The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kingdom was?”
    “Ah—Aldersyde? No, it’s Hartsholt, isn’t it—that’s why Hartsholt’s a duchy.”
    “Very good, Galing. The capital was indeed in Hartsholt, or somewhere near it—there’s nothing left of it now. So tell me, Lord Nicholas, what do you deduce from available evidence?”
    It was like pacing through honey, trying to figure out why Arlen was leading him this dance.
    “I’m being most unkind, making you go through all this,” Arlen remarked sympathetically. “But really, it would be a shame for all that expensive tutoring your father gave you to go to waste. As I recall, you even flirted with the University for a year or two.”
    “I went to a few lectures, to keep my friend Edward Tielman company.”
    “Ah, yes. Edward Tielman. Secretary to the Crescent Chancellor. Very sound man. Discreet. His father was your family’s steward, wasn’t he?”
    “He still is,” said Nicholas shortly. Did Arlen know he and Edward had been lovers? Was he asking whether they still were? Why should he care? Because Edward was somehow connected to the favor Arlen wanted from him, Nicholas answered himself—Edward and the old capital at (or near) Hartsholt and the oak leaf brooch and the dead man from the North. There was one thing missing, one fact connected to his schooldays, when his tutor had taught spelling and rhetoric and mathematics and history to him, to his older brother the heir, and to Edward, the steward’s son.
    “The kings,” Nicholas said slowly. “Before the Union, the kings lived in the old capital city. There was a sacred grove, wasn’t there? An oak grove.” Lord Arlen nodded, very much as the tutor had nodded, glad to see his student performing well. “The man from Hartsholt must have been a royalist, and you think this oak leaf is a royalist badge. And you want me to use Tielman’s connections at the University to find out if there are royalists there, too.”
    Arlen laughed. “That’s the bones of it. Very good.” Nicholas felt himself flushing again, this time with pleasure and something else, something he knew Lord Arlen was unlikely to return.
    “Quite,” said the older man, disconcertingly. “Now. You are no doubt asking yourself why I am concerned about a handful of unlettered hobbledehoys whose ancestors have been diverting themselves with rebellions for five hundred years.”
    Nicholas made a gesture designed to convey his complete confidence in the Serpent Chancellor’s political acuity.
    “Nevertheless. The situation is this. The current Duke of Hartsholt’s a wastrel and a bad landlord. His steward is a thief, and his heir is as great a spendthrift as his sire. And it’s not only Hartsholt’s private estates that are suffering. There is famine all through the North, and great poverty. Young men are pouring down to the South, looking to better themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s what the ancient kings did, after all. But there are more of them every year, and all of them are angry. They wear their Northernness like a flag, flaunt their braided hair and their barbaric customs, shout out incomprehensible Northern slogans in City Sessions. This fellow”—Arlen touched the oak leaf—“was all too comprehensible. He got up in open Sessions before the Mayor and offered a formal petition for the king to be restored to the land.”
    Nicholas felt as amused as shocked—it seemed like such a stupid, pointless thing to do. But Arlen was studying him gravely, no hint of amusement lighting his face. “What did he imagine it would gain him?” he offered diplomatically.
    “I don’t know,” said Arlen. “All he would say under questioning was that the land needed its king again, and the time was at hand.”
    “Is it a general uprising, then?”
    “No. I don’t think so. It’s more like creeping sedition, with mystic complications. Call it an illness. We need to study it, to discover whether it’s a plague or a mild fever. I’ve sent men