The days passed without many surprises after the sparring match, two weeks in all.
Contrary to what Hrafn had expected, nothing especially remarkable happened. The harsh training he had imagined, the trials and rites, the sermons of some grave men coming to tell him what to do with his new life, all of that seemed to exist but not for him. It was reserved for the fylkirn who still needed to reach what he had gained without even trying.
There was also the education many of them received, such as etiquette, history and even vocabulary, the sort of thing wellborn people seemed to breathe. Edvard had tried to push him in that direction more than once, and perhaps might have succeeded, had Hrafn not already been a full voroir. The Hirds took titles seriously, once touched was once elevated.
That left Hrafn to practice with weapons under the supervision of patient instructors and to deal alone with his own blessing. At some point they told him there would be someone better suited to guide him in the use of megin. But he had risen too fast, and the Hird did not seem to have spare hands for rare problems.
At the very least the thought of Briorn learning to read amused him. As for himself he had no desire to learn how to make the right pose at the right angle, nor to choose cutlery as if different knives transformed food into something else. He did not care much to understand the whole theater of high society either, though he was beginning to suspect it was not clever to ignore it entirely. But what he wanted was something else, useful information, things that might one day come knocking at his door. Important names, dangerous names, who profited from war and who profited from peace.
"Making connections is important, my lord," said Edvard beside him, carrying three books as though each possessed moral worth. "This is an old house."
Edvard had been improving, or worsening, depending on one's point of view. He had grown somewhat accustomed to Hrafn, which made him less rigid in certain matters and more irritatingly comfortable in others. Discovering that Hrafn could read had seemed to raise him several degrees in the butler's esteem, which in turn said a great deal about the shamefully low measure wellborn people usually reserved for commoners.
"Alva, you mean," Hrafn replied, without lifting his eyes from the open book on the table. He drank a little coffee before turning the page, that luxury still seemed indecent to him, which only made him appreciate it more. "Foreign trade and mining?"
"Yes, my lord. A branch abundant in coin." Edvard set the books down one by one, aligning them with the precision of a man who might have corrected the whole world, given enough time. "And in influence."
"An inconvenience too and a dangerous one." He spoke with disinterest. He had never been a man to chase after coins, because had learned too early not to mistake it for salvation. As for influence, it seemed to him only another word for owing favors to people who deserved very little.
"Yes," said Edvard. "It will mean leaving the walls more often."
Hrafn rested his elbow on the table and let his eyes travel over the map spread before him. Thin lines cut across the kingdom, marks for rivers and smaller towns, watchpoints such as roads too wide for petty bandits and too narrow for large armies. All of it seemed more honest than etiquette, a route said what it wanted, a family rarely did.
"It is interesting, but I already have money," he replied.
That had been a particularly pleasant discovery, there was a considerable sum set aside for stationed voroirs, even if they spent long stretches doing nothing except existing in a useful and threatening fashion. A kind of sweetening, Hrafn suspected, to muffle the fact that in return the Hird could call upon them at any moment during fifty years of honorable compulsory service.
Honorable. Hrafn liked it when powerful people gave pretty names to ugly things.
"I would not say that—"
"Someone your age ought to be drinking tea by the hearth, Ed," he interrupted, closing the book. "Cursing pots, perhaps complaining about the weather, those sorts of things. Why do you still make the effort?" The question was sincere.
Edvard was not as old as Saga, but neither was he anywhere near young. Meticulous as he was, Hrafn doubted he had mismanaged his life so badly as to need work out of desperation. A man like that calculated the future the same way he folded napkins: with aggressive exactness.
The butler straightened one of the books on the shelf, though it had already been straight. "When one lives by the same work for many years," he said, "one grows accustomed to it."
Hrafn let out a low sound through his nose. "I do not see how I could imagine that." He paused. "No. That is a lie, a do." The memory of Saga came easily. History seemed to inhabit the old woman like another layer of skin, that made him reach among the books on the table for one volume that stood apart from the others, larger and less dignified, a book of tales. Its edges were frayed, the spine marked, and pages bearing the sort of use no respectable book in that place carried.
"You said Lady Alva's family enterprise reaches a quarter of the kingdom, yes?"
"Yes, my lord. And some of its routes run beyond, to neighboring kingdoms."
"But she is the eighteenth daughter of the line." Hrafn thumbed through the book without truly reading it, more interested in listening than in the words. "I imagine she has little influence in her own house."
"She has some," Edvard replied. He noticed the empty cup and asked: "More coffee?"
"I'm going to be spoiled, Ed... little cakes would do nicely too."
Edvard poured the coffee and summoned the cakes with a clap as he explained. "She has some influence," he continued. "And things tend to change very quickly among the nobility. The house name almost never disappears, but the hands change. Sometimes by death, another by marriage, mostly by error."
"Many opportunities," Hrafn added.
"Yes, my lord."
Hrafn accepted the coffee and leaned back a little in his chair. He was growing fonder of Edvard by the day, perhaps even respectful. The man knew how to listen, knew how to answer and there was something else there as well, pride perhaps or the vanity of the trade. Edvard's fortune was tied to Hrafn's and the butler seemed to regard that with disciplined ambition.
"I imagine she expects a filthy cripple, stupid, poorly instructed and easy to manipulate," said Hrafn, watching the steam rise from the cup. "A good card to climb a few steps."
"No one would imagine that an elevated voroir—" Edvard stopped. The mocking look Hrafn sent him said more than words, the butler nodded once. "Yes, my lord, she will expect exactly that."
"Good." Hrafn turned another page of the old book of tales, though now he smiled at something that was not written there. "Good that we understand one another, Ed."
The cakes arrived, and Edvard set them on the table as though taking part in something solemn. Hrafn picked one up, bit into it and approved in silence. Then he closed Nanna's book with surprising care, with a respect he gave to very few things. "Let us give her a surprise."