The person who stepped through the doorway wasn’t her son. Sabiha Kalliam, once Skestinin, wore a simple gown of pale yellow that warmed the tone of her skin. Her hair draped about her shoulder, its softness at odds with the thinness of her lips and the solidity of her gaze. Clara stood, uncertain for a moment and afraid, before the girl stepped forward and embraced her. She smelled of mint and chamomile, and the warmth of her flesh felt like walking into summer. Clara felt an anxiety she hadn’t known she carried drop away.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, and then ran out of words.
The moment passed, and the two women stepped apart and sat. Clara found herself wanting to take Sabiha’s hand, to preserve the moment of contact a little longer, but the seating arrangements didn’t allow it.
“Jorey will be along soon,” Sabiha said. “How have you been?” The hardness in her voice sounded almost like regret. Clara gestured vaguely.
“Some days are better than others. Much as one might expect, I suppose. I have taken the liberty of stopping by and seeing my grandson. They’ve named him Pindan, which is apparently some sort of family name.”
“My uncle that died,” Sabiha said. “How is he? My … How is my son?”
“He’s a boy,” Clara said, chuckling. “He eats his own weight when he isn’t fasting, gets everywhere he ought not be, and thinks it hilarious to smear mud on people’s legs.”
Sabiha’s cheeks flushed and she nodded. For a man of the court, an illegitimate child might be an annoyance or even an opportunity to boast. Lords had been known to take their bastards as squires or put them into the more lucrative sorts of trade. It was one of many little asymmetries between the sexes.
“And you?” Clara asked. “I haven’t seen you since you left for the season.”
Sabiha lifted her eyebrows and looked down.
“Jorey thought it important that we attend the hunt,” she said. “My father agreed. It was … I don’t know. It was long, tiring, humiliating, and hard. Jorey does what he can to take the worst of it on himself, but it wore on him. He didn’t sleep well, and I don’t know whether the feasts we weren’t welcome to chafed more than the ones he attended.”
“Poor boy,” Clara said, fitting a river of melancholy into the two words. Jorey was her youngest son, and in some ways the one of her children the world had been cruelest with. Vicarian was safely in the church. Barriath, before he left, had been in battles, but only at sea and never particularly vicious ones at that. Jorey had helped to slaughter a city, and the ghosts of it walked behind him. The guilt had driven him to marry Sabiha in hopes of cleansing her name, and instead of raising her up, he had made her position in the court less tenable. Clara thought her son’s spine was made of pure enough metal to stand the strain. She hoped so.
“Some days were better,” Sabiha said.
“And you?” Clara asked, drawing her pipe from her pouch and filling the bowl with a pinch of cheap tobacco. “God alone knows this can’t have been easy for you either.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Sabiha said, her smile thin and oddly cruel. She took a twig from the fire and offered Clara the ember for her pipe. “I’m used to people pointing at me and whispering down their sleeves. I suppose I’m glad it’s not my past their amusing themselves with. It hasn’t left me with a deeper love of the court in general, though.”
“I imagine not,” Clara said, and drew the smoke into her lungs.
The pause was not entirely comfortable. Sabiha moved her head in one direction and then the other, testing out words without speaking them. Clara waited, knowing well how such things took their own time. The young woman’s hands relaxed just before she spoke.
“I don’t know how to help him.”
“Mother!” Jorey said, pushing through the door. His smile looked almost genuine. Clara rose into his arms. Regret that he hadn’t waited just a few minutes more was washed away by the scent of his hair and the strength in his arms around her. Her little boy had grown to a man, but she would always see him as infant sitting up by himself for the first time, an expression of wordless triumph on his dough-soft face. Holding him, she was neither the widow of a traitor she had been nor the half-formed woman she was becoming, but only the mother of her child. It was enough.
The moment passed and he pulled away.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said.
“And also you, dear,” Clara said. “Sabiha’s been telling me that the hunt was as much a masculine bore as ever, and I was acting as though I missed it.”
“I didn’t think you ever went,” Jorey said, sitting at his wife’s side. Clara took her own seat, gesturing with her pipe.
“It seemed polite to pretend,” she said. Jorey laughed, and Sabiha looked for a moment surprised before she smiled herself. “I’m sorry to say that I’ve come begging.”
“Of course,” Jorey said. “I’m sorry we didn’t leave you better provisioned. But—”
“I have been quite content with what I’ve had,” Clara said. And then, with a bit of effort to keep her tone light, “One of your father’s huntsmen has taken me a bit under his wing. Vincen Coe.”
“Father’s private man?” Jorey said. “The one who always went with him when he was intriguing against Feldin Maas?”
“Yes, him,” Clara said, silently regretting having mentioned him. Only she didn’t want it to seem as if she’d been hiding him if Jorey found out through some other channel, and now that he was back home it was so much more likely that he would, and damn it if she didn’t feel the beginning of a blush rising in her cheeks. “His cousin has a boarding house, and she’s been kind enough to give me a very pleasant room. Not the best neighborhood, but what is, these days?”
She pretended to catch an ember in her throat, coughing to explain the redness of her face. It wasn’t the first time she’d used the subterfuge, though the last time had certainly been a decade or more ago. Jorey called for a servant girl to bring a cup of water, and by the time Clara had drunk it down, she had her composure again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, seeming to apologize for the coughing fit but meaning something more diffuse.
“Are you feeling better?” Jorey asked, and she wasn’t certain what he meant by the question. She answered the simplest option.
“Yes, dear. Just breathed in something I oughtn’t.”
“I was hoping to see you,” Jorey said. “I’m looking at ways to bring the family back into favor.”
“I can’t imagine that will be easy.”
Jorey held up a hand, asking her to hear him out.
“Geder came to me,” he said. “He … apologized to me, in a way. I think despite everything he’d open to rehabilitating me within the court.”
“And would you be open to that?” Clara said, more tartly than she’d intended.
“If he’ll have me,” Jorey said. Sabiha took his hand as if she were comforting a child, but he took no notice. His voice had the light cadence of conversation, but his gaze grew distant. “Geder is Lord Regent. He’s the nearest thing we’ll have to a king until Aster comes of age, and that’s years from now. We’ve lost the holding and the mansions. Barriath’s gone. I’m living on the sufferance of my wife and her father, and you’re in a boarding house, living off the scraps from that. Geder doesn’t associate me with what Father did, even if everyone else does. He can put me in position to win a name back.”
“So you’d forgive him,” Clara said.
“No,” Jorey said, “but I don’t see that it matters. The world isn’t what it was a year ago. I have to take care of you and Sabiha. I want to wake up in a bed I own. I want Sabiha treated with respect. I want you invited to all the occasions that they’ve excluded you from. If I have to kneel down before a man I hate in order to do that, it’s a small price.”
He shrugged, and it was the motion he had always had. A gesture she had felt when he’d still been in the womb. Clara smiled and nodded, then turned her eyes to Sabiha. The dread in the girl’s expression w
as like looking to a mirror.
I don’t know how to help him either, she thought.
Might be a blessing,” Vincen Coe said.
“Odd sort of blessing,” she said and sipped at her beer.
The taproom went by the name Yellow House, and it stood at the edge of the Division just by the Silver Bridge. The sun had only just set, and the torches that lit the courtyard radiated heat without going so far as to warm her. But the drink was cheap and the soup wasn’t just water and hope, so it would do.
“Puts him in places to hear things,” Vincen said. “Even just having him in the Great Bear would be enough to fill one of your letters every day or two. What the debates were, and who was arguing which side. Might even come to a place he’d know orders before they were sent.”
“No. I don’t want him to be part of this. Not directly, anyway,” she said, leaning close to him and speaking softly. “If I find myself invited to tea or a sewing circle because of his place in the court, I won’t be so rude as to refuse. But I won’t use him without his knowledge, and I won’t have him know.”
“I can respect that,” Vincen said.
“And I’m not going to send the army’s orders to the enemy. I’m not a traitor.”
“If you say so, m’lady,” Vincen said.
At the edge of the yard, a traveling theater company had set up their stage. A round-faced girl and an older man lit a hundred candles in tin reflectors set all along the stage’s edge. Beyond them, the deeper dark of the Division, and then the torches and lanterns of the far side, as distant, it seemed, as stars.
She drank the yeasty, thick beer and wondered whether she might be a traitor. Geder Palliako was, after all, the crown. His failure and the failure of the empire were difficult threads to tease apart. She had risked her own life for King Simeon, and without regret. If anything, she felt herself more a patriot now, standing against the crown, than she had standing with it.
But Jorey had been right. The world wasn’t what it was a year ago. The Severed Throne as she’d known it was gone. The buildings might be the same, the city, even the people, but the nature of the empire—its soul—had changed. It might be possible to betray this new empire and not what it had been. A loyal traitor, then? It seemed absurd and enticing both. She wondered whether one could be faithful to the past and yet not be bound by its rules. Perhaps it was only the beer, but the question seemed heavy with importance.
“Do you know—” she began, but Vincen shook his head and gestured toward the stage.
“Show,” he said.
A dark-haired woman had taken the stage, her smile haughty and wild.
“Come!” she cried, her voice filling the darkness. “Gather near, my friends, or if you are faint of heart, move on. For our tale is one of grand adventure. Love, war, betrayal, and vengeance shall spill out now upon these boards, and I warn you not all that are good end well. Not all that are evil are punished.” Clara felt her throat growing thick, her heart beating faster. The words seemed like a threat. Or worse, a promise. “Come close, my friends, and know that in our tale as in the world, anything may happen.”
Geder
The first battle of the war came at a garrison ten miles from the low hills that marked the border. Ice still clung to the edges of the creek, and snow lurked at the roots of the trees and the northern sides of the walls where the sun could not reach them. Lord Ternigan led the vanguard himself, waiting until midday when the sun offered the enemy no advantage. If the soldiers of the keep had taken the field, it would have been the work of an hour, but instead the iron and oak doors closed, and Ternigan’s men withdrew to prepare their brief and bloody siege.
“Why didn’t they just go around it?” Aster asked.
Geder tapped his lips with the reports, thinking. In truth, he’d been in the field considerably less than Ternigan had, and though he had read deeply on the theory, practice, and history of war, the analysis of men who’d spent more years conducting it was still sometimes obscure to him. He felt Aster deserved an answer, though, and he did his best.
“If you just go on, then you leave them at your back,” he said, fairly certain that was right. “An enemy you haven’t destroyed utterly could always regain strength and come at you.”
Aster’s brow ceased as the boy considered this, then he nodded.
“Go on,” the boy said. “Keep reading.”
The forces of Antea outnumbered the garrison keep by easily five men for every Timzinae or Jasuru, but the keep walls were well made and maintained. Ternigan began by sending a squad of archers and hawkers to the east to bring down any rider or bird sent to alert the enemy or call for aid. The siege engines were constructed in the dim evening just beyond arrowshot of the keep’s walls. In the night, Ternigan patrolled to slaughter the fleeing enemy, and caught and killed nearly a dozen. The priests that had come with the army spoke their sermon by firelight, and their words—that the destiny of Antea to bring peace to the world began here, that the spirits of the dead would ride with them in the morning and make their assault unstoppable, that the rising tide of war would lift them all to glory—so filled the men with lust for battle that Lord Ternigan had to argue against making a night attack.
In the morning, with spring frost still glazing the tents—
“Oh that’s nice,” Aster said.
“Ternigan’s reports do have a certain poetry,” Geder agreed. Basrahip, sitting a little apart, coughed out a short laugh.
In the morning, with spring frost still glazing the tents, Ternigan called the attack. The desperation and fear of the defenders came clear at the start. The rain of arrows and stones held no reserve, and a cunning man hidden in the keep’s walls threw great gouts of living flame from the keep’s single tower. The crew of a battering ram was lost to the flames before a bolt brought the cunning man down. When a second crew began to falter under the defenders’ arrows, Ternigan had called the charge, bringing the body of the army up behind them. With their own men blocking the path of retreat, the men’s resolve stiffened, and at the last, Ternigan dismounted, putting his own hand to the ram for the final dozen critical blows.
When the keep’s doors fell at last, Ternigan led the charge. There were few Timzinae and Jasuru in the keep, but they were wild with despair. Rooting them out took the better part of the day and took its toll in men, including Ternigan’s own squire. But the sun set on the banners of Antea flying above the conquered keep, and the first true victory of the war could now be unequivocally announced.
Geder folded the last page and dropped it on his desk. His private rooms in the heart of the Kingspire were grand and beautiful—carved stone and rich tapestry, wide vaulted ceilings. The gentle light of the afternoon sun filtered through the finest glass in the world. The scent of lavender and lamp oil filled the air. They were also home now, the place where Geder could retreat from the demands of the court. Here, he could rest at ease with his velvets undone and scratch himself when he itched. Aster sat at the great table where Daskellin had had a map of Sarakal, Elassae, the Free Cities, and southern Antea built. It wasn’t as detailed as the war rooms dedicated to the re-creation of the paths of armies and the death of cities, but it served as a good general reminder of the shape of things. Here was Nus, there the thin green threads of the dragon’s roads, at the southern edge the mountains that kept Sarakal from fading into Elassae, and the far city of Inentai that guarded the mountains’ end. Each keep and holdfast was marked by a tiny pewter model. Geder leaned forward, plucked the first of these from the dirt of the map, and put it back in place with the red banner of the spider goddess with its eightfold sigil flying from its minute rooftop.
“Do you think it’s true?” Aster asked.
“What bit?” Geder asked.
“Do you think it was really like that? With Lord Ternigan taking the battering ram and the frost on the tents and the cunning man calling up flames?”
“That part, I don’t know. The number of lost soldiers is probably accu
rate or nearly so. I have other men who can confirm all that. And how long it took to win the keep. The things that can be measured and counted, I don’t think he’d dare exaggerate. But the rest?”
“You think he lied?”
“I read a fair number of field reports from all through history,” Geder said, “and they didn’t match my experience.”
Aster glanced over at Basrahip, and the massive priest lifted his eyebrows.
Geder hadn’t known many children. Growing up, he had been the only child in the manor, and the boys and girls of the village had been only occasional companions. But even then, Geder thought that the patterns of age must be invisible to the people suffering them. Aster was his example. It was almost two years now since King Simeon had come and asked Geder to become protector of the prince. Geder could almost think that the boy he sat with now had been there, but that was an illusion. Aster had grown a bit taller, yes, but more than that, he had grown into himself. The planes of his face were still gentle, but not those of a child. Or at least not as often. He had become stronger too, leaner. There were still years before Aster became a man grown and took his crown, but Geder could see glimpses of that man. That king. It left him proud and melancholy both. If he was going to give Aster a world that was truly at peace for the first time since the dragons fell, he wouldn’t be able to rest, and there were days he would have liked nothing better than to sleep late, eat in the library, and nap in the sun. He had known that being Lord Regent would be a sacrifice. Even with all the power and status it gave him, carrying the weight of empire was only supportable because he was doing it for Aster.
That was what he told himself, anyway. He also could admit to himself that there were some parts of wielding power that he would miss, when the time came.
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