They had argued long into the night, and when he awoke with a brutal headache and a weight on every limb Elfred’s first thought was that he must have drunk much, more more than he remembered.
Drinking was a natural means of defense, faced with the press of arguments that Viza and Lomaz, his lover and his friend, kept marshaling to prove that he shouldn’t obey his brother’s summons, that he shouldn’t return to the empire — that he should instead leave Antiala for the worlds that opened southward, down the Mersana or over the mountains, worlds of wealth and plenty, worlds his brother couldn’t reach.
For him to seek to escape his brother was, of course, an insane idea, which was why their arguments weren’t working, why he was bound to ride northward in just three days time — after a final court appearance, a ceremonial goodbye — to join whatever imperial escort would be coming down to meet him in Argosa.
Certainly it was too insane an idea to broach with Welsten, who was organizing their departure, who would ride north with him in obedience to Padrec’s imperial command.
Except that Welsten was one source, one of several, for the tidings that had followed the initial summons home — the wild reports and wilder rumors borne by birds and travelers from the distant north, the tales of assassination and civil war, of his sister and his brother meeting in open battle, of plots and counterplots encompassing Argosa, Brethony, the empire as a whole. And it was quite obvious that the adjutant had slowed the pace of his planning as each new bit of intelligence arrived.
At first they were leaving within a tenday, but then the timeline kept being extended, past one winter feastday and another — initially with talk about the risks of winter weather, eventually with comments about the need for “certainty” about the situation in Argosa before they placed Elfred’s imperial person in any kind of danger.
From the reports they had now, the iron duchess’s city currently … well, simmered was the word most often used, with two occupying legions in its streets. Which was not ideal for their journey, not ideal at all, but they couldn’t wait forever, Welsten had hired more men to supplement his bodyguard, and it was finally time to leave —
— yes, time to leave, the mother of his unborn child told him, the mother (she claimed certainty on the matter of the child’s sex) of his firstborn son, time to leave here and get somewhere where your brother can’t find us.
We’re so close, Lomaz said, so close to power that puts all your brother’s legions in the shade, and you want to put yourself in his power, not knowing what really happened to your father and your sister? Put yourself, his last remaining rival —
— a rival with something he doesn’t have, Viza said, a son and heir waiting to be born …
— put yourself fully in his power, the brother he hasn’t seen in ten years, the brother with a foreign taint, and if half the stories are true what do you think will happen? Maybe you’ll be kept alive until he marries and has an heir, but if he’s this ruthless you’ll exist on sufferance, you’ll be locked away somewhere at best, he won’t want any rallying points, any rivals who could actually be emperor –
— and Lomaz has friends, she interjected, he has friends everywhere, you can move freely through the river cities, wait to see what happens in the north, you can always return later, you need information, our child needs safety …
Her story had changed, that was the thing he found himself considering as they worked on him. The tale of a powerful father or a spurned husband-to-be who would pursue her if they could, the sense of fear that had supposedly brought her this far north … all that was oddly absent when she talked now about the possibilities lying south of them. When he pressed her, once, she said something about how much time had passed, and emphasized that she was not suggesting that they actually enter the High King’s dominions … and of course, if her purpose was to marry him, and surely that was her purpose now, then a marriage to a Narsil prince would be something she could bring back to the world of her childhood, something that more than redeem her great escape. So maybe that was the subtext of her airy indifference to perils she had previously treated with the utmost gravity.
But beyond that there was a still a sense, as she and Lomaz talked together, of ownership over the southern world, a confidence in their own capacities that went beyond what a late-born noble son and a concubine’s daughter ought to have between them.
Because whatever Elfred brought with him if he went south, he would not bring any great power save his name, and that would be a complicated thing to trade upon. So why were they so certain, so intensely certain, that they would all prosper greatly together in Jasipar or Seraphport, far from the actual source of Montair strength? Was it just a version of their shared confidence in the magic, borrowed and transposed to his situation, to Viza’s pregnancy, to Lomaz’s desire to have an imperial prince as part of his magical experiments?
And was that Lomaz’s actual desire? With Viza at least the pregnancy explained her intensity, but his friend seemed equally invested, beyond what either affection or self-interest might suggest …
But holding these thoughts as they debated with him and he resisted, he also held the thought — or the fear — or the completely rational supposition that they might be right about what waited for him in Rendale. In which case he would remember his choices now, his inevitable-seeming return northward, the way a bird on the altar of sacrifice remembered its fatal flight into the net.
Those fears were the last thing he remembered of the prior evening — the servant refilling their glasses, Viza talking about some new rumor that made his sister out to be alive and fleeing southward, while his own mind reimagined some of his unhappy memories of the north as prophecies, where his last few winters of life would be spent sick and miserable, hacking his lungs out in some drafty fortress, supervised by someone crueler than Welsten, surviving only until his brother proved capable of putting a child in some fortunate noblewoman …
… those thoughts, then the curtain, the dark, the very depths of something deeper than an ordinary sleep. And now this strange awakening with a terrible heaviness all over him, the midday sunlight harsh through the open door to the balcony, no servant to attend to him, no sounds from anywhere in the apartments, no Vizalaga beside him …
Somehow he managed to reach his feet, the throb quickening behind his eyes. The door to the bedchamber was open, there was something on the floor, the servant had dropped a pile of clothing, no, someone had collapsed —
He was not a woman, he did not scream, but he gasped for breath when realized what was lying there, half-inside his bedchamber door — a door that wasn’t open so much as broken from its hinges, the inner bolt torn away, and across the threshold sprawled Welsten, dead and staring, still in his smallclothes, a dagger’s hilt protruding from near his armpit, blood down his chest, blood everywhere, blood especially all over the black-haired man who lay facedown, clutching the adjutant’s legs, as thought they had wrestled together into death.
Gasp — he stumbled past them — gasp — into the parlor where there were three more dead, two men sprawled in the wreckage of the chairs with weapons near them — gasp — and the servant who had filled their cups the night before sitting stupidly with his eyes closed and his throat cut in the corner. There was still no sound except his own pants as his eyes jumped crazily around the room, jumped to the door out onto the landing, which was not broken-down but innocently open …
Then he heard the thumping on the stairs and before he had time to to find a weapon they both burst through the half-open door, Viza and Lomaz, the big blonde man with a sword buckled on, that was a novel sight, and while Lomaz paused and gaped at the scene she threw herself sobbing across the room, threw herself on Elfred —
“Oh Mithriel thank you Mithriel sweet Mithriel you’re alive, I couldn’t wake you, I couldn’t wake you, they were all dead when I woke, it was just like this and the soldiers are all dead, the guard outside and the soldiers in the other apartment, their throats were cut in their beds, something in the wine, something in the wine, I’ve never slept so heavily, I didn’t know what to do, I went for Lomaz, I brought him, oh Elfred …”
“He saved you both,” Lomaz said numbly, staring still at the tableau. “Your man Welsten, it looks like he fought all three of them …”
“Something in the wine,” Viza said again. “They drugged us all. They would have killed us all. Killed our child. Killed us while slept.”
“I’ve never slept so heavily,” their friend said. “Never never … I was barely awake an hour when Viza came pounding on my door. My head feels like there are hammers working …”
The hammering was slightly easier in Elfred’s skull, and his breath was likewise more controlled. He gently took Viza’s arms from his shoulders and turned back to the corpses in the bedchamber doorway.
“He’s dressed for sleep,” he said to them, looking at his adjutant, his friend. “Welsten — he must have come awake when everyone else was still drugged, somehow …”
“Awake enough to interrupt their plan,” Lomaz agreed, as Elfred bent and turned over the man who had died grappling with Welsten.
The face was nondescript but it didn’t look southern. The coloring made the prince think of the servants at High House who came from Ysan.
Lomaz had his blade out and was prodding gingerly at the other corpses, as though he feared that one might come to life. He lifted a dead hand to expose a knife underneath, a blade with a worked handle —
“… do you recognize this, Elfred?” He lifted it carefully, held it out. “It looks like …”
It looked like a falcon, because it was a falcon. The blade of a Falconguardsman, stained with blood.
“Your brother did this,” Viza breathed. “Easier to kill you here than in the north.”
“We don’t know that,” Lomaz said. “We don’t know anything yet. There could be plots within plots, some kind of deception, one of the factions here making a play …”
“Do you think that whoever ordered this intended to leave dead bodies and discarded daggers for you to find?” she cried. “We are all meant to be gutted in our sleep! We were never meant to see their faces or their blades!”
“We don’t know all that,” he said again, shaking his head, still looking at the dagger in his hand. “I don’t know – they could have planned to leave the dagger in the prince’s breast, a token …”
Eflred suddenly remembered swordfights with his brother, wooden blades clacking against each other in the practice yard, in the fields above High House. He closed his eyes, squeezed away the bloody horror, tried to call Padrec’s face back into his mind.
“… one thing I’m sure about,” Lomaz said, “is that whoever ordered this has eyes on this square, this building. They’ll know their plan failed; maybe they know all ready. This place won’t be safe. We can go to my apartment …”
“The whole city won’t be safe,” Viza said. “We’d need to ask for sanctuary in the palace, and even then, would we really be protected? Does the king want to protect a Narsil prince his brother the emperor wants to kill? And if they know where we are, if your brother knows we know he means to kill you, then they’ll want to act again soon. We need to be somewhere they can’t find us. By tonight. Soon.”
He couldn’t see his brother’s face. Each time he tried he conjured something different — a version of his own face, pale and haunted; an archangel’s face, stern, demanding; Welsten’s face, bloodied, staring. His mother, he could still see his mother’s face. But Padrec’s face was lost.
He looked at his hands, bloodied just from touching the bodies for a moment. He looked at his lover: at her belly (was there a hint of a swell now?), at her frantic eyes (but how much of her hysteria was real?). He looked at the dead servant. He looked at Welsten, desperately wishing the adjutant was still alive to tell him what to do.
Viza reached for him. “Elfred, as you love me, as you love yourself, you must see what we have to do.”
What was the verse Welsten quoted to him? Judge a man … what was it? Judge a man by how he travels the road the angels open for his feet?
Not quite right, but it would have to do. He didn’t trust her but there was no one left to trust, no choice better than the one being offered to him by the bloody hands of fate.
“We have to go south,” he said, and he saw her exhale, a great gasp of relief.
Lomaz’s eyes were bright but wary. “South to where? How far?”
“As far we have to go,” the prince of Narsil told him. “As far as Mandor, if it comes to that.”