Free The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman Page A

as wicked as Gerard. But Basil had read their very words, had touched the paper that they had touched, breathed the dust of their official documents and private correspondence, and Basil knew better. There was nothing of madness in Anselm’s letters to his councilors, no wickedness in the love poetry Roland the Stout wrote to his wife, Queen Isabelle, or in the clever sketches Orlando the Fair had scribbled in the margins of the draft of the Arkenvelt Treaty. For generations after the Union, the kings had ruled fairly and well, presiding over courts in which scholars and statesmen practiced their crafts, and young men danced, fenced, debated, jousted, dallied with the daughters of nobles and with each other. And before that, the Northern kings had kept their rocky little kingdom independent and prosperous against the twin threats of foreign invasion and famine. Basil loved the ancient kings. He loved them for their mystery, for their bright courage, for the love and poetry and art that they had inspired. He loved them because nobody else did, and because loving them seemed to be the same as loving buried truth. He loved them, and wanted justice for them.
    The problem, of course, was evidence. Charming as he found Hollis’s Chronicle History of the Northern Kingdom, Basil understood it to be a piece of political puffery, commissioned by Alcuin the Diplomat and his queen to introduce the history of the king’s ancient land to their new subjects. Their descendants were better documented; but in his heart Basil knew that the key to it all lay in Alcuin’s predecessors in the North, in what they had brought to the Union and how it had worked its way into this land’s living heritage. The ancient North kingdom had yielded precious few written texts, and those that survived were so fragmentary as to be almost incomprehensible. Basil believed the history of the North lay encoded in ballads and poetic fragments, in legends of skin-changers and wizards and tales of glorious battles and hopeless loves—but that was not the kind of evidence even the most liberal-minded of historians would accept as authoritative.
    The Treaty of Union, however, was a document whose historical authority even Roger Crabbe could not question. And an astute scholar could deduce a great deal about the laws and customs of the mysterious northlands from the provisions of that treaty. Inheritance, for example. Why should a whole section of the treaty be devoted to ensuring that the throne never pass to a woman? It set the queen’s nobles against the king from the beginning, flying in the face of their own traditions. What did the kings and their wizards have against women, and in whose interest was such a law? What tradition did it spring from?
    In pursuit of answers, Basil devoted himself to sifting through the stacks of books and papers he found in the Archives, or bought from the rag-and-bone men who made their living combing through the city’s trash. Among the useless bills and tallies and notes, occasionally he discovered historical gold: letters from an ancient Lord Davenant to his son, or a half-filled book of private musings by a Lord Montague in the reign of King Alcuin’s great-great-grandson Rufus. He’d found that one in a box of old romances and household accounts belonging to an impoverished Karleigh cousin, which had also contained the diary of old Hieronymus where he’d read the remarkable story of Hilary’s death.
    Basil was annoyed, but not surprised, to find the wizards mentioned everywhere. Davenant urged his son to seek their help with his wife’s infertility. Montague cursed them for interfering in a drainage scheme before he’d told anyone about it. Montague also quoted a certain Pretorius, who “performed a ritual of Sweet Water over the well at Hemmynge House. No more sickness there, the Land be thanked. But like the shepherd in the tale, now the King desires the river purified, and P. doubts the whole College of Wizards