The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)

by Dorothy Dunnett

hope you won’t be fool enough to…that is, your womenfolk are pretty anxious about Lymond.”

He tilted the ruby on his finger, and a beam of sunlight ran over a sardonic cheekbone.

This is how villains are supposed to behave!

“The first encounter between the old lad and Lord Wharton I shall see or die. They’ll be heaving each other’s guts out of the window.” “Well,” said the Earl of Angus crossly, “what’s so funny about that?…You’re

You’re a weird sort of devil, George,” said his brother with the flatness of long usage.

Lymond’s men descended like moths; and even then they lost seconds in realizing that these horses had riders. The

“He can’t be called that. He’s a Scotsman.”

have come to see your little English friend, Sir Andrew; but I’ll break you a limb in the Turkish style as often as you like….”

“that people have no business to settle other people’s future for them when they’re five years old. It’s a typical man’s scheme,”

ruthlessly. “It’s not for our own good; it’s no use saying it is. It’s to add to their rotten lands, or because they need to carry on the family name, or because it’ll bring them enough money or tenants or rights of lineage to stop a war, or start a war, or carry out their own uninteresting masculine affairs.”

chorus of witticisms. The next two were wide; the fifth caused a mild sensation

“About the bloodhounds,” said Sybilla. “Bloodhound yourself,” said Buccleuch, jerked, in his alarm, out of even the nominal form of courtesy he usually practised.

It was not the cold, as she well knew. It was the crowded strain of the day; the blaring darkness; the devils’ orchestra of uncouth music; the coarse chatter, the catcalls and the mindless, ganting laughter. The Fair had become by night a bloated Saturnalia, sodden, sottish and leering of voice.

She was buffeted by blundering bodies and twitched by grasping hands. Smells assailed her: beer smells, food smells and leather smells; the stink of human bodies and once, as two struggling shapes crashed into her, the reek of blood, forcing on the mind the warm fire and the reeking arrows of an hour before—Culter’s voice:

Mothlike in its lightness and rapid insistency, the so-familiar voice spoke. “This, of course, is the chamber of devils, who sit in hexagon babbling like herring gulls about the ruin of charity and the disorderly rupture of souls….The

“Don’t, for your own sake, begin weaving fantasies of evil around me as well. I haven’t tried to kill anybody today, I give you my word.”

Truth’s nothing but falsehood with the edges sharpened up, and ill-tempered at that: no repair, no retraction, no possible going

Today, a morose and pallid Friday in November, the subject was Lymond.

tell you, Lymond has taken three months to kill all the years of my childhood. He’ll destroy Will Scott in a week.”

Are your companions dull? Surely you can educate them? Are they poor conversationalists? Then edify them: they should make princely listeners. Do they have little skill at cards? Then ruin them: you have my permission. It is really time,” said Lymond, “that you were developing some sense of social responsibility.”

strange and fabulous history of the Philosopher’s Stone.

The small panes of the Dowager’s window became grey, and then ultramarine, and the hot, scented air fondled and set about

It’s for you to decide how badly you want Lymond.”

For the gentlemen, officers and heads on the west parts of Scotland entered to the King’s service said the notice. Read aloud by a staid, cultivated voice, it proceeded to expect the English gentlemen thus

Be mistrustful, and you will live happy and die hated and be much more useful to me in between.

He was brought to admitting, austerely, that the entire trip had been a wild-goose chase expressly fabricated by Lymond; he then apologized again for his absence and indicated that, if she would allow him, he would leave for Bogle House and change his clothes.

I’m with Lymond because I like it.”

“But Lymond—” began Scott. “Lymond planned it. God, I saw the letter and the signature, and every stroke of the pen was as much his as that

“So you’re for Lymond after all.”

THEY FEARED THE ENGLISH more than her disease. The sick baby Queen was taken to Dumbarton, rocky fortress on the Clyde,

“And meantime we shall be getting troops of our own from France.” “For nothing?” said Mariotta. She was

“But isn’t it sometimes more expensive to accept favours than it is to buy them?”

“France, of course, is the ancient ally, tied to us by history and temperament and blood and religion. But there’s sense as well as sentiment in it. By supporting us with troops, France forces England to divert men and money from Europe.

Besides, France has never tried to conquer us by force as England has. Three English kings have claimed to own Scotland, and have done their best to hack their names on the door….What sort of a people would we be if we tolerated that?”

“Only that I like to be entertained. And Lymond is more perceptive than you are.”

The effort of self-control was so great that he was literally shaking on his feet: one hand shot up and gripped the wall to one side of her; the other, following more slowly, held the other side, locking her in the deep embrasure. “Lymond has been here?” He didn’t touch her.

“But I hardly ever indulge in acts of retribution: they’re usually bad for trade. I propose to offer the child for sale to the Scottish Government, whether alive (which they might find awkward)

I’ve escaped the grand mal and the petit mal and even the Duke of Exeter’s daughter…”

“And bitterness is a new thing.” “Not at all. My natural habit, like the squirting cucumber. Any further traces of rot?”

“Tonight?” asked Lymond, and thoughtfully lifted the hair from her neck. “What will you pay me?”

King Henry’s decision to make a scapegoat of me was no accident.”

Lymond sober was someone distinctly to be reckoned with: Lymond sodden was a child of danger. “I wanted to speak to you,” said the boy. “But not over a sword.”

Without trouble, how could we live? There the thorne is thikkest to buylden and brede.”

am generally tidy when sober,”

Prior exiit, prior intravit, as the good old saying goes.”

Lymond looked shocked. “Mariotta, my Sarmatian poppy! Such a violent volte-face! I thought you loved me as the marabou loves its one-legged mother. I thought we should be shikk to shikk, indivisible, like Richard and his piglets. And now!”

I’m sorry. I should infinitely prefer to call on you with sixteen pearly elephants and a litter of jade, with silver trumpets and sarcanet and schorl and satinwood, spring water and roses from Shiraz…would you receive me?” “Provided you gave me time to array my dusky charms. ‘And who is this? Great Alexander? Charle le Maigne?’ ”

London had French fever again. After the sad fiasco of February, nobody was looking forward to reopening the Scottish campaign.

George’s angry glance met Lymond’s sardonic

“Because the young fool plans to trap Lymond at the convent. The ruined convent where five years ago his sister was killed.”

had invented new graces. Its tongueless bell slept unharried among the cuckoo flowers and behind painted robe and beaded halo its broken beams, leafed like an artichoke, fed a thousand mouths. Of human life there was none nearer than the adjacent hilltops, where armed men waited and