The Seeress of Kell

and his irritation grew out of a sort of moral dilemma. To reveal to his mother that he had been eavesdropping would of course be quite out of the question, and so he could not discuss with her what he had heard until she broached the subject herself. It seemed quite unlikely that she would do so, and so Kheva was at an impasse.
    It should be stated here that King Kheva was not really the sort of boy who would normally intrude on his mother's privacy He was basically a decent lad. But he was also a Drasnian. There is a national trait among Drasnians which, for want of a better term, might be called curiosity. All people are curious to a certain degree, but in Drasnians the trait was quite nearly compulsive. Some contended that it was their innate curiosity which has made spying their national industry. Others maintained with equal vigor that generations of spying had honed the Drasnians' natural curiosity to a fine edge. The debate was much like the endless argument about the chicken and the egg, and almost as pointless. Quite early in life, Kheva had trailed unobtrusively along behind one of the official court spies and thereby discovered the closet hidden behind the east wall of his mother's sitting room. Periodically he would slip into that closet in order to keep track of affairs of state and any other matters of interest. He was the king, after all, and thus he had a perfect right to the information. He reasoned that by spying, he could obtain it while sparing his mother the inconvenience of passing it on to him. Kheva was a considerate boy.
    The conversation in question had concerned the mysterious disappearance of the Earl of Trellheim, his ship Seabird, and a number of other individuals, including Trellheim's son Unrak. Barak, Earl of Trellheim, was considered in some quarters to be an unreliable sort, and his companions in this vanishing were, if anything, even worse. The Alorn kings were disquieted by the potential for disaster represented by Barak and his cohorts roaming loose in the Gods only knew what ocean.
    What concerned young King Kheva, however, was not so much random disasters as it was the fact that his friend Unrak had been invited to participate while he had not. The injustice of mat rankled. The fact that he was a king seemed to automatically exclude him from anything that could even remotely be considered hazardous. Everyone went out of his way to keep Kheva safe and secure, but Kheva did not want to be kept safe and secure. Safety and security were boring, and Kheva was at an age where he would go to any lengths to avoid boredom.
    Clad all in red, he made his way through the marble halls of the palace in Boktor that winter morning. He stopped in front of a large tapestry and made some show of examining it. Then, at least relatively sure that no one was watching—this was Drasnia, after all—he slipped behind the tapestry and into the small closet previously mentioned.
    His mother was conferring with the Nadrak girl Vella and with Yarblek, Prince Kheldar's shabby partner. Vella always made King Kheva nervous. She aroused certain feelings in him with which he was not yet prepared to cope, and so he customarily avoided her. Yarblek, on the other hand, could be quite amusing. His speech was blunt and often colorful and laced with oaths Kheva was not supposed to know the meaning of.
    "They'll turn up, Porenn," Yarblek was assuring Kheva's mother. "Barak just got bored, that's all."
    "I wouldn't be so concerned if he'd gotten bored by himself," Queen Porenn replied, "but the fact that this boredom seems to be an epidemic worries me. Barak's companions aren't the most stable men in the world."
    "I've met them." Yarblek grunted. "You might just be right." He paced up and down for a moment. "I'll have our people keep an eye out for them."
    "Yarblek, I've got the finest intelligence service in the world."
    "Perhaps so, Porenn, but Silk and I have more men than you do, and we've got offices and warehouses in places Javelin hasn't even heard of." He looked at Vella. "Do you want to go back to Gar og Nadrak with me?" he asked.
    "In the wintertime?" Porenn objected.
    "We'll just wear more clothes, that's all." Yarblek shrugged.
    "What are you going to do there?" Vella asked. "I'm not really very interested in sitting around listening to you talk business."
    "I thought we'd go to Yar Nadrak. Javelin's people don't seem to be having much luck finding out what Drosta's up to." He broke off and looked