Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

Will turned his back on the palace and continued trudging through the snow. The way nobility acted never ceased to surprise him. On one hand you had folks like King Augustus, who were good and noble most of the time, but who admitted they didn’t act well toward a friend. On the other hand you had Scrainwood, for whom Will actually would take a bucket of warm piss in exchange. And in between you had folks who could be greedy and grubby, or who would tell you whatever they thought you wanted to hear, or just had folks who had no idea what life was like in the world of the streets. They all seemed stupid.

He frowned because he didn’t want to classify Princess Alexia as a noble in that regard. She really was different, but even she hadn’t done anything about Nefrai-kesh. He did allow as how she didn’t have a magick sword with her to kill him—Resolute had one, but he wasn’t there. And Crow’s sword, Tsamoc, now resided in the princess’ room, where it was no help. Still and all, he was pretty sure she had to have seen the stupidity of leaving Nefrai-kesh alive.

A shiver ran down his spine. He really had been ready to shove his little dagger into the thing that had been his grandfather, but that hadn’t scared the sullanciri . He’d just opened his arms and said that Will could come to him. Nefrai-kesh had said that Will would be his heir.

“I don’t want to be your heir.” Will snarled loudly and stamped his feet. “It’s because of you I’m in this mess!”

The absurdity of his complaint struck Will and made him laugh for a moment. He looked up, seeing if anyone else thought things were as silly as he did; but what he saw surprised him because most folks were completely ignoring him. They just paid him no mind, and that astonished him because even walking to the palace to attend the trial he had constantly been subjected to profuse wishes of good will by folks he didn’t even know.

But now, now everyone treats me as if I don’t exist! He wondered at that for a moment, then his jaw dropped open. Of course, the mask! The mask he’d left lying in the court had been the thing people recognized. Oriosans could read masks as easily as Will could calculate the worth of a purse by how it bulged. He might be Will Norrington, but Lord Norrington wore a specific mask and without it he was nothing.

He mulled over the irony that meant not wearing a disguise made him invisible, but realized it was just a reversal of the sort of misdirection he and his companions had used when cutting purses in Yslin. Working a crowd, he’d find a target. At a signal two of his confederates would start a fight, jostling people, including the target. As they bumped into him, Will would clip his purse and slip away quietly. All the attention had been drawn to the fighting kids and since no one was watching him, he got away cleanly.

Here the lack of a mask meant that you were beneath notice or, if not that, certainly below the interest of those who could wear masks. Will knew enough of history to know that Muroso, Alosa, and Oriosa had, at one time, been provinces that rebelled against an empire. The rebels had worn masks to disguise themselves as they fought against the empire, and when they won independence, those who had fought for it became the new nobility. To them and their descendants went the right to wear a mask, and the decorations on their masks marked their importance.

Because of the masks, the Oriosans constantly seemed to be looking for symbols and significance in things. Will was certain that tugging off his mask and throwing it on the floor would be seen as having all sorts of portents and meaning, while he’d just done it because he wanted to throw something and wasn’t going to throw the dagger, which he liked.

He shook his head, imagining them thinking it was a rejection of his citizenship. Since the masks of the dead were often kept by the family, tossing it toward Nefrai-kesh could be taken as a sign that he was saying that the sullanciri should just consider him dead. Or it could be taken as a gesture of his rejecting the niceties of the court and vowing to wage his own war against Chytrine.

There were many more things, and he assumed that gossip mills would be grinding away long hours making them up. He didn’t like the idea that some folks would think he was walking away from the war with Chytrine. That would probably be the darkest of the omens read in what he had done. There had to be a way to put that to rights, but exactly how to do it, he wasn’t certain.

More symbols, and the Oriosans will believe in me again. They all do things with reasons, and as long as I have a good one, they’ll believe me . Will sighed. He knew he’d have to figure things out. He’d have liked to talk to Kerrigan about it, since the mage’s perspective on things was even weirder than that of the average Oriosan. Kerrigan, however, had gone missing, and Lombo was out hunting him. The Vilwanese consulate had reported back to Princess Alexia that they didn’t know where he was, and their courier sounded nervous enough that Will believed the Vilwanese didn’t have him.

The idea that Oriosans always do something for a reason began to bounce around inside Will’s skull. He started to wonder what purpose Nefrai-kesh would have for showing up at the trial. Sure, his appearance in the palace was likely to scare a lot of folks—Scrainwood first among them. But a better way to scare a lot of folks would have been for the sullanciri just to kill Scrainwood. Having Linchmere on the throne would have terrified everyone in Oriosa and well beyond its borders.

The sullanciri couldn’t actually have intended to come to give testimony. That made no sense whatsoever. Crow’s fate really didn’t matter, and if Chytrine wanted Crow dead, she could have sent the sullanciri into his cell. Making folks use the laws of a nation to kill an innocent man might strike some nobles as a horrible thing, but Will was fresh from war and knew that anything Scrainwood might have done to Crow would be, odds on, more pleasant than the sort of death found on a battlefield.

By the gods —/ should have seen it immediately ! Will began to run through the streets, dodging carts, slipping in muddy slush, going down, splashing, getting up again, and continuing as fast as he could. He leaped over snowdrifts, ducked, and twisted through the middle of a snowball war and shoved slower people aside. Ignoring the cries of the few who went down, he sped on, ever faster, toward the Rampant Panther.

There was only one reason that Nefrai-kesh would risk showing up at the trial, and that was misdirection . If there was going to be any alarm sent up, it would summon all of the guards to the palace. And the false flag of truce makes folks believe he means no harm, but I don’t believe that at all . Putting Nefrai-kesh in the palace was a risk, but Chytrine would only undertake that risk for a greater gain, and there was only one thing in Meredo that she wanted that badly.

The ruby fragment of the DragonCrown!

Will burst through the inn’s door and bolted immediately for the stairs to the rooms. He held his left hand up beside his face, half in a wave, but mostly to hide the fact that he had no mask on. He hit the landing and doubled back to the second floor, then dashed along the corridor toward the last room on the right.

Time slowed for Will despite his haste. He studied the floor at that end of the corridor, for Kerrigan’s room was right across the hall from his own. Before leaving that morning he’d checked Kerrigan’s room and had placed a thread between the door and the jamb that would fall out if the door had been opened. More important, Will had used lampblack to darken a couple of knots in the wooden flooring. Had a boot brushed over them, the scuff marks would have showed clearly. Will had avoided them himself, and Resolute had been warned, so only a thief would run afoul of it.