The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) by Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman

Author:Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman [Kushner, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

chapter II

HENRY FREMONT’S NOTE INFORMING GALING ABOUT the challenge was short and not particularly informative: Doctor St Cloud has challenged Doctor Crabbe to a debate about the wizards.

Galing looked at the back of the paper, but there was nothing more. It was not like Fremont to let a chance escape to expand Galing’s knowledge. His reports were commonly as full of ancient history as modern news ( context, Henry said), and ran to several closely written pages. Whatever else Galing might learn in the course of this investigation, he was learning a great deal about history. But not today. What about the wizards was St Cloud intending to debate? Why had Henry suddenly grown so coy? He laid the letter on the thick stack of Henry’s reports and buried his shapely hands in his curls.

This favor Arlen had asked of him, this matter of tracing and diagnosing a troublesome rumor, was more complex, more obscure than Nicholas could have imagined. No sooner did he root out one stem of it than two others would spring up to claim his attention. First, there were the Northerners, the Companions of the King. Troublemakers, malcontents, full of superstitious customs and beliefs. Now that their ring-leaders were safely stored in the Chop for easy reference, that should be the end of it. But it wasn’t the end, not by a long shot. The world of the Companions was beginning to creep into the drawing rooms of the Hill. While their wives danced, the older nobles discussed in shocked whispers how the Duke of Hartsholt’s “revolting peasants,” as Condell insisted on calling them, had burned Hartsholt’s steward in effigy up north in their MidWinter bonfire. Even Lord Hemmynge, who was more interested in horses than politics, knew that the women of Harden had made a show of stuffing their mattresses with valuable goat hair, rather than spin it for sale on their lord’s estates; they called it “Alcuin’s Bed,” and said they slept easier on it than the old king had. The past was rising; people were talking, and even nobles with no Northern holdings were beginning to say that something must be done.

Under the circumstances, it made Nicholas uneasy that a young Doctor of History was proposing to trot out theories about wizards in a public forum. It made him even more uneasy that the heir to Tremontaine was so consistently attracted to lovers who delved into the past.

But when he imagined explaining his unease to Arlen, he could all too easily imagine Arlen’s response: “Historians talk about wizards. Painters love exotic subjects. Young men are romantics. Where is your proof?”

Right now, all Galing had to go on was Greenleaf and Smith in the Chop, Ysaud in her studio, and Doctor Basil St Cloud in his lecture-hall, all babbling, in their several ways, about wizards and deer and mystic sacrifices. And the subject of the Northern boys’ hunt, of Ysaud’s paintings and St Cloud’s passion, was Theron Campion, heir to Tremontaine.

If Galing could only

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