That was the first time Hakkon had intervened for him, but it had by no means been the last.
They’d been led to a vast wing of mostly tiny rooms, about the size of monastic cells, actually smaller than the bedrooms supplied to the servants here at the manor. There had been just enough room for a wardrobe, a chest, and two narrow beds. Hakkon had left him alone to survey this grim prospect with dismay. And, truth to tell, he had been close to breaking down in tears. He hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. He’d been forced to leave all of his friends at the manor behind, and by that time, that had included Isla, who was his very best friend.
The overt reason for Isla coming to spend time at Valdemar had been to help his then-invalided mother run the manor. Now he knew (although he had not at the time) that their fathers had decided to introduce the two of them to see if they would suit. It had been a clever move; their birthdays were within two moons of each other, they were both highly intelligent, and they were both mages—though their fathers had made it very clear that they were never to reveal this outside the family. The Emperor prized mages, and would collect every one that he found into his service. And Isla had the added bonus of being a Mindspeaker.
I hate to think what would have happened to her if the Emperor had known about that. The best she could have expected would have been being mewed up with the rest of his mages. He’d seen where they lived, a vast edifice attached to the Imperial Palace; he’d also seen, rarely, some of the mages themselves. They never looked happy.
The worst she could have expected would be much worse than being locked up in a gloomy mausoleum to labor for the Emperor every waking moment. There were not many female mages among them—so Hakkon had told him—because female mages, unless they were very powerful indeed, were treated like breeding stock for the purpose of making more mages.
Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d come to Valdemar when they were both eleven, and by the time the Emperor summoned him, they had been absolute best friends.
And, fortunately, she had also had neither great wealth in the form of a dower, nor great beauty. The former would have made her a rich prize that the Emperor could have used as a reward for one of his faithful. The latter—well, she’d still have been a reward for one of his faithful, but first the Emperor would probably have made her one of his many mistresses. He collected beautiful women and seemed to relish best the ones who were openly afraid of him and dared not defy him.
Well, she’d escaped the Emperor’s trap. Her twin brother had been the one who’d gone as a hostage.
And her brother had died there.
Nothing sinister about that, though. It was just reflective of the lack of care that the hostages got. Idor and his body-servant had both fallen ill. No one came to check on them at first when they did not turn up for meals, and by the time Kordas himself had gone to Idor’s room to see what was wrong, it was the first that anyone knew how sick they were. And by that time, it was too late. Despite the best that the healers could do, they had both died within hours of being found.
This was typical. You needed someone like Hakkon to make sure you got your share of food at meals, that nothing was stolen from you, that you weren’t beaten or worse by the predators among the children. In theory, having nobles send their firstborn sons (or daughters, if they had no sons) to the Emperor wasn’t a completely bad idea from the Emperor’s point of view. The youngsters were all treated alike, they got the same education, they integrated into the fabric of the Empire, and they would theoretically grow up loyal to him.
In practice, with a thousand children there, it was barely organized chaos, in which older children ruled the younger, and abuse was common.
The moment that Kordas had discovered Isla’s brother had been lying sick and alone for days was the moment Kordas had vowed to himself that no child of his was ever going to be sent into Imperial care.
Pain in his jaw made him realize he was grinding his teeth—as he often did when he thought about the Emperor and the Imperial Court.
I’m nothing to them, and as long as things stay that way, my family and my people are safe.
The problem was, he knew very well that could change overnight.
I need to check with Jonaton tomorrow. Maybe his answer will be different this time. Jonaton was so close . . .
I’m clenching my jaw again. Time for bed. Today had been good. Perhaps tomorrow would be better.
3
Valdemar kept “farmer’s hours,” even at the Ducal level, which disconcerted Imperial visitors a great deal. Breakfast was nearly at dawn, and was the biggest meal of the day.
The Great Hall of an Imperial-gift manor was meant for holding massive audiences, ceremonies, and enormous celebrations. It was not meant to be used as Kordas used it: as the communal eating-room.
In an Imperial-style Court, the people of rank ate together in a pleasant, well-lit dining room, while the servants and commoners ate in a larger, windowless, basement room off the kitchen. That was the room that Kordas’s grandfather had cut up into kitchen-staff rooms.
The Great Hall at Valdemar was set up with trestle tables and benches around the clock, and had never, to Kordas’s knowledge, been used as anything but an eating space. Kordas’s father had partially solved the heating problem by suspending a kind of cloth “ceiling” at about the height where a normal ceiling would be, made of painted sailcloth covered in images of stars, moons, and suns against a dark blue background. Kordas had no idea what things looked like above that cloth ceiling these days. It’s probably the home to about a million spiders at this point, he mused as he entered the room.
There was the difference between the High Tables, where people other than the servants and commoners ate, and the rest of the hall. There were no cloth coverings on the common tables; people had to pick up their own pieces of trencher-bread as they came in; they needed to bring their own cups, spoons, and knives; and they served themselves out of bowls and platters placed at intervals along the tables. When those were emptied, someone at the table was expected to fetch more from a table along the side of the room. At the High Tables, there were tablecloths, plates, cups, knives, and spoons, and people were served individually by the pages. Not by the youngest ones, who were still in training, and could not be expected to carry heavy bowls and platters of food, but by the ones in their last year of page-duty, at which point they would become squires. About half the pages were from the households of the lords of his manors. Not because he was holding them hostage, as the Emperor did, but to ensure their educations in being gentlemen. The pages were exclusively male. Little girls were expected to be trained in their own households by mothers or senior servants in the duties that were the traditional purviews of women. There might have been exceptions to this, but Kordas didn’t know any. There were rarely female squires—he had three—but they had come to him at the express request of their parents, for martial training as knights.