The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card Page B

as certain that the kind of magery a child excelled in had only a chance relationship with the particular talents of either parent.
    In Iceway, however, the importance of seamages was so great that a seamage king, in order to produce seamage heirs, would mate only with women who were proven seamages.
    Here is where King Prayard’s life became complicated. For his father, King Oviak, having started a war with the Jarl of Gray and having then promptly lost it, was forced to accept a state marriage between his son, Prayard, and Bexoi, the sister of the victorious young Jarl. Bexoi had no shred of seamagery in her, and only the slightest talent as beastfriend.
    It would be generous to say that Bexoi was talented enough with birds to call herself a Feathergirl—they would come when they were within earshot, and then only small and rather useless birds, not even geese or ducks that were large enough to be worth eating, or hawks or other birds of prey that might be trained to hunt.
    To everyone in Iceway—and Gray, too, for that matter—it was obvious that the marriage with Bexoi was meant to put an end to the hereditary line of seamages that had culminated in Prayard, who was the most powerful Wavebrother in the recent history of Iceway. Prayard’s and Bexoi’s children would have sharply reduced talent, and far less likelihood of having affinities for the sea.
    Prayard was a gracious man, and accepted Bexoi as his wife for the sake of the nation, even as he grieved over his own lost progeny. Not for a moment did he expect that any child of his and Bexoi’s would be seamage enough to succeed him as king. Rather, he expected that the royal succession would pass into another house—whichever noble family of Iceway did produce a notable seamage in the next generation. In other words, it did not cross his mind that Iceway would have a ruler who could not command a fleet of sailless ships; rather, he took Gray’s action in forcing this marriage to be an act against this particular royal family.
    But the terms of the treaty did not stop with the marriage. For along with Bexoi there came to Iceway a host of Grayish “servants” and “stewards,” all of whom were assumed to be, and were in fact, spies and overlords, and sometimes both at once. And it soon became clear that Gray would not accept any change of the royal house. The Jarl’s goal was not to end the power of Prayard’s family, but to force upon Iceway a king who was half-Gray by birth and magically weak and misdirected into some channel other than seamagery: in other words, the perpetual subjugation of Iceway.
    So the fortress of Nassassa, where King Prayard lived, became a constant silent war between the Icewegians and the Grays. Prayard gave every outward respect to his wife, even to the sharing of her bed at least once in every month; her lack of children was blamed entirely on Bexoi’s barrenness and not on lack of effort by Prayard. She sat beside him in court, attended all his official meetings, and was given an ample allowance with which to support the large contingent of servants and stewards who constantly meddled with the government and business of Iceway.
    At the same time, Prayard was well known to have a mistress—no, a concubine, Anonoei—who had given birth to two sons, Eluik and Enopp, whose resemblance to Prayard was constantly remarked upon by Icewegians who already regarded them as their father’s heirs.
    If Anonoei had been a seamage, or even a powerful mage of any sort, then those sons would long since have been murdered in some untraceable way by one of the Grayish agents in the queen’s employ. Or, failing that, their mere existence would have provoked a war. But as far as anyone could tell, Anonoei had no magical ability at all, not even Bexoi’s feeble beastmagic. She formed no clant, practiced no discipline, served no aspect of the natural world. She seemed to live for no