Mercedes Lackey - Storm Rising

So although he had great affection for the land and the people of his estate taken as a whole, he had no particular concern for any single person on that estate. He felt warm fondness, in the way that a young man might have fondness for a favorite horse or dog, but nothing more passionate. He had always felt that the love of his heart was somewhere out there, distant, untouched. Gaining emotional attachment for his immediate surroundings... well, he hadn't deemed it to be of strategic advantage in the development of a Grand Duke or a potential Emperor. Prudence dictated that one should never extend himself past his ability to predict outcomes.

It was altogether fortunate, given the effect of these mage-storms, that his family had maintained a tradition of conservatism where the management of the estate was concerned.

People called us old-fashioned and sometimes laughed at us, but we'd never depended on magic to run the estate . Water was pumped by hand or by windmills, water mills ground the grain, transportation was by well-maintained roads, using horses and mules, ridden or driven. So of all of the lands claimed by the Empire, Tremane's duchy was probably one of those that was better off than most at the moment.

As for Kedrick, he's young, but he's sound, or I wouldn't have left him in charge in the first place . His current heir, a young cousin, was as well-schooled in the management of the estate as Tremane could manage before he left. Now he had plenty of incentive to do the job right; if he failed, he'd starve right along with the others.

I did everything I could for them. It will have to be enough. I certainly can't manage anything more at the moment.

Though if he could get back, with the troops, the duchy could certainly support that many more mouths to feed. It would be impossible to pry him out of his little kingdom with his own private army. That might be a thought to tuck away, for later consideration.

And as I recall, there was a scarcity of eligible young men round about there. It wouldn't be a bad thing, to tie the men to me by marriage ....

Once back at the manor house, he dismissed four of the men and went on to his rooms with his usual two trailing along behind him. He stopped at the office where his chief aide sat behind a desk laden with lists. Young Cherin looked up at Tremane's footstep; the aide could easily have been the older sibling of the scout leader. Brown hair, brown eyes, sun-browned skin, square and unremarkable face; he was neither ugly nor handsome, but at least Tremane did remember his name, which had not been the case with his last aide. The poor boy had been so self-effacing that Tremane often forgot he was in the same room. He was so good at being inconspicuous that Tremane eventually sent him off to his spymaster for special training.

"Have you any reports for me?" he asked as the young man looked up, then jumped to his feet with a crisp salute.

"No, Commander," was the prompt reply. Tremane sighed; he'd hoped that at least one of his people would have some ideas for meeting the coming winter. But perhaps he was asking too much, too fast.

"Carry on, then," he replied automatically. The youngster saluted again and returned to his work; lacking anything else constructive to do, Tremane went back to his own suite to sit at his desk and leaf through the old reports listlessly.

A word caught his eye; Valdemar . It was nothing much; just a report that the Valdemarans had been working frantically on a way to block out the mage-storms themselves.

He hadn't thought much about the report at the time he'd first read it, but now as he reread it, he began to wonder about some of his earlier assumptions.

I was so certain that they were the source of the storms , he mused, staring at the fire in his small fireplace and listening with half an ear to the sounds of his men drilling in the courtyard below his office window. He found that sound rather comforting in its ordinary familiarity. I was so certain that this was some strange new weapon that Valdemar had unleashed upon us. But according to this, they have been suffering as badly as we have. Their Queen doesn't have the reputation for being ruthless that Charliss has. So would she turn something like this loose on her own people just to eliminate us?

She might, of course. just because Selenay did not have a reputation for being ruthless, it didn't follow that she was not ruthless. She might simply be a very good actress. She could be mad, too; that was hardly a novelty among royalty.

What was more, Valdemar did not depend on magic for anything. It didn't even have magic as Tremane knew the art. So the only hardships that Valdemar was suffering were those caused by the storms interacting with the physical world—

But there, his reasoning broke down, as he thought about the creature his men had brought in. Only? Not a good choice of words. There was nothing "only" about that monster .

And as a counter to the rest of his arguments, there was the entirely random nature of the storms and their effect. Why would anyone who was sane—and he had seen no reason to think that Queen Selenay was insane—unleash something whose effects were so completely unpredictable? If you had a weapon and you knew what it did, of course, you used it. But if you had a weapon and you had no idea what it was going to do—well, there was no sane reason to use it, not when it could harm you as badly as it harmed your enemies.

Now his head hurt, and he rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands. He hadn't liked sending that assassin in to destroy the alliance Valdemar was making. Something had told him at the time that he might be making a mistake, but he had persisted in order to make the mage-storms stop.

But they didn't stop, did they? In fact, they got worse.

Could he have made a major error in judgment? Granted, the alliance hadn't been disrupted, but at least one of the more important mages had been eliminated. Since the storms hadn't started until after that Karsite priest had arrived in Valdemar, it made sense that he was one of the prime forces behind the mage-storms, if they were indeed originating from Valdemar. With him gone, they should have stopped.

What if Valdemar was not perpetrator, but fellow victim?

His head hurt worse than before. If he'd had better spies—but he didn't. He'd done his best to break up the alliance with Karse, and it hadn't happened. He'd tried to scatter them, leaving them as disorganized as a covey of quail scattered by a beater. But they weren't disorganized, and his assassin hadn't even made an appreciable difference in their level of efficiency. Furthermore, and this was the important point, the mage-storms continued, increasing in frequency and in power.

So what if I was wrong?

He brooded on that for a while, feeling sicker and sicker the longer he thought about it. If that was the case, he had ordered the assassinations of people who could have been his allies against the storms.

Nothing like burning your bridges before you reached them.

I haven't heard from the assassin, and that fool of an artist would contact me if he thought he was in the tiniest danger . He shifted his position in the chair as his back began to ache and his legs to twitch restlessly. The fool must have gotten caught, though I can't imagine how. He's probably dead by now. Even the Valdemarans wouldn't keep an assassin alive. They're probably working out ways to pickle his head and send it to High Priest Solaris in Karse.

In fact, given the evidence from Valdemar, the assassin must have been caught before he did any damage. Only that would account for the seamless way in which Selenay and her allies were presenting themselves.