King's Shield by Sherwood Smith Read Free Book Online

than us fighting pirates, if you ask me.”
    Buck turned his thumb up in agreement. He was about to go on when he remembered the rest of that terrible day, and sidled a glance at his brother.
    Cherry-Stripe made surreptitious motions that Buck couldn’t make out, but when Inda glanced his way he yanked his hands down, thumping the table. Fnor repressed a sigh as she righted a spilled pepper dish. Cama’s head turned sharply as he tried to keep everyone in the view of his one eye.
    “So Evred and Hadand had to marry. Did that on Midsummer Night, and Evred officially took everyone’s oaths as king.” Buck hastily shifted to a description of the coronation, joined in relief by the other two. They spoke in Iascan, but they may as well have stayed with Marlovan. Their words were so quick, their accent so strange, and their Iascan so full of Marlovan slang, that Tau, Jeje, and especially Signi found it difficult to follow.
    The Marlovans had all been trained by the same masters in giving a report; Inda had given and received enough since then to know when he was being bustled past details the speakers did not want to address. That was all right. Like Buck said, he could ask his sister or Sponge—now the king. Even after a few weeks, he still couldn’t get used to that idea.
    Inda listened, assimilating most of what they said, but his attention was on his old friends and how they had changed. Except for Buck being seven years senior, they all were pretty much of an age. But in Inda’s memory they had drifted through the years as scrubs of eleven and twelve, dressed in academy smocks as they played war games through the eternal sunshine.
    Cama’s sudden, white-flashing grin, Cherry-Stripe’s waving hands, his laugh—the same laugh as in boyhood, only deeper—sparked recognition yet caused those cherished memory-images, sharp for so long, to blur and evanesce.
    The account of the coronation and Evred’s first Convocation fumbled to a close in a morass of mutual interruptions and half-finished gossip, until Buck cast a quick look around as if spies had crept into his own citadel. “Is it true you were really sailing with the Montredavan-An heir?”
    Inda’s first impulse was to laugh, but Buck’s uneasiness reminded him of the historical context. Every Marlovan grew up knowing that the Montredavan-Ans had been exiled by Evred’s own ancestors to their land for ten generations when the throne had changed hands. If they crossed their border except to go to and from the sea they would be killed as treaty-breakers. This was why Fox had gone to sea in the first place—not stepping over the border included not being permitted to train at the academy with the other Marlovan heirs.
    “Yes, I did,” Inda said. “He saved my life.”
    As soon as the words were out Inda regretted the impulse—which he couldn’t really explain.
    Sure enough, they all looked surprised, and Cherry-Stripe said, “What happened?”
    Inda loathed any reminder of the days of torture at the hands of the Ymaran Count Wafri. Either he explained it all—which he had no intention of doing—or he skipped over the complicated story about how the Ymaran count had pretended to be a Venn ally but wasn’t. His old friends wouldn’t care anyway. Inda suspected that to them, Venn and Ymar and Everon were all alike. So he said, “Stupid plan went wrong. Fox Montredavan-An put it right. Here’s the fun part. On our way out, we set fire to the enemy’s castle.”
    Sure enough, that worked to divert them. Cherry-Stripe crowed, Buck laughed, Cama demanded the story.
    “It was the biggest sting I’ve ever done,” Inda said, and gave them a fast description, mostly of the chaotic aftermath—chickens squawking, people running around yelling and throwing buckets of water at one another, the furious hand-motions of some guards who each thought the others should try to storm the wall as he and Fox sat there alone, holding off the entire garrison with their