“A Daughter’s Choice.” Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy 9.93 (June 2005) <http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/>.

A ruler must not be governed by emotion, Isabella’s father had once told her, but the truth was that she despised her chief counselor and, with each passing day, was less and less able to hide her hatred. She could almost hear her father’s despairing sigh as she privately admitted her failure.

But her counselor was so easy to hate. Isabella had ample time to list his obvious shortcomings while strolling down the hallway toward the council room, and the list was long. Yet it could easily have been brief, if she included only the items that truly mattered. She suspected that Simon d’Kite wanted her dead. Set against that unpalatable probability, his disloyalty, condescension, and crassness were small matters. His oily civility and ridiculous black goatee were almost too trivial to note. Almost.

The fact that they were technically related, only fourth cousins but still members of the same family, merely intensified her disgust. Her great-great-great-grandparents would have been embarrassed to witness the degeneration of his side of the family.

Thin slices of sunlight brightened the dull gray stones beneath her feet, and the quiet tranquility of dawn offered her scant comfort. Four guards marched in pairs ahead of and behind her—their presence was as normal to her existence as was breathing—and Orlando Sorenson, the captain of her royal guard, walked beside her. His presence was a rarity. The captain spent most of his time supervising the soldiers of her guard and training on the practice fields to hone the edge of his skills, which his age increasingly worked to dull. But his presence, although unusual, was necessary.

At eighteen, when she became Queen of the kingdom of Baden, Isabella had frightened nobody; one year later, she fared no better. Seeing Captain Sorenson, though, always reminded her powerful enemies of how easily they could wind up serving as food for maggots, and his coldly efficient slaughter of her father’s enemies over two decades had earned him wary respect from people throughout Baden. His loyalty to her father had been absolute, and after her father’s death, Captain Sorenson had transferred it to Isabella, who felt like she had received a deadly viper for a birthday present. She had yet to ask the captain to bloody his hands, but she was wise enough to keep him close when she met privately with Duke Simon.

She halted, and then waited while the captain opened the tall oak door and preceded her into the chamber. When he glanced back and nodded, she followed in his footsteps.

Across the room, Duke Simon stood from his seat at the council table. He was a waspish man, but almost a foot taller than she was, and his black hair was salted liberally with gray. Her father and the duke had been the same age, and one of the duke’s conceits was to act as the supportive uncle.

He greeted her, bowing, and said, “I am grateful, Majesty, that you could meet with me on such short notice.”

Only the light tapping of her shoes on the stone floor and the scraping of wood on stone as the captain pulled her chair back from the table rippled through the sea of quiet that filled the room. It was technically rude, Isabella knew, to ignore his bow. “It was always my father’s practice to take seriously requests from his council,” she said in a cool voice. “I see no reason yet to stop doing so.”

The duke waited until she sat before taking his seat. He lifted a sheet of vellum and swept one hand toward it, as if presenting it and disowning it simultaneously. “Your father was a wise man,” he said, “but I bear more of a warning than a request. A proposal has been raised at the council table, and I fear that its content will disturb you.” The worry in his voice might be real, Isabella decided, but whether it was worry for her or for Baden as a distinct entity was an open question. She thought it was the later, which meant that she was . . . dispensable in his mind.

[cont.]