The Broken Eye(275)

“Hmm,” Andross Guile said. He said nothing for a long time. It stretched to an uncomfortably long time. Grinwoody stood still as a statue. Andross drank his liquor slowly, and Zymun finally squirmed, but didn’t say anything.

Finally, Andross said, “Well then, we shall begin your education, and perhaps at the end have a little test, to see if you have the Guile mind. If you fail, you’re useless to me, even if you are what you say. A stupid Guile is no Guile at all.”

Teia’s heart soared, while Zymun nodded with feigned confidence over fear.

Andross said, “During the Blood War, some prominent families began arranging marriages with an eye to war instead of to political alliances. The Guiles were the first of these. My great-great-great-grandmother Ataea was from a small noble family that supplied half of the horses for the chariot races in Ruthgar and Blood Forest, and almost all the champions. Galatius Guile was a drunk who was bent on wagering away the family fortune at those races. She rescued his fortune by telling him which horses to bet, and soon stole his heart. She convinced him that marrying down—to marry her—would be the bravest act of his cowardly life. It turned out to also be the smartest one. She, like many, despaired of the Blood War ever truly ending, so she brought the lessons of horse breeding to the Guile house. She was a savage but shrewd judge of character, and she kept a ledger book of genealogy. Her husband, like every other noble she met or could learn about, got a single line: ‘Galatius Guile: drunk, gambler, a bit dimwitted, blue eyes, no drafting, inspires loyalty in family and beyond.’ Later in her life, her journals got more extensive, noting skin tone, musculature, bravery, height, and relative fertility. It helped, of course, that she herself had eighteen children and lived to be a hundred and five years old. She arranged marriages that defied politics, bringing in the blood of the brilliant but impoverished, the hale but unconnected. Where other families fought over who would marry the beautiful or the rich, thus driving up the cost of acquiring those matches, she instead believed that having smart warrior-drafters would result in riches and power both—in the long term. She even birthed several bastards of her own from the great men of her day, and clearly noted the fathers in her book, with no apparent shame.

“In that first generation, she was either very, very good; very, very lucky; or both, because almost every child born was a drafter. That she was similarly lucky with several other attributes wouldn’t become clear for a few more generations. Which pleased her. After all, if other families are becoming smarter and more magical, too, where’s your relative advantage over them? In fact, no one would have even known the logic behind her scheme if she hadn’t infuriated one of her grandsons by refusing to let him marry a girl he loved. He rebelled and ran off to a Blood Forest family that gladly took his secrets, and later, when Ataea refused to pay his ransom, his life.”

“Nice people,” Zymun said.

But the sarcasm hit a wall. For a few moments, Teia almost took hope in how much Andross Guile seemed to dislike Zymun. Then she realized he didn’t much like anyone. Or maybe he’d just been so powerful for so long that he never bothered to conceal it when someone displeased him.

He was the opposite of a slave, and yet his constant truths were no more winsome than a slave’s constant lying smiles.

“No one has kept that book as well as Ataea Guile did, and war has intervened again and again, killing men and women before they could contribute their children to this family. Bastards have been brought in, and their patrimony concealed. But in eight generations of faithful record-keeping—and sometimes nine and ten and twelve, for Ataea researched the family before her time back as far as she could—the Guiles have learned a few things about what’s heritable, what’s highly heritable, and what seems to be a dice roll. Of course, I don’t believe in dice, but I understand that there are systems whose workings I don’t understand. A lesson you might do well to learn.”

Zymun looked appropriately chastened. “Yes, grandfather,” he said.

“Grandfather? Haven’t connected it yet, have you? All this I’ve just said, what does it mean?”

“My lord?” Zymun asked, and Teia could tell that he hadn’t been paying attention at all. Who takes their first interview with Andross Guile, with their entire fate in his hands, and doesn’t pay attention to the first thing he says?

“Do you think me stupid, boy?” Andross asked.

“Of course not,” Zymun said breezily, but it sounded like a lie. Who spoke so fearlessly to Andross Guile?