39. Alar
ALAR
“Wars decide whose line shall rule. The mingling of blood decides how long it shall endure.”
—Queen Hanith of Catonia
The first time I came to tell my mother my plan, hope had rekindled in her eyes at the chance, however slim, of restoring Arlen to at least some of his former glory. She'd taken my hands in both of hers and told me to save Arlen and leave the rest to her.
Now I was about to find out what leaving the rest to her actually looked like.
Hopefully, she'd been more successful in her endeavors than I had been in mine.
My inquiry into the assassination was going nowhere, which was telling in its own way.
The twins knew nothing, of that I was certain.
I'd spent an evening drawing them out over drinks, but as I had suspected, they were as oblivious as they appeared about everything other than court gossip about who was sleeping with which envoy.
They hadn't been plotting a coup.
If they had, they were exceptional actors, and I didn't think they were.
Avren was conducting a thorough investigation into the assassination attempt, which should have put him above suspicion, but the truth was that he wasn't doing that because of loyalty to Arlen or our father but rather for the joy of the hunt.
He'd settled his theory from the get-go, and he was bending the evidence to fit it. He suspected the rival provinces, the two or three great houses that had spent generations trying to pry the Head of the Council position out of Catonian hands, and he might even be right.
I thought that it was a mistake to rule out the Sitorians, but he dismissed it the way our father did, with the same flick of the hand and the same phrase about a distant fire that couldn't reach us across the Federation.
It worried me as it always had, but even more so now. Avren was too certain about the origin of the threat, so he wasn't looking anywhere else, even if the Sitorian threat was a clear and present danger.
They were the reason I had embarked on the Elucian adventure.
Well, that and my dream of riding dragons.
Spending five months among people who faced the Sitorian threat day in and day out and had built their entire society around resisting it reinforced my conviction that this was the horizon we should be looking at.
And that wasn't the only thing Avren seemed to be oblivious to. He either really didn't know about our parents' maneuvering to find brides for all five of us or pretended not to know.
My suspicions arose when he'd let something slip about a possible tie with one of the rival houses and a particular princess he wouldn't mind marrying, though he doubted she'd return the sentiment. He'd said it lightly, in his typical self-deprecating manner, and then watched to see how I'd react.
I'd come away from that conversation with a suspicion that Avren wanted to be nominated the heir. He hadn't said so. He was far too disciplined to let that slip, but it was there in the dismissive, almost insulting way he'd talked about Arlen.
Avren had no patience for weakness and showed no interest in helping Arlen recover. I suspected his true motive was his own ambition to someday claim the throne, despite the twins preceding him. He knew Father would never entrust either of them with Catonia’s or the Federation’s future .
What he didn't know was that our parents had told no one but Arlen and me that I was the heir in waiting. If Avren was scheming to get the nomination, he was going to be disappointed.
If he'd known, he might have helped me heal Arlen out of spite. It made me want to tell him just to see his reaction, but regrettably, I couldn't. Maybe once Arlen was reinstated as heir, I would tell Avren just to make sure he didn't plot anything against him.
I put all of that aside as I reached my mother's door.
The two guards posted there bowed to me, and then one of them opened the door without knocking, which I found odd until I caught a glimpse of what was going on inside.
My mother's receiving room had become a war room.
She'd had the delicate couches and chairs pushed back against the walls, and in the cleared center stood three small writing desks, and at each desk sat an assistant, and all three were penning correspondence.
My mother stood among them like a general, but instead of a uniform, she wore a plain, comfortable gown, her grey-streaked hair pinned out of her way.
She was dictating to one assistant while reading over the shoulder of a second and holding out her hand to the third for a page to check.
"Alar." She didn't look up from the page she was scanning.
"I'll be with you in a moment." She turned back to the flustered assistant.
"Davna, the phrasing in the second paragraph is too warm.
The queen will read warmth as weakness and immediately demand more concessions.
Make it cordial and immovable." She handed the page back, corrected something on the next, and only then turned to me, with a bright smile and a sparkle in her eye.
She didn't look like a woman whose heart was failing. She looked like a commander in the middle of a winning campaign. Whatever was wrong with her, if anything was wrong with her at all, it had been conquered and subdued because there was work to be done.
"I'm impressed," I said. "Your sitting room looks like a command center."
"I have a campaign to run." She crossed to one of the chairs that had been pushed against the wall, sat, and gestured for me to take its twin.
"Your plan has complicated my work. Before you came home, I had almost everything arranged, but now I have to keep more options open, because I don't yet know which one of you will assume which role.
The betrothals have to match the stations, so I keep them all in the air and commit to nothing, and that's a serious juggling act since I need to appear fully engaged with each of the houses I'm dealing with without letting them suspect that anything is uncertain. "
So that was what leaving the rest to my mother looked like.
I think her job was the most difficult one. I understood most matters of state, but I could never untangle the complicated web my mother was spinning.
"Why do you need three of them?" I nodded at the assistants, who all seemed to be flustered and sweating. "Aren't you afraid of leaks?"
"I need three because there is a lot of correspondence, and each one needs to be written precisely and error-free. It's not as easy as it seems." She smiled fondly at the young women. "They are loyal to me, fully and completely."
I didn't know how and why she seemed so certain of that, and I wasn't going to ask. I understood why she needed three of them, though. It was a laborious process.
"So, you are just signing the letters? You do not write them yourself?"
"Of course, I write them. The marriages I arrange are politically motivated, but they are still personal in nature.
I care about who my future daughters-in-law are, and I need to maintain good relationships with their mothers while not letting them walk all over me.
Bottom line, they expect letters written by my hand, and I expect the same from them. "
I frowned. "You lost me."
She chuckled. "My assistants trained for a long time to produce an exact replica of my handwriting, and don't give me that disapproving look. I dictate the letters, so they are my creation. It doesn't matter whose hand I command, mine or that of my assistants." She winked.
I was stunned. I'd never seen my mother wink or admit to violating the Precepts of Truth.
"Are you admitting to that in public?" I waved my hand at the three young ladies, who were trying very hard to stay on task but were distracted by our conversation.
"As I said, these girls are pure gold, and I trust them with my life.
Besides, sometimes speed matters more than gestures.
" She leaned closer to me as if to impart some great secret.
"I have people in the far provinces who I trained to emulate my handwriting.
In Tarina, in Heldor, and four other provinces that are too far for my letters to arrive quickly enough when time matters.
I telephone, and I dictate, and they write the letter out there and send it from there.
It saves a week, sometimes two." She smiled.
"How do you think you got letters from me in such quick succession in Elucia, when correspondence takes two weeks on average to travel from here? "
For the second time today, I was stunned. "I couldn't tell they weren't written in your hand. I immediately recognized your handwriting."
"They were produced by a very good clerk who transcribed my exact words. Does it really matter if they were written by my hand or by a hand I instructed? The clerk was simply a tool I used. He wasn't the one who thought up the words to put on paper. He was just the pen that I activated from afar."
"Aren't you afraid of what a person like that could do? One of them could decide to write a letter you never dictated, thereby committing you to something. They might forge your hand on an order, a promise, a debt." The possibilities multiplied in my head, each worse than the last.
I wanted to ask how she could be so naive, and whether my father knew about her network of clerks.
My mother looked at me and smiled, suddenly looking far younger than her years. "I have ways of ensuring their complete loyalty."
There was something in the way she'd said it that made me decide I didn't want to know what those ways were.
On televised audiences, my mother was steel wrapped in courtesy. In this room, with the pens scratching and the wry smiles and winks, she was steel wrapped in dynamite. My mother, the Queen of Catonia, was a very dangerous woman, and I was just starting to realize that.
"I'm not going to ask how you ensure your network's loyalty," I said.
"That's wise, because I wouldn't have told you.
" She leaned back and rearranged the folds of her gown over her knees.
"But if you accept the nomination, I might reveal my methods to you.
" She sighed dramatically. "Or maybe to your bride.
If I'd had a daughter, I would have taught her everything my mother taught me, but I have only sons, and it's all part of the inheritance, so you'll have to do it. "
I lifted my hands in mock surrender. "I don't think I would be able to do this. It seems far too complicated."
"It is," she agreed. "And far more interesting than anything your father does in his throne room." She waved her hand at the three small desks. "This is where the real deals are made. You'd be astonished how much of ruling is correspondence."
"You're a dangerous woman," I told her, and meant it as the compliment she'd take it for. "I am dying of curiosity, mostly about how you ensure your network's loyalty, but it still isn't enough to make me want the nomination. I'd much rather do other things."
"That's a shame." She sighed, and some of her mirth dimmed.
"Well, not everything is done by correspondence.
I arranged private audiences with the emissaries of the other houses.
It's never the principals themselves, always the emissaries, so that nothing spoken could be attributed directly to them.
I have at least two potential brides for each of you, and I'm not closing any of the deals until we know who's who.
The one we told you was meant for you might now be meant for someone else. I hope you don't mind."
"I don't care. I don't want to marry any of them."
"Oh, Alar. Don't say that. They are all lovely young ladies."
As she kept on going, regaling me with details about every royal daughter, I thought about her network of clerks and what I could do with it. A message of mine could reach the border with Elucia in days instead of weeks.
My letters could reach Kailin in a fraction of the time they took now.
I could dictate to one of my mother's clerks in cipher so that the clerk taking it down would set out string after string of nonsense and never know the true content of what he or she was writing.
I would have to ask her for it, and it would cost me something, some piece of the privacy I'd been guarding, because my mother gave nothing without noting what it bought her. But it might be worth it to expedite my letters to Kailin.