Page 66 of Valdemar

Restil had been afraid that the Lord Martial would not accept the substitution of himself and his mother for the King, but he soon discovered that he needn’t have worried. Evidently the Lord Martial was perfectly happy with a Queen instead of a King.

Then again . . . he sat in Council, and he had a very good idea of what the Queen could do, and how intelligent she was.

They turned up at his makeshift office, which was in the barracks section of the wall, arriving together. With their Companions, of course, though Darshay and Dendalin remained outside. The Lord Martial—his name was actually Lord Ventis Endimon, but almost no one ever referred to him by anything except his honorific title—was in there, sitting at his desk, with a page accepting papers as he signed them. He had been Kordas’s Lord Martial back in the Duchy, having taken over from his own father when Kordas became Duke. He was older than Kordas by about twenty years, and his job was, and always had been, the organization, training, leading, and disposition of whatever quasi-military force the Duchy fielded. Unofficially, of course, because officially all that a Duke of the Empire was allowed was a private force of guards, usually no more than was absolutely necessary to safeguard their property and provide a bit of strong-arm over any recalcitrant highborn under the Duke’s authority. And technically, that force should only be under the authority of the Duke himself. But pretty much everyone from the position of Duke and above had had a Lord Martial, and this was one of the very few things that the Empire turned a blind eye to. Mostly because in a pinch, if the Imperial forces ran out of officers, they could commandeer as many Lords Martial as they needed.

Lord Martial Endimon looked every bit the military man, as he should, since he had been trained in the Imperial Military Academy as a youngster. Unlike Lord Legenfall, he had weapons training, and had done some field commanding with the Imperial Army before being released to return home when his knee blew out during maneuvers in impossible terrain and the Healers could not get to him before there was permanent damage they could do nothing about. He had taken that discharge gratefully, since so far as he was concerned, a blown knee was a small price to pay for going home.

His hair had been cut aggressively short, and what was there was iron-gray and had been for as long as Restil had known him; square-jawed, with penetrating dark eyes, he had not put on a pennyweight of fat since his “retirement.” That blown knee was no handicap to him in combat, and he had been invaluable on the trek here, keeping the back half of the convoy of barges in order while Kordas managed the front half. Since the establishment of the “New Valdemar,” he had been far more than invaluable. He habitually dressed in brown, as being the color least likely to draw attention and collect dirt; his clothing was usually canvas in summer and leather and wool in winter and identical in cut and style to the Guard uniform.

His office consisted of a single room on the first floor, with nothing in it but the fireplace, a desk, his chair, and two chairs across from the desk. But the walls were papered with maps of the Kingdom, covered with cryptic markings Restil couldn’t even pretend to understand, in different colors. Restil didn’t think the markings were in ink—maybe artist crayons—and what he assumed were unit markers were wax-backed decals. Easy enough to peel up and move.

The Lord Martial looked up as he signed the last of the papers, and handed a stack to the page. “Ah, Isla and Restil. Come in place of the King, I presume? Good. I’d rather it was you two. Kordas tends to overthink everything.” He made a shooing motion at the page. “Off you go, Ternly. Drop those with the Seneschal-in-command. And tell the pages they don’t need to quake in their boots because Hakkon put me in charge of them until he comes home. I’m not a bear, I won’t eat them.”

Ternly, who evidently knew the Lord Martial well enough to know that he was, in fact, surprisingly gentle with the pages, grinned. “Sir, yes sir,” the lad said smartly. With a pile of loose papers in his hands, he couldn’t salute, but he did click his heels together. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but it might be a good thing to put old Asterdil in charge of the page’s dormitory while Master Hakkon’s gone. He’s fair, and he gets respect, and with his back actin’ up, he ain’t good for long Guard shifts.”

“Wait—don’t go—” The Lord Martial grabbed two pieces of parchment and hastily scribbled down some orders, signing and stamping them. He placed them on the top of the pile. “There, done. One for Asterdil, reassigning him, and one for the sergeant, verifying the order. Good suggestion, lad. Hate to lose you, but when Hakkon gets back, I think it’s time you moved up to squire. We’ll do that as soon as one of the squires moves up to knight. Which will be soon. The more knights I can field if Legenfall turns up, the better. He won’t have any . . . or if he does, they’ll be on foot. He got no chargers, and the horses he has aren’t up to a knight’s weight.”

The boy brightened considerably at the suggestion he might become a squire. There were not a lot of knights in the Guard at the moment—the Empire didn’t approve of a Duke having more than a token number of elite fighters—so this meant that there were not a lot of squires yet, either. This would be a big step upward for the boy.

As Restil had learned as a page in his brief lessons on heraldry and the hierarchy, small “s” squires were assigned to knights, both as helpers and as “apprentices” of a sort. Large “s” squires, like the Young Squire, were something else entirely. Short for “esquire,” it was a hereditary title, lower than lord, technically lower than knight, higher than “village headman.”

“Knights” were made; the title wasn’t hereditary. Most highborn who kept knights “grew” their own, although the Empire had its own college of knights. You took all the younglings in the Court whose parents could spare them and who wanted to train, and made them pages. Let them train part of the day and see who was good at fighting, at least at the youngling level. Elevate them to squire, and pair them with a knight. When they were ready, make them knights. You could have as many knights as you could afford heavy horses. And, of course, Kordas had no shortage of horses.

It was a good place to put highborn youngsters who otherwise didn’t have a lot to do. And you very soon sorted out the lazy, those who were unsuited to fighting, and those who refused to be under the authority of anyone else.

There were twenty knights in Kordas’s service now, and the shock of twenty heavily armored men and animals against a line of light-armored troops would be more than enough to disrupt and dismay.

When they had first arrived here, Kordas had had only three knights, because any more would have attracted unwanted attention from the Emperor. As soon as the basics had been established and they had a bit of stability, he had started raising more knights up out of the squires, figuring one day he’d need them against a conventional army. Before, a squire was a dead-end sort of position. When you reached adulthood, you just left the squires and did whatever your family deemed appropriate. Now, well, every page had the potential to become a knight if they were worthy.

The page stopped long enough to even up the edges of the stack of papers, tied a bit of string around them to keep them in place, and headed off on his errands.

The Lord Martial gestured at the two spare chairs in his painfully neat office. “So, we need to create a proclamation that will put the folks outside of Haven on the alert and ready for trouble, without scaring them into racing for the city and demanding shelter inside the wall. Have I assessed that right?”

“Perfectly,” Isla told him, dropping into the chair farthest from the door, leaving the other for Restil. “Since you’ve been successful at getting them to practice fighting and shooting, perhaps we should begin with that? Something like . . .‘We have cause to believe that your fighting skills may be put to the test some time within the next six moons’? That will remind them that they are not helpless, and that they can rely on their own walls and skills to hold off enemies until a larger force can come to help.”

“Let me tinker with that a bit, Majesty,” Lord Endimon said in return, and between the three of them, along with some suggestions passed on by Darshay and Dendalin, they hammered out a document that satisfied all of them in about a mark.

“Good!” the Lord Martial proclaimed. “Kordas would have tried to make an inspirational speech out of this, which is all well and good, but that sort of thing falls flat when someone else is reading it. This is better. Short, informative, to the point. Puts people on alert without making them panic. Leave the inspirational speeches to their local leaders—or the Herald in question, if they feel up to it. Now, does this go out under the royal seal or mine?”

“Both, I think,” said Isla, and held out her hand for the original, complete with its scratchings-out and corrections. “I’ll take this back to the Palace, get the scribes to make copies, and have the Seneschal-in-command stamp it with both seals. Then I’ll pass them out to the Heralds after we assign who will cover what areas.” She paused, and looked at both Restil and Endimon. “Should we have Kordas mage-impress the seals?”

Both Restil and the Lord Martial shook their heads. “No need for something like this, Majesty,” the older man said. “Especially not something where there is more than one copy being sent out.”

“It’s too likely that the proclamation will be discarded,” Restil added. “Easy to steal that proclamation out of the discarded documents meant to be scraped and re-used. Too easy to ‘lift’ the seal with a hot knife and apply it to something else.” He shrugged. “Best not to put temptation in the way of people who are all too easily tempted.”

“Good points,” the older man agreed. “All right, I’ll leave that in your hands, and start on requisitions and supplies of weapons to go out to those villages. Arrows, mostly,” he added. “Good thing we’ve been stockpiling against this very thing.”

“Because you insisted on doing so from the moment we got here, sir,” Restil pointed out.

“Well, well, that’s my job, Prince.” The Lord Martial actually cracked a bit of a smile. “I trust you don’t need escorts back to the Palace?”

Isla sniffed. “When have I ever needed an escort?”

“Personally, I don’t think anyone has been of the opinion that you need one since the day you blasted that wyrsa that came over the wall and landed at your feet, Majesty,” Endimon acknowledged. “Opened some eyes that day, you did. And now? You have half a ton of potentially lethal horsemeat on your side. You are more at risk inside the Palace than outside.”

“One tries,” she replied archly, and she and Restil left. “I’ll take this to the royal scribes and get the seals attached,” she said. “I think that Beltran might be best suited to deciding which of the Heralds should be sent where.”

“Beltran and me, I think,” Restil countered. “Menalus is off and so is Delia; everyone else is back from their last messagerun. Can the Kingdom stand doing without me for a day or three? Because obviously you and Father can’t go out, so that only leaves fourteen of us to make this run, if Beltran goes out, and I think he should.”