Chapter 169 Just in Time

The Count's words, Corbin Tate's proofs — and, added to them, the testimony of Dr. Osler, summoned into the palace that very hour: he had been in Lohenheim when an attendant of the Young Lady Odenheim took an arrow for her and was wounded.

"This time it sat in the shoulder; a knife and a steady hand took it out clean enough. That Odenheim guard — the head had gone deep into the lung. It was next door to the last breath."

Dr. Osler's father, his grandfather, his father-in-law — generations on generations of royal physicians out of the Royal College of Physicians. He himself, pleading a closed door and a medical book to write, had never entered the College.

Which cost him nothing in the world's trust. He was a free physician — and the princes of the blood, the lords and generals, found him easier to summon than the court's own; men spoke before his face with very little guarding of their tongues.

Back in the Palace of the Holy Crown, the King sat with the arrowhead Osler had drawn out in his hand, murmuring:

"The gall of it. A dissolved corps of the Thorn Guard; weapons under ban; a fugitive who helped assassinate a great minister — the whole nest of it in Chancellor Bohun's retinue! And such men, moving at Our elbow day in and day out... Voss — what say you?"

And what would Voss say? What durst he?

There in the Serene Palace, the King had already given Corbin Tate his praise:

The White Guard carried nothing but the standards; the swords at their hips were parade-steel, all shine and no edge — and yet here was a man with a true royal guard's whole sense of his charge, who had marked a suspicious figure and stayed on his heels to the very end.

After all, the old princely line, withered though it was — the King would see him measured out his reward in full.

The King praising a parade-sword White Guard — wasn't that the same breath damning a service-saber Silver Shield? Voss was nobody's fool. Could he miss it — that the Windsor house was past saving? He hurried the subject off down other roads:

"The Silver Shield will lend the High Court its whole arm, rest assured, till the bottom of this is turned up. And a mercy it is that the Eastern Capital's Windsors have had their clearing-out at the General's hands already... Your Majesty — the General proposed his third son for the City Watch. Why did Your Majesty not say yes on the spot?"

"The Odenheims already have one son off to the Falconberg army — and now a second into the City Watch? You take Us for a simpleton? The capital, inside and out, the whole of it handed to one house?"

The King rose and paced a few turns. He spied Augustus von Klein standing well off, hands tucked in his sleeves, wearing his it's-no-affair-of-mine face, and put to him:

"My lord von Klein — the Lohenheim garrison carried you through Yorvik safe and whole, and never a word for them from your mouth since. Is the Lohenheim army so sorry a thing as that?"

Von Klein bowed in haste: "Your Majesty never charged this old servant to sound out the Lohenheim army; truly, the old servant never attended to it. And what the garrison escorted was Your Majesty's own edict — how should the old servant presume above it? As for the Odenheims... Your Majesty's weighing is just and round: the capital cannot be given over, inside and out, to one house. The old servant does recall..."

"Recall what?"

"Roland Odenheim stood twenty-seventh on the university rolls. You said it then yourself: a university man like that, back to the Lohenheim army — a waste; he should go into the War Office as a civilian. But Roland had been ten years from home, and home-pulled hard; so back to Lohenheim he went."

True enough — so We had said. The War Office held no great power; lift him two grades, though, and the debt of tonight's guarding was honestly paid.

As for the City Watch — let that young Tate have it. No letting every sword-waving general think that a little merit buys wind and rain from Us at a whistle.

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Early on the sixteenth of the eighth month, as the Odenheims were making ready to go out, the edict-chamberlain arrived:

Roland Odenheim, for merit in the guarding of the King's person, promoted to Vice-Marshal of the War Office under the Privy Council. To enter the palace at once and give thanks.

It ran a little off Leon's reckoning. Leon had figured one grade — a master's post in the War Office, filling Windsor Harold's place. Instead his brother the King had lifted him two grades outright, and set Roland in as Vice-Marshal of the War Office.

The scouring of the Windsor power had begun.

Chancellor Bohun was stripped of office and sent home outright; the house's own in the Privy Council were packed off, every one, to sheriffdoms and magistracies of the middling and lesser shires.

The Royal Exchequer took on itself the auditing of the Lord Treasurer, Windsor Kendrick. Who wanted a task like that — a task made of enemies? Should the Windsor house's dead ashes ever rekindle, would the man who had dug their pit not be first into it himself?

But away from the Exchequer, who else could read an audit? So — the new Vice-President. The Grand Princess's son; a young bull that did not know enough to be afraid; just the man for the books.

Felix made his show of declining, took the ledgers as they came, and buried himself head-first in the Fiscal Board's offices.

Seven days on, the Fiscal Board at last opened its accounts again. Whatever they had yielded, the King could breathe. The Lord Treasurer, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Salt and Mines Commissioner — the three boards that between them governed the Empire's whole economy: let any one of them seal its books, and the King's head would ache.

Over the clean-ruled accounts, and the false and mistaken entries picked out and flagged beside them, the King looked at his own cousin and laughed:

"It seems a third-honors laureate like you was buried alive in the Exchequer. The vacant directorship of the Fiscal Board — let it be yours."

Felix bowed and gave his thanks.

Only von Klein and Voss at court knew it: the King had first gone to Earl Lomond, offering him the Lord Treasurership. Lomond knew that seat too well — every hand in the realm stretched out to it for money; power, aye, and enemies made easy — and he had put the King off as gently as he could.

Then the King had gone to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who pressed Felix's name hard — on grounds little other than those that had sent him into the audit.

Riding the fresh wind of the Windsor impeachments, von Klein put a sheaf of petitions onto the pile: "Your Majesty — the justiciars' impeachments of the Master of the King's Ceremonies."

"The Master of the King's Ceremonies? The man has gone his way quiet as a mouse forever — what brings a whole flock of justiciars down on him?"

Von Klein bent and smiled: "How should the old servant know? As the petitions tell it — the mischief is every bit of it his son's doing."

The matter sat between big and small: the Master of the King's Ceremonies held high rank, but touched no other official's interest — and just now nobody at court dared open his mouth, every man in fear the Windsor business had his own name knotted in it.

Then out of nowhere, an impeachment a man could safely speak to — and every soul at court grew lively, each in his finest cloak of righteousness, damning the old Master for indulging his own son past all bounds, and harrying the countryside at home.

A son untaught is a father's fault.

And so — how could the Master of the King's Ceremonies be the one man alive without one?

Poor Master of the King's Ceremonies! Walking the capital's ice on thin shoes, diligent and trembling, all those years — and his spendthrift son, back home, flapping his lips twice — and his father's post was gone.

His younger brother was a Prince Consort, to be sure — but even that could not stand under a whole court's condemnation, the whole body of them wearing heaven-will-strike-him-down faces. There was nothing for it but to swallow it down: the Prince Consort got him a secretaryship in the Eastern Capital's Exchequer.

From Master of the King's Ceremonies at the Western Capital, a great office — to Secretary Yule at the Eastern Capital, a petty one.

There was talk that Eustace Yule's backside had been beaten raw off him by his own father. Certain it is that the young lord's figure was a long, long time absent from the streets of the Eastern Capital.

The wooden dolls of the doll house had new frocks out again!

With every new dress a young lady bought came a little handbag thrown in, cut on the same pattern as the doll's own.

"I already have four different dolls. Garnet told me — come the Robing Holiday in the ninth month, plenty of Lohenheim folk holding posts in the Western Capital bring their families home, and there is to be a dress-up contest!"

"That's right — my cousin is coming back too. Every time, she calls our Lohenheim the sticks. This time I mean to open her eyes to our wooden dolls."

"But how do you hold a dress-up contest? Everyone bought the same things."

"Haven't you been round the shop these two days? Garnet has made piles of separates now — dresses, trinkets, all to be mixed as you please. I even fought off the crowd for a pair of high heels!"

"High heels?"

"They're much like the 'evening shoes' the Western Capital ladies wear — only those have a lift under the ball of the foot too. In these it is like dancing on your tiptoes the whole while. Ever so much prettier than theirs!"

The gossiping young ladies all went tittering and tee-heeing:

"Truly? I'll have Garnet sell me a pair of high heels too!"