Asrana looked around furtively, and when she spoke to me it was in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘How do we proceed, Polly?’ she asked me.
A word of advice to my family here. If anyone among you ever calls me ‘Polly’, you’ll all get boiled hay for supper every night for a week. I let Asrana get away with it for a very specific reason.
‘In the first place, Asrana, you’re going to stop doing that. No crouching, no tip-toeing down dark corridors, and no whispers. Talk in a normal voice and don’t keep looking around like a burglar with a sack-full of loot over his shoulder. When you do that, you might as well wave a flag, blow a trumpet, and hang a sign reading “conspirator” around your neck.’
‘You’re taking all the fun out of this, Polly,’ she pouted.
‘How much fun do you think spending forty years in the dungeon’s going to be?’
‘Not much, I suppose,’ she conceded.
‘Think about it, dear. Keep the idea of sleeping on moldy straw with rats for company firmly in mind all the rest of the day.’ I looked at Earl Mangaran. ‘I gather that Oldoran doesn’t really have much support here in Vo Astur, right?’
‘Almost none, Lady Polgara,’ he replied. ‘The members of his own family support him, of course, and there are a few nobles who’ve been profiting from his misrule. That’s about all – except for those bodyguards I mentioned before.’
‘I’ll take care of the bodyguards,’ I assured him. I thought about it for a moment. ‘Is there someone you can depend on who has a house here in Vo Astur – a house some distance from the palace?’
He thought about it. ‘Baron Torandin sort of fits that description, my Lady.’
‘Does he know how to keep things to himself? And will he do as you ask without needing too many details?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Good. Ask him to have a party at his house this evening. Draw up a guest list that includes everybody with blood ties to the duke and those who have a financial stake in his remaining on the throne. Sprinkle the crowd with some neutrals just so that nothing’s too obvious. I don’t want any of the duke’s partisans around tonight.’
He grinned at me. ‘Torandin’s the perfect choice, then. His parties are famous all over Asturia. Everyone he invites will be there.’
‘Good. Now let’s move on to our party. Let’s keep it small and exclusive. The more people who know about our scheme, the more chance there is for word of what we’re up to to reach the wrong ears. I don’t want more than a dozen people to know what we’re doing.’
‘You can’t overthrow a government with only a dozen people, my Lady!’
‘You can if you do it right, my Lord. We’re not going to run around waving swords and shouting slogans. Our scheme’s far more subtle.’
‘That’s a very nasty word, Polly,’ Asrana complained.
‘Which word was that, dear?’
‘ “Scheme.” Couldn’t we find something more uplifting to call it?’
‘Let’s see. How about “plot”? “Conspiracy”, maybe? “Treason”? “Betrayal of trust”? “Violation of a sacred oath”?’
‘None of those sound very nice either,’ she objected.
‘What we’re doing isn’t nice, Asrana. Oldoran’s the legal authority here in Asturia, and we’re plotting his overthrow. That makes us criminals – or patriots.’
‘That’s a nicer word. I like that one.’
‘Very well, then, Patriot Asrana. You told me that you could wrap any man in Vo Astur around your little finger. Get to wrapping.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Go out there and start breaking hearts. Flutter your eyelashes, spread around those long, low, suggestive looks, sigh a lot and heave your bosom. Let your eyes fill with luminous tears.’
‘Oh, what fun!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands in glee. ‘Are you going to break hearts too, Polly?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not known here, so the people we’ll be trying to recruit wouldn’t be inclined to listen to me. Besides, I’ve got some other things to take care of. That means that you two will have to make all the necessary contacts. I want a dozen or so cohorts in the proper places at the proper time tonight. See to it.’
‘Have you by any chance ever commanded troops, Lady Polgara?’ Earl Mangaran asked curiously.
‘Not as yet, my Lord. I can usually get things done without bloodshed. Oh, that reminds me. I am going to need an archer – the best you can find. I’m going to need one arrow in a very specific place at a very specific time.’
‘I knew she was going to kill the duke!’ Asrana exclaimed delightedly.
‘No, dear,’ I told her. ‘I want the duke to come out of this alive. If we kill him, all the people at Baron Torandin’s party will be up in arms tomorrow morning. The arrow’s intended for somebody else. Let’s get started. This day won’t last forever, and we all have a lot to do. And don’t sneak or look guilty. Keep that word “patriot” right in front of your eyes.’
That set things in motion, but the limitations I’d imposed kept our plot from stirring too many ripples. Regardless of their other faults, Arends are among the world’s great plotters. Asrana and Mangaran moved quietly through the courtiers, sounding out the crucial ones and keeping the rest in the dark. Naturally, they extracted oaths of silence and embedded some ridiculous passwords and recognition signals in the minds of our co-conspirators. I guess the only objections they encountered had to do with the haste at which we were moving. A one-day coup didn’t really fit into the Arendish conception of how things ought to be done.
By noon, our conspiracy was fairly well established. Mangaran subverted a few older, more substantial members of the court, and Asrana skimmed off the cream of the young hot-heads. My own contributions that morning were chemical in nature. The wine our co-conspirators drank for the rest of the day wouldn’t have knocked a fly Off the wall. Those most likely to remain loyal to Oldoran drank wine that would not only have gotten the fly, but probably the wall he perched on as well.
It was about an hour or so past noon when Mangaran’s friend, the Marquis Torandin, issued his selective invitations to ‘an intimate little soirée at my residence this evening’. Then Mangaran and Asrana had to go back through the ranks of their cohorts to tell them not to protest their exclusion from the festivities. At that particular time in Vo Astur just about everything was suspended when a good party was in the offing, and several plotters seemed torn between the conflicting delights of a good party or a good revolution.