"Of course, I write them. The marriages I arrange are politically motivated, but they are still personal in nature. I care about who my future daughters-in-law are, and I need to maintain good relationships with their mothers while not letting them walk all over me. Bottom line, they expect letters written by my hand, and I expect the same from them."
I frowned. "You lost me."
She chuckled. "My assistants trained for a long time to produce an exact replica of my handwriting, and don't give me that disapproving look. I dictate the letters, so they are my creation. It doesn't matter whose hand I command, mine or that of my assistants." She winked.
I was stunned. I'd never seen my mother wink or admit to violating the Precepts of Truth.
"Are you admitting to that in public?" I waved my hand at the three young ladies, who were trying very hard to stay on task but were distracted by our conversation.
"As I said, these girls are pure gold, and I trust them with my life. Besides, sometimes speed matters more than gestures." She leaned closer to me as if to impart some great secret. "I have people in the far provinces who I trained to emulate myhandwriting. In Tarina, in Heldor, and four other provinces that are too far for my letters to arrive quickly enough when time matters. I telephone, and I dictate, and they write the letter out there and send it from there. It saves a week, sometimes two." She smiled. "How do you think you got letters from me in such quick succession in Elucia, when correspondence takes two weeks on average to travel from here?"
For the second time today, I was stunned. "I couldn't tell they weren't written in your hand. I immediately recognized your handwriting."
"They were produced by a very good clerk who transcribed my exact words. Does it really matter if they were written by my hand or by a hand I instructed? The clerk was simply a tool I used. He wasn't the one who thought up the words to put on paper. He was just the pen that I activated from afar."
"Aren't you afraid of what a person like that could do? One of them could decide to write a letter you never dictated, thereby committing you to something. They might forge your hand on an order, a promise, a debt." The possibilities multiplied in my head, each worse than the last.
I wanted to ask how she could be so naive, and whether my father knew about her network of clerks.
My mother looked at me and smiled, suddenly looking far younger than her years. "I have ways of ensuring their complete loyalty."
There was something in the way she'd said it that made me decide I didn't want to know what those ways were.
On televised audiences, my mother was steel wrapped in courtesy. In this room, with the pens scratching and the wry smiles and winks, she was steel wrapped in dynamite. My mother, the Queen of Catonia, was a very dangerous woman, and I was just starting to realize that.
"I'm not going to ask how you ensure your network's loyalty," I said.
"That's wise, because I wouldn't have told you." She leaned back and rearranged the folds of her gown over her knees. "But if you accept the nomination, I might reveal my methods to you." She sighed dramatically. "Or maybe to your bride. If I'd had a daughter, I would have taught her everything my mother taught me, but I have only sons, and it's all part of the inheritance, so you'll have to do it."
I lifted my hands in mock surrender. "I don't think I would be able to do this. It seems far too complicated."
"It is," she agreed. "And far more interesting than anything your father does in his throne room." She waved her hand at the three small desks. "This is where the real deals are made. You'd be astonished how much of ruling is correspondence."
"You're a dangerous woman," I told her, and meant it as the compliment she'd take it for. "I am dying of curiosity, mostly about how you ensure your network's loyalty, but it still isn't enough to make me want the nomination. I'd much rather do other things."
"That's a shame." She sighed, and some of her mirth dimmed. "Well, not everything is done by correspondence. I arranged private audiences with the emissaries of the other houses. It's never the principals themselves, always the emissaries, so that nothing spoken could be attributed directly to them. I have at least two potential brides for each of you, and I'm not closing any of the deals until we know who's who. The one we told you was meant for you might now be meant for someone else. I hope you don't mind."
"I don't care. I don't want to marry any of them."
"Oh, Alar. Don't say that. They are all lovely young ladies."
As she kept on going, regaling me with details about every royal daughter, I thought about her network of clerks and what Icould do with it. A message of mine could reach the border with Elucia in days instead of weeks.
My letters could reach Kailin in a fraction of the time they took now.
I could dictate to one of my mother's clerks in cipher so that the clerk taking it down would set out string after string of nonsense and never know the true content of what he or she was writing.
I would have to ask her for it, and it would cost me something, some piece of the privacy I'd been guarding, because my mother gave nothing without noting what it bought her. But it might be worth it to expedite my letters to Kailin.
40
IDRILIA
"A camera captures what the eye sees. A drawing captures what the artist perceives."
—Professor Lorento Haldren
"Professor Lou Haldren to see Her Highness Princess Idrilia," Raufel announced formally when Ursa opened the door.
