Free By Heresies Distressed by David Weber

many things I’d like to say to you at this moment,” Cayleb continued. “Unfortunately, I’m well aware that there are any number of
official
things we need to be discussing, instead, not to mention all of the public folderol we’re both going to have to put up with. I assure you, I have my public face ready to put on for all of that. But first, the Empress, my wife, charged me most sternly, as my very first duty in Chisholm, to give you and her Queen Mother all of her love.”
    â€œI—” Green Mountain stopped and cleared his throat. “I thank you for that, Your Majesty,” he said after a moment, his own voice just a bit husky. His hand tightened on the emperor’s forearm for a second. Then his nostrils flared as he inhaled deeply.
    â€œAnd now that you’ve delivered her message, Your Majesty, we really do have those formalities to deal with, I’m afraid.” His head twitched ever so slightly, indicating the gorgeously clad ranks of aristocrats—some of whose expressions seemed just a bit less welcoming than his own—standing behind him at a respectful distance on the jam-packed quay.
    â€œWill you come and meet your Chisholmian subjects?”

    Welcome heat poured from the vast fireplace to Queen Mother Alahnah Tayt’s left as she sat at the foot of the table, gazing up its length across the glittering silver and polished glass and china at the dark-haired young man sitting at the table’s head. For the past several months, that chair—the one at the table’s head—had been Alahnah’s, and it felt odd to see someone else sitting in it.
    Especially
this
someone else
, she thought.
It wouldn’t bother me a bit to see
Sharley
sitting there again!
    She watched Emperor Cayleb turn his head, laughing at something Baron Green Mountain had said, and she discovered that her eyes were examining his profile intensely. It was as if by staring at him she could somehow have a glimpse of her daughter once again. Then, without warning, Cayleb stopped laughing at Green Mountain’s comment and looked straight at her, and she found her eyes gazing directly into his.
    They were dark in the lamplight, those eyes. Dark and deep and surprisingly warm. Almost . . . gentle.
    Odd. “Gentle” was the one adjective it would never have occurred to her to apply to the victor of Rock Point, of Crag Hook and Darcos Sound. And yet it was the only one which really fitted. The young man sitting in her daughter’s chair met her gaze directly, not challengingly, but with understanding. With compassion.
    A peculiar little tingle danced somewhere deep inside her at the thought. It was as if in that moment she had finally allowed herself to realize—or, at least, to
admit
—something she’d refused to face directly from the moment Cayleb’s proposal of matrimony arrived in Cherayth. Fear. Fear that the man who’d won those smashing victories, who’d threatened to sink every one of the Earl of Thirsk’s ships, without quarter or mercy, unless his surrender terms were accepted, must be as hard as his reputation. As cold as the sword at his side. Fear that her daughter had gone to wed a man as merciless, in his own way, as the kraken which was the emblem of his house. It wasn’t that she’d feared Cayleb might be
evil
, the monster of depravity depicted in the Group of Four’s propaganda. But a man need not be evil to be cold. To recognize all of the ways in which political calculation must trump mere human emotions when the prize was the life or death of entire kingdoms, and to act accordingly.
    But she wasn’t seeing that man. Oh, she had no doubt that a man with that chin, those eyes which had seen too much blood and death already for a man of twice his years,
could
be just as hard and cold as any steel blade. Whatever else he might be, Cayleb Ahrmahk was no weakling, no captive to indecision or to