Book 3 - Surrender to the Will of the Night by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online

the strain of trying to hold everything together. Hecht told him to ease up. If it looked good, let it ride. Let it work itself out.
    Advice he had to take himself. He could not walk away before the wedding.
    *   *   *
    The wedding did come, though the wait seemed endless. As an anticlimax. Being Boniface’s representative, the Captain-General watched with the attendant clerics. He played no part himself, not being in orders. Pella was not allowed to join him. The boy remained outside the Holy Kelam and Lalitha Church, shadowed by Presten Reges and Shang “Bags” Berbach. The lifeguards were frantic. If ever someone wanted to get at the Captain-General through his son, this was the time.
    Holy Kelam and Lalitha was one of the great churches of the Grail Empire, rich in architecture, furnishings, and decorative detail. It was an object of pilgrimage. Relics of both Founder namesakes were buried beneath its altar. The lame and sick came to light a candle and pray to Lalitha, who had wrought miraculous cures while living.
    The Captain-General spared little attention for the wonders of the church. He focused on the wedding party. On Princess Helspeth and King Jaime. There was little mystery about his interest in the Princess Apparent. The Adversary had found a foothold inside his soul. He did wonder why the Direcian monarch interested him, though.
    Attitude? The man was sure to be trouble. Everyone watching could tell he was impatient to get this nonsense over. That he was eager to start throwing his weight around.
    Jaime was headed for a world of disappointment. Katrin might be besotted, might be fawning over him, but she was Johannes Blackboots’s daughter. No pretty Direcian would win control of the Grail Empire simply by wedding her.
    And if she did surrender all reason?
    The Council Advisory would step in. A dozen grim old men and their grimmer women. They watched from the floor, afraid that they had erred by agreeing to this match.
    They could tell that the Castaurigan had ambitions unfettered by reality. He expected to outshine Peter of Navaya, using his new spouse’s wealth and power.
    Could he be that blind? His bride meeting privately with Boniface’s military commander had outraged him. He had no idea what might have been discussed, but was aware that the Church was little interested in glorifying Castauriga or its king. The Church was cozy with Peter of Navaya.
    King Jaime would be in a tight place with the Church. The outstanding characteristic of his wife was her devotion to Brothe. That was her external strength and her great political liability inside the Empire.
    Hecht leaned nearer the Archbishop beside him, Elmiro Conventi. Conventi represented several Imperial cities in northern Firaldia. “We need to watch this King. He’ll intrigue with the anti-Brothens if he can’t bully the Empress.”
    The grossly fat Archbishop first showed annoyance, then grasped the suggestion. “Excellent observation. I’ll pass the thought along.”
    The ceremony was a long one. It did not just join a woman and a man, it formalized an alliance and founded a dynasty.
    Piper Hecht thought he had been in the west long enough to be acclimated to its weirdest customs. He was aghast when he discovered that the grande dames of the court were, at this late hour, jockeying to be chosen to witness the Empress’s defloration. There would be five. Tradition assigned the respective mothers and the bride’s aunts the task. Neither Jaime nor Katrin had a living mother. Jaime had brought no sufficiently exalted Castaurigan women. He tried to refuse the ceremony. The court harpies would have none of that.
    They wanted to see the Ege chit humiliated.
    Somehow, the Empress, Alten Weinberg, the Grail Empire, and the greater world got through the night. As did the Captain-General of Patriarchal forces.
    Madouc assured him, “Only the highborn endure that. Before the conversion to Chaldareanism, girls lost their virginity early. They