Anza nodded. She had a head scarf of her own that would do. She said, “And afterward, if we win? Who rules? You? Someone has to lead.” Even if she knew nothing of politics, she would know that; humans needed leaders. She had seen it with village children, with students at the College, with those of Radd’s clients who anxiously deferred to him.
“Not me,” Sparrow said. “Never me. Nor anyone in the resistance, I think. We have to find people like Radd, who are thoughtful and strong without being overly ambitious. And we need several of them, to check each other.”
Radd would be a good ruler, though he would hate it. How many people like him were left? Had Karolje’s corruption spread far beyond the Citadel?
“There might not be enough good people,” Anza said. “It could be chaos.”
“It’s a risk we have to take. The gate to power is locked by accident of birth or by force or both, and it must be unlocked. This isn’t a battle we fight just for ourselves, for now. We’re fighting for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Our enemy is not just Karolje, it’s the idea of Karolje. We can’t let kings have such power ever again.”
“Let?”
“Kings only have the power that is given them. They need our consent, even if we don’t know it. That is what will eventually undo Karolje.”
Anza nodded. It occurred to her that the resistance was not about deposing the king so much as it was about restoring power to those who thought it lost. That was what Esvar had done in freeing her. He had given her back her power over herself. She wondered if he knew.
The house grew fuller and fuller of silence. In daylight, it would have become uncomfortable. In the heat, the shadowy lamplight, the lateness of the hour, the silence took on a soporific quality. Dense, thick, slow. Sparrow’s back was to the lamp, her face unreadable. The muscles in her forearms were relaxed.
“Well,” Sparrow said. “I need to decide what to do with you. You’re of more use than for things like breaking windows. If you had a teacher who put you at the same level as the other students in the College, that must have been costly to your father since you were small. Why did he do it?”
Because he loved me! was hardly an adequate answer. Anza recognized Sparrow’s tone—it was probing, not accusatory. Sparrow was right about the tutor; the old man, Nihalik, must have once been a teacher of lords’ sons. He had appeared one day in her life, and she had not questioned it. She vividly remembered those hot afternoons in his cottage, when she sat across the table from him while he taught her things no farmer’s niece needed to know. Languages, mathematics, and above all history. Histories of countries that had no kings, essays on the origin of laws. Dangerous things, which had prepared her to fight Karolje.
Thinking as she spoke, she said, “I was his only child. He had no wife, no other person to give money to.”
“He didn’t have to bring you here to support you. You would have been safer back in your village. Did he want you to marry up, to marry someone like Rumil?”
Her father had never met Rumil and had never criticized her for living with him. But he had not pressed her to marry either. There was no ordinary reason he would—many people without property did not marry at all—but if he wanted a rich husband for his daughter, he had been silent on the subject.
“No,” she said. “He never said anything about marriage. I don’t know what he wanted. He was a quiet man.” The one time she had confessed awkwardly to him about the end of the affair with Thali, he had given her an embrace, but no advice.
“I can’t know why your father did as he did. But I doubt he was unable to see what would result. With the right clothing, no one would guess you were not a well-born woman. I think he wanted you to have power, perhaps even to get into the king’s court.”
“Why would he want that?”
“Perhaps he saw a future for you as a spy. Bringing you into the Citadel would have opened a door.”
“Bringing me into the Citadel would have been dangerous. He’d have made sure I was better with a knife,” Anza said. “And he wasn’t a traitor.”
“It’s not a bad thing to betray Karolje. Karolje has betrayed his own people.”
“Yes. No.” She shook her head fiercely but had no words. The picture of her father that Sparrow painted was of a man who was sly, disloyal, and manipulative, and she was sure her father had not been those things. But did she want to believe he had been loyal to a tyrant? That he had not had the courage to oppose what he knew to be wrong? He could not have opposed Karolje directly.
Perhaps he had. Perhaps that was what he had been killed for.
And here she was herself, an undisputed traitor. A murderer. What right had she to question her father’s actions? Were evil acts in the service of good still evil? Could good people do evil things?
Sparrow’s question about the gods had been pertinent after all. Anza was not sure right now where her moral center was. It was not a question the College had ever wanted to discuss, because it would have inevitably led to an examination of the state. She had had such conversations with Nihalik often, but her conclusions, her beliefs in her own behavior, had never been tested.
Sparrow said, “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of, Anza. Life is compromise. Not at the core of our principles, but it can be a long time getting to them, especially if you are trying to keep other people from getting hurt along the way. The opposite of abasement is fanaticism, and the strong, decent, principled people fall somewhere in the middle. When you make your choices, you get shunted in one direction or the other, and sometimes at the end you find yourself in a box without knowing how you got there.”
“Are you saying that’s what happened to my father?”
“He had the courage to train you to fight back, with weapons and with your intellect. That’s no small thing. Honor him for it.”
The words brought back grief she had thought vanquished. She swallowed and said nothing.
“I’m not going to make you a spy, at least not yet,” Sparrow said. “And I won’t ask you to do anything that endangers Radd. For now we will start with the bow. You will need to learn the codes and signals. Kanakili’s spies might be able to connect things, but there’s no reason to make it easy for them, so you need a new name for messages and the people who don’t know you. What should we use instead of Finch?”
“Harpy.” It took hardly any thinking at all. She remembered the birds sitting on the ruined city walls. The vengeful goddess.
“Why the harpy?”
“When Karolje kills everything else, the harpies will still be here.”
A slow smile curved Sparrow’s lips. “I like that,” she said. “I like that very much.”
TEVIN POURED THE tea, a dark stream. He said, “Let me set a problem before you. This problem is named Interrogator Mityos Lukovian.”
The sky was cloudy, and though the air was muggy, the tea was a comfort. The window looked north, over the garden to the iron-grey lake. Esvar’s blood felt sluggish and cold despite the heat.
He sipped the tea, which was dark and bitter as both he and Tevin preferred, and said, “Has he complained about my interference with his work? Because if he has, I don’t regret it and I’ll do it again.” Thus far, Karolje had treated his second son as loyal. Defective, but loyal. It was a flimsy shield but should be strong enough against one of the king’s minions. An examiner’s power did not penetrate Karolje’s own defenses.
“Worse than complained. He’s saying that you conspire with the smugglers for your own gain and bank the proceeds in Milaya. In essence, that you are traitorously defrauding the Crown. I’ve had him arrested.”
The allegations were utterly absurd. Someone could still twist facts to fit the story. Forged documents, false confessions. Esvar had seen too many men brought down that way to believe he was immune. Karolje was unlikely to believe it—that was a little less certain these days—but the king wouldn’t hesitate to make use of the story if it suited him.
And perhaps it was no
t quite as absurd as Esvar wished. “If that letter you sent to Milaya is discovered, this rumor could get teeth,” he said.
“That’s one reason Lukovian needs to be silenced.”
Silenced. How far would Tevin go? Well, this was the kind of challenge he had asked Tevin to make.
Esvar tilted his chair back. The ceiling plaster had been patched and painted in the spring, and it was a smooth expanse of warm gold. He said, “Lukovian was angry at me, no doubt of that. But he wouldn’t do something like this on his own. Goran must be at the other end of the rope.”
“I agree,” said Tevin. “Lukovian’s his man, and this is exactly the sort of meddling and slyness Goran loves. That doesn’t make it less effective.”
“Does the king know about the arrest?”
“Yes. I told him with three other men in the room, including the chancellor, and Karolje listened to me, which made Goran unhappy.”
“Why did Karolje listen?” Esvar asked, baffled. The king had let darker rumors flourish many times.
“Not for my sake. This business about Lukovian is Goran moving to consolidate his own power. He moved too soon, and Karolje didn’t like it. If we’re going to be taken down, he wants to be sure he’s the one behind it. I think it likely that he Disappears Lukovian and the whole story vanishes.”
“Better he Disappears Goran.”
“He won’t do that. He needs Goran to balance Doru and keep us in line.”
If only the two men could battle each other to the death, and their supporters with them. “What happens next?”
Tevin said, “I need you to be patient and not push anything for a while. Don’t do anything unconventional. You shouldn’t have talked to that girl, now they’re going to be convinced she had something to do with it. I’m considering having her watched, for her own safety.”
“That would draw attention to her,” Esvar said, slightly queasy. He had not screwed up that badly, had he? The sweltering, colorless air hung around him, heavy, confining. “Don’t try to fix things, that never works. It will be too tedious for them to follow her for long. She’s not any sort of threat.”
“You know that and I know that, but they don’t believe anyone is innocent. Whatever possessed you to get involved in the first place?”
Justice. A word full of righteousness he did not have credit for and never would, no matter what he did. He was too tainted.
“It must have been something I ate,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
Tevin glared at him. “It had better not. Do you remember Piyr dying?”
What was that about? “It’s hard to tell what I remember and what I’ve filled in since. I remember him lying in state.” That was vivid in his mind. The bier, edged in gold and covered with blue velvet. The dead king, grey-white hair and beard trimmed, fully uniformed, hands on his chest. In the memory Esvar looked down at him; he must have been lifted up to view. The silver wolf’s heads on the tops of the posts at each corner of the bier had been frightening, their black diamond eyes gleaming and alive.
Tevin said, “If Piyr had lived longer by a few years, he might have had Karolje killed to make space for me. Or if we hadn’t been at war. He knew what his heir was like. He didn’t think he could leave a regency, though. There would have been too much quarreling. Piyr was weaker than he seemed.”
“Who told you this?”
“He did. They took me to see him before he was too sick to talk. Everyone else was sent out of the room, even the doctors. It was just me and the old man. He made me sit next to him, on the bed. He told me who I should go to if I needed help. Five men, two women. By the time Karolje dragged me south for the next campaign, they were all either dead or had withdrawn from court. I made a mistake with one of them at the coronation, listened to him for too long or smiled too much, I don’t know, and before a month was out he was killed for treason. His ghost and Piyr’s ghost were in my dreams for a long time after that, blaming me.”
“Gods,” Esvar said. He had been just six, his brother eleven, when their grandfather died after a long gradual decline. There were times he envied Tevin, who remembered life without Karolje as king, who had known their mother and grandfather longer. And then there were times like this, when he was glad he was the second son, unburdened with expectations.
“The lords remember who was killed or exiled those first few years. They’re all wondering if I will be as ruthless. Goran will be my example. If I play things right, he’ll retreat swiftly.”
Esvar thought it over. “Blackmail,” he said. He had not expected such a strategy from his honorable brother. “You have something dirty on him.”
“Something very dirty. Which you are better off not knowing right now. I’ve only told you this much so you won’t crowd me. I have to find the exact moment to spring it on him, and that depends on Karolje’s health.”
The sudden steel in Tevin’s usually warm brown eyes took Esvar aback. Turn those eyes on the court and they’ll obey you, he thought.
“You’re up to something,” he said.
“I intend to be the king.” Tevin’s voice was newly edged.
This time he means it, Esvar thought, warming with grim joy.
* * *
His new lieutenant, Jance Mirovian, had the erect carriage of a soldier but none of the plod of the ordinary guards. A slenderness to his build, not unlike Esvar’s own, indicated he had spent his life in some comfort before coming to the Citadel. He had hazel eyes, light skin, and hair that would have been dark gold if it had been allowed to grow. The resemblance to Lord Darvik was noticeable.
Esvar had decided to test the man’s intellect, so he took him to the house where his own raid had failed. Three thick boards had been hammered roughly across the doorframe. The guards wrenched them loose with a crowbar. The king’s Mark burned into the door would be enough to keep the curious away, but there were always fools. A door opened in the neighboring house long enough for a head to peep out, see the soldiers and horses, and retreat. Esvar wondered if the head belonged to the person who had tipped off the watch about the meetings. Spies were good, but frightened neighbors were better.
That was thinking like the king. Like a soldier, damn it, and a loyal one. It was so easy to do. All the forces around him pushed him in that direction. No wonder Tevin tried so hard to set himself apart from Karolje.
Nothing showed there had been an explosive unless one knew to look. The rain hadn’t managed to fill the crater with mud or melt all the lumps of thrown earth, but the potholes appeared ordinary. One of the lower windows in the house had been broken.
The soldiers had left the door open when they went in, and he heard the thump of their feet on the stairs like beats on a drum. It was not long before a man opened the gable window and gave the clear sign.
Esvar said to Mirovian, “What do you know about the resistance?”
“What everyone knows, sir. They’ve killed some soldiers and damaged property. They’re scattered and ineffective.”
“Not as ineffective as you think. I’ve been leading the raids on the resistance since Captain Havidian was executed, but it’s soldiers’ work, not a prince’s. Unless you prove yourself a fool, I’m handing it over to you. Did word get out to everyone in the Guard as to why he was executed?”
“Because his men killed the resisters instead of capturing them,” Mirovian said.
The raid had been planned for weeks in the hopes of capturing a leader of the resistance, Ivanje Stepanian. Once Stepanian died, the captain’s execution had been a foregone conclusion, along with that of the man who had actually killed him. Stepanian’s secrets were sealed forever. Several soldiers had died too, bitten by one of the king’s hellhounds that had gone wild. Havidian had always been loyal, and there had been no reason to assume it was anything other than bad luck, but an unlucky soldier was as much a weakness for Karolje as a treacherous one.
“Just one. But it was the wrong one. And one got away.”
“Is there any
chance the leader was killed intentionally, sir?”
“For mercy?”
“Or to keep the secrets.”
The possibility had been considered, of course. Nothing had been found in the lives of either Havidian or the soldier to indicate sympathy toward the resistance, let alone treachery.
“It was unintended,” Esvar said.
Mirovian’s face had the intensity of expression belonging to a man about to descend a narrow path on a steep cliff. He had to be calculating whether there was a way to honorably avoid the mess he was about to be ordered into. Alas for him, there wasn’t.
“Was it here, sir?”
“No. The failure here was not the late lamented captain’s. It was mine. Two resisters died, and another killed three soldiers and escaped.” Esvar pointed up at the gable. “There was an archer there. She got out somehow, over the roofs I imagine. One deduces that she was able to climb. It was a dangerous thing to do that night.”
There was a brief silence. The soldiers who had searched the house had come out and taken up guard positions to either side of Esvar and Mirovian. The horses’ tails flicked loudly at the flies.
Mirovian said, “What happened, sir?”
“They threw an explosive,” he said, “a small one, but enough to make a mess of the road, and shot my men. The raid had just begun.”
“They had explosives?”
“Yes. And we know they weren’t Tazekhs. The three we captured told us about the woman who escaped. Fortunately, the two who died were as young and unimportant as the others.”
“Do you know anything about the one who escaped?”
Esvar said, “She was described as small and dark-haired, which could be anyone. She used a plain hunting bow and soldiers’ steel-tipped arrows, which is a failure on someone else’s part. If you had been in command, what would you have done to keep her from escaping?”
Mirovian thought, a wrinkle of concentration on his brow. “It would have been impossible for armed men to be quiet. Too heavy on the stairs. If she was waiting in the attic, I don’t see how you could have prevented it, sir. Not unless you had archers yourself, and light to show up anyone leaving.” He glanced up at the gable.
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