The servants flung back the draperies and the late-morning sun filled the room with light — much of it reflected in a blinding glare off new-fallen snowdrifts. Padrec sat up growling, wondering why the servants had the gall to rouse him when he could have slept into the afternoon, and what matter that he missed the midday ceremonies for his sister and her betrothed — surely half the nobility would be sleeping off the night before? And as he opened his mouth to berate the black-clad servants, he saw the faces crowding round, and the words vanished into a soft hiss of surprise.
“Prince — Prince Padrec,” Lord Arellwen said haltingly, fingering the seal of office that hung, chain-linked and clinking, about his neck. The chancellor’s gaze darted to the men flanking him — Secretariat, City, Army, Exchequer and Ethred the Archpriest — before coming to rest on a point just to the left of Padrec’s heaped pillows. Behind the council stood the chamberlain and Lord Captain Wentwain of the Falconguard — and there were others just outside his doorway, faces he could not make out as he blinked in the sunlight, crowding the corridors with eager whispers.
“What is . . . what is going on?” he said after a bleared moment.
“He's dead, Padrec,” a female voice said softly — his sister’s voice, from a corner of the room where the drapes were pulled back into a shadowy column. “He’s dead,” Alsbet repeated, stepping into the light, clad in black with that broken-nosed Captain Gavian beside her, and her blue eyes seemed to contain winters worth of sadness.
For a moment Padrec thought she meant Maibhygon, and a wicked happiness boiled in his breast.
“Yes, he is dead, Your . . . Majesty,” Arellwen said haltingly. Then, in an alarming clatter, the group of men dropped to their knees, and the chancellor found his voice.
“The emperor is dead!” he cried, and the walls and windows muffled his voice but not enough — it still rang clearly out into the halls where the whispers were loud and the faces hidden. “The emperor is dead — Long live the emperor! Long live His Imperial Majesty, Padrec the Second, lord of All Narsil!”
“Long live the emperor!” the crowd responded. “Long live Padrec!”
“Long live Padrec,” his sister said softly, on her knees with the others, her black skirts pooling on the room's floor, and the uncrowned emperor blinked in the glare of sun on snow and heard, for the first time, the distant pealing of bells.
So Edmund Montair died in the last days of the year of the world One Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Nine, three hundred and twenty-five years after Andarion Narcilis had begun constructing the Con Rendala in whose throne room the late emperor now lay in state, his broken features patched up with thread and painted into a semblance of life.
There was glorious sunlight on the day of his death — “emperor’s weather,” the people called it — and an aperture in the vault was propped open, allowing a single perfect sunbeam to reach the tiles below. The ray crept slowly across the long, banner-hung hall, and when it crossed Edmund’s bier in late afternoon the light gilded the body, as though his corporeal form lay ready to join his soul among the angels.
Afternoon passed into evening and night; the next day the sun was gone, and the emperor’s weather gave way to a fierce mountain storm that descended upon the city spitting sleet and icy rain. The freeze that followed coated everything — wooden walls were sheathed in silver, detritus from the storm lay in glistening heaps like piles of discarded jewelry, and the temple’s bell-ropes were hung with icicles, so thick that the mourning peals fell silent.
The city-folk called the storm a sign of darker days to come, as they skated on iced-over streets and filled the temple with murmured prayers. Meanwhile the Castle became a place of warmth and claustrophobia, where all conversations seemed public, and everyone watched everyone else — as the empire's nobles waited for the storm to pass, for the ice to melt, for the funeral to go forward, for Padrec to be crowned.
Waited, and let the rituals of the empire sweep them up. The day after the storm they walked the long cold way from Castle to temple, dressed in black and trailing a party of Azrielite priests, to hear the archpriest’s prayers for the gentle repose of Edmund's soul. That done, the entire company retraced its slippery steps, and stood for an hour in the high-ceilinged silence of the throne room while the black priests chanted the deathwatch, the ancient syllables echoing upward amid the incense and the dust motes that swirled in the vaulted darkness high above.
The priests’ faces were pale moons in the night of their robes and hoods, and Padrec's nostrils burned with the incense and his eyes teared up so that some in the clouds of watchers believed that their uncrowned emperor was crying.
This was not the truth. Beneath his sorrowful exterior, Padrec exulted. It was as if the Archangels had dropped a supernatural headsman's axe on all the long miserable years he had anticipated — a long agony of impotent waiting from which his father’s drunken plunge from Matheld’s Tower had spared him, by delivering power into his own hands at the proper time, which was now.
Now, before the dukes grew too powerful; now, before the possibility of war with Bryghala slipped from his fingers; now, because that way there was no need for them to end where other princes and emperors had ended, with a disastrous ruler in his dotage and a son tempted, understandably tempted, to give his beloved father a push
and in his mind’s eye he saw Edmund falling, falling, and a pair of hands on the tower above forcing him over the edge, his hands
but that wasn’t what had happened, because he had been abed and asleep and his allies had been ferreting out a plot against the emperor, and that plot had not yet come to fruition, Aengiss was sure of it, and the only footprints in the snow atop the tower had been his father’s, Wentwain had said as much, and a drunken tumble made so much sense, it fit spiritually with everything that had gone wrong for his father, and perhaps even explained how Caetryn had somehow anticipated it with her sight, well enough to write him a note that he had probably been reading at the very moment when his father, soused and reeling, had fallen to his death
and sometimes he thought back to that night and tried to parse his conversations with Aengiss and with Paulus, tried to remember details through the haze of drink, and found himself guiltily relieved when he couldn’t remember all the details, just Aengiss asking him for trust and patience and Paulus telling him to get to bed for his own safety, which he had done of course, and anyway no one had pushed his father, not his enemies and certainly not him, no one
and so he stepped from the darkness of these thoughts into the light of his new imperial power. The ambassadors came to him and found him charming and gracious, more so than expected, willing to guarantee the treaties and accords of his father's time, full of promises of Narsil's continued friendship — and they did not see the visions of southward conquest that danced in Padrec’s thoughts.
But those visions would have to wait, because there was Bryghala to deal with — yet even that could not be dealt with just yet. Prince Maibhygon came to the new emperor as well, and the two men exchanged careful pleasantries under a host of watchful eyes — and then Padrec confirmed his father's treaty and his sister’s marriage, and sent Maibhygon back to his rooms in Blind Tower without even hinting at his desperate desire to tear the parchment down the middle and cast it into the fire.
“The excuse will come,” Aengiss promised his new sovereign. “Before your sister leaves the borders of the empire, it will come.”
Yes, Aengiss was full of promises now, and full of advice as well, advice that Padrec chafed at but accepted all the same. Accepted, even though his old commander was still unwilling to discuss the details of the plot against his throne, swearing up and down that he knew that Edmund’s death was not the plotters’ work, but otherwise putting him off with promises of revelations soon to come.
“Your father’s death will have altered all their plans,” the old general told him, when Edmund was twenty hours dead and the mourning bells still pealed without ceasing in the city. “Give me a few days to gather knowledge, while you tend to what must come first — including settling on the men to advise you, the men who will help you rout your enemies once I can name them without a shred of doubt.”
To which Padrec told Aengiss his plan for the council, how he would probably take Dunkan as Lord of the City, Paulus for Secretariat, Elbert for the Exchequer, and finally to create a new seat dedicated to Brethon affairs, and to bring one of his circle, maybe Cadfael, east over the Yrgheim to represent Brethony on the council.
“As a first step toward a dual monarchy?” the general said with a faint smile. “Where his majesty rules half the year from the throne across the mountains …?”
Padrec flushed; the thought had been in his mind. “I don’t have clear plans, Aengiss. But I’ll do whatever’s necessary to make sure Brethony is fully part of the empire, an equal part, no matter if some fat Heart lords would prefer to see it plundered.”
The general’s bird-of-prey smile widened. “That’s a fine speech, and a fine intention. And then who would you have for chancellor?”
“Why not you? Would you accept?”
“Me? I am flattered, majesty, but wouldn’t there be a danger of appearances? The young adjutant chooses his old general to run the empire for him? You must do as you will, you are the emperor, but I would say for now you should mostly leave the council as it is. Certainly leave Arellwen as chancellor. The man has kept the empire running amid difficulties, and he's loyal. Not qualities to be taken lightly.”
“But if you think I’d risk looking a lapdog — shouldn’t I have my own men, if I’m to be my own man? These are my father's lords there now! Won’t I look like I'm afraid to change anything?”
Aengiss nodded. “A fair point. The dukes are watching — so make a beginning by packing off Gaddel and making Elbert Lord of the City in his place. He’ll be good at the job, and the administration will begin to train him to become your chancellor when Arellwen retires. But leave Exchequer in place — the man knows coin, and you will need an experienced hand for that if all goes well. Secretariat and Army, too, for now. For now. Oh, and by Uriel, don’t put Dunkan on your Council! Your brawn doesn’t need to sit table with your brains.”
“And nothing for Paulus?”
A wintry smile. “I wouldn't tie Paulus down to any one post. He knows how much you value him. As for the Brethon seat — it’s not a bad idea, but just picking one of your friends isn’t crafty enough. Better to bring in one of the dukes, Cymrin or Aedevys, and find a way to make them think it’s their idea, that the seat will be theirs permanently even though you have other plans.”
“And Ethred? I’ll need my own archpriest …”
“Yes, but in good time. You don’t want someone too, shall we say, pious” — Aengiss made the word cut with its contempt — “and you don’t want to open your reign with a move against your own blood, however many streams removed. Speaking of which, there is a letter you must write, and soon.”
“A letter?”
“To your brother … your brother and your heir.”
“Elfred?” Padrec waved a hand. “Arellwen and my sister have tried to bring him back. He seems happy as the scholar-playboy of Antiala.”
“Others may have tried; you can command. He might be an asset, he might be a threat, but either way you cannot know so long as he is frittering away his life and your gold in a foreign land. So write him a letter, cajoling and commanding all at once, and send a loyal man south to fetch him. Perhaps he should have a seat on your council, perhaps a post in Brethony, perhaps — something else entirely.” The veiled threat was not so very veiled. “And then at the same time you know what else you must do.”
“A wife,” Padrec said.
“A wife. Here make no great moves yet; we must await certain developments, and the unwinding of your sister’s betrothal. But a year from now, wherever matters stand in other policies, you must have a bride.”
Padrec nodded, deliberately postponing actual thinking on the matter, deliberately not thinking about Caetryn, not at all.
For now, he would move carefully and let himself be steered. There would be time enough later to make his own mistakes.
After the storm had passed, the sun appeared for a day, melting most of Rendale’s ice before a bank of slate-grey clouds hurried up the river valley. Beneath that canopy, a flock of grackels came to roost atop the squared-off bulk of Berdeger's Tower, the lowest of the Castle’s spires, having been delayed somehow on their usual southward migration. All day they peppered the windowsills and balconies and raised a piercing din. Then evening came, the cold sky burning orange at its fringes, and the birds took their wings and clatter southward, leaving the tower to silence and the night.
Benfred’s bedroom was in the tower, a token of the days when the entire spire had been turned over to his father’s household on their visits. He took his evening meal in the chamber, let his bodyservant clean up and withdraw, and then seated himself at the desk where his father had once done correspondence, turning the pages of an illuminated book — Para Varelion’s Counsel for Princes, denounced as impious by the inquisitors and copied more eagerly for that — without reading any of the words. The bells rang for the eighth hour before he heard the knock, went to the door, and took the scrap of paper from a curtsying maidservant with the complexion of Argosa.
Another hour passed, and then Benfred left the desk and his chamber and went down the staircase to where it opened from the tower into the eastern hall. Even so late there was a crowd there, but on the landing he was protected by the shadows, and he felt certain no one observed him step behind a threadbare tapestry into an alcove built to hide the narrowest of doors, which opened to the key one of his cousins had stolen many time-lost years before, revealing a single downward step and then the darkness.
They had often gone by candlelight but they had also memorized the way, all the Montair cousins — twenty-five steps down, then twelve flagstoned paces, push the door, another twelve steps, turn right, ignore the cobwebs (but there were far more of them now), push the bars, and then another ten steps down, these ones wooden (and one was rotted through, but Benfred was careful), and finally a last door and you were inside … and there she was, waiting in flaring candlelight that lit the pitted walls and burnished the weapons that hung there, some rusted, others still ready for the use.
“Remarkable,” Cresseda said. “But then every castle has its secrets, I suppose.”
“I’m sure there are better ones than this, but it’s the one we found as children. Old mad Erveront’s work, my brother thought. A hidden armory with at least three paths down, at different corners of the castle. Once we thought there must be a fourth path from the emperor’s apartments, but Erveront changed his sleeping place from tenday to tenday, so mayhap he thought he’d always be close to an entrance no matter where slept.” Benfred waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it still works.”
“Indeed,” the duchess said. “I’m just grateful that the passageway I took didn’t open into a pit where the foes of northern kings have been tortured since time immemorial.”
Her tone was light, and immediately irritating. “Shall we move to business? We have lost days without being able to speak clearly. I need to know if your preparations have been rolled back, as I have rolled back mine.”
“If you mean that the Old Hound will not be descending upon us with his army on the Feast of Mithriel, then yes. My man sent that bird on the day your cousin first lay in his catafalque. I trust your men will not be riding south to their tasks tomorrow.”
He nodded curtly. “They will not.” His men were mostly crowded in an inn on the waterfront, awaiting orders. “But I – ”
“But,” she said overridingly, “if by rolled back you mean that I intend to accept the rule of Padrec Montair for the rest of my doubtless already declining days, then no, Benfred, nothing is being rolled back. We have come too far for that.”
“How so?” he said. “Our case has evaporated. We are no longer saving the realm from a tottering, failing emperor. We are no longer offering his son a form of power that he otherwise might wait years to grasp. Our act would be naked — without the cloak of justice, without any tempting gilt to dazzle Padrec. Just pure power-seeking, with no warrant save that we believe that we would wield it best.”
“So eloquent! But still — wouldn’t we? Padrec is unready — a child could see that. He leans on old Cullolen like a beggar on a crutch. The Brethon conquest is still a folly, a trap from which our empire may never quite escape, and Padrec will take us deeper …”
“He has confirmed the treaty, confirmed the betrothal. And you’ve seen my cousin the princess with her prince. We thought she might thank us for saving her from that engagement. You cannot think that any longer, not after seeing her with him.”
Cresseda raised a thin eyebrow. “She might thank us if she believed that her Brethon prince had killed her beloved father. Which is a possibility that folk in the Castle mutter about when Brethon backs are turned. And not a ludicrous one, given what happened on the river a year ago.”
“I’ve also heard them mutter that Padrec might have ordered it. This kind of death lends itself to such rumors. But do you actually believe any of them?”
“Oh, true belief is for the sisters, Benfred. Our charge is to decide what others ought to believe — for their good, and for the realm’s.”
“And you think that having the Old Hound march his legions into Rendale will make everyone believe that Prince Maibhygon killed my cousin, and force Padrec to give up rule in Narsil for the sake of a western crown alone? You told me that you thought you could seize the throne but that you could only keep it with the legitimacy provided by my house. But deposing Padrec now will be seen as illegitimate even if I am standing beside you. I do not see the path, Cresseda. I do not see the path.”
She had moved to one of the antique swords, running a finger along its serrated edge. “The path is simpler now, Benfred. It just takes a sterner man to walk it.”
“How is it simpler? Don’t talk nonsense.”
“And don’t talk to me like I’m some silly lady of the court. I said it’s simpler, and I meant it. Your cousin’s death is suspicious. There are whispers about the Brethons. Another death, and there will be certainty.”
“Whose death?”
“I told you there would be killing before this ended. I told you I could not promise something clean enough for your own conscience.”
“You mean to kill Padrec?”
She turned her gaze from the sword to his churning countenance. “I mean to put the right man in power in this city, and set a course for my house and this empire for years to come. And if our uncrowned emperor is found with a dagger in his back, a Bryghalan dagger, then no one will question the steps that we take next.”
“No,” he said. “No, you will not.”
“Quite right, I will not. And the only truth that anyone remembers will be that the Bryghalans did it — the Bryghalans come for a vengeance disguised in courtesy, the heathen Bryghalans who tried to kill Montairs on the Mersana last autumn and who this time found a way to break through our defenses and succeed …”
“… putting Elfred on the throne …?”
“Elfred? Come now. Come now.”
“You mean for me to simply disinherit him, I suppose, proclaim myself Benfred the First, give you Alsbet as a daughter-in-law, and hang the Bryghalans without a trial?”
“Not without a trial, but yes, Benfred, yes, that’s the spirit. Elfred was sickly in the north and lives as a wastrel in the south. You don’t even have to fully disinherit him — you can give him Brethony, if you want. But as for claiming power yourself, which duke would say no, with Padrec dead and the Old Hound’s soldiers marching in? You might not even need his legionnaires behind you, if the other choice is Elfred. They know you, they respect you no matter what you believe — the legitimacy you fear we lack is there, has always been there, you just need the right circumstances to use it.”
“And those circumstances require me to kill my own blood.”
“The emperor who built this room killed for power, so did the man who overthrew him, so did your first imperial ancestor. There is always a price to be paid, Benfred. And if it salves your conscience, you can blame the wiles of a wicked woman. That’s the kind of excuse that men have often used …”
“Don’t goad me, Cresseda. You cannot force me into this.”
“And you cannot force me to give up on a plan seven decades in the making, a good plan, a plan that would be good for the empire, because of your sentiments about a boy who — I can tell — you do not even like. No: We’ve come too far together, Benfred, for you to not go forward with me. Much too bloody far.”
“Nothing has been done yet …”
“You know that’s false. You know that’s false. Veruna is ready in Caldmark. Your men are ready. I am ready. You have no other path to take — save to denounce me now, I suppose, to a stripling emperor who will be even less forgiving of your treason than his drunken father would have been. Is that the endgame you desire?”
“Do you desire an endgame where you blackmail me into complicity in kinslaying, and then help me take the throne? Do you think that I would not have ample opportunity to express my … displeasure with you in that future?”
She smiled. “Now there’s the steel we need! Yes, I am gambling, gambling that once you are Benfred the Lord Protector or Benfred first of that name, you will keep your promises and let Ambarian marry Alsbet and become your heir. I’m gambling that once you have power you will appreciate the choices — the necessary choices — that gave it to you, and also that you will wish the secret of how you got it to pass with me to the grave. Yes, I think I will take that bet — as I think that you will take the crown.”
Her hand had left the sword, but now his eyes went there. That was the other possibility, he suddenly realized — not to denounce her, ensuring that he would be denounced and arrested in his turn, but to take one of these weapons here and shove the blade between her breasts. Maybe she had told someone else the way here, some servant or intimate, but most likely nobody would come to this chamber as nobody had come in years, and the duchess of Argosa would simply vanish, another great mystery for the assembled gossipers. And with her would vanish all the strands of conspiracy that seemed to bind him now, all the reasons why he might feel compelled, against his will (is it? is it?), to let his cousin be murdered so that he might rule instead.
“Yes,” she said, following his eyes or reading his mind. “Yes, there is that option for you as well.”
But even before she spoke he knew which choice he would make.
Padrec held two councils the next night, the last night before the Feast of Mithriel, the last before his father’s funeral.
The first was a meeting over dinner with his official council, which was still his father’s council, no allies of his own elevated as yet. Arellwen presided, and much of the discussion was given over to the protocol for the funeral, with Ethred holding forth at tedious length. Then it became much like the council meetings that he had occasionally attended as crown prince, with brief but still-somehow-deadly-dull discussions of legion recruitment from Army and the spring levies from City and tax adjustments for the Heart after the pox. There was a conversation about the likelihood of another Skalbarder raid in spring, and a request for a new legion for his coast from Eldred Gerdwell, which might perhaps be finessed with some rotations from the Heart — Army had ideas but he would need to consult with the Heart commanders first — and then Secretariat mentioned that he had confirmed with Veruna in Caldmark that all his troop movements were routine, so there was no reason to worry about northern raids … and Padrec, who had let them go on without intervening for some time, took the opportunity and asked, a bit more flatly than he liked:
“What about plots within our realm at the moment, Lord Rell? Plots against the crown?”
“Well, majesty,” the spymaster said, “happily there continues to be quiet from the Black God’s cultists at the moment. My intention is to cultivate a stronger network of informers within Bryghala once your sister is married there, and indeed perhaps the three of us could speak at some point …”
“I wasn’t thinking only of the Brethon cultists,” Padrec said. “I meant plots from our nobility here, our dukes. If my father’s decline encouraged certain ambitions, I want to know what we know of them.”
“Happily, little enough — meaning we know that nothing was terribly far advanced when your father … when your father died. Of course there are ambitious dukes, but I’d know if ambition had carried them toward treason, and the signs are otherwise …”
“What sort of signs? How do you know that you actually know?”
Rell’s voice was pleasant though his features bore a hint of annoyance. “I know, majesty, because I am a kind of sieve, filtering what is needful, and my sieve captures all manner of things — from travel to beddings to bowel movements, to be frank, and whispers of every sort. So you can rest assured when I tell you nothing great is there — for now, at least. Of course vigilance is essential.”
“I appreciate your vigilance, my lord, but I would like to hear some of these whispers myself. What is the most interesting one?”
Rell cleared his throat, flicking his eyes left and right as though looking for support. Arellwen leaned forward:
“Your majesty’s question is apt, but I think it points to a larger duty that we have. We are accustomed to working together, accustomed — if I may be blunt — to your father’s absence, and there are things we take for granted in the background of these conversations. So it makes sense, perhaps, for each of us to write you a report, following the lines you suggested to Lord Rell, outlining the challenges from within each of our portfolios. It would be useful for us, honestly, as well as for your majesty — and you could apply your own judgment to our work, as is your right and duty.”
From someone else the last sentence might have seemed condescending, but if Arellwen was somewhat dull he was also, in Padrec’s experience, impressively sincere. So he nodded agreement, not wanting to press too hard without knowing exactly what he might be pressing for …
And we know, Arellwen would say to him privately as the meeting adjourned, that you will want to exercise your judgment in replacing some or all of us soon enough.
But for now it was Exchequer speaking: “Just keep in mind that we might be apt to conceal stark realities behind dry words. For instance it will be helpful when you read my report to translate every sentence as follows: Eventually the gold will run out.”
There was some easy, familiar laughter, but Padrec wasn’t sure whether to join in. “I’m sorry, my lord, I can’t tell — are you serious?”
“Lord Clava has been warning that the gold will run out since he first took his seat at this table,” Ethred said. “And thank the angels, the prophecy has not yet come to pass.”
The Lord of the Exchequer flashed a self-deprecating smile. “It’s a merchant’s habit to always worry about where the next year’s capital will come from — but some grim charts will, indeed, be featured prominently in my report to your majesty.”
Padrec had never imagined a world where there ceased to be a flow of gold down the roads into the treasury; the mines were like the Guardians themselves, a fact of the northern landscape. “I look forward to reading,” he said, concealing something he hadn’t felt since coming into his inheritance — a sense of all the disastrous possibilities that lurked for any ruler, a feeling of almost-sympathy for his father’s retreat from the duty of trying to master all the tides.
But it passed, as the council meeting passed, and soon enough he was in his chambers for the meeting that really mattered, the promised council of war. The fires were roaring in the bedroom and sitting room, where four men warmed themselves — Aengiss upright in his chair, Dunkan lolling beside the blaze, Padrec crouched with his hands extended to the flames, and Elbert pacing with his usual nervous energy, rubbing the faint, downy beard that had lately been added to his boyish features.
“You’ll need it to thicken if Padrec’s going to put you on the council,” Dunkan said lazily, watching Elbert scratch. “Nobody’s going to take you seriously if your face looks like that. You can’t be a great lord with a squire’s beard.”
“I don’t intend to be a great lord, Dunk,” Elbert said. “And Padrec hasn’t said he’s putting me on the council, whatever you think you’ve inferred …”
“Inferred? Such a schoolman you are, Bert. That’s why you’re going to be on the council and I’m to be charged with breaking up tavern brawls in Cranholt.”
“There won’t be any brawls under the reign of his majesty Padrec, Dunk, because the sun will shine every day and there will be two girls for every man who wants one.”
“Or because every able-bodied man will be off conquering, Bert.”
Padrec was trying to relax into their banter, but he kept looking to the doorway, waiting for Paulus’s arrival.
“He’ll be here,” Aengiss said, reading his glances. “And then we’ll begin.”
“Why not just let us all in on the secret beforehand?” Elbert said, with a schoolboy’s freshness. “If Paulus can’t get here when his majesty summons him, then missing the details is his own look-out.”
The general shook his head. “Part of the story is for Paulus to tell. He’ll be here —”
“And he is!” Kander-on-Tarcia’s earl declared, sweeping through an open door, swinging it shut, and tossing his cloak across a convenient chair. "Sorry to keep you all waiting — except you, Elbert, you deserve to wait, it’ll give you time to grow a few more whiskers on that chin.”
“There’s only one noble chin in this room,” Freshett said, “and Dunkan’s already buried it under that carpet he calls a beard.”
“Ah,” said Paulus, “but soon our Padrec’s chin will be dramatically improved, because some talented artist in the mint is going to have to make him look more serious and handsome if he’s going to grace every coin from here to Brethony.”
“I’ve asked them to use your face,” Padrec said, deadpan.
“And then,” Elbert said gaily, “the lonely ladies of the empire will hoard coins for solitary amusement, instead of finding smiths and stablehands to pleasure them, and the treasury will run out of gold in the first year of Padrec’s reign.” He gave Paulus a fake-swooning look, then reached for the wine on a nearby table. “Here, you handsome devil, have a drink.”
“Perhaps not yet,” Aengiss said, rising. “I think first you should all hear what we face.”
“None too soon,” said Padrec, rising as well.
“Your majesty’s patience is appreciated,” the general said coolly. “You can judge whether I was too slow in telling you; perhaps I was, since our time has now run out.”
“I suppose you’ll tell us what that means soon enough,” Dunkan said.
“I will tell you now,” said Aengiss. “But there are two stories here, which is why we waited for Paulus. Mine can be told briefly enough: For the last four years I have had a reliable informant well placed within the network of spies and agents that Cresseda of Argosa has inherited, and expanded. There was no sign initially that this network was actively plotting against your house, majesty, and the informant did not specifically identify any traitors — and I was loath to bring the matter to the attention of your father, given his decline, and loath as well to involve a council that for all I knew might be compromised as well. So I carried out my own investigations, made lists and connections, and attempted to figure out where this movement might find allies.”
Cresseda … “You kept this secret from me …”
“I did, and there are more secrets to be revealed. You can pass judgment when the telling is complete. Now: What the informant told me helped me make lists of plausible names, and one such was Varelis bar Veruna, the Old Hound. I had, and have, friends in every corner of the legions, which meant that if I wanted to keep an eye on my fellow lord general, I could. I could know when he unexpectedly requested the frontier command from the council. I could know that from his post at Caldmark, he reassigned battalions in the north to different borderforts, with a pattern that — if you knew the legions as I do — looked like he was concentrating officers and men who had served with him around the fortress itself. I could know that the reassignments became more abrupt this autumn, that a few forts were left almost bare of men, so that some soldiers were wondering if he feared a threat behind his lines …”
“And still you said nothing?”
“And still I said nothing, because what did I have? Lord Veruna is admired and loved, he has the same rank I have, and I had no evidence save suspicion to tie him to the iron duchess’s network, and no excuse to leave my command to go on some sort of private investigation. I came late to the betrothal because I broke my eastward journey at Northmark to talk at length with the commander there, about what Veruna had been doing with the borderforts that lie between their two fortresses … and I left convinced, convinced, that some move was all-but-imminent. And I told you as much on Winter’s Eve, majesty. But I thought that when the plot was set in motion my informer would be given instructions, that until then we still had time. And then your father’s death intervened — and I assumed that it would throw the plot into uncertainty, and that I should wait for some further signal that it still had life.”
“And now …” It was Elbert, his voice like a boy asking for more from a storyteller.
“Now we have the signal, and more,” said Aengiss. “So the time has come to act.”
“What signal?” Padrec said, trying not to bark angrily.
“That much I leave to the informant to describe.”
“The informant? Where is he?”
Paulus assumed a drawl. “Why, my dear Padrec, I’m the informant.”
The fire popped into the sudden silence. Dunkan began laughing. Elbert cursed. Padrec, unfrozen, crossed the room to his friend and grasped him by the arms.
“What? What — angels, Paulus, you’re a traitor?”
“Well, that’s for you to decide,” said his friend with his usual preternatural coolness. “But there’s no question that I’d be a traitor if I did as I’ve been bid.”
“Bid?”
“I’m to kill you, don’t you know? That’s the order, at least.”
Padrec released him, stepped backward into the center of the rug, his friends and his old commander the points of a rectangle around him. The firelight threw shadows, and the feeling in his gut was like the feeling in the council chamber listening to Exchequer talk about emptied-out gold mines, except deeper and colder and lonelier, because he was emperor now and somehow he had no one, no one, not even his closest friends, whose motivations and loyalties were clear …
… with his inner eye he saw Caetryn and Cadfael riding out of the mists, the prince’s banner floating over them. But they were far away …
Aengiss stepped from his corner of the square and took Padrec by the shoulder, his touch firm and reassuring. “Adjutant Montair,” he said, the old voice of command. “Adjutant Montair. Listen to what he has to say. We all love you here. Listen to his story.”
“I certainly want to hear what he has to say!” burst out Elbert.
“I’m listening,” Padrec said, hoarsely. He tried to make his voice stronger. “Speak.”
“It’s a family story, I’m afraid,” his friend said, stepping behind one of the chairs and resting a pale hand on the wooden ornamentation. “You know the Merulas were lords of nothing — a manor house, some acres and some pliant peasant women — before the legions took Argosa. We were raised to our present fiefdom then, to dear old Kander-on-Tarcia … I probably always told you it was a gift of your great-grandfather, but really it was a gift of the first Verna duke, of Titarian bar Verna, little Ambarian’s great-great-grandsire. Your Montair ancestor chose the new great nobles from among the lords that bent the knee, but he let Titarian distribute minor fiefs like ours — it was beneath a conqueror’s attention, understandably. And ever since then it’s been the great houses, the great fiefs, that attract attention and suspicion here in Rendale — with an eye to any who might be thinking of raising the White Rose.”
“But the White Rose was never the real resistance. It was families like ours, the ungreat, the little, that from the beginning the Vernas groomed, plying us with silver in secret and the promise — someday, someday — of great rewards when they took your family’s throne. It was families like ours who sent their second sons into the legions or the priesthood, so they would be spread around the empire, promoted to positions of moment wherever a captain or archpriest might be stationed. It was families like ours — a secret brotherhood — who have been the arrow pointed at your throne, waiting for our liege lord, or lady now, to pull the bowstring taut.”
“Who else?” Padrec said, still hoarse. “Who else was in this, this brotherhood?”
“Well, we didn’t have masquerade balls where everyone showed up, or secret convocations in the Rose Palace cellars. We were cultivated individually, by the dukes or their close advisers. I’ve met Cresseda a brace of times, and seen her spymaster as well — that’s her priest-chancellor, Amalis. But as for the others, I’m like Aengiss — I think I know some, but I couldn’t prove it before an inquisitor.”
“Veruna?”
“He seems to fit. The Verunas are a poor house that always seems to make good marriages, and they came to their earldom when we came to ours, after the conquest.”
“And the Old Hound stayed in the legions even after his father and elder brother died in the redeye fever of my youth.” It was Aengiss, interjecting. “Even after he came into his inheritance, long before he knew he might hold a great command.”
“Maybe he just liked fighting,” Dunkan said.
“It’s all a matter of maybes,” Paulus agreed, “but if I were to list the ten most likely families the Verunas would be there.”
“Clava?” Padrec said. “From my council?”
“Possible, but surely less likely. Your father raised him to the nobility, not our dukes. He’d have to have been bought more recently, and it’s as likely that one of your other council lords are bought as him.”
“So you came to this through … your inheritance?” Elbert said, his tone careful. He had moved closer to Padrec, which for some reason the almost-emperor found comforting, even as his mind spun through the conversation with his council …
“Yes, and that’s the rub for dear Cresseda, because the truth is I never cared much for my father, or my family, or Kander-on-Tarcia, or anything in the south. So my joining the legions and becoming a friend — becoming your friend, Padrec — well, that was a great coup for them, but for me it was a reason to think about leaving the brotherhood entirely, leaving the oaths I took at twelve years old behind.”
“And so he came to me,” Aengiss said. “He came to me three years ago, Padrec, during our last campaign in Allasyr, and told me everything, and said that he wanted to serve you rather than Argosa, and what should he do?”
“And you told him …” Padrec fumbled for words. “You told him not to tell me? Not to tell his great new friend that he had been secretly plotting against me all his life?”
“His life was all of twenty-one years, and his plotting was telling Cresseda or her archpriest a few details of our campaigning and your taste in Brethon women.”
“Or lack thereof, to be honest, much of the time …” Paulus put in, and somehow the continued ease of his tone pushed Padrec into fury:
“Do you think this is joke? A bloody Mithriel-damned joke? Here I sit, being told about a plot against my own life, and what I’m actually being told is that this plot has been going on for years, and the people closest to me not only knew but one of them was fucking by-all-the-angels part of it, and nobody saw fit to tell me! And what if the plot had been hastened, what if a page or an armorer had been hired to kill me … what if … what if my father … for all you know my father was killed as part of this plot, Aengiss, for all you know you already failed my father, for all you know you already failed the empire, and we’ll be stabbed in our beds tonight …”
Paulus’s face was now a perfect pale blank, like an angel frozen in stone and kissed by firelight. Aengiss let Padrec trail off. “Are you finished, your majesty?” he said gently.
Padrec stared at his general, rubbing at his close-cropped scalp. “I’m finished if you have answers to offer me.”
The older man spread his hands, inspecting the gnarled knuckles for a moment before he spoke. “One answer, Your Majesty, just one — which is that you are the emperor, you are the ruler of the largest realm this continent has seen since the High Kings, and you are responsible for protecting it. You are not responsible for protecting yourself. That is what we are here for — we, the Falconguard, the council you will eventually appoint. Do you think that this will be the last plot? Do you think Cresseda has the only ambitions? There will always be plots; you will always be in danger; you cannot spend your own life always thinking about it.”
"But I should know about it, damnit!"
"Yes, you should know about it, when it is necessary, when the plot is real and tangible and dangerous and not just a matter of people around you taking silver and writing notes to dukes or duchesses. Perhaps I should have told you everything I suspected a month ago, or on Winter’s Eve. Perhaps I should have told you about Paulus when he told me. But I judged in that case that we had gained a great advantage, a window into a world whose existence I only suspected, and that to tell you would be to both burden you and hurt Paulus’s ability to be what he has been for us these last two years — a double agent, a fine one so far as I can tell, who now has done something for us that if he did not exist as your friend he could not do.”
“And that is?”
“Why, without him they might have hired a page or armorer to kill you; without him you might be already dead. But with him we know, and more than that we have him, a witness who can testify to this treachery, who can justify our countermove.”
“Really?” Padrec said. “Really? If a witness is all we need, why couldn’t Paulus have been that witness when he came to you in the first place? Why couldn’t my father have ordered Cresseda arrested for treason then, and spared us this entire nightmare?”
“Because regicide is more clearly treasonous than a little spying, for one thing. And also because we must assume that now they are extended, that they have put things into play that we can turn against them, so that we might turn the whole sack upside down and shake it until all the traitors come falling out.”
“You think we can execute Cresseda for treason on the say-so of my own” — he tried to bite the word off contemptuously — “bosom friend?”
Aengiss shrugged. “She will ask for trial by the red priests, as is her right. And in the end it might be exile rather than the axe. But what your bosom friend’s testimony justifies is arrests, many arrests, and the chance to put many men to the question. And that, in turn, will yield more than just one young nobleman’s evidence.”
“Here’s what I don’t understand, Paulus,” Elbert said. “I’m glad you liked us all enough to make us your new family, to throw over all those rotten southerners. I’m glad you told Aengiss, I understand why you told him first, I can even half-understand why you never told the rest of us. But what I don’t quite see is why they, why she, trusts you enough to have confidence that you wouldn’t do something, well, like this. Especially now that they’re asking you to kill your emperor, who is also your friend. That’s quite a leap, unless they made you hand over a hostage or something — you don’t have a younger sister imprisoned somewhere in the Rose Palace, do you?”
“They’re rattled,” Aengiss said. “They’re making mistakes. The death of your father, Padrec, wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was to use his weakness and folly as an excuse, and now that excuse is gone …”
Paulus was shaking his head. “No, I’ll tell all, Aengiss. Tell all, and let my friend — my prince — my emperor judge. The truth is that Cresseda expects me to kill for her because I’ve killed for her before.”
He would be unsurprised from now on. Rage had died; time to be as cool as Paulus.
“Who did you kill?”
His friend’s lovely ladykilling smile was rueful. “You might not even remember him. The first war, we were encamped with him outside Naesen’yr. He wasn’t in the legions, he brought his father’s men-at-arms as part of our auxiliaries. Young Aldarian, who was the heir of Neruda then. But no longer, of course.”
“Cresseda’s own cousin?” Elbert said, in a small voice.
“Yes, yes, her own cousin. He was in the White Rose, and I suspect that they had some plot against Ambarian — she was still new to the regency, probably some in Argosa thought to push her out. I didn’t ask; I just acted. He was killed by Brethons, officially — when he strayed too far on patrol. I proved myself to Cresseda then — and helped her prove something to her own nobles in the bargain.”
“The south is a bloody viper’s nest,” Dunkan growled.
“And I’m a bit of a viper, is the truth,” Paulus said, coming around the chair now to stand directly in front of Padrec. “In that sense Cresseda really has always had my measure. I’m a bit cold — you know that, Padrec. You all know that. And I’m a good killer — on the battlefield but not only there. But the truth is that emperors need killers. They need cold men. I’ve been your cold man in truth, old friend, these last few years; I’ve been loyal to you; I’ve done things for you that no other man could have done. So now I’m at your mercy, do with me as you wish. But I wish to continue serving you.” And here he swept a bow that ended with him on his knees on the carpet, head bowed, unmoving, with that peculiar poise even in submission.
Padrec looked at the others, at Aengiss. “You can kneel while I think,” he said into their silence. “And while Aengiss tells me what, in all his wisdom, we should do next.”
Thin shadows played across the general’s face. “That depends on our ambitions.”
“Our ambitions?”
“Two things of note have been mentioned in this conversation. One is your suggestion that your father might have been killed by an assassin. Which is false …”
“Or so you think,” Padrec said, and he felt something dangerous teasing at the corners of his mind …
“He probably blacked out,” Elbert said, his voice reassuring. “Died quite happy, you know, on Winter's Eve, with his daughter betrothed and all and the empire peaceful ...”
“And then there is the other thing, from Paulus’s story of what happened to the young heir of Neruda. The story that he died at Brethon hands. A false tale, but one that held because there were plenty of reasons to believe it.”
“So what … what do those things have to do with what we do next?”
“As I said,” Aengiss said, “it all depends on what we want to make of this opportunity. This gift that may have been given to you, this chance to consolidate power and doom your enemies in the first hours of your reign.”
Padrec looked down at Paulus, still kneeling, then over at Dunkan’s firelit perplexity, at Elbert’s eyes that seemed to see something he could not.
“If we are to have trust again, Aengiss, I’d ask for fewer riddles.”
“Then I’ll be plain, majesty. We must find and arrest and expose the truly guilty. But the question is whether we also want to implicate others, in order to cut through a knot that your majesty might otherwise be months or years entangling.”
“Others?”
“He means —” Elbert began eagerly but Aengiss’s voice rose over him.
“I mean that in exposing this treacherous plot to the court and to the realm, we might also want to implicate the Prince of Bryghala.”