Read Online Nobody's Son by Sean Stewart - Free Book Online Page B

Court.”
    “Tell the gentleman he does neither of us credit by making a public jackass of himself,” Gail hissed.
    Lissa turned politely back to Mark. “The Princess has observed that while you—”
    “Shite and swan’s-piss! I’m going, all right? I’m going!” Holding his cloak out with one arm to keep it from piling on the floor Mark bowed and fled to the appetizer table at the back of the room. Here, standing before trestles laden with food and drink, he stared fixedly at bits of fruit bobbing in tureens of bright pink punch.
    This was it: he had hit bottom. All his life he had looked forward to this day, his triumphant return, his hero’s welcome. Instead, he was alone among strangers and enemies.
    So much for happily ever after.
    Wasn’t it every boy’s dream, to marry a princess with flashing eyes?
    He’d been so sure Gail wanted him to ask for her hand. Damn it, she made me do it ! But now she was acting like any other high-born lady, despising his manners, his birth, his breeding. The feast he had come to so hungry, after so many years of lonely toil, had turned to ashes in his mouth.
    “Delicious, isn’t it?”
    The speaker was perhaps five years older than Mark: a young man still. His clothes were soft, comfortable, and expensive-looking. His small mouth was all but hidden by a magnificent beard, carefully trimmed, of warm brown hair soft and silky as ermine. He frowned at a pair of silver epaulets on his forest green tunic, as if they were a brace of toads he’d found squatting unexpectedly on his round shoulders. His hands were soft and pale; on his little finger he wore a silver ring set with an emerald. Instead of a dagger he carried at his hip an odd copper cylinder, narrower at the top than at the bottom.
    Most remarkably, he wore a strange contraption on his nose: a bridge and two circles of wire, holding discs of glass through which peered his pale grey eyes. His arched eyebrows gave him an eternal look of faint surprise.
    He seemed friendly. “I prefer the trout, myself. Some like the almond-spears: too sweet before a meal, I think.” As he spoke he turned a flake of trout deftly onto a small cracker. A round pink-rimmed hole appeared in his silky beard; he popped the cracker in.
    Mark wondered how long it would take him on handy-man’s wages to buy just one of those crackers, topped with flaked trout. He felt his hackles rising.
    The courtier finished his cracker, looking like a small brown owl snapping down a mouse. “Magnificent! Atrexides’ Avayar’s Valerian’s Archibald’s Valerian,” he said with a bow. “ Your name of course is known to all. May I have the honour to inquire on how your honoured father fares?”
    “Dead,” Mark snapped.
    Valerian blinked. “Er. Um. Allow me to express my—”
    “I don’t know he’s dead: I only hope so. Like as not he just abandoned us.”
    Valerian took the contraption from his face, and polished the glass discs with his satin tunic-hem. “The only trial of spectacles: they get so easily smirched.” He frowned, held them to the light, settled them back on his nose. He peered at Mark as if trying to work out a difficult sum. “At Court the Truth, like vinegar, is a better garnish than a beverage,” he remarked, biting into a second cracker. Bits of flaked trout clung to his beard. “For instance, when I inquire about your honoured father, you say ‘As well as we could hope.’ You shake your head in sorrow, to give me time to sympathize, without encouraging a further question. Then in turn you question me about my honoured father; listen; nod; and echo my trivialities.”
    Mark smiled in spite of himself. “Tell me, sir: how is your honoured father?”
    Valerian swallowed. “Cross as a crab and sick of the sight of me,” he said frankly. “Would you stalk one angry leftward stride? I’d like to try the punch.”
    Deftly Valerian ladled pinkness into a crystal cup. He nodded to Mark, blinked, and smiled. “Advice unsought