Orson Card - The Gate Thief

“And trusted me, once upon a time. The question now is, what should I do with you?”

“I’m now the open enemy of the Queen, known to her. If she lives, my life is as good as gone. I don’t know why she isn’t killing us both right now, but even if she chooses to bide her time, I’m a dead man. I doubt there’s anywhere that I can flee where she won’t follow, or send an assassin after me. So I will do whatever I can to kill her. Does that make us allies or enemies?”

“Not until her baby is born,” said Wad.

Keel nodded. “Yes, you told her that. You spared her for the baby’s sake.”

“And so will you.”

Keel nodded. “Unless she comes after me. I will defend myself.”

“Whatever is keeping her silent,” said Wad, “does not make her deaf. I think she hears us and she understands, even if she can’t give us a sign of it. Maybe pride alone holds her tongue. But I tell her now, in front of you, that if she harms you in any way, or Anonoei’s children, I’ll overcome my scruples about not killing her unborn child.”

“Thank you,” said Keel. “I can’t understand why I don’t feel any pain. I hung there for hours.”

“Passing through a gate restores your body to perfect health, maintaining the age and shape that you’ve achieved.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Keel. “So gatemages are all healers. Yes, I think I had some vague knowledge of that. Old stories.”

“Keel, I need your help.”

“I doubt you want a ship, you who can travel anywhere in the blink of an eye.”

“I have the body of the Queen, apparently in some kind of trance. But she’s in your private office. Surely this is not where she should be discovered.”

Keel thought for a moment. “Can you take her back to her own rooms in Nassassa?”

“And let her simply be discovered? The problem is that her clothes are half burnt away.”

“No woman in my house has clothing fit for a queen.”

“Then I think our purpose will be best served if she is found in some strange place, without clothing. She needs to be discovered quickly, because in this weather she would soon die of exposure.”

“You want me to discover her.”

“Tell me a place where you or a workman would find her, but where you would not be suspected of having put her.”

“In the water,” said Keel. “If she bobs to the surface where fishermen are passing on their way home, then she’ll be found. Found naked in the river, no one will know where she might have been thrown in.”

“Should we bind her hands and feet?” asked Wad.

“No,” said Keel. “No one would believe that she hadn’t drowned. Better to have it thought that she was struggling to swim and then fell victim to the cold.”

“And the cold would explain this coma. If it persists. There’s always the risk that the moment she’s not in my direct control, she’ll start to speak. I’ll keep a watch on her. If she starts to talk to anyone, I’ll warn you. I’ll gate you wherever you want, you and anyone you want to take with you.”

“So much simpler just to kill her,” said Keel.

“For a man who was almost the victim of assassination yourself, you’re awfully bloodthirsty.”

“You don’t understand,” said Keel. “She murdered Anonoei, a woman I honored and admired and obeyed. Even if Anonoei, as a manmage, put these feelings in my heart, that doesn’t make them any less real. The murder was terrible. I will not let this monster live. If I’m in exile, I won’t be in a place where I can kill her.”

“If she starts to talk,” said Wad, “I’ll bring you to her with a knife in your hand.”

“I wish I had realized, years ago, that you were something more than the palace monkey,” said Keel.

“But if you had realized it,” said Wad, “would I have let you live to reach this happy day?

“This happy day,” said Keel bitterly. He moved to the burned clothing, the ashy corpse of Anonoei, and knelt. “She used me, but in a way that I was happy to be used. If she was compelling me, it was to do what I would have done by choice, though with less boldness-work against the Queen. May I take these ashes and these clothes, and give them a proper deeping in the river?”

“As long as no one knows whom you’re deeping, then I would also like her to have such honor. I did her great harm once upon a time. Now I can never redress that wrong. But her sons are still in my keeping, and my own way to honor her will be to keep them safe and whole, and help them reach a happy life, if they choose it.”

“Are we friends, then?” asked Keel. “I don’t know what I can offer such a mage as you. My powers are not worth mentioning, compared to yours.”

“It’s not the magery that makes the man, but what he does with it, and with any other opportunity that he is given,” said Wad.

“You say that as if it were an old saying, but I’ve never heard it.”

“I learned it in my childhood, more than fourteen centuries ago, and in another language.”

Keel took in this information calmly. “There are tales in this that someday I’d like to hear. How a man can live so long. How you kept your gates when the Gate Thief took everybody else’s. What harm you did Anonoei, and how you came to be the lover of the Queen.”

“What parts I could tell you, you would not believe, and what you would believe, I dare not tell you,” said Wad. “But I know the service you have done for Iceway, and if it comes to war with Gray, I know that Iceway will have a mighty fleet, only because of your brilliant and devious mind. That’s what you bring to our alliance-your loyalty, your love of country, your intelligence, your resourcefulness, and a deep goodness that Anonoei admired.”

Again a sob caught at Keel’s throat, but then he mastered it. “Few will know, except for you and me, the greatness of Anonoei’s heart, and how faithfully she served King Prayard and the people of Iceway.”

“Everyone will know, if one of her sons someday inherits this kingdom,” said Wad. “But now it’s time for you to place yourself where the fishermen who find Queen Bexoi in the river will come directly to you. Tell me where you want to be, and I can put you there. Or you can go yourself, so that the ordinary witnesses will believe that you were there on business and it was only chance that made you the official into whose hands the fishermen delivered the half-drowned body of the Queen.”

Keel told him a place on the docks where he had a team of workmen refitting a ship for a long voyage. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “And I have work enough to keep me there for another ten.”

“Make sure there’s a likely fishing vessel coming in or going out,” said Wad. “The Queen will bump against the side of it.”

“There’s always at least one fishing boat, and usually a dozen, within hail of the docks.”

“Then gather up Anonoei’s remains,” said Wad, “while I undress the Queen.”

It took Keel very little time to gather the sad ashes of Anonoei, along with her half-charred clothing, and put them in a pot that previously held nuts, which now were strewn on his writing table. Wad did not remove the last of Bexoi’s undergarments until the man was gone. She was the Queen, after all, and once he had loved her. With his hands on her unresponsive body, with the warmth of her flesh under his fingers, old feelings came flooding back. He had loved her with the intensity of a boy’s first love, for she was his first love after the long amnesia of the tree, and when it began he was a boy again, though old memories came back quickly enough, along with his knowledge of how a woman might be pleased. By habit he found his fingers stroking her as if in lovemaking, but he caught himself and stopped. She was no longer the woman he had been besotted with. Now she was the murderer of their son, the boy whom she called Oath and he called Trick, and he did not love her. Yet those feelings were so strong within him that he could hardly drive them away. He had to stand up and pace the room until he judged that Keel had been gone for long enough that it was worth checking on his progress.