“No less troublesome for it,” she said softly, keeping her voice level despite the tittering of her heart and her hands. “Wisdom is knowing when to listen and when to balk.”
A mixture of emotion crossed the man’s face, from sharp query to calm acceptance. He nodded and barked at his men, calling them into formation, while Charlotte’s own sycophants reassembled with horror and gratitude writ plain across their stupefied features. They, at least, were not men of war. Nor did they expect the same of a lioness.
They were mistaken.
From among them, she sought out Sara. The princess was pressed between them as though their frail forms might somehow defend her, but she seemed wracked more with indecision than with terror. She dipped her head to her friend, but looked past, watching the bodies as the soldiers hounded them for anything of use. Sensing some of the anticipation that fluttered in her own heart, Charlotte rode beside her and snatched her friend’s hand up, smiling in an attempt to distract her.
“Shall we see now what men might still claim a woman cannot fight?” she teased.
The princess murmured something, looked askance at their forebears, and shuffled uncomfortably in her saddle. Too close a challenge for her comfort, Charlotte supposed. Though her gryphon tittered at being so close to a horse, Charlotte slipped her fingers between those of her friend and clutched her tighter still.
“Are you alright? My uncle always told me such was never easy at the first.”
Perhaps, she mused, I should be a little disturbed it was not more frightening for me.
Sara glanced at her and nodded, but her eyes held something back. Something more. Charlotte might have pressed her, but the woman smiled suddenly and gave shout to the rest, ordering them on.
It was only later, as she shadows threatened to overtake the hills and plains of Idasia’s heartland, that Sara returned her interest, riding beside her as the first of the moons crested.
“It reminded me of things I have tried very hard to forget, Charlotte.”
The look Charlotte turned on her was incredulous, at best. “Pardon?”
The princess looked around, as though worried the others might hear. But if they listened, they were wise enough not to look the part, and most gave them a respectable spot of room to have their words. Intimidation, if nothing else.
“My brothers,” she said after a long moment, with a voice like paper on the wind.
Charlotte dropped her gaze but slowly, forcing forward her own, practiced lament. “Sara, I am so…”
“Do not. Just…do not. It is harder to deceive the fly, you know, when she has all the pieces of the web before her. It just becomes a matter of connecting the lines.”
Charlotte swallowed, said nothing. Dreaded what her father might begin to think in such a moment. Dreaded herself what Sara might say—or plot. At another time, she should have denied the girl. Yet now, she sat wordless as a chastised babe.
But Sara’s hard stare never left her. “Our families are all creatures of secrets, Charlotte. And yours is chained in a field beyond the castle, too fearsome to be loosed, too terrifying to be killed. Need I say it? Need I put words to it? For they would be as a poison between us, I think—even more so than the silence I have borne.”
It only took Charlotte a few seconds to draw her card from fate’s hand. It may be our nature to lie, but it only makes our moments of truth that much more powerful to bear.
She did not look away again. She met Sara’s green-eyed hurt with her own flat sympathy.
“I am sorry, Sara.”
“Are you?”
To her own surprise, she truly was. For Molin, at least. Not for the creature crowned.
A breath heaved through Sara as from a summer storm. “I believe you. But where does it leave me? I have wondered, long and hard, as the feathers fall, Charlotte. We are, all of us, potential pretenders. Visible or invisible rivals. So when the dust clears and the winds shift, and all that I have done for you is at its end, where shall my own feather settle?”
In a breach of etiquette most foul—their train of fops be damned—Charlotte seized her friend’s hand once more from the reins and kissed it. “At my side, my friend. You still must show me Anscharde, after all.”
Uncommonly, that face roved the seas of emotion. Surprise widened her eyes, sadness tugged the skin beneath them, regret quivered her lip, while desperation and love tensed the muscles of the rest. For once, Sara Durvalle did not look beautiful. She looked human and painfully, painfully frail. But her fingers tightened in Charlotte’s grip.
“I should very much like that, sister. But a woman must ask: will that day come paved in blood or gold?”
In the shadows of a day five settings hence, they rode back into Fürlangen with an edge of mistrust between them. Charlotte threw back her hood as they entered the crowded city, heedless of the rain that peppered her cloak. Her father waited at the head of the crowd, and when his eyes met hers, out from between his lips wriggled that rarest semblance of honesty: a grin as white as snow.
Only later did she realize: not all of the people at his back were born and bred of Usteroy. They came from Lucretsia and Wassein and Momeny, from little towns and villages and cities that had heard whispers down the vines—and though they came with whatever tools they could find, they came with a few words burned as fuel in the confines of their weary hearts.
Their disgruntled masters would not be far behind.
Chapter 4
For three days, they rioted. Fires burned in the streets and crowds of malcontents sacked everything that wasn’t guarded by cold, hard steel.
They created chaos because they feared life without order. Took what they dreaded would no longer be provided. Stole what did not belong to them, because some poor fool spread a rumor, and a host of them revived labors on weary souls without any real capability to oblige.
For three days, they rioted, and for three days, he waited them out. On the dawn of the fourth, he pulled himself from the ashes of his hopes and put to heel all the insidious thoughts that had been allowed to burn in his people’s minds. They were disobedient, unfaithful, and unlawful, so he extended his hand and let loose the full extent of law’s fury upon them.
The old Leopold should not have watched as his men did their dirty work. Yet in the crippled nature of his fear, now, he rode out with them into the haggard streets and watched them at their butchery. Hundreds of armed sellswords paraded him into the dirty, ravaged streets of Anscharde, and after his herald read out the charges against the peasants’ unlawful assembly, he committed these men—with whom no ties to this precious, defiant city lay—to purge all those that had not complied.
It was butchery, pure and simple. When the peasants realized the soldiers meant not to sweep the streets, but to clear them, they panicked. Some fought back, and these died the quickest. Heads rolled, blood spilled, and whether they were responsible or simply could not run fast enough, the mercenaries’ blades did not distinguish between them. The mob stampeded and still more souls were lost to the path under the weight of a thousand pounding feet.
This he watched, and noted, and felt nothing—for he was the father, and they the children, and they had neither listened nor obeyed, and they had forced his stern hand.
By day’s end, most of the districts were contained, but in the eastern quarter, he was told, several hundred of the rebels had been caught in a square. Most were women, with some small number of fighting men among them. It was too great a host for his captains to order a charge, yet the people had surrendered, citing themselves as loyal subjects caught up in affairs beyond their control.
As it was a father’s duty to listen, he rode to his children personally, to hear their pleas.
All bowed, or kneeled, as he reached the square. His own men, having formed lines at every entrance, parted for his horse, and he entered with no attendants but the Imperial Guard. For all this, he watched his people shake and tremble, in fear of what he had become.
That
he was pale. That his hair had been reduced to the countenance of snow well before its time. When he slid from the saddle of his horse, it took everything he had not to quaver with the spasms that sometimes wrenched his rejuvenating muscles. Nor was his eyesight what it once had been—and it shone in the opaque dullness that had settled like a film about his eyes.
He was old before his time, unlike his father, who had gone too long into his years with the vigor and will of a younger man.
When he spoke, he stood up straight and tall, though his voice broke and warbled, lacking the vigor it had during the burial of his father months before.
“Who so would call upon their emperor and bid bring him to task?”
They stumbled to obey—half a dozen men, pillars of their communities, perhaps, but unrecognizable to Leopold. Only one truly caught his eye, and this, because the gamely old man crept forward whilst bundled in the robes of the priesthood. It rendered him unblinking in rage to think that a man of his own order should dare lead such madness while draped in the folds of the Church. The Church was with him. This man, whatever he was, was thusly not of the Church.
“Most gracious father, Lord High Emperor,” they bid with tremulous voices, “we come to you not as taskmasters, nor rebels, nor traitors. But as loyal subjects. In the streets, there has been no law. No reason. People run mad. And now, your soldiers—they kill without question. We do not speak for all; we cannot say there aren’t those that haven’t used your silence to rise against you, but we tell it to you true, they are not we, and we seek merely to retreat from this madness.”
Leopold’s tone was flat as he countered, “You speak of retreat, yet your men outnumber mine own. Speak of loyalty while bearing arms before me. What loyalty is this? What reason?”
And the men scraped lower still, but from them, the voice of the priest rose to speak for all. “For before all, men have the right to defend themselves from harm, Your Majesty. To protect those very ideals which you yourself enshrine—were empowered to protect. This is why terror reins in the face of silence, majesty—because those rights become uncertain. We should surrender, if you might give us assurances of safety.”
The black cloak of Leopold’s own wrath drew away at those words. A lesser man should have been stricken to his soul to think his children dared such voice—that he, their father, should have to tell them he meant safety! It was another demand, by any other name, but one he willingly offered.
His smile was empty, but still he spread his arms grandiosely before his withered form. “Then bid you, Father, heed my words. You are, all of you, but children of the Empire, and though it is a father’s right to punish the wayward, it is their protection to which he strives. I am no common vagabond. I bid to you—throw down your arms, and all will be well with you.”
It took but little congress among the leaders. They were not there to negotiate, not truly, but to seek out an excuse to do precisely as he asked. They wanted an out, and he offered it, and couched in his promise they knew what it was for any soul to reach out his voice and cry sanctuary through those most hallowed halls.
And when they had made good of their bargain, and crouched before him, Leopold turned to his captains and gave them his word as well.
That this word contradicted the last was not a thing for sellswords to object. As gold-slicked words demanded, they raised their long guns to the wide-eyed sea and made a fog above its head with the belching of their arms.
“Into the thickest of them, and let them know disobedience’s cost.”
The exits were barred and the soldiers only stopped firing when they ran they ran out of ammunition. Leopold angled between the lines to watch them as they died. When this was done, he pulled himself up by the reins of his horse and headed east, where more soldiers gathered beneath the city gates.
His the walls, the old adage intoned, his the kingdom. Mine the walls.
Anyone who thought to compare the unconscionable smell of human flesh lost to the rot to the most tortured bit of pork was, by Leopold’s guess, well beyond the bounds of sanity. Never had he tasted a ranker smell. Nor had he guessed that savoring it should do anything less than satiate the measured anger in his spirit.
There had been no choice.
When the massacre in the square had attended itself, he had shown he could—and would—deal swiftly with dissidents of any strand. In its wake, however, he stressed the need to show the city maintained a grip on justice as well. From the already wracked crowd, he ordered sixteen pulled—its still living leaders among them—broken, strung up on wheels before the city gates, and their heads stricken from their necks. Those heads, in turn, were dangled from the palace’s walls, that they might look out on the city with which they had conspired.
They were joined there by the remnants of another body: the witch that had guided his wife and him through the séance that had nearly damned them all. That one had gone piecemeal, drawn out for his own satisfaction. He did not thrive on screams, but it gave him an outlet he desperately needed.
This went on for an octet—two corpses a day—until the stench reached its unbearable height in the summer sun and the rioting in the streets came to its inevitable, somber end. Only as the wind carried their stench wafting through the palace’s windows did he regret his decision. For his subjects, he no longer held remorse.
Let them hate him, so long as they feared him.
He raised taxes to punish further and to pay for the sellswords now making up the bulk of his shieldmen. While the palace guardsmen were still allowed about the grounds, he had little use for them—did not trust them, rather—and scoffed at any man that spoke of skill among them.
“And the Blades, Your Majesty? What are they to think, should you turn them aside?” Ersili asked him.
Breathing deep of the candles he had lit to ward the stink, he turned to find her gaze unsettled. Rarely, since that night, had his wife’s gaze been anything but. That night had shaken the stalwart force of her.
And broken him.
“If it is their duty to serve, they shall accept it and do as I bid them. And it’s not as though I’m sending them to exile.” Worse, some might argue: he had reduced them to captains of the palace guard. “No one connected to this place can be trusted.”
“And men who serve for nothing but coin can?”
He waved her off. “So long as you have the most coin.”
Which they did. For the moment. Between taxes and the levied wealth he had plucked from his uncle Portir’s imprisonment, the Crown was flush with coin at a time when much of the rest of the nation was bankrupted by war. The thought of having to rely on Mauritz for protection, punishment, and confrontation appealed far less than it had before.
He had begun to feel like a pawn in these events, rather than the king. It was astounding what the ethereal squeeze of wrath’s claws could do to the heart. Perspective, he chose to think of it.
When his wife had gone, he called on the captain of his guard and marched for the tower that held his uncle still. The Constable of the Tower divested him of most his accompaniment, but led him readily to Portir, in the Tower’s highest quarters. This was common for so powerful a guest as Portir. The higher the drop, the less likelihood of flight.
Beyond the gates, however, this was where all notion of the Tower’s place as a prison ceased. When he entered Portir’s room, Leopold found him seated at a desk, quill in hand. Many of the goods the Crown had not bothered to seize from the man’s properties had in turn made appearance here—meaning a prison decked in silver, mahogany, and silk. Suicide was, they had decided, apparently no real risk for one so esteemed.
Or, more to the point: one so well acquainted with the nation’s courts.
“Nearly as comfortable as the council’s chambers,” Leopold quipped approvingly.
Portir, exceedingly yellowed for all this, turned a bland expression on him. “More comfortable than that, I should say. Less empty wind.”
Ignoring the barb, Leopold waite
d for Portir to motion him in. The only motion of the sort was for the portly recluse was to return to his scribbling, so Leopold took the initiative. He drew up a seat near one of the windows, far from his uncle, lest he antagonize him unnecessarily. Through the bars, he could look out over Anscharde: snuffed fires, cracked marble, and marching soldiers. That, and the solid gold ring of the temple, rising like a second sun over the muddled rest. It seemed rustier than once it had.
While he was content to wait, Portir was, oddly enough, the impatient one.
“I heard you were dead, majesty.”
Leopold scowled at him. “A common misconception. Studiously corrected.”
A faint, whistling snicker emanated from his uncle. “Words must hold different meaning in the south. Impulsively, I think you mean. Note it: it seems common enough with you. Nevertheless, my most sincere condolences.”
“You look like shit, Portir.”
At this, at last, his uncle finally hooked him with another frosty look. “Funny, that. Only now do I recognize the family resemblance.”
This new Portir unnerved Leopold more than a little, and he found himself wishing he had possessed commonsense enough to bring his wife. She was the one suited to trading barbs. Without a drink in hand, he was all but useless at them. But Portir had always been the simpering confidante of the family—to see the distress in his eyes and the sickness of his purpled, wrinkled lips bring forth defiance was not only contradictory to his personality, it was infuriating.
But he suppressed that rage. For the moment. Reminded himself: the man had already been through much, and he needed him. For now.
“I did not come for small talk, uncle.”
“No?” Portir’s eyebrows wiggled suggestively and he sank back on his fat haunches. “Death must have spoiled you, than. I’ve no wine here, so I can’t think any other reason that should bring you.”
As Feathers Fall Page 6
