Two Kingdoms 2: Shadow Court (1)

[DoctorM]

TWO KINGDOMS 2: SHADOW COURT (1)

This is something of a dramatis personae: a set of character notes for my Two Kingdoms stories. Not long ago I read Hilary Mantel's "How to Play Wolf Hall", her advice for actors in the London stage production of "Wolf Hall",  and quite liked it. Its style gave me the opportunity to think about my own "Two Kingdoms" characters and also about the way I see the KK characters I've been using.  These are, mind you, working notes only, and I will be expanding them. As always, comments are invited and appreciated.

SHADOW QUEEN

You are Charissa Aymarine Festilliana of the Tolan Festillic. You are the Duchess of Tolan and Marluk. Later, you will style yourself Queen of Tolan and the West. You are known as the Shadow Queen. 

You are the villain of the story, and a monster. You have been told this since you were barely in your teens. Sometimes you believe it.

You are Deryni, though this is not the most important thing about you.

You are the youngest and last surviving child of the Marluk. Your father's children included two older brothers and two older sisters, none of whom you can really remember. All four have died by the time you are fourteen.  You were born with a twin, called Clarissa, who died within days of her birth. Your enemies have spread the story that you drained the life from your twin in the womb, that she was the first of your many victims. You are indifferent to most of the tales told about you, but this one leaves you in a cold rage.  Your twin is with you always, and sometimes when you are alone you speak to her image in your head.  Her ghost is there in your mind's eye as confessor and advisor.

You grow up surrounded by death. Your twin dies as an infant. Your older siblings die one by one, of ordinary things— disease and childbirth.  When you are eleven, you watch your father die on Brion Haldane's sword. Over the next few years, you are the subject of assassination attempts, more or less serious, paid for by men in both Rhemuth and Beldour. At fifteen, you dance at New Year's Court in Beldour and know that there are men in the room, men with whom you'll be expected to dance, who've laid out good money to see you dead. 

You are the Marluk's child, and you have inherited his height and his coloring, as well as his fierce impatience. By the standards of your time and class, you are striking but not beautiful. You are coldly blonde, with eyes the deep blue of polished sapphire. You are all angles and edges. The world around you admires soft,  pink-and-white blonde beauty, which you will never possess. Once, the story goes, an angry bishop demanded to know what you got from Satan in return for your soul. You answered simply, "Cheekbones." This is a story you enjoy recounting. (Your husband often adds, "And hipbones." ) You are slender almost to the point of gauntness. The Marluk gave you his height, and you are shockingly tall. You would stand eye-to-eye with Alaric Morgan.  Your husband describes you as having legs as long as he is tall. In another world and another age, centuries later, you would not be out of place stalking like a panther down a high-fashion runway.

The Marluk adores you, and you are a loved child. You are brought up to Beldour court standards, and all your life your manners will be impeccable. You speak multiple languages with grace.  Nonetheless, your father and the duke of Arjenol are involved in seemingly endless plans and plots in the east, and you are often carried along on campaign with the Marluk's retinue and raised by soldiers' women. You grow up both as a young noblewoman at court and as an almost feral child amidst camp followers.  By the time your father is killed, you know how to perform flawlessly in the most intricate and arcane court ceremonies and how to swear like a soldier's woman. You can change between the two seamlessly. As a girl, you  master the art of listening to and deciphering gossip around campfires and at royal balls, and you come to understand all about men and women and their possible combinations.

At fourteen, you throw away your reputation. You take a lover, and you will never apologize or repent. You will become the object of every lurid story imaginations all over the Eleven Kingdoms can conjure. You will be accused of debauching your ladies-in-waiting. You will be accused of bathing in virgins' blood to stay young. Your name is connected with tales of predatory sapphistry and the names of dozens of male bedmates, most of whom you've never met. The stories leave you indifferent, as does the idea of virginity.

By your early teens, you understand that you are an object of political desire. Men plot to marry you, others plot to have you killed, or at least removed. You are duchess of Tolan and Marluk, and whatever men think of you as a woman, it is your lands and titles that matter. You learn, too, that you are an object less of physical lust than of some male desire to conquer, to see if you can be tamed like a recalcitrant province. 

You will come later to use yourself and your body as a weapon, to deploy what are known as feminine wiles. You can arrange your face and do what is necessary for political ends. You tell yourself this is no different from your father or his friends facing death by axe or sword on campaign. You will never talk about this part of your life with the one person you do love, and you tell him that he has to know what questions never to ask. When you seize Rhemuth, there is a particular list of names that you will give to Marc-Friedrich Aurelian. Within weeks, every name on it has been scratched off. No one at your court, whether at Rhemuth or Valoret, will mention any of those names in your presence. The late Howell earl of Eastmarch is subject to a kind of damnatio memoriae:  erased from all public memory, and certainly erased from every tongue at court.

You feel no guilt or remorse about killing Brion Haldane. Your plans call for the Haldanes to be eliminated, and many of the Furstans of Torenth as well. You have no qualms about this.

Your wardrobe is filled with gowns in eastern and southern styles, and you know how to deploy fashion as a statement of power, Nonetheless, you are also notorious for dressing as a boy to ride and hunt. You are, as everyone agrees, a skilled horsewoman and an avid falconer.

You are Deryni, and capable of marshaling enormous power. Still, despite being known as a sorceress, as the Witch Queen, you are too impatient to master many of the skills other Deryni of old blood do. In your twenties, you still need rhyming spells to focus your energies. 

In the Tolan and Marluk lands, you are a competent administrator. Your subjects there probably do not love you— a ruling duchess is a suspect thing, and you never court popularity —but they agree that they are largely well-governed. You are known for having a hard hand at high justice, though mostly this is admired by your subjects as a a sign of good order.

You have your father's ruthlessness, but also his fierce loyalty to friends. Those who have shown you affection and kindness— the young Lionel of Arjenol,  say, or Thorne Hagen —will win your trust for life. You have no problem burning down a village in wartime, or sending bishops to the gallows, but you will never betray a friend.  Your ladies-in-waiting are terrified of you, but probably admire your courage.  You refer to them off-handedly as les chiennes, "the Bitches", but you understand that you are responsible for them and probably like them.

You are in love with Christian-Richard de Falkenberg. This is not something you choose to explain. It has been a given for a dozen years when you take power at Rhemuth. On Coronation Day at Rhemuth, and all that long night while Rhemuth burns, you stand guard over the wounded Christian-Richard with a stiletto in your hand, aware of how empty any victory will be without him. You name him a prince and first nobleman of your new kingdom. Against all precedent and expert advice, you marry him. Whatever political capital this costs you, your choice is final.

KHELDOUR

You are Christian-Richard Evgeni Alexander de Falkenberg. 

You are now Prince of Kheldour, captain of the Falcon Horse, and Queen's Remembrancer.

You are the Shadow Queen's man. 

This is the thing that defines your life: I am the queen's man.

Your family, insofar as family tales can be trusted, comes originally from Arjenol and perhaps Lorsol or R'Kassi. Your ancestors rode west out of Torenth with the first Festil to seize Gwynedd from the old Haldanes. They held lands in what is now Carthmoor country, but picked the losing side at the battle of Iomaire. For the next two centuries, they remain loyal to the descendants of the House of Festil.  They support themselves in exile by hiring themselves and their tenants out to fight other men's wars in the east and south.

You are born in the far north, in Tolan country on the edge of the northern sea. You spend much of your childhood in Arjenol. You will nonetheless think of yourself lifelong as an Easterner.

You are the only child of your father, who commands light cavalry for the dukes of Marluk and Arjenol. Your mother is an illegitimate daughter of the Arjenol ruling line. She dies young; your father never remarries. You grow up back and forth between the two dukedoms.

From early childhood you are the smartest child in the room. You have a facility for languages and an eye for terrain. Your chief fascination is history, and as a boy you obsess over places and people centuries gone, over how kingdoms rise and fall. Your father is ambitious for you, and you are groomed to be more than a light-horse commander.  You are expected to one day take up a place at court in Beldour.

You are a competent horseman, and competent as well with a steppe horseman's bow. In Arjenol you learn the arts of reconnaissance and how to map territory. You can captain a column of light horse or plan a coup in some southern city, but you know you will never make a general, and you have no real ambition to be one.  In another age and another world, you might be one of those men who moves quietly back and forth between academia and service in some arcane corner of diplomacy or intelligence.

You do not see yourself as handsome. You are a bit above middling height, but you are nearly a head shorter than the Shadow Queen.  You do not feel insecure about that, and others' jokes on the subject mean nothing to you. You are broad-shouldered, with an archer's deep chest. You have the black hair and dark eyes of both the Falkenberg and Arjenol bloodlines. You seem younger than you are; you will be addressed as "young man"  long after others your age are husbands and fathers.  You have long, slender hands and you can write a fine chancery script or a passage in Moorish calligraphy. You tend to finish a sentence in a different language than the one you started in.

You do not regard yourself as brave, but you are fiercely and absolutely loyal to Charissa de Tolan.  You went to Rhemuth to face down Alaric Morgan (and kill Ian Howell)  as proof of that. You did not expect to live through that day.

You have written poetry, something not unusual for young noblemen, but you have done more. You have written a short life of the first Festillic king of Gwynedd, and had some praise for it from scholars. You have also consorted with Moors (and with heretics among the Moors) and used records held down in Moorish country to write about the origins of the Deryni. This lands you in front of the Camberian Council, accused of attempting to overturn the Deryni past, of dangerous thinking. You are no friend of most of the Council, though Thorne Hagen and Kyri de Roiste were willing to defend you. You have seen universities in the south, and sometimes you wonder— if you were not a horse soldier, or not a courtier —what it would be like to stand at a lectern in a scholar's gown and talk about history.

You like high desert  and steppe more than the green of Gwynedd. You think of yourself as an Easterner, but you could imagine living in the southwest of Autun, somewhere along the coast, or in the Moorish emirates. You have a light cavalryman's belief that distance is no barrier, that you can always ride away from trouble and dash off to a new world.

You have been desperately, totally in love with Charissa de Tolan since you were a boy. You understand that half the world regards you as the queen's folly, as a jumped-up minor lord who has slept his way to the queen's side. There are hundreds of jokes about this, and much mocking speculation across the Eleven Kingdoms on what sorts of depravity you'd need to know to woo the Shadow Queen. You and Charissa both laugh over the list. Didn't we do that when we were fifteen?

Your own conscience is clear. You went to Rhemuth to die for her, and you'd do that again. You know that if she lost everything, and you lost your new princedom, you'd go south or east with her with just a light-horse captain's baggage. If it comes to it, you've  told her, if it all goes bad and they come for you, they have to go through me to get to you. They have to take me down first. So I'll never have to see you die.

You know, although you've never asked, and would never listen to anyone tell you, about the things Charissa had to do to be queen.  You know that there was a list, and what happened to the names on it. You had an arrow put in Ian Howell's back, but you will not allow yourself to feel anything personal about those names on the list.  No one at court would mention those names to you; no one wants to be identified as the source of any smirking gossip.

Your weaknesses are those of children told too young that they're smart. You are used to learning things intuitively and quickly, and you become deeply frustrated and angry when some new skill defies you. You find yourself easily distracted by new kinds of knowledge. You take up ideas and skills easily, focus on them, and then quickly lose interest. You play backgammon in preference to chess. You tell yourself that this is a metaphor for why you'll never be a general.

You are Deryni, though more intrigued by Deryni history and by the theory of the Deryni arts than by actual practice. You know how to use the tiles both for fortune-telling and for gambling.

You would, as a mercenary captain, work for a king of Torenth, but not the current king: you'd never work for Wencit and his clique. You would never under any circumstances work for a Haldane. You would never hire out against a friend.

You and Charissa carry matching stilettos in your sleeves; you've taught her to use hers. Walking next to her down corridors at Rhemuth or Valoret, or down side streets in Forcinn ports, you know that you are exactly where you're supposed to be. 

MARLEY

Bran Coris, Earl of Marley, later Duke of Marley and Eastmarch, Captain-General of Tolan and the West.

You are born fortune's favourite. By your mid-twenties, you are an earl of Gwynedd and a successful soldier.  You marry young, to a beautiful heiress who gives you a son.

You are handsome, wealthy, intelligent, and attractive to women. You are also ambitious, ruthless, and known for sharp elbows. You push your way to offices and influence at King Brion's court.

In your twenties, though, you learn that fortune has its disappointments as well. Your marriage is not a success.  Your wife has not yet given you other children to marry off for alliances. There are other women, of course— how would you not have other women? —and your countess cannot do the sensible thing and avert her eyes. The offices you want as key to your career elude you, despite your undoubted success at both warfare and diplomacy.

You are reputed to be anti-Deryni, and you probably are, but in truth there is only one Deryni you despise outright. The duke of Corwyn has cut across your ambitions and taken the place you know you should hold as Lord General of the royal armies and chief advisor to King Brion. This is not something you will forgive, now or ever.

On the day of Kelson Haldane's coronation at Rhemuth, in the middle of escaping the chaos of the Shadow Queen's coup, you are made an offer. You listen to it from the behind the barricades you've erected at one of your Rhemuth townhouses: You can come out of there a duke, or you can come out face down over a saddle.  You choose to be Duke of Marley.

Changing your allegiances earns you the dead Ian Howell's lands and earldom. You become the Shadow Queen's captain-general.  You fight against Haldane supporters and allies in the north, and you fight against Torenthi incursions into northeast Gwynedd. 

Your wife— your duchess, now —remains irritatingly pro-Haldane. She is told very clearly to keep her mouth shut and remember that if you're Duke of Marley and Eastmarch, then she's a duchess and her son— your son and hers —will be a duke. Your marriage, though, does not improve, and your wife makes a habit of complaining about other women, complaining to the queen and to anyone who'll listen.  The queen listens, nods, and warns you off her ladies-in-waiting. Well, the queen's women are all Arjenol's leavings, anyway.  Rhemuth and Valoret are full of women who'll lift their skirts for a young and handsome duke.

You are captain-general, and your list of victories grows. You have not yet crossed swords with Alaric Morgan, but that's very much on your list. You have visions of Coroth Castle in flames. The Shadow Queen makes it clear that when the time comes, you  can keep whatever you can seize in the Corwyn lands.

You are not first nobleman in the new order. That  title goes to the queen's leman. You are prepared to live with that, at least for a while, and with not having all of Kheldour country for yourself. You have enough sense not to cross the Shadow Queen on her choice of husband or the titles she gives him. Go south, the queen tells you. Go far to the west. You can live with that.

You understand that you are at the center of any number of rumors. Marley, the whispers say, is getting above himself. He wants half Gwynedd for himself, they say. Marley will make sure the Prince of Kheldour suffers an accident and marry the widowed queen himself.  Marley will take Torenthi money to turn on the Shadow Queen and share out the whole of eastern Gwynedd with Wencit of Torenth.

Well, half Gwynedd doesn't sound bad. But trusting the Torenthi? You're no fool. And marry Charissa de Tolan?  Sawing your own leg off would be easier and less risky. (The Shadow Queen and your duchess both laugh openly about that rumor; you may or may not find that irritating)  You've known Christian de Falkenberg in the past,  Christian who's now Kheldour, and while the man is bookish and no swordsman, you suspect he'd be harder to dispose of than most people think.

You begin to think that the new order does make almost anything possible. Oh, not a crown. You're ambitious but no fool. But when the Shadow Queen is finally in foal, your son is the perfect match for a Tolan daughter. If Richenda can stop sobbing and complaining long enough, she could give you a daughter to marry off to any son Charissa bears. Either thing is possible.

You are fortune's favourite. You know this. And your elbows are just as sharp now as they were when you came to court at Rhemuth a decade ago.

[Nezz]

Oh man, now I have to go back and reread the rest of the story! I want Charissa and Christian to win!

[DoctorM]

I do like that!

[Jerusha]

Fascinating!

[DoctorM]

I'll be doing more soon!

[DerynifanK]

Fascinating but I still cannot want them to rule Gwynedd. They are too willing to kill and destroy. I do want them to be happy together, just somewhere else.