Dead But Once

by Auston Habershaw

  “Ha. Ha.” Tyvian scowled at Myreon, who smiled sweetly back at him. “Anyway, what’s different is that the economy has changed. Somebody has decided that I need to be seen as a serious candidate for heir because the spring campaigns are shaping up to be the most chaotic since the last time they had a king. A powerful central ruler could possibly stabilize the country—for better or for worse—and then, once the status quo is achieved again, they can just bump me off just like they did my alleged father.”

  Artus sat forward. “Soooo . . . is he?”

  “Is who what?” Tyvian frowned.

  “Is Perwynnon your dad?”

  “What do you Krothing think?” Tyvian was surprised by the venom in his voice. He shook it off. “No . . . of course not. No.”

  Artus frowned. “Sorry. Touchy subject, I guess.”

  Tyvian took a deep breath. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. Even if I wanted to act the heir, I’d eventually be proven a fraud. Only the blood of Perwyn can sit on the Falcon Throne, you see—it’s a very old, very powerful abjuration set into the stones of the palace itself. If I were to try, I’d be burned to ash or something. Likewise if I try to touch the crown, wield the royal sword, enter the royal chambers—you name it.”

  “That doesn’t matter, though,” Myreon said. “Even if you can’t do those things, that doesn’t mean everybody knows that you can’t. Perwynnon himself didn’t try to sit in the throne until his ascension was more or less guaranteed politically.”

  “Wouldn’t somebody just ask him to?” Hool said.

  “No.” Myreon shook her head. “There’s no advantage in it—if you want a king, and Tyvian is incinerated by trying to sit on the throne, you lose; if you want no king and Tyvian can sit on the throne, you also lose. It’s too big a gamble. Nobody will risk it until they absolutely have to.”

  Tyvian nodded. “Myreon’s right—as long as people think I’m the heir, I am going to be treated like the heir whether I want to be or not. Hence the invitations to parties and salons in town. Hence that box full of jewels that Vora girl sent me.”

  “Us,” Hool corrected. “They sent that to us. Those jewels are mine.”

  Brana seemed excited by this. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Well . . .” Tyvian rubbed his stubble against the back of his hand. “I’m going to have to formally renounce the throne, of course.”

  Artus blinked. “Oh . . . that’s . . . that’s it? I thought it was gonna be another one of your complicated plots.”

  Myreon shook her head. “Renouncing isn’t simple.”

  Tyvian nodded. “To formally renounce means going to the Congress of Peers—the Eretherian governing body—and being recognized as having standing to speak.”

  “But you’re the heir,” Artus countered. “Shouldn’t that give you standing?”

  “But if I’m the heir, what’s to keep me from ascending the throne, which happens to be in the exact same room as the Congress of Peers?” Tyvian said.

  “And if he’s the heir,” Myreon added, “then nobody is going to want him anywhere near that throne.”

  “Except the people who want a king, and then they don’t want me to renounce.” Tyvian sighed once more. “So, yes—complicated.”

  Brana nodded slowly. “Soooo . . . what we gonna do?”

  “Run away,” Hool said. “Right now. Nobody will find us.”

  Tyvian motioned vaguely at the opulent dining room. “And give up all this for a life on the road? Gods, Hool, do you remember what we went through to get all this?”

  Hool put her ears back. “Yes. I traded a bunch of stupid pieces of paper with fools and then they paid me lots and lots of money and you made me sail on a boat.”

  Tyvian sighed—she would never let him live the “boat” part down, would she? “We don’t have to run away, Hool. I have a plan.”

  Hool curled one lip just high enough to show a row of jagged white teeth. “You said no more crazy plots. You said no more trouble.”

  “The trouble found us this time, Hool.” Tyvian shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Hool folded her arms. “I say we run away. And I have the most money, so I’m in charge.”

  Myreon shook her head. “Actually, I think Tyvian should stay.”

  Artus blinked. “What?”

  So did Tyvian. “Wait . . . what?”

  Myreon looked at him. “Think of what you could accomplish, even as heir, even for a short time.”

  Tyvian frowned. “Myreon, we already have all the money we could possibly want.”

  Myreon rolled her eyes. “Gods, Tyvian—I don’t mean money. I mean this country. The people. You could help them—you really could!”

  Tyvian laughed, but tried hard to stop from laughing. He largely failed. Finally he was able to say, “Me? A philanthropist? You must be confusing me with some kind of dolt.”

  Myreon stood up. “You selfish, self-absorbed, preening—”

  Artus waved his hands around. “Hey! Hey! Will somebody just tell me how the hell we can get Tyvian to renounce without getting Tyvian killed?”

  Myreon slowly sat down, her mind once again distant, but her face clouded with thought.

  Gradually, Tyvian tore his eyes away from her and fixed them on Artus. “It’s actually simple—we just need to get invited to the party.”

  “We’ve already been invited to a party,” Hool said. “Lots of parties.”

  “Not just any party—the Blue Party. The party that concludes the Winter Season and marks the formal beginning of the spring campaigns. It is held at the palace, which contains both the throne room and the Congress of Peers and will have in attendance every major player of every house. All we need is an invitation from somebody willing to sponsor me and recognize me on the floor of the Congress.”

  “And how do we get that?” Hool asked.

  “We are, at this juncture, playing a very delicate balancing game.” Tyvian searched all of their faces to make sure they were paying attention—he didn’t want to have to explain this twice. Everyone but Brana was looking at him expectantly. Brana was sniffing his own armpit.

  Close enough.

  He cleared his throat. “On the one hand, if I appear to be too dangerous a political threat, someone is going to hire a mercenary company to lay siege to this place and kill us all before I amass too much power.”

  “And,” Myreon chimed in, “if you appear to be too weak, somebody will hire a team of assassins to kill you off before you can be used as a pawn.”

  “Exactly.”

  Brana emerged from the depths of his own body odor, looking confused. “Soooo . . . what we gonna do?”

  “Well . . .” Tyvian rubbed his stubble against the back of his hand. “. . . the short answer is that we—as a household—need to appear strong enough to resist anyone’s influence, but bad enough at politics to fail to amass any power. Assuming we can do that, it will render us nonthreatening enough to earn an invitation to the Blue Party and support when I renounce. Then we can all return to obscurity here in our little gaming house.”

  Hool’s copper eyes bored into Tyvian. “That is the stupidest plan I have ever heard. How can we even do that?”

  Tyvian shrugged. “By throwing a party of our own, of course.”

  Chapter 7

  The Houseguest

  Count Andluss of Ayventry, partly out of courtesy and partly out of sheer terror, had offered Prince Banric Sahand the whole of his city estate’s west wing, even though he had brought with him no retainers, no servants—nothing but himself. From the great windows of his private chambers, Sahand could see the soaring Empty Tower of the Peregrine Palace piercing the twilit sky like the ivory horn of some fabled beast. He remembered a day when he thought he might rule from that palace—a day in his youth, now long past. It made him angry to think of it. He felt taunted by it; it dared him to violent acts.

  A servant cleared his throat behind him. Sahand turned to see a skinny, powder-wigged boy in Ayventry liver
y bowing to him. “Begging your pardon, Your Highness, but Their Graces have sent me to inform you they are ready to attend you at your earliest convenience.”

  “Go and tell them I will receive them presently,” Sahand said, waving the stooge away. These Eretherians—all so delicate and polite and manicured. He felt like a bear among peacocks. But I need them, he reminded himself. The thought stung.

  He pulled on his heavy fur cloak and strapped a longsword to his hip, its familiar weight tugging against the baldric—an unfashionable weapon in these mageglass obsessed days, but possessing a few tricks these fops were likely unaware of. In addition to this, he slipped a thunder-orb up one sleeve and a stiletto up the other, all this in addition to the knives he already wore openly on his hip and leg. Thusly armed, he planted himself in a great chair fashioned entirely of antlers and waited to receive his guests.

  The Count of Ayventry, Andluss Urweel, was the fat indolent son of a fat indolent father. Sahand remembered his father well—the blubbering especially. At the end, when Perwynnon was shattering the cream of Ayventry’s knighthood in battle after battle, Sahand was glad to be rid of him. And now, here he was again, sitting in what was probably the same exact room in the same exact chair ready to have almost the same exact conversation with the same exact idiot. Come to think of it, Sahand was reasonably certain this chair had been a gift from him to the Urweels, just so he would have something suitable to sit in when these conversations were destined to take place.

  Gods.

  To make the meeting somewhat more interesting, Andluss was joined by Velia Hesswyn, the Countess of Davram. She was visibly ancient in an age when youthful appearance was a purchasable commodity, which said something about her and, by extension, the entire miserable line of Davrams—they were conservatives, stuck in the old ways. Rumor had it that, in order for Perwynnon to get Velia’s sons to join the Grand Army of Eretheria, he had bested each and every one of them in a duel with a weapon of their choice. It made for a very dashing tale, of course, but Sahand had really no interest in repeating the feat. The woman would do as she was told or he’d cut her in half and feed her dusty entrails to the dogs.

  Ordinarily two Counts of Eretheria would hardly be found in the same room together without an entourage of a dozen people, but as a prince of a sovereign nation, Sahand outranked them, meaning they couldn’t bring a larger entourage than himself without offering insult. So the only people present besides Sahand and the two counts was a servant and Countess Velia’s grandson, some square-jawed oaf cut from the same cloth as a thousand Eretherian knights—a pretention born of power without the slightest idea of what power actually was or required of you—who was there to help the old woman stand up, sit down, walk, and so on.

  After the necessary bows, the Countess introduced the oaf on whose arm she clung. “This is my grandson, Sir Valen Hesswyn.”

  “So this is the young man who informed you that Waymar of Eddon is dead?” Sahand asked, smiling.

  Valen bowed deeply. “Yes, Your Highness. I saw it with my own eyes—bloodroot poisoning. Our assassin—”

  Sahand cut him off with a sharp gesture. “Failed. The word you want is failed. Waymar of Eddon lives.”

  Valen’s mouth fell open. His grandmother was better able to handle the shock. She nudged him backward with the top of her cane. “My grandson tells the truth, as he saw it. I am curious how you came to know he survived. He has not been seen.”

  Count Andluss cleared his throat. “Well, it seems Lady Hool spent the morning calling in the debts of those she suspected of colluding with the assassin. Some of those are . . .” He cleared his throat, clearly unwilling to admit that his own vassals had debts they could not pay without a loan from some glorified innkeeper. “They are known to me.”

  Countess Velia bowed her head. “If this is true, Your Highness, then I apologize. I had no way of knowing that this Waymar would have the resources to—”

  “Stop blubbering.” Sahand ran a hand through his short, iron-gray beard and gave Valen a hard stare. “Your lack of imagination is now clear to me, Sir Valen. The question becomes this: what am I to do with an unimaginative boy from a failing house who cannot even have a gutter-dwelling gaming house master killed?”

  Valen stiffened. “But I didn’t—”

  “Shut up,” Sahand barked. The force of the Prince’s voice was sufficient to make old Velia jump. “I am sick of excuses—it is about all you worthless Eretherians produce. At least when you had money, you were tolerable. Now that you’re all scrabbling to maintain your pathetic households and begging at the door, I feel as though I have suddenly become an orphan-master doling out gruel to the urchins.”

  Velia pulled herself to her full height—which wasn’t saying much. “I beg your pardon, Your Highness!”

  Her protest was to be expected. As was Valen’s hand moving to his rapier, but he froze when a ball of yellow fire formed in Sahand’s left hand. Sahand rolled it over his knuckles as he spoke. “Yes, you are begging my pardon, aren’t you, Hesswyn? And since you are here begging, I should make it clear that you do not have the luxury of taking offense to the things I say to you, you fleshy waste of a human being.” Sahand’s eyes fell to Valen’s sword. “Now, sir, if you wish to die at this precise moment, by all means draw that sword of yours. I will wait.”

  Slowly, his mouth closed tightly, Valen let his hand drop away from the hilt.

  Sahand let the ball of fire extinguish in a whupp of air. He beckoned a servant in the livery of Ayventry. “Oggra—strongest you have. In a goblet or flagon—not those skinny little glasses you all like so much.”

  The servant bowed deeply. “A . . . a whole goblet of oggra, Your Highness?”

  Sahand slapped the armrest of his chair. “Yes, Kroth take you!” The servant vanished.

  Velia cleared her throat. “Count Andluss, I was given to understand that this would be a civilized meeting. The behavior of your guest reflects poorly upon you.”

  Sahand laughed at this, long and hard, while the counts watched, aghast. At last he controlled himself. “Ah! Is that an Eretherian threat I hear? How typical—I threaten to burn your grandson to ashes where he stands, and you respond by threatening Andluss here with nasty stories. Gods, what a stupid country this is!”

  Count Andluss, who had been furiously minding his own business, flapped his jewel-studded hands, “Be reasonable, Velia. These are trying times for all of us.”

  Sahand nodded. “Yes—let’s all be reasonable, shall we? Let us talk about what I want and what you want. The both of you are just about out of money, and Ousienne of Hadda is not. She has hired or will hire all the best mercenary companies for the spring campaigns, whereas all you have is a couple two-bit Verisi pirates playing soldier and all the sullen peasants you can slap a pot-helm on and get to march. Does this sound like a fair assessment?”

  Nobody spoke. Velia looked ready to slap him. Good. A little fire under her arse would do her well.

  “So, my offer. I will provide you, Count Andluss, with all the mercenaries you require from Dellor, sufficient to fight off House Hadda. And you . . .” He looked at Velia. “. . . are invited to join in an alliance, if and when you are able to kill Waymar of Eddon. This was the deal. It has not changed, except in one detail: you, House Davram, have failed.”

  “We will continue to employ the assassin,” Velia said. “She will be successful next time.”

  “The hell she will,” Sahand said, shaking his head. “If she didn’t get him the first time, there is no way she will get close enough for a second try. I know the man too well.”

  Andluss looked puzzled. “He will never ascend the Falcon Throne, Your Highness. Why is he such a threat?”

  Sahand reached out to take his goblet of oggra from the returning servant. “Who said anything about the man being a threat? I merely said I wanted him dead and that you should employ the finest assassin your money can buy. You either did not take my advice or could not afford to, and in either case,
our arrangement is dissolved.”

  The Countess of Davram looked like she might explode. “You cannot. We had an agreement. The money we spent . . . the time it took . . .”

  “We’ll expose you!” Valen shouted, probably at a louder volume than he intended. Everyone stared at him. “We’ll tell everyone you’re marching into Ayventry! The counties will rise against you!”

  Count Andluss shook his head. “Velia, control your boy, will you?”

  “Valen!” Velia snapped.

  Valen’s face was red. “They can’t treat us this way! This is . . . is . . . unconscionable!”

  Sahand laughed. “Boy, if you reveal that Andluss here is colluding with me, then Andluss there will reveal you as the source of the assassin that nearly killed Waymar. And then, while the other three houses are raising their banners behind their new king, you will be left out in the cold as traitors and collaborators.” Sahand took a quick drink, but then spat—somebody had watered it down. Gods, this country.

  Velia Hesswyn planted her cane between her feet and leaned on it. “Well then, Your Highness, if you have no further use for us, we will be on our way.”

  Sahand waved them away. “Yes, do. I am through doing you favors. Begone. Take the boy with you, too—I am not just now in the mood to kill fools.”

  Valen turned on his heel and grabbed Velia by the elbow. “Come, grandmother.”

  The Countess of Davram had more to say, though. “You, sir,” she said, glaring at Sahand, “You, sir, are no Prince!”

  Sahand laughed. “There are no princes, Velia Hesswyn. There are just costumes worn by brutal men—something you would do well to remember.”

  Valen dragged his grandmother away a pace, but she swatted him with her cane and turned back to the Mad Prince. “Why did you summon us here, then? To mock us? To revel in our misery?”

  Sahand drank his oggra and smiled at her. “Other people’s misery is the best salve for one’s own failures, don’t you think?”