Lord of the Silent Kingdom

3. Alten Weinberg, Heart of the New Brothen Empire

Princess Helspeth, Grafina fon Supfer, Marquesa of Runjan, and so forth, had come to Alten Weinberg thinking the Emperor meant to celebrate her twentieth birthday. She went to her knees three times before her little brother, Lothar, Emperor of the Grail Empire. In the presence, now, she suspected his summons had nothing to do with her birthday. The hall was filled with the ravens and vultures who orbited Lothar these days. And Katrin had come, too.

But not Ferris Renfrow. She would have been more comfortable if Renfrow were visible. You could call Ferris Renfrow the conscience of the Empire.

Helspeth did not like bending the knee but her brother was acting in his official capacity tonight. Probably reluctantly. In front of Omro va Still-Patter, Grand Duke of Hilandle, first among equals in the Council Advisory, styled the Protector. Accompanying Hilandle, interposing themselves between the Emperor and the lesser lights in the hall, were the Master of the Wardrobe, the Master of the Privy Purse, and the Lord Admiral Vondo fon Tyre, whose fleet was almost entirely imaginary. These men had gotten their claws into the Imperial power simply because Lothar was still five years short of his majority.

Helspeth's older sister Katrin, Grafina fon Kretien and Gordon, Princess Apparent, also knelt. She did not disguise her irritation, nor her loathing, for Hilandle and his cronies. Lothar was her baby brother, her beloved "Mushin." She had pampered him through countless illnesses, spoiling him terribly. Helspeth did not like or think well of her sister but she ould not deny that Katrin loved, nurtured, and indulged her brother selflessly. And, like Helspeth, she loathed the grasping old men who had seized control of the boy.

Tall, lean, blond, and beautiful, clad simply in dark clothing, Katrin Ege seemed cold and remote. She had her father's stubborn will but little of the magnetism that had served him so well. That lack, her sex, and the ambition of so many nobles put her in a weaker position than she liked. But the Protector and his cronies were blinding themselves willfully, seeing either of the Ege daughters as a weakling.

All the children of the Ferocious Little Hans were in weaker positions than they liked.

Johannes had compelled the Electors to fashion an Act of Will and Succession that enacted, published, and ratified by the Patriarch and Collegium would withstand every possible challenge. But Johannes Blackboots had not anticipated his own death in battle. He had expected to outlive his sickly son and see the Imperial throne passed on through Katrin and her sons. He had hoped to forge powerful alliances through both daughters.

Negotiations had come and gone before Johannes fell at al-Khazen. No arrangements had been finalized.

Helspeth had been included in the succession almost as an afterthought. Johannes was thorough in everything. After Helspeth, the sons of his sister Anies were named in the Act.

It would take a major Ege family disaster to put the succession back into the hands of the Electors.

Lothar stated, "The Council Advisory has cautioned us, and we are in agreement, that the world today presents our reign with unprecedented challenges."

This was the first time Helspeth heard Mushin use the royal "we." It took her aback. She was not accustomed to her little brother being anything else. And, studying him closely, she suspected that this Emperor Lothar was a creation of the Grand Duke and his cronies. An eventuality she had feared increasingly as Hilandle and his flock circled more closely round the Emperor and isolated him ever more from his family and the world.

Lothar understood what was happening. A minor, he had little hope of halting the process. He had to remain strong and play one Councilor off against another. He managed that with some success.

"It has been demonstrated that our present style of life is inappropriate for a family of Imperial dignity. The daughters of our father should not be inviting scandal and disaster by roving like common men-at-arms."

Helspeth glared at Lothar. Half the nobility had spent the past ten years appalled and scandalized because the old Emperor not only permitted but encouraged his maiden daughters to accompany him to the field, to risk the life of the camp, and to come into regular contact with coarse, crude common soldiers.

So the Council was about to end all that.

The boy Emperor wilted under Helspeth's glare. And was no happier when he turned to his older sister.

Katrin was less inclined to the scandalous life. Helspeth had taken up arms and armor during the Calziran Crusade, getting into desperate straits under al-Khazen's wall. Katrin was more willful, more determined to preserve her prerogatives and independence.

Lothar was strong of mind, if not of flesh. He did not remain cowed. "We have decided that our princess sisters shall withdraw into their households till suitable marriages can be negotiated. Silence! Both of you." Helspeth had been about to explode. She did not see Katrin's reaction because her own focus had become so narrow. She was sure her sister was equally outraged.

The Grand Duke all but sneered behind his short, gray-tinged beard. His eyes were icy. "It's the Emperor's will." Meaning Lothar had been bullied until he gave in.

Helspeth reminded herself that Hilandle, till Johannes forced his Act of Will and Succession upon the Electors, had counted himself the leading candidate to succeed.

The boy Emperor then demonstrated that his advisers did not have him as neatly under thumb as they might want to believe. "Katrin, we convey to you the Imperial holdings at Grumbrag, with all the rights of Eathered and Arnmagil."

Members of the Council were so aghast they failed to sputter. There were snickers amongst the lesser lights.

The boy continued. "To our sister Helspeth we convey the City of Plemenza and its dependencies and trust that she will lake the opportunity to further her education."

Plemenza was much the lesser prize. Eathered and Arnmagil, now unified into a single Imperial province, had been kingdoms in their own rights scarcely a century gone. But Plemenza had been Johannes's favorite city. He would have shifted his capital there from Alten Weinberg had the Firaldian city not been so far from the heart of the Grail Empire. He had spent a lot of time in Plemenza, often for his own pleasure, not just because Imperial policy focused on Firaldia and the difficult behaviors of Sublime V and the Church. Johannes's daughters had enjoyed much of their schooling there.

Helspeth flashed a grin. Lothar flashed right back.

Hilandle had been outmaneuvered. Two score witnesses, few congenial to the Grand Duke, had seen the Emperor convey Imperial holdings to members of his family. If Lothar was clever indeed, the patents were ready now, prepared by someone he knew was not Hilandle's tool.

The Grand Duke's face turned stony. He would never underestimate the boy Emperor again.

Helspeth glanced sideways. Katrin seemed pleased. Eathered and Arnmagil was a plum, a fine, fruitful country – and Grumbrag was known for its craftsmen and ingenious artificers. A suitable city and province for the Crown Princess of the New Brothen Empire.

The fleeting look Katrin sent Helspeth's way was only slightly less venomous than the one she had given Hilandle.

She was jealous! Of Plemenza! Because her time there was filled with happy memories, too. Perhaps the only such memories she had accumulated in her twenty-three years.

Johannes Ege – variously known as Johannes Blackboots, Hansel Blackboots ("Little Hans" because he was not a man of great physical stature), or Hansel the Ferocious – had been elected Emperor of the New Brothen Empire before the birth of any of his children. Katrin's mother, Hildegrun of Machen, had just turned nineteen when she married the new Emperor. She was tall, blond, and beautiful. Gossip at the time suggested she had caught Johannes's eyes when she was just fifteen. The Imperial nuptials antedated the birth of the Princess Katrin by a scant five months.

The alliance with Hildegrun's family solidified Johannes's hold on the Grail Empire. She was a devoted wife with numerous knightly brothers who served the Emperor faithfully all his years, remaining friends and allies through several bouts with misfortune. Hildegrun often accompanied Hansel on his progresses through the Empire. She made herself beloved immediately everywhere, even by the wives of the Emperor's enemies.

When Katrin was four months old, while her father was campaigning amongst the countless states of Firaldia, Hildegrun died in a riding accident.

An accomplished equestrian, Hildegrun loved to gallop with the bolder women of her household. On the evil day her mount stumbled as she raced along the bank of a canal. The Empress was unable to leap clear. The horse fell on her. The animal thrashed its way down the bank into the water, rider unconscious and still entangled in harness. Horse and rider drowned before they could be dragged out.

Patriarch Clemency III, the Collegium, and the Five Families of Brothe sent up praises to God. The Patriarch's forces had been defeated in detail everywhere that summer. The Emperor was marching on the Mother City itself when the news reached him.

Hildegrun was not in her tomb many months when Hansel wed Helspeth's mother, the Dowager Princess of Nietzchau. The Princess Terezia was his senior by ten years. The alliance further strengthened Johannes's position among the Electors. The Dowager Princess, at thirty-four, had been a woman possessed of considerable carnal appetites. Her new husband satisfied them sufficiently to subject her to two miscarriages, a son, Willem, born live but who died within two weeks, and, finally, Helspeth. Who never knew her mother.

The Dowager Princess died of childbed fever three days after Helspeth's birth. She was interred beside Willem in the family tomb of her first husband in Wortburg, in Nietzchau.

Before her death the Dowager Princess transferred all her family honors and obligations to the Emperor. Leaving him, in his twenty-seventh year, the third most powerful man in the Chaldarean world, exceeded only by the Brothen Patriarch and the overlord of the Eastern Empire. Among the tasks she left him was the humbling of the worldly power of Brothe. That he prosecuted with skill and success.

But never again did he come as close to breaking the temporal power of the Church as he had before Hildegrun's death. In part, that was due to despondency over his own losses, in part because he had to cope with pro-Brothen sentiment among his own nobility. He did not show much vigor in the field for nine years after Terezia's passing. By then bribery and treachery had undone half his earlier successes.

Then a stubborn new Patriarch, Sublime V, assumed the mantle of the Brothen Episcopal Church.

Eighteen months after the death of the Dowager Princess, Johannes wed Margaret of Eathered in an alliance arranged by Hildegrun's father. Margaret, the spinster daughter of Johannes's predecessor, was a devout woman he respected but never loved. She worshiped him. The marriage brought Johannes the territories endowed upon Katrin by her brother. It joined the Ege line with that of the family that had provided the majority of past Grail emperors.

Margaret of Eathered was never a well woman. Nor was the one son she bore her beloved Hansel. Nevertheless, Margaret survived longer than either of Johannes's previous wives. But when Lothar was seven a plague swept through the Empire. It carried off most of the elderly and sickly. The Crown Prince himself was preserved by being sent into ferociously enforced isolation at the first hint of the outbreak.

When Margaret died Johannes swore he would not marry again. He contented himself with courtly romances ever after.

Each of the Emperor's children favored their mothers in appearance and their father in intellect. Katrin might have been Hildegrun at twenty-three had she lived. Helspeth, everyone said, was the image of Terezia in her youth. Katrin had a bevy of uncles who doted on her and still bore their love and admiration for her father. Because of those hardened warlords, and the families of Johannes's subsequent wives, the Council Advisory of the New Brothen Empire would not dare dispute Lothar's gifts to his sisters.

Lothar failed to win one point. Johannes's daughters would not be permitted to behave as though they were sons. They had come into vast new estates. Now they would have to go to them and behave like other women of the stature and time.

Helspeth was not pleased. But she was dutiful.

Katrin, she could tell, was going to cause trouble.

The Grand Duke's faction had a powerful bolt in its quiver. Marriage.

Lothar could not ignore marriage indefinitely. Neither his own, nor those of his sisters. It was his bounden duty to provide an heir, despite the past Imperial tradition of election. And his sisters…

Marriage would clip their claws. Though they would not lose their places in the succession till Lothar produced a son who survived, any husbands they took would have strong legal rights to control them.

Helspeth sneered. Law and character could come into conflict.

She knew of no man with a will more powerful than her own.

She had no desire to wed but if circumstances so compelled, she would make sure the gentleman involved regretted his ambitions.

Anyone who wed Katrin would be even unhappier.

Still, the daughters of Johannes Blackboots were among the greatest prizes in the marriage market of the Chaldarean world. Because every month that Lothar Ege survived was another amazement to that world.

Lothar could not possibly live long enough to provide an heir.

Alter what he had done tonight, Helspeth wondered if Mushin was not at risk. The Grand Duke sometimes acted before he thought things through. Action against Lothar would not be bright. Katrin had less love for Hilandle than did Lothar. And she had attained her majority.

She should be a terror to the Grand Duke's faction.

Unless she failed to win the allegiance of Ferris Renfrow.

Katrin did not like Renfrow. Helspeth did not know what Renfrow's feelings might be. Ferris Renfrow never revealed himself.

Sometimes Helspeth thought Renfrow was like the Night: a fact of existence. A force of nature. Part of the weather. Always to be reckoned in any strategy.

Ferris Renfrow might be the most important man in the Grail Empire.

And no one knew where he was.

Helspeth Ege stared at the back of the Grand Duke's head, willing him to fall down dead.

As so often happened, the object of her anger failed to respond to her will.

The universe was stubborn that way.

The Emperor dismissed his sisters with the direction that they claim their new possessions immediately. He assigned a small company of Braunsknechts, the Imperial lifeguards, to each. Helspeth thanked God for small favors.

Her captain would be Algres Drear, long close to her father and well known to her. Johannes had entrusted Drear not only with his life but with special missions outside the competence of Ferris Renfrow. Drear was intimately familiar with Plemenza.

Even so, Helspeth wished she could sit down with Renfrow. Renfrow would restore her courage and confidence.

Helsepth tried to talk to Katrin as they returned to their quarters. Katrin refused to speak. Katrin had changed. Katrin was no longer her friend.

Katrin was afraid.

Katrin was a heartbeat away from the throne of the Grail Empire. Katrin was caught in the eye of a growing cyclone of intrigue. Everyone wanted to manipulate or control her. She trusted no one. Not even the little sister who might someday want to replace her.

Where, oh where, was Ferris Renfrow when Johannes Blackboots's girls were in desperate need?