One Good Knight Read Free Page B

very good road that led straight to the heart of the Five Hundred Kingdoms and was safe and well patrolled, and that put it squarely on one end of an extremely lucrative trade route. Where there was money, there was power. Where there was power and money, people who didn’t have it would be scheming to get it. Knowledge of who, if anyone, was Queen Cassiopeia’s lover would be one more weapon to be deployed by those people. Which is one more thing all my reading has taught me. You couldn’t read history for long without seeing the patterns.
    Without that deep-water port, Acadia would have been the poorest of the Five Hundred Kingdoms. Although the sea did well by those who dared the waters to fish, the sea took as well as gave, and fishing was a dangerous profession. The rocky hills could not support grazing for much except goats and a few sheep, the only fruits that flourished were olives and grapes, and the grain harvests were just enough to keep the populace fed without any surplus even in the best years. There were pockets of richer soil, but not the broad, flat pastures and huge fields of waving grain that other lands boasted. Acadia didn’t even have a Godmother—hadn’t had one in so long that plenty of nobles who never left Ethanos thought Godmothers were as mythical as centaurs and fauns.
    There were pockets of all sorts of so-called “mythical” creatures, little colonies in the wilderness thatthe country-people traded with. Thesus had grown up playing with centaur colts and faun-kids as his friends, before he’d come down out of the high hills and joined the Guard. He’d told her stories, and the tales had the ring of truth about them, in no small part because they were not tales of great adventure, but of the same sort of mischief that any children got up to. The only difference was that when Thesus and his friends teased a bull or a he-goat, his friends’ parents could grab him up and take him to safety on their backs, or speak the same language as the goat and make the patriarch of the herd back down.
    Plus, the history of Acadia was full of treaties with the “Other-folk,” or Wyrding Others, treaties that were on file in the library—and how could one write up a treaty with things that were mythical? I would so like to see some of them…fauns, sylphs, centaurs, dryads and nymphs.
    She’d have liked to see a Godmother, too. But it was clear from everything she had read that Acadia didn’t have one. Probably Acadia was too insignificant. After all, when had Cassiopeia ever hosted a ball? Or a masquerade? When had other Royals even visited? Not so much as a sixth-or seventh-son Prince had ever ventured across the border or into the harbor. Nothing of any consequence had happened here in more than a generation.
    No wonder the Godmothers ignored them in favor of Kingdoms that actually did things.
    But—if we had a Godmother here, I bet she’d see toit that Mother started educating me in my duties. Leaving me ignorant like this is just making a big fat hole for The Tradition to stick an evil Prince into. Someone who’d come sweep me off my feet, then oppress my people. Or was the fact that she was already aware such a thing could happen enough to prevent it from happening? Maybe Acadia was so quiet and small that even The Tradition ignored it.
    Acadians themselves ignored The Tradition. Of all the people she’d ever mentioned it to, only a few seemed even vaguely aware of such a thing. Maybe, again, because things were so quiet here that the only thing The Tradition did was to ensure that there were enough poor-but-honest peasants, worthy orphans, hearty fisherman, nosy gossips and that sort of thing.
    Or maybe The Tradition is satisfied that we’ve got our quota filled with Queen Cassiopeia, beautiful and wise, she thought a little cynically. It doesn’t need to waste its time on anything else.
    There certainly didn’t