Fortress of Ice by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page A

you should have come with me.”
    â€œWell, I didn’t know ye’d be plottin’ theft and knavery with ’Is ’Ighness. Filch ye a couple coin, that I can do, an’ we got a few o’ Gran’s, which is far easier, then I go down an’ get your sack of apples in town, none the wiser, wi’out stirrin’ up the whole hill an’ gettin’ the Prince in trouble. You just let me tend to it.”
    â€œNo! Coin’s not apples. You can get in so much trouble…”
    â€œApples an’ coin is the same to the law, an’ coin o’ th’ realm’s a sight lighter an’ easier to hide. If you’re goin’ to thieve, lad, ye got to be light. Besides, if ye bribe the stableboy, ’e won’t remember a thing when they find the flour sack.”
    â€œWell, you’d have to get the whole sack of apples up past the Guelesfort gate. That’s where you’d get caught.”
    â€œWi’ what? A sack of apples I paid for wi’ good coin? I’m bringin’ it upstairs t’ m’lord.”
    â€œFor Fast Day?”
    â€œAh, that is a point.”
    â€œAnd neither you nor I has money. We shouldn’t spend Gran’s.”
    â€œAn’ Gran’ll skin us both for fools for good an’ all for even thinkin’ it, an’ me for lettin’ ye risk your neck! Whoever come up wi’ this wild notion in the first place?”
    â€œMaybe I did,” Otter admitted. “I don’t know.”
    â€œWell, how can ye not know?”
    â€œIt was mostly both of us. Prince Aewyn said they don’t feed the horses on Fast Day, or well, they do, but they don’t, and he said they scatter grain around and let them into the stalls where it is. But it just seemed right to give them a real treat. We already have coin. Or Prince Aewyn does. He gets pennies for market day. We could just tell the grooms to go buy apples because they’re the ones to do it.”
    Paisi made a rude face, not letting him get further. “An’ who knows if the grooms takes ’alf your coin an’ spends it in the tavern, neither? I don’t trust them lads, especially not that shifty fellow who’s the stablemaster’s get. Ye give ’im a bribe, so’s he knows it’s his, an’ ’e don’t have to get all stirred up and sweaty to pilfer it, so’s he can lie wi’ a pure, clear face when authority comes askin’.”
    He was sure that, where it regarded thievery, Paisi was the one to ask. He and Paisi had shared little mischiefs at home in Amefel, minor misdeeds, like filching windfall apples during harvest from an unwatched orchard, and Paisi had taught him how to lie low and cover his tracks. But here, Paisi was right, it was priests, and law, and very skilled guards stalking up and down the halls; and whether it was because they were in the strange and Guelen west, or because it was priests lying about being cruel and calling it good deeds, he had no idea of the ground he stood on in Guelenish lands. He had come to the Guelesfort, it had turned out, because Prince Aewyn wanted him to come and not because, as he had always hoped would happen, his father had had the idea. So he was not the king’s guest. He was here on Aewyn’s whim, and they liked each other, but it was a question how far Aewyn would stand up for him if something went wrong. Here in the Guelesfort the penalty wasn’t just paying extra chores to Gran and delivering simples to the offended orchard owner. It was the priests, the law, and the Guelen Guard, and Paisi, who wasn’t the king’s son, and had no protection, wanted to get between him and the law.
    â€œI just felt badly about my horse,” he said, the only moral sense he could come up with. “He loves his grain. Gran wouldn’t hold with these priests, would she?”
    â€œNor would she hold wi’ you stealin’,”