Limits of Power by Elizabeth Moon Read Free Book Online

certainly be delayed until we engender another child. Sonder will understand that and can explain it to Mikeli if he returns immediately. But perhaps he would stay until you could travel if Dorrin and Beclan left. I’m sure she’s anxious to get back to her steading, and it’s the king’s command that he and Beclan have little contact that makes him anxious to leave. It should not take us long…” He looked at her, and she looked back at him. They both grinned, though he saw the glitter of tears in her eyes.

CHAPTER THREE

    North Marches, Tsaia
    W elcome home, my lord.”
    Jandelir Arcolin, Count of the North Marches, nodded his thanks. His face was near-frozen with riding into the north wind. It bit even through the layers of wool.
    He dismounted, handed his horse over to the grooms, and stamped, banging his hands together until he could move his fingers. The courtyard was almost empty; he had seen the recruits drilling far out on the plain as he rode up from Duke’s East. At least here, the rest of the stronghold broke the wind’s force, and he could look forward to a hot bath soon.
    â€œAny news?” he asked one of the servants.
    â€œNot up here, my lord. There’s a message for you from the Duke—I mean King Kieri, my lord, sorry.” More than a year since Kieri had left on his last journey, and he was still “the Duke” to most here in the north. Probably always would be. “Come across country by Lyonyan courier, not ours. He’s gone these hand of days.”
    What could be important enough for Kieri to send his own courier so far? Rumor in Vérella had it that Kieri had pledged to one of his Squires at Midwinter, but Mikeli had said nothing about it. An unmarried king, as he and Mikeli both knew, would collect gossip and rumor. But maybe it had been true. He couldn’t himself see Kieri courting one of his Squires: not the man who had been so careful to distance himself from his troops. Except for Tammarion, of course, but that was only the once.
    Inside the officers’ courtyard, his household staff waited, and soon he was warm, clean, and refreshed by two mugs of sib and a hot meal. Now for work.
    The green velvet sack with the gold-embroidered arms of Lyonya lay alone in the center of his desk; lesser messages were stacked to one side, a courteous gap between them and the royal missive.
    Arcolin opened the sack. A letter from Kieri, in his own hand, and a wedding invitation in multicolored inks, clearly the work of a palace scribe. He read the letter first, brow a little contracted. Kieri was marrying one of his Squires but no youngster—she was his age, half-elven like Kieri but on her father’s side, not her mother’s. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, a Knight of Falk … Arcolin nodded slowly. He understood: a king must wed and get heirs. So should he himself. A king must consider a queen differently than a light-of-love. And yet … Arcolin’s gaze blurred as he thought of Kieri’s first marriage. That had been love, combined with character. Would his second be only character?
    He looked at the next passage in the letter.
    Do
not
fear, old friend, that this marriage is mere statecraft. For beyond my hopes, Arian has true affection for me, and I for her. I have not been so happy for a very long time.
    Well. If it was not too late for Kieri … perhaps it was not too late for him. Though where he’d find a wife, what with spending near-half his time in Aarenis or on the road and the rest up here in a fort, he did not know.
    The wedding, he saw as he worked his way through the fancy scrolls in scarlet, gold, green, blue, and silver, was to be on the Spring Evener. Arcolin shook his head. He wanted to go, but Kieri knew the schedule he must keep to get his troops to Aarenis on time. Four hands of days to and from Chaya he simply could not afford.
    The other messages were routine. Marshals of the two granges on his