The Two of Swords: Part 9 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Notitia.”
    “You’re in the—”
    He grinned. “Afraid so. Just enough Imperial blood in my veins to paint a butterfly’s wings, but, yes, I qualify. And you can bet the Chamberlain’s read up on me, so he’ll know. Fortuitously, my brother’s current status and activities are highly obscure, which is a way of saying they haven’t caught him yet. For all I know, he might well have a daughter, scores of them, enough for a battalion of heavy dragoons. The point is, if I’m a purple-blood and you’re my niece, then you’re purple, too.” He smiled. “Well, a sort of pale lilac. But it means they’d have to look after you.”
    She stared at him. “I could go home.”
    “I don’t see why not.” He sipped his tea and put the bowl down. “But I don’t see us being able to arrange that until we actually reach the capital. It’d mean sweet-talking the higher-ups in the Chamberlain’s office, which can only be done on the spot.”
    She frowned. “But I can’t go to the capital,” she pointed out. “Can I?”
    “You can’t be
seen
in the capital. There’s a slight but effective difference.”
    She breathed out slowly through her nose. Oida a scion of the Imperial house. Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? The same Providence that ensures that buttered bread always lands butter-side down would see to that. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll do that, then. Thank you, Uncle Oida.”
    He scowled at her. “My brother’s much older than me,” he said.
    “Of course he is,” she replied gravely. “Now, you get off to bed. Are you sure you can manage the stairs?”
    Six days in the coach across the Great East Plains. They were using the military road, reckoned by experienced travellers to be one of the best in the world; it was flat, level and straight, free of ruts and potholes, and it seemed to go on for ever. The view from the window was always the same and mostly sky – blue, cloudless. It wasn’t unbearably hot, and every twenty miles there was a way station, with clean water and stabling for the horses. They changed escorts every two days (there was a reason for this; Oida had explained it, but she hadn’t been listening) but it was inconceivable that they should be attacked out here on the plains. The thought that anything could be alive out there, even savages, was simply grotesque. You’d have to rethink all your definitions of what constituted life.
    As well as Saloninus on frailty, Oida had brought Eutolm’s
Meditations on Darkness and Light
, a selection of Structuralist lyric poetry,
Achis and Sinuessa
(but no pictures) and
Notes on the Rituals and Protocols of the Imperial Court
by the Emperor Sarpitus II, the annotated edition with notes and commentaries. She read them all. Then they played chess – Oida had a travelling set; pegs on the base of each piece and holes in the middle of each square – but he got upset when he lost and they stopped. There was always sleep, but if she slept too much during the day she stayed awake all night, and the stone benches in the way stations were uncomfortable enough as it was. Oida was happy to talk; he was much better read than she thought he’d be, and tremendously well informed about every aspect of current affairs, but that just made her want to hit him.
    “All right,” she said one day, in desperation. “What do
you
do on long road journeys? When you’re on your own, I mean?”
    He frowned at her. “Actually, it’s when I get a lot of work done.”
    For a moment she couldn’t think what he meant. Then it occurred to her that by
work
he meant writing music. Somehow, she’d always assumed that it just came to him, fully formed and complete, in moments of enraptured inspiration, or else he bought it cheap from struggling young musicians and passed it off as his own. “Am I in the way?”
    “Well, yes,” he said. “I can’t work when there’s someone else there. I need to hum, and I’m self-conscious.”
    “Don’t mind me.”
    “Yes,