes in the Guard for his manners and the superstitious way he hung himself with good-luck charms and amulets, fiddling with them constantly.
    Not for the first time, she wondered if Solon was her mother’s lover. Well, if he was, he was certainly so discreet and careful about it that there had never been so much as a hint of it her entire life. And there were plenty of people looking for information like that, she had no doubt. Information was leverage, and the game of inter-and intra-kingdom politics was played largely on the basis of leverage.
    Acadia might be small and rocky, but it had theonly protected, deep-water harbor for leagues and leagues, as well as one