by Sarah Dalton
“How do I do that?” Luca asked eagerly.
Brother Axil spread his hands. “Many ways. But one of the first is to choose generals who will not seek glory, as your brother does, but instead seek to protect their fighters, engage only when necessary and on good terms, and win this war for you quickly if Stefan does force a battle.”
Luca nodded and settled his crown on his head. It was a simple circlet, but he liked that. Not only could he feel it, reminding him of his duty, it was not the heavy crown his father had worn. That crown had always seemed so uncomfortable to Luca. He wondered, somewhat hopefully, if Stefan had taken it. That way, Luca could order a new one to be made.
He came out into the main room to find Lord Rokkan waiting for him. Rokkan was a tall, lean man, well into middle age. His dark, thick hair was greying at a rapid rate, but his black eyes, set in a tanned, weather-beaten face, were piercing and alert. Luca had spent the past meetings comparing each potential general with Matias in his head. All of them had been wanting in that regard, not so young and handsome, not so kind.
Now, he regarded Lord Rokkan in a different way. Rokkan might not have read as many books as Luca had about military strategy, but he likely knew much more than Luca from experience.
“Lord Rokkan.” Luca inclined his head and gestured to a chair. “Please, sit. Would you like some wine?”
“Yes, thank you.” Rokkan accepted a cup from Brother Axil with a nod of thanks. “It has been a hot day in the training yards.”
“Lord Rokkan still drills with the soldiers himself,” Axil told Luca. There was respect in the Governor’s voice.
Luca liked this as well. Someone who saw his soldiers every day would understand their capabilities much better, and be able to direct them in battle with a good understanding of what was possible and what manoeuvres they excelled at. Moreover, he would be fond of his soldiers, surely.
“Lord Rokkan.” Lucca chose his words carefully and tried not to think about how much better Matias or Serena would be at this. “As you know, my brother has fled the capital. We are not sure of his location, but we are sure that he does not mean to accept his defeat.”
Rokkan snorted. “I should say not. The boy could not wait to wear the damn crown.” He took a gulp of wine and then frowned somewhat warily. “I beg your pardon, Prince Luca. I know I am speaking of your brother. I say only what is the truth. Your father was not even cold before Stefan was trying to arrange the coronation and spreading rumours about you, so no one would want to back you.” His eyes met Luca’s. “He said you were a Menti.”
Luca purposefully kept his gaze directed away from Axil, afraid to see the warning in the old Gov’s eyes.
“You have been honest with me, Lord Rokkan, and so I would like to be honest with you in turn. If you were a general in my army, you would fight alongside Menti. I hope it will be many Menti, but there will certainly be at least one. My brother is correct. I am Menti.”
Lord Rokkan stared at Luca, his mouth hanging open.
“I understand if you wish to leave,” Luca said. “Unlike my brother, I am not vengeful. If you do not wish to lead soldiers for a Menti prince, I will neither force you, nor punish you—and if you are one of my generals, I believe you should know the truth of the man you serve.”
Lord Rokkan closed his mouth. “I see,” he said faintly.
“Lord Rokkan, I called you here because of your experience.” He had not, but now that he was seeing this man, Luca understood that Rokkan’s experience would be invaluable. “What I want is not a glorious battle to be spoken of for generations. What I want is for my brother to be defeated with a minimum of bloodshed so that Estala can prosper. My brother….” He looked over at Axil. Should he tell the truth about Stefan?
“Stefan is a dragon shifter,” Axil said bluntly. “Luca has been training to defeat him with the aid of other Menti.”
“I fear that Stefan will massacre our troops if he finds a large number of them in one place,” Luca said gravely. “I also fear that Stefan’s strength as a dragon will be used as a distraction to keep us from paying attention to his soldiers. I need a general who is able to work within such constraints, enforcing discipline within the ranks, so that we can meet Stefan’s army successfully without putting our own in undue danger.”
Lord Rokkan considered this as he drained his wine cup. “You ask a lot,” he said bluntly. “But I think it can be done.” Luca gestured for Axil to refill the man’s cup, but Rokkan waved it away. “No, please. I need a clear head for this.”
Rokkan’s eyes were distant, and Luca realised that the lord saw this as a puzzle. He wanted to find the solution, no matter how strange the parameters. Luca liked that.
“Lord Rokkan, I would be honoured if you would serve as a general in my army.” He waited for Rokkan to respond.
“I’ll do it.” Rokkan hesitated, then reached out to clasp Luca’s arm. “Never thought I’d see a battle like the one you described, but I like the way you think, Prince Luca. I like your honesty.”
Luca smiled and nodded. “Thank you, Lord Rokkan.”
“Two of Davead’s sons are Menti.” Rokkan shook his head at Axil as he stood. “That is unexpected.” He left with a bow, whistling as he went down the stairs outside the king’s rooms.
“That was well done,” Axil said. “I did not think it was wise to tell him you were Menti. Men like Rokkan, who served your father, have certain prejudices after the war. But you were quick to see that he values honesty above all, and you appealed to the other thing he holds most dear: the safety of his soldiers.”
“I hold it dear as well,” Luca said. He clenched his hands briefly in his lap and sighed, then took the circlet off. “Stefan will come after my armies. He can breathe fire on them as he flies. They would be terrified. How do we fight that?” Rokkan would find a way, he thought.
“There will be losses,” Axil said. “That, you must accept.”
Luca felt his good mood vanish. He took a sip of his own wine and set the cup back down again. He did not want wine. He wanted to be gone, back to the Shadow Valley. He had never thought he would miss those days, but when he was on the run from his father and his older brother, he had still felt freer than he did now. The hard work had kept him too exhausted to think of much else.
“Where are Geraldo and the others?” he asked.
“The ambassadors’ wing,” Axil told him. “It is not perfect. Those rooms and courtyards were made to be spied on, so they could not train any troops without us noticing, or anything like that. But I wanted them kept apart until we knew that they would be…accepted.”
Luca nodded. This had been wise. Since his father’s war against the Menti, many still believed that all Menti were evil.
“I am going to visit them,” he announced. “For the rest of my generals, I would like Lord Feryn, Lord Bellanon, and Lord Essad.”
Brother Axil nodded.
Luca hummed softly as he walked across the palace grounds to the ambassadors’ wing. It was a fine day, and Rokkan’s competence—and the man’s own whistled tune—had left Luca feeling as if things were not so bad. He tried not to think about Axil’s promises that there would be losses in battle, because every time he did think of that, his stomach clenched and he felt horribly sick.
He somehow had to find a way to defeat Stefan, the crowned king, without any bloodshed. How was he going to do that?
In the ambassadors’ wing, he lingered at the doorway to the courtyard. He had told the guards stationed there not to announce him so he would not have to see his friends bow to him. He still did not like that.
He left his guards at the doorway. “I will be training with the others,” he told them. “Sometimes they will strike at me with Menti powers. You must not intervene. I am perfectly safe.”
The two guards nodded. Axil had chosen them, Luca knew, and he assumed that they were both more flexible about the concept of Menti than many of the palace guard. He had not seen either of them before, attendi
ng his father.
Luca walked into the courtyard, and Nico was the first to spot him.
“Ludo!” Nico’s eyes lit up, and he laughed a little as he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can train myself to say Luca, but you will always be Ludo to me.”
“You will call him ‘Your Majesty,’” said Tania. Her face was grave, and Luca saw from the way she held herself that she was tense. “So you will not need to use his name.”
“I hope I will never be ‘Your Majesty’ to you,” Luca told her. He still felt hurt every time he saw her, but he could not imagine Tania being so informal. A moment later, he realised all of them were staring at him. “All of you,” he clarified. He could feel his cheeks burning, and he turned away from Tania before he could say anything else that would sound like he was forgiving her.
He knew he was going to forgive her someday, but he was not ready yet. Without her intervention, he would not be here.
“Joss,” he said. He clasped the other boy’s hand with a smile. “Should we spar? I need to keep training.”
“You do,” Geraldo said sourly. “You’ve been in too many meetings, and how are you going to defeat your brother when you can only wield fire as well as a five-year-old?”
Luca felt the familiar surge of anger, but he knew Geraldo was right. He nodded at Joss. “I am here now. I am ready to train.”
It was a relief to pour all of his energies into the fight. It became a game for Luca to throw fire from angles where Joss was not expecting it, because Joss could summon a gust of wind that would make Luca’s flames gutter out. They fought on and on, while Luca summoned ever-bigger fireballs and Joss countered them, until Luca bent over and put his hands on his knees, signalling an end to the fight.
“That will do for today,” he said, panting slightly. “I have still more meetings to attend. But this was good. Thank you, Joss.”
The others waved at him as he left, and Luca was careful not to look at Tania. He did not want to smile at her.
To his surprise, when he returned to his guards, there was a man in black robes waiting with them. The man bowed to Luca.
“Prince Luca. I am Brother Josef. I saw you fighting.”
Luca regarded the man warily. This Brother did not seem familiar to him, but he had not been back at the Keep for long, and he knew there had been a heavy presence of Brothers since the plague began. “It is good to make your acquaintance, Brother Josef.”
“You will face a dragon,” Josef told him matter-of-factly. “And you have only your powers of fire with which to do it.”
Luca felt the nausea creeping back. He did not want to be reminded of this. “I will find a way to defeat my brother,” he said finally. “Good day, Brother Josef.”
“You will not defeat him,” Brother Josef called after Luca and his guards. The robed Brother waited until Luca turned. “Not if you keep training with those Menti. They are strong in the conventional sense, yes, but you must be more than strong. I can teach you to defeat your brother—alone.”
Luca stood frozen for a moment. He did not know this Brother Josef, and the robes the man wore were unlike any he had ever seen. How did Josef know about Stefan? But the man’s words had caught Luca’s attention, and now he had only one thought: If I can kill Stefan myself, there does not need to be a war at all.
“Tell me how,” Luca said.
The Lord
The denizens of the town crowded into the barn, pushing and shoving their way toward the makeshift dais. There, on a rough-hewn chair, sat the Lord. Beside him was Brother Mikkel. Some followers from the cave stood along the sides of the dais. Others had been sent to bring tidings of the Lord’s return to all corners of Estala.
“Do you think it is wise to be masked in the outlying countryside, and yet tell your true name to other followers?” Mikkel sounded uncertain. “These men are here because they are angry at the king. When they find out—”
“They will not,” the Lord said. He did not bother to disguise his annoyance. “To them, I am only the Lord. To those who need to be convinced of a blood right, I am Stefan. To the most loyal of my followers, I am both. When I am in power again, it will be immaterial.”
He judged that he had let the men before him shout for long enough, so he stood and waited for them to go quiet. His eyes passed over the crowd once they were paying attention to him. The faces here were gaunt, and the men’s eyes were wild. The plague had claimed many in the villages of Estala, and those who had come to the gathering were angry.
“Why are you here?” the Lord asked them finally.
The men regarded each other as though they were searching for the answer to that question. They were nothing but sheep, coming because they had been called.
“You are here,” the Lord told them, “because you have been attacked. You have faced the scourge of the plague. You have suffered Anios’s wrath. And why? Why you? Surely, you have done nothing to merit such a punishment.”
The heads of the men bobbed up and down in fervent agreement, and the Lord saw their flushed faces and set jaws. He had sensed their angry mood accurately. He knew the words to say next to drive them into a frenzy of rage.
“Anios has punished the world because heresy has been allowed to flourish!” the Lord called to them. His voice echoed from the rafters. “Menti are found in every village, and they are not killed, as they should be.”
The crowd was silent now, and afraid. Everyone had a story. If not them, it was their cousin from another village, their wife’s relatives, a traveling tinker—I heard a tale of a Menti who torched the barn. I heard tell of one who called the river nearby and drowned everyone in the village. I heard of one who could take any face he wanted, so that you could never tell whom you were speaking to. Learned everyone’s secrets and spread discord in the village.
But they all knew the other tales, too, of the parents who cried when their children were snatched by the Sisters, or worse, by the king’s army. They had probably been afraid that such a thing would happen to them. Who could bear to see their own children killed? They might have asked each other those very questions in the tavern, in a whisper, secretly sympathetic.
The Lord’s lip curled. These people were still soft. They must be shown true faith, and he knew the weaknesses of their hearts. He knew that if he punished people who did the same things, these people would fall into line like easily led animals. He would rule with an iron fist as he wiped out the Menti once and for all. There would be no tolerance for sympathisers.
“King Davead promised you that he would save you from the Menti,” the Lord continued. “But I know that he did not. I know that he let the Menti live. He sent them to the Gardens of Anios, still alive, an affront to the Prince of Truth. They lived and flourished in these protected places while you starved.”
There was a sudden, angry murmur. One could not underestimate the value of lies, the Lord thought grimly.
“Instead of rooting out all Menti lines and putting them to death as he should have, King Davead was soft. He made a show of piety. He demanded obedience from all of you as he waged his wars and levied his taxes. Is that not so?”
They nodded cautiously.
“Your brothers, your fathers, your uncles—all of them served, did they not? Many did not come back. And yet, at the end of those wars, so costly to all of us, Davead proved they were nothing more than a show. He simply wanted to be known as the Menti killer, without having accomplished his goals. And you cannot lie to a god.”
There was a sudden silence. These men were here because they had heard the rumours about the Lord, carefully spread by his followers—but they had not quite believed them until now.
“I see all,” the Lord told them. “I saw betrayal and rot in Nesra’s Keep. You cannot imagine the perversions I saw there. They are followers not of truth and light, but of greed!” The Lord slammed one fist down into the other palm. The crowd was rapt, and he drank in their adoration. This, this, was what strengthened him. “When they could hav
e sent soldiers to finish the job, they did not. When they could have killed Menti, they did not. They were afraid of war, afraid of bloodshed. And all of you paid the price!”
There was a pause, and then yells of fury filled the barn. The Lord knew he had led them rightly to the truth. Soon, they would see the world as they should. Soon, they would be his zealots, spreading the word of his return.
Now the Lord approached the steps and began to descend slowly. “As I watched Nesra’s Keep, I wanted nothing more than to see the whole world burn. I wanted every one of you to suffer. I wanted your blood in recompense.”
There was a startled silence.
“And then I saw you,” the Lord told them.
He looked out into the crowd as he reached the bottom of the stairs, and they shuffled back to allow him to pass through their ranks. Mikkel hated when he did this, fearing that harm would come to him, but the Lord knew he was safe. These mortals would not defy him—and if they did, he would make an example of them quickly enough. He walked among them and reached out to touch certain faces as if he knew them, as if he had seen them before.
“I saw the devotion in the common people of Estala,” he told them. “I saw how dedicated all of you were to your faith. I felt your worship. As the plague struck, you knew what was required of you! You punished yourselves so that I might spare your families! You punished yourselves, even when the sin was not yours.”
He looked around to meet their gaze, and he felt the hunger emanating from them.
“For years, my followers prayed for me to return to this world,” the Lord told them. “I did not do so. I am a god, but I do not lightly accept this form. But when I saw your devotion, I yearned to walk among you. I allowed Brother Mikkel to bring me to the world—to you.”
He turned to gesture to Brother Mikkel, and the men bowed their heads in thanks. Mikkel was radiating pride at his accomplishment.
Your only accomplishment was convincing yourself that the weakling king could ever be Anios, the Lord thought, but he did not say it. He would dole out scraps of praise and keep Mikkel as his faithful lap dog. The man was useful.
