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soldiers were already on edge; that would only get worse the longer they camped here.
    â€œPerhaps I should’ve said something sooner,” Tenoctris went on. “I didn’t realize it would be quite like this.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t have changed Garric’s plan,” Sharina said, glancing sideways toward her brother among his aides and black-armored bodyguards. “He didn’t want to land on Sandrakkan proper because there might be trouble between our soldiers and the Earl’s. Would be trouble.”
    There always was trouble: between soldiers and civilians, even when the soldiers were in permanent barracks at home, and between soldiers of different regiments even in the same army. Dropping an army of twenty thousand, armed and full of themselves and secretly frightened, onto an island that had fought them during the lifetime of many on both sides, meant that the inevitable drunken insults and brawls over women were very likely to escalate into full-scale warfare.
    Sharina knew that a bloody war between the royal army—which was still the Ornifal army in the minds of many—and the army of any of the major islands was likely to doom the kingdom no matter who won that particular battle. King Carus had fought a score of usurpers and secessionists, winning every time. Even if wizardry hadn’t destroyed him and his army, there’d still have been a final battle that Carus lost if only because there were no longer enough able-bodied men to stand beside him.
    The Old Kingdom had died with Carus. The New Kingdom would die just as surely with Garric if he started down the path of ruling by his sword arm.
    Sharina looked at her brother in silence, feeling love and pride.
    She also felt an embarrassing degree of relief. No matter how willing she was to help him for the kingdom’s sake, the final responsibility was Garric’s, not hers.
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    The Sandrakkan mainland was crowded with people, standing on the shore or already in the barges that would bring them across to Volita as soon as they’d gotten permission. Even a mile away they could see Prince Garric of Haft, Regent of the Kingdom, in his dazzling silvered breastplate and the silvered helmet, from which flared wings of gilded bronze.
    Inside that splendid armor was Garric or-Reise, the peasant son of the innkeeper of Barca’s Hamlet. There were many things Garric would rather’ve been doing than the job he had before him. They started with reading verse by the great Old Kingdom poet Celondre while he watched a flock of sheep on the hillside south of the hamlet, because that was a job he understood.
    â€œYou understand being ruler as well as any man does, lad,” said King Carus, the ancestor who’d shared Garric’s mind ever since his father gave him Carus’ coronation medal to hang around his neck on a thong. “Better than I ever did, as the Gods well know.”
    Carus laughed, his presence unseen by others but to Garric as real as his own right hand. In life Carus had been a tall man with a ready smile and a swordsman’s thick wrists. That was how he usually appeared to Garric as well, leaning on the rose-wound railing of a balcony in an indeterminate place. Carus’ features and those of Garric, his descendant after a millennium, could have been those of the same man some decades apart in age.
    We don’t know what history’ll say about me after I’m dead, Garric said in his mind.
    â€œWe know that if you don’t continue to do better than I did,” said Carus in what was for him an unusually crisp tone, “there won’t be any more history.”
    â€œThat’s Marshal Renold’s standard, a crow displayed,” said Liane, slitting her eyes as she peered toward the waiting barge with a cloth-of-gold canopy shading the passengers amidships. “If he’s present, he’ll be in charge of the negotiations. The marshal traditionally commands