Read The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (21 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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Gil hesitated a moment between a stroll through the gardens for pleasure’s sake, and one through the ballroom for duty. No
shirking
, he told himself, and turned left into the ballroom.
All right, Commander, time to circulate. Listen to the gossip. See who’s here. Find one of those little cakes with the nut toppings … .
Gil insinuated himself into the crush. At once, the babble of a dozen conversations assaulted his ears.
“ … dear Marchen hired one of the very
top
stage designers to plan the west view … Interworld Data up twenty points by closing LastDay … that stand of trees around the ruined castle … in three volumes, with an index, too boring for words, I assure you … hired a hermit to live on the grounds, just to add an air of mystery …”
The commander drifted away in the direction of the buffet tables.
The things I do for the galaxy. Today could turn out to be even longer than I thought.
He kept an ear turned toward the chattering voices just the same, while he loaded up a plate from the buffet—nut toppings didn’t seem to be in vogue this season, worse luck, but this made the fifth afternoon in a row he’s been confronted by pink sugar icing and candied flower petals—and he was rewarded for his perseverance.
“ … Sapne.”
He couldn’t place the voice. The size of the crowd made such judgments difficult. But the planet’s name caught his ear; it wasn’t the sort of place he’d have supposed this crowd thought about very often.
The speaker’s unseen companion seemed to agree. “But Sapne doesn’t even have enough population left to qualify as an independent world anymore.”
“One doesn’t need people in order to be noble, my dear,” said the first voice. “The ancestor of the House of Sapne-in-Exile was on his own Grand Tour when the Plagues hit—the duke told me so just yesterday—and he married off-world to found the present line.”
Who’ve probably never been within half a sector of Sapne
, thought Gil. After more than a year on Galcen, he knew the type. The civilized galaxy was cluttered with them—ousted royalty, deposed presidents-for-life, former chairmen of planetary boards—and sooner or later they all showed up on the Republic’s capital planet.
Funny
,
though … I haven’t spotted anybody so far who looked quite that spectacularly useless. I must be losing my touch.
He wandered back out into the atrium with his plate of finger foods and took station against one wall, the better to keep a watch for visiting royalty and other objects of interest.
 
I’m going to starve
, thought Beka, smiling in her best regal manner as she held out a hand for the head of the Ovredisi Bankers’ Guild to kiss.
I’ve
been living on pink cakes and little pale sandwiches for a solid month. I wonder what they’re feeding the lowlife out back?
She hated these parties. The tight sleeves and fitted bodices of this year’s fashionable gowns left her with no convenient place to hide a knife. The sheath strapped to her upper thigh, just below where the skirt flared outward into a filmy cloud of pale green, gave her some comfort, but not much.
And nowhere to carry a blaster at all … I feel like I’m walking around naked.
She swallowed a laugh.
I’m getting as bad as Dadda
.
“Is something wrong, Your Highness?”
She shook her head at Marchen Bres. “No, gentlesir. A momentary spasm, only … a hereditary affliction, I’m afraid.” She smiled at him again. “Fortunately it’s not a serious one, though it’s kind of you to ask.”
The banker positively glowed.
Right about now,
she thought,
if I asked him for a mil
lion
in cash
he’d
hand it over and not ask for collateral.
She’d never thought they could carry it off, back when the Professor had laid out his plans on board
Crystal World
, the tiny but extravagantly appointed pleasure yacht he’d brought out of mothballs for the occasion.
“Sapne?” she’d asked. “
Sapne
? Professor, nobody is from Sapne. That whole damned planet’s nothing but a bunch of ruins and a few mud huts. The locals wear fur loincloths and trade colored rocks to each other for flat beer. I’ve been there,” she finished. “I know.”
“We will be the Royal House of Sapne-in-Exile,” the Professor repeated. “An off-world branch of the family.”
“It’ll work,” said Jessan. “There’s already two Kings of Sapne and a Sapnish Pretender running around. The way planetary royalty intermarried in the old days back before the Magewar, a Rosselin of Entibor’s probably got as good a claim as anybody else anyhow.”
“You’ll notice the Rosselins never bothered to assert one,” Ari grumbled. They were gathered on
Crystal World’s
observation deck; like everything else about the little yacht, it was an exquisite miniature, and Beka’s brother had been moving for three days now with exaggerated care, as though he expected to break something the moment he let down his guard. The caution had not improved his temper.
The Professor ignored him. “You, my lady, will be the Princess Berran, and Lieutenant Commander Jessan will be her brother, the Crown Prince Jamil. And Mistress Hyfid, if she agrees, will be Her Highness’s companion-chaperone, the better to further the illusion.”
Llannat looked abstracted—Beka was reminded of somebody trying to remember the date of the last solstice by counting the weeks backward—and then nodded. “I can handle it.”
“Handle what?” Beka asked.
“Keeping us from being recognized,” said the Adept. “The easiest way is with a single wide-range illusion—language, for instance. None of us know Sapnish, but give me some tapes to listen to for a few days and I can manage to convince everybody else that we’re speaking it. It’s not infallible, but it’ll work better than fancy disguises.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Jessan said. “I can fake the accent when you’re not around.”
“Excellent,” said the Professor.
Ari looked suspicious. “And what am I supposed to be doing while the rest of you are enjoying the high life on Ovredis? Parking the hovercar?”
“As a matter of fact … ,” said the Professor.
Ari regarded the Entiboran in silence for a moment, and then started to chuckle. “Why not?” he said. “Bee, I’ll bet you twenty credits the food’s better down in the servants’ quarters.”
And so far, he’s been winning,
Beka thought,
doing the gracious-smile bit again as Marchen Bres bowed himself away. Where the hell is Jessan, though? He was supposed to meet the rest of us here, and I haven’t seen him yet.
The doorman’s stentorian tones broke into her worries. “His Royal Highness Jamil, Crown Prince of Sapne!”
About time
, thought Beka, half-turning to glance toward the door.
Lieutenant Commander Nyls Jessan strode into the atrium, flinging off his light summer cloak and tossing the swirl of purple satin over his shoulder to the doorman without turning his head or breaking step. Beka’s eyes narrowed. The Khesatan medic had thrown the cloak aside with even more bravura than usual, and his whole bearing projected self-satisfaction.
He’s got something hot.
 
Gil located the Princess of Sapne without much trouble, once he knew what he was looking for. The tall girl in frosty green wore a plain metal circlet around hair already twisted high up on her head in a shimmering, pale-yellow crown, but what first caught his eye was her stillness. The rest of the throng in the atrium milled about, collecting in groups and splitting up again, but the girl in green stayed in one spot, with a grey-haired avuncular gentleman keeping watch on her left hand and a sable-gowned duenna hovering on her right. Marchen’s party guests came to her, it was clear, and not the other way around.
She wasn’t bad-looking, either, in a thaw-me-out ice-maidenish sort of way. Marchen Bres got two smiles out of her while Gil watched, and went off looking like a man ready to sell company secrets just to get another one.
Time to circulate a bit more, Gil told himself. Maybe I can find somebody who’ll introduce an overworked baronet living on his Space Force pay to a planetary princess.
He stood away from the wall, and was making ready to ditch his now-empty plate when he heard the doorman’s voice echoing across the indoor garden.
“His Royal Highness Jamil, Crown Prince of Sapne!”
The Princess turned her head sharply, looking back over one shoulder toward the door—and Gil froze. He set his plate down on a passing waiter’s tray with a nerveless hand, while his mind played back first one picture and then another. Beka Rosselin-Metadi, age seventeen, looking out at the camera from the holocube on General Metadi’s desk, her hair the same moonlit blond and her dress the same light green … and Captain Tarnekep Portree, age unknown and habits unsavory, caught by a Security camera in the act of glancing back over his shoulder with just that air of damn-your-eyes arrogance.
 
“G
OOD AFTERNOON, sister dear. How’s the party?”
“Boring,” said Beka.
Jessan smiled and gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek. “D’Caer’s on his way here now,” he murmured.
Beka felt a warm glow that had nothing to do with the kiss.
Finally
, she thought.
That night of all-out war back on Pleyver had been a bad mistake on the part of the other side—or failing to win it had been, which amounted to the same thing. And while Tarnekep Portree and his copilot didn’t have access to the social circles traveled in by the rich and regal, the Royal House of Sapne-in-Exile turned out to be another story.
“Is our driver ready?” she asked.
Jessan smiled, and tapped the comm link built into one mother-of-pearl cuff button. “He awaits our departure, dear sister—but we can’t leave just yet, I’m afraid. I promised a good friend an introduction to my lovely sibling.”
Beka looked down her nose at him. “That was a trifle presumptuous of you, wasn’t it, Jamil?” She turned to the Professor. “Uncle—must I?”
“I’m afraid so, my dear, if Jamil has promised.” The Entiboran gave Jessan a look of faint disapproval. “You shouldn’t be so free with your sister’s company, Your Highness. Dare we hope that this time, at least, your friend is a gentleman of good family, and not another of the local merchants?”
“A very rich merchant, Uncle,” Jessan said. “And very lucky at cards.”
“Oh, Jamil,” wailed Beka softly, “you can’t have gambled away all your pocket money again!”
Jessan gave her and the Professor a scapegrace grin. “’Fraid so, Berran. And the news got round after Uncle stopped my allowance the last time—he wouldn’t take my note-of hand.”
The Professor’s faint disapproval changed to a stern frown. “Do you mean to tell me, Your Highness, that you made your sister the object of a public wager?”
“Caught, by the gods!” said Jessan, with a reckless laugh. He looked over at Llannat, standing by in her modest black gown. “Tell me, Cousin Lana—will you have me if they cast me out?”
Llannat only sniffed.
Too wrapped up in her illusion weaving to do anything else, Beka supposed. Well, thanks to her, everybody else in the room is getting the impression of a royal family spat—in Sapnish
.
The Professor was doing a good job of it on his end, too. “Your Highness, you have overstepped the bounds of what is permissible, even for one in your privileged position. We leave for home as soon as this affair is concluded.”
“Oh, Uncle,” Beka pleaded, “must we? Home is so
dreary.”
“I’m afraid we must, my dear,” the Professor said. “If your brother will not learn responsibility on his own, he must be taught. We will keep the promise which he so rashly made in your name, and then make our farewells.”
Jessan laughed a second time and chucked her under the chin. “Cheer up, sister mine … my friend Ebenra’s charming as well as rich. You might even enjoy his company, if you can get away from Uncle and Cousin Lana long enough to appreciate it.” He bowed and kissed his hand at them all. “I’m off to the punch bowl, dear hearts—collect me when it’s time to leave in disgrace.”
The man’s wasted as a medic,
Beka thought,
smiling after him. He should have gone on the stage.
 
Commander Gil leaned his shoulders against the atrium wall. Right now, frankly, he could use the support, and never mind the cultivated air of negligent idleness he’d been trying to convey earlier.
So Beka Rosselin-Metadi is Tarnekep Portree is—the Princess of Sapne. Let’s have another look at the rest of them, why don’t we, Jervas?
He let his gaze move from one member of the Sapnish party to the next. After that first revelation, the rest was easy. The grey-haired gentleman, for instance, could only be the copilot of
Pride
of
Mandeyn,
the one known around the spaceports as the Professor. And as for Crown Prince Jamil—if that wasn’t Nyls Jessan playing royalty as if to the manner born, then Gil was never going to trust a Space Force ID file flatpic again. He gave a slight smile and an inward chuckle.
I could solve the mystery of the vanishing medical station right now if I wanted to, just by asking.
The chaperone, though—that rather plain, unremarkable face didn’t belong to anybody involved in the Pleyver affair. But the
Pride
had snatched an Adept off Nammerin along with Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi, and Mistress Llannat Hyfid was a small, dark woman not unlike the princess’s duenna. Very like, in fact. Gil thought about General Metadi and the questions he was careful not to ask, and hurried on to the next topic.
If the Adept is with Captain Portree … ah, Beka Rosselin-Metadi, then Ari Rosselin-Metadi must be somewhere hereabouts as well, and I haven’t seen him. He’d certainly stand out in this crowd—right. That big chauf
feur
out
by the parking bay.
No
wonder he looked so
fa
miliar.
Gil accepted another glass of the sparkling pink stuff from a passing waiter, and stood sipping it while he watched the Sapnish contingent over the wafer-thin crystal rim. The family seemed to be having a bit of a tiff right now—
Funny,
thought Gil,
I know
who they are, but they’re speaking a language
I don’t understand.
For all
I
know, it might even be Sapnish.
He took another swallow of the pink-and-sparkly, wishing that his conscience would let him switch to something stronger. What he’d seen went a long way toward explaining some of the mysteries he’d encountered lately, but left him staring at an even bigger one—just what were the General’s daughter and her grab-bag crew up to on Ovredis?
As he slipped his drink and mulled the question over, the doorman’s voice boomed out yet again.
“Gentlesir Ebenra D’Caer!”
A stir and a hum went through the crowd in the atrium, and all eyes, even those of the Sapnish contingent, turned toward the door. Gil wasn’t surprised. The head of the D’Caer Combine might be only a common Gentlesir, and not even a Guildhead like Marchen Bres, but he still counted for more than all the local nobility and imported royalty put together.
D’Caer hadn’t changed much since the last time Gil had chanced into his orbit, during a home leave nine or ten Standard years before. He was still tall and hatchet-faced, he still dressed with the same insulting plainness for office work and social occasions alike, and he still traveled with a bodyguard even taller and broader in the shoulders than he was himself.
I wonder if he stills feels up young ladies at parties?
wondered Gil—who’d been amazed, on that long-ago leave, by the things a girl would tell an older brother who could be reliably sworn to secrecy.
Right now, Beka Rosselin-Metadi was looking across the atrium at D’Caer with a smile that for some reason made Gil remember CC2 Peyte’s report on the fight in the cargo bay—and the comptech’s description of Tarnekep Portree, white shirtfront soaked from neck to waist in somebody else’s blood, standing in the line of fire and smiling as he took aim.
Whatever she’s holding against D’Caer,
thought Gil,
it’s got to be something worse than roving hands on the dance floor. Bad enough to get help from her brother, and from the CO of a Space Force Station, and from an Adept. Not to mention General Metadi’s tacit approval … and maybe Master Ransome’s as well.
Commander Gil could only think of one offense that warranted all that. “Damn,” he muttered aloud to the dregs of his punch. “What am I supposed to do now?”
 
He’s here
, thought Beka. A chill of anticipation ran down her back as she looked over toward the door, and she smiled in spite of herself.
She smiled again at the sight of Jessan ambling back through the atrium, brushing cake crumbs off his fingertips with a napkin as he came. Jessan paused, gazed languidly around the room, and then started toward D’Caer with a cheerful cry.
D‘Caer bowed, and Jessan did the “stand up, friend” routine with the hand that held the napkin. The older man straightened, and his dark eyes flicked about the room. The head of the D’Caer family had a hungry-predator look to him that made Beka wish for a moment that she’d come to the party as Captain Portree instead of the Princess of Sapne. Tarnekep knew how to deal with types like that, but the Princess Berran …
I wish that knife was easier to get to.
His gaze hit on her, and took in her circlet and her little entourage. She forced herself to give him a courteous “have I met you?” smile in response. He turned to Jessan, and said something or other. Calling in his debts, probably.
Yes, that was it; here they both came.
Gracious, my girl
, Beka reminded herself.
Act gracious. And don’t mess things. up this time!
“Sister dear,” said Jessan, with a mischievous smile, “allow me to make known to you my good friend Gentlesir Ebenra D‘Caer, of the Rolny D’Caers. Ebenra, this is my sister, Her Royal Highness Princess Berran of Sapne.”
“Your Highness,” murmured D’Caer, making a bow even lower than Marchen Bres’s as he kissed the hand she held out to him.
“Gentlesir D’Caer,” she said, as demurely as she could manage, and looked up at him from under her eyelashes while blessing the years-ago schoolmate who’d showed her how.
I can’t remember the last time I thought about Jilly. She’ll never know her eyelash trick finally did me some good.
It appeared to work as advertised, too. D’Caer showed no intention of moving on to the buffet tables or joining any of the other groups scattered all about. Instead, he made innocuous small talk with Jessan and the Professor and glanced from time to time in her direction—nothing she would call offensive, but probably heady stuff for a sheltered princess. She made a point of catching his eye the next time he looked over at her that way, and then she did the eyelash bit again. The effect was even better the second time around.
Thank you, Jilly Oldigaard—I’ve got him hooked. Now to maneuver him off alone—but how is a sweet little innocent thing like Berran going to manage that? And right under the noses of her uncle and her chaperone, too!
As if on an unspoken signal, Llannat Hyfid sagged against Beka’s right side with a gentle moan. “Oh, dear, Your Highness …”
Beka slipped an arm around the shorter woman to support her. The Adept had gone pale under her dark skin, and tiny drops of sweat beaded her forehead.
“Cousin Lana!” Beka exclaimed. “What’s wrong? Are you ill?”
Llannat’s drooping eyelids lifted. “I feel … unwell, Your Highness. The room is so hot … .” The eye on the side of the Adept’s face away from Ebenra D’Caer closed, and then opened again, even as her faint voice went on, “Does Your Highness think it could have been the shellfish salad?”
D’Caer gave a harsh laugh. “It’s possible, by heaven, as long as Bres keeps on trying to serve it out of season.”
“Damned inconsiderate of him, I call it,” said Jessan. “Cousin Lana, light of my life, let me take you away from these crowds to recover yourself.”
The Khesatan held out his arm, and Llannat took it with another little sigh. “Your Highness shouldn’t go on so … but if you sister is able to spare me … I do feel most peculiar.”
The two faded off into the greenery of the atrium garden, leaving Beka alone between the Professor and Ebenra D’Caer.
“Your Grace,” D’Caer was saying, “I’ve long hoped for the chance to pay my respects to your niece. If I could presume to ask the favor of a stroll about the atrium in her company?”
The man certainly knows how to take advantage of an opening
, Beka thought.
At her left, the Professor was going grave and protective again. “I’m afraid that with her companion taken ill—”
There’s my cue
. “Please, dear Uncle?”
Her “uncle” managed to appear indulgent and concerned at the same time. “I don’t know what your mother would say, Your Highness.”
“I’m sure,” said D’Caer, “that a noble and kindhearted lady such as she must be would say that no harm could possibly come of it.”
The Professor smiled at Beka. “Very well, dear child—but only in the downstairs rooms, mind you, and don’t stray out onto the grounds. It wouldn’t be seemly without your cousin.”
“Yes, Uncle,” Beka said as she took the arm D’Caer held out to her. “We won’t be long, I promise.”
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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