Free Earthly Crown by Kate Elliott

he’d like to go.”
    “Ah,” said Cara in a dangerous voice. “I’m sure he’d love to attend tonight.”
    They made their good-byes. They left. Marco began to walk after them.
    “Marco,” said David softly, “she is an intelligent and sensitive young woman, and I stress the word, ‘young.’ Stop playing with her. It’s cruel, above all else.”
    Marco spun. “Et tu, Brute? Hell, I had a lecture from Suzanne before she left to go back to Odys. Is this some kind of conspiracy? I think she’s old enough to know her own mind.”
    “Maybe she just strikes us all as more vulnerable than the others. She’s terribly romantic.”
    “Well, so am I,” Marco snapped. “I suggest you let the subject drop.” He propped his elbows up on the battlements and glared out at the bay, striped in darkness and moonlight. But then again, Marco was always short-tempered when he was in full pursuit.
    “I’ve said everything I intend to say. For whatever good it will do. When do Maggie and Rajiv and Jo get in?”
    “Tomorrow,” said Marco grumpily. “And don’t forget Ursula.”
    “Ow.” David winced. “I had. Well, I’ve lived through worse.”
    “Or the next day,” Marco added, evidently determined to be perverse. “It depends on the weather. They’re marking time in orbit now.”
    “Why did you tell Charles that an irresistible force is about to meet an immovable object? What does that have to do with Tess?”
    Marco fixed a brooding stare on David. “Don’t say I didn’t warn him.”
    “My goodness,” said David, “you certainly make me look forward to this expedition.”
    Marco only grunted. Then he lapsed into a silence from which, David knew, he could not be coaxed. David decided to see if he could go wangle a chair in the prince’s box, to see tonight’s performance of The Tempest. Somehow, a play about being shipwrecked on a lost and primitive island seemed appropriate to the moment.

CHAPTER FIVE
    J IROANNES ARTHEBATHES WAS AT Eberge when he received the courier from his uncle ordering him to leave three-quarters of his retinue and all of his women and their attendants at the northern villa of the Great King’s fourth cousin.
    His personal secretary, Syrannus, read the letter to him. Jiroannes grabbed the parchment out of Syrannus’s hands and spoke the words to himself. “‘…It has come to our attention that the presence of women in your party would be a hindrance to our negotiations. Therefore, nephew, I feel it wise for you to travel with only twenty guardsmen, two grooms, three slave-boys, and your personal secretary. Be so good as to obey my wishes.’”
    Jiroannes had learned to swear fluently at the palace school for boys; he did so now. “This is humiliating! And well he knows it, too. He would never travel with such a paltry escort.”
    “Surely, eminence, your uncle would not demand such privations of you without good reason.”
    “How can he expect that I will be granted any respect at all, even by such barbarians as these jaran, coming to them with a mere six servants? And no women! Their Bakhtiian will think me the merest lordling. Surely my uncle understands that as the ambassador of the Great King, may his name resonate a thousand years, I must present a dignified retinue. Savages are only impressed by force, size, and gold. They will think Vidiya is some trifling princedom.” He snorted and glanced around his chamber. True, he was far out in the provinces, but the Great King’s fourth cousin had imported the finest carved furniture from the port of Ambray, and the cunning designs woven into the upholstery of the couch attested to the skill of his slaves. Though it was also true that the tile inlaid into the floor had flaws and inferior color, and the beads of the door curtain were painted wood, not glass. “How can the jaran respect us as the most civilized of peoples, as well as the most powerful, if the Great King’s ambassador arrives with a train of servants that