Free One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey

case, but Lady Thalia had her own ideas of what she was to do, and that included patiently instructing Andie on the running of a royal household, on court protocol, and on how to watch other people, catch them in unguarded moments and learn something about them.
    And Iris was a treasure—far more of a friend, because she was near to Andie’s age, than Guard Merrha ever could have been. Between them, they turned what could have been an ordeal into something that was merely demanding, and could be quite interesting.
    The one thing she didn’t much care for was that she had to wear gowns now, instead of tunics and bare legs. But a great deal of the rest of what Lady Charis deemed needful to a lady was rather pleasant. The daily massages, for one thing. So she didn’t miss running wild as much as she had thought she might.
    The only problem was that she kept turning up odd things in the records…. Such as the oddity that in her mother’s lifetime, a substantial percentage of the scavengers’ rights along the coast had reverted to the Crown, and none had been parceled back out again.
    Now, since such rights were a traditional way of rewarding good service, that was historically out of the ordinary. Even stranger, it seemed as if every one of the rights that reverted was always the center of a tangle of subdivisions, sales and inheritances that came out to favor a party who was either dead or vanished.
    It was enough to send a shiver up her back as she thought about the old stories of cursed treasures, and ghosts taking revenge on those who profited, however obliquely, by their deaths.
    When she looked back over the old records of her mother’s reign, she discovered this had been happening, off and on, ever since her father died and her mother began to rule alone. It appeared that the policy of generations, to use scavengers’ rights to reward those who in other Kingdoms might be given lands and titles, had been reversed. She wondered, though the Queen ruled in her own name and right, was this Cassiopeia’s idea, or had someone advised her to it?
    The source of the Queen’s personal wealth, which had been puzzling her a little, was revealed in this, however. No wonder Cassiopeia was able to afford silk, where her predecessor had made do with linen!
    Andie frowned a little and stopped herself just before she began chewing on her nail. Lady Charis would have a kitten—
    It was true that this was a way—without raising taxes or harming anyone—for Cassiopeia to increaseher “discretionary” income. Seen in that light, there wasn’t anything to find fault with. And it was also true that since Andie had begun paying attention, there hadn’t been much that she would have chosen to reward anyone for—or at least, nothing that would merit the sort of permanent reward that salvage rights represented. The Queen loved luxury, loved beautiful things, loved ornaments and extravagant entertainment; richer countries than Acadia had been bankrupt by such Queens and Kings. But Cassiopeia seemed to have found a way to indulge herself without bankrupting her country or impoverishing her people. Maybe she was going against Acadian custom, but in this case, it was hard to disparage her.
    But then there was the other disturbing thing: the number of shipwrecks was also increasing. Thus, increasing the Queen’s revenue…
    Now, there always had been and always would be merchants who sought to bypass Acadian harbor taxes, unloading fees and inspections by bypassing the port at Ethanos altogether and meeting up with a caravan at some shallow or less-protected bay or river mouth or minor fishing harbor where there were no harbor officials, no tax inspectors matching what was unloaded with what was being declared, and no laws saying that they had to pay the longshoremen of Ethanos to offload their ship. And there were always smugglers who wished to bypass all Acadian taxes