As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  Rage shook him. It left him knotted, white-fisted, gritting his teeth. “I did not say you could go!” It made him a child. Ersili had dedicated her young life to the raising of her two children—she did not even cast a shoulder back at his tantrum. Nor did the guards, posted and no doubt listening outside the high bronze doors, make any moves to bar her departure.

  He twisted in her absence, writhing with the indecision that had plagued him for days. Ersili was supposed to be the certainty his own mind lacked. When she disagreed with what certainties he had, he became a man adrift.

  Sunset spilled across the floor from the multitude of narrow windows above his head, making a red, honeycomb visage of his ghost. Nothing about the room bespoke even an inch of his own personality. The more he looked, the more he loathed it all. Vast emptiness, tapered with frescoes of battles and saints that meant nothing to him, as well as statues of feathered pets no longer anything like what the carvers must have seen. It was a dark, drab place, dampened by the tapestries, deprived of proper light, wrought of cold, dark stone and backed by a throne-topped dais all smothered under a canopy of green and white cloth.

  There was no private thought in so sparse and smothered a room. In the whole of the castle, there was no privacy. Everyone seemed to have some measure of his thoughts and disagreed with him.

  At least the people had learned. There had been no more rioting since his reprisal. Yet defiance was a disease; it spread by rats, it spread by insects, and they were everywhere and all around, penetrating even the most stalwart corners of the most stolid stone.

  He sank into his father’s chair of wood and felt, and he brooded on what was coming. Outside, there were two men waiting, and he would keep them waiting until they were properly reminded what it was to serve. Mauritz, for one; Bove, the insufferable ambassador of the Church, for another. He had summoned the one. The other came unbidden and unwanted.

  Damn it all, Ersili. Time would only diminish him as well.

  “Ontlaus!” he barked for the captain of the guard.

  The aging white cloak, brother-in-arms with all the failures that had served Leopold’s father and brothers, shuffled forward from the foot of the dais, wisely displaying no hints of the previous conversation. This was a practiced man, though heavy bags had permanently lodged beneath his sun-weathered face. He bowed just so for the man to which he was pledged, without question. There was no hint of the pain he must have suffered when Leopold banished his fellow brothers from his presence and made him little more than his steward.

  “Fetch my lord uncle. It is time we dispatch this charade at least.”

  Deference was a cool thing. It leant no hint of indecision, and guided the knight swiftly from his room. There was a time that Leopold should have contemplated sitting, that he alone might find comfort when other men were brought into his presence. Now, he could not bear it. He would tower over his uncle, he thought, and let the old man know that there was but one emperor in Idasia, and it was not Mauritz the Wild.

  “Well?” he shouted into the knight’s absence. “Come about, come about, it’s time for petitions, and we must have a court for that. And steward—wine!”

  From the shadows of his father’s great hall, the crowd of sycophants shuffled. To further the distance between himself and his uncle’s inevitable presence, servants scurried forward with a table for his lord’s council—a table now graced by but two of the six that should have populated it, and these the least amongst their worth. Hinslen and Turgitz, his masters of affairs foreign and ships, respectively.

  He should have called them both useless, but they would serve one purpose at least: shields of the flesh between him and a crazed old man.

  Leopold could feel the unease in the hall as the doors strained open. From the spillage of light emerged Mauritz, mailed though unarmed, his long white hair tied behind him as though he marched to war already. Scorn dripped from his face unrepentant, and Leopold swore he would make the man pay for that as well. They had come to an arrangement, these two, but no longer.

  From the gallery, past the tapestries, to the table at the foot of Leopold’s throne, Mauritz strode with none of the weight a man of his advanced age should have suffered. “Your Imperial Majesty,” the old man said with a delicate inclination of his head. Ontlaus slipped past him as he did so, and Leopold looked more for a glance or gesture between them than at his placating uncle. There was none that he could decipher, but he supposed that meant little.

  Ontlaus took his place beside the table. Then the council was three again.

  In spite of all, his uncle smiled. “If it pleases His Majesty—”

  “It would please His Majesty to have his uncle doing what he was supposed to. It would please His Majesty if his uncle were winning a war for us in Usteroy,” Leopold snapped. In the same breath, a beautifully merciful youth scurried up the steps with his wine, and he both snatched and downed a fair portion of it in one fell swoop. “Instead we are the both of us here, and so we must make the best of it.”

  His uncle tightened, but held his smile. “Might I be so bold as to ask the reason for the latter? My men are, of the moment, in fact skirmishing in the Lion’s lands, and I would quick return to them, that we might keep your crown secure, majesty.”

  A threat? Here? He gritted his teeth, tried to ignore the laughter he knew would be sifting through the ranks of the crowd at his feet. They knew nothing, cared for nothing more than a witty jab here and there. That was all these people were: air, air and bad wine.

  “But my lord, we are in need of our Justiciar.” He managed to breathe, to smooth any hint of what was to come leaking from his face. “There is only so much an emperor can do, and we need our little folk here to take up the rest; we are only human, after all. To win a war, well—what is the point, if we should lose justice in the meanwhile?”

  Leopold extended a hand to his left, where the visage of a knight kept watch. “Ser Ontlaus? Kindly fetch our other item for my dear uncle. There is much to be done and little time for it.” This time the knight hesitated, just a hint of a thing, but Leopold caught it, and marked it, and weighed it against him as the knight strode away. “I bring word from our former Master of Coin, uncle. And I would have you weigh it.”

  “Have not those scales already weighed? It was my belief that traitors remained within their towers, and that their presence was far from commonplace amongst that of their lords.”

  Truth: there was no love lost between Leopold and Portir, but he detested—more than anything—the thought that he was being played. What they had done to Portir…that had been one thing. A thing they were both supposed to find advantage in. Yet he saw now that Mauritz had drawn far more advantage in the man’s downfall than he, and this he could not abide.

  The more that table at his feet shrunk, the more power each upon it was entrusted with—and Leopold, foreign raised and without even Bertold to his name any longer, had not the arms to bear that with any comfort. He was supposed to strengthen his position—not isolate himself.

  I will not be cuckolded in my own court.

  “Majesty, this would not have anything to do with Prelate Bove’s presence, would it?” Mauritz prodded after a moment’s silence, apparently bolstered by it. “I assure you—”

  “What Prelate Bove and I must discuss concerns the future of the war you have danced around to no conclusion, uncle. Have you met at all with your brother since his incarceration?”

  “I have not, Your Majesty.”

  “Have any of your lackeys met with him?”

  “They have not, Your Majesty, to the best of my knowledge.”

  “Tell me: have you ever supped there?”

  This last tugged at Mauritz’s sneer of a lip. “Majesty?”

  “As Lord Justiciar, you are acquainted with the Tower, are you not?”

  “No more or less than anyone else at court, I should suppose.”

  “Then what might you tell me of the food, my lord? Who prepares it? From whence d
oes it come? Do you pluck it from your wrinkled ass?” A collective gasp quaked the room. One meaningful scowl to his sellswords, though, and the menace they stoked in his attendants made sure no one would be so bold again.

  Mauritz sucked in his gut and reared as if weathering the incessant whimpering of a child. “Majesty, you did not bring me half across the country to debate the merits of food, surely.”

  I am Emperor. I am your God. I can bring you across the whole of the country if I so much as want a particular hand to scratch my ass. He drummed his fingers on the arm of his throne. It might have been a tempting thought, had he eyes in his ass. One never knew what such as Mauritz might slip into that blindness.

  “Lord Hinslen,” he said in a change of tack, directing his attentions to the council table, “His Grace Bove is well attended, yes? He and his men have been settled?” He resisted the urge to look Mauritz in the eye. He wanted the threat to speak for itself. Ravonno, he was determined, would be his. Let Mauritz have his loyal men of Idasia, Leopold would have men of faith—bought on Portir’s coin.

  “He is, Your Majesty. We settled him into the appropriate apartments this morning.”

  “And his men?”

  Hinslen licked his lips and folded his hands in his lap. “Camped outside the city.”

  “Good, good,” Leopold said. Then he turned his attentions back to his uncle. “Apologies, uncle. Emperors have so many matters they must keep amongst their attentions.” It was time to stop toying. “Now then—food. Portir claims that someone means to poison him.”

  Nothing. No reaction at all. Which was, he estimated, suspicious in its own regard—as though Mauritz had seen this coming.

  The general said, “A serious accusation, Your Majesty. What proof?”

  “The color of his own skin is proof enough, I dare say,” Leopold said.

  “And you think I have something to do with it?”

  “I said no such thing, uncle. What I said is that you know the Tower; that, as Lord Justiciar, you know it better than most. That, as Lord Justiciar, you are the only person other than I whom might have the ability to command the guardsmen of that tower.”

  Mauritz bowed his head in false deference. “Apologies. But as I said, I have been away to war. This is the place of His Majesty, and of his Chancellor—were he to appoint one. I have been doing my duty, as the army has been doing its duty. If you have lost faith with me, you need but say so, and I will hand you my sword, majesty;”—which was the last thing Leopold could afford to do—“What I can assure you is that if I wanted someone dead, as you say, I have the authority to do it. I would not fret with poison.” He even had the audacity to smile at the last.

  “Only if your emperor had given you leave to do so.”

  “As you say,” Mauritz agreed.

  “So you deny the accusation?”

  There was a moment he thought Mauritz might give him something he could use. The man straightened, dignified before even the most languishing verbal abuse, and slowly took a measure of those in the room. Contemplation—stalling. In Ravonno, Leopold had seen many men attempt the same before the courts, but none so gracefully as his uncle. Most twisted, fear or desperation in their eyes. Mauritz was like a ramrod—firm, unmoved.

  When his eyes came back to his nephew, Mauritz had no smile, its audacious bearing swept away by the solemnity of purpose. “I do, majesty—and pray they shall not color your portrait of me. I am the crown’s man. No other.”

  Vaguely, he wondered just how many times Cullick had said the same.

  A steward approached, and Hinslen took the news. Then the emaciated-looking man turned, slightly paled from the whisper. Leopold did not need to ask what the message was; it was he that had ordered its execution, through Ser Ontlaus. Now we shall see who shakes. He raised clapped his hands together and rose from his seat with a less than graceful flourish.

  “Lord Hinslen?” he asked, all pomp and office. “The preparations?”

  “Complete, my lord…”

  “Good, good. Uncle, would you be so kind as to join me at the window? Good men and women of the court—you may find your own.”

  Carnival was the atmosphere in the streets below their viewing. People were fickle, he had found. Oh, they lamented disaster—but only so long as that disaster turned on them. The moment it turned to others they forgot, they excused, they turned aside. Self-preservation was a powerful thing, but people were still by nature bloodthirsty.

  Time and again this truth had held in Ravonno, where the Office of the Inquisition was firmly entrenched. At the Patriarch’s order, even the greatest of nobility could be sacrificed to fire and steel, and the crowds would turn out en masse, not cheering, per se, but even if it was someone they had adored in times past, they would watch, and some would smile, and still others would gleefully denounce the soul of one their betters had denounced to die.

  Below them were the Hinnlisch Stairs, resplendent marble colored by the din of human mass. Atop these, in the spacious palazzo where, mere months before, Leopold had committed his father’s ashes to the wind, where the bones of dead traitors were now caged, a shadow rose above the heads of the gawkers. Like an aged tree, its roots hammered deep into the cracks of the stone, a stake ramrodded a man to justice.

  Even from above, congealed blood licked his skull and shadowed familiarity. Mauritz’s hands stiffened on the guardrail as his eyes crossed the threshold. Show yourself. Here, now, and save him. Show yourself, and cast yourself to the flames. Is this not what family means? Dark eyes joined the mass in damnation, but gave nothing in return. Mauritz would not be moved.

  Heinrich had been moved. Prince he may have been, but only now was he truly a prince of the blood. Little remained of the conservative, dour man Leopold had been forced to entertain. There was little of a man in him. A nonentity, more like—stoic without a cause to graft reason to that stoicism.

  His hair was cracked, tangled, its dark strands torn. He was balding, Heinrich was, like no other in their family. Perhaps that was why it was so easy to make him the sacrificial lamb.

  Traitor would be his pronouncement. It hung its chains about Heinrich’s neck the moment he had fled Anscharde, he and all of Leopold’s thrice-damned siblings, for fear of the specter to which he had been sacrificed. Well, what has it done for your complexion now, he thought bitterly. And in that space he learned something of himself: he could live with the title kinslayer. Such as Heinrich were no true family.

  “You were once kind enough to reveal me a traitor, uncle. I thought it only right to return the favor.”

  “His crime?” Mauritz asked.

  “Dereliction of duty,” Leopold answered. Or, more accurately, being stupid enough to surrender himself to Urtz—and think that opportunistic lout wouldn’t use him to curry favor.

  It might have been different, if they had taken Leopold’s children with them. Alas.

  Heinrich’s wife, Marren, had already been strangled in her bed. His children were henceforth banished, with but a single servant to their name. There might come a day they sought vengeance for what had been done them. Leopold would see to it that no one beheld a country weak enough for the plucking to dare and give them voice.

  “Please!” his brother’s voice carried high on the breeze. “Brother! Maker! I am no traitor. Do not do this! Do not!”

  It would have been unseemly to gag a high nobleman. More aptly: it would have been unseemly to deny the crowd one’s begging. The executioners, though, had no need to wait for their emperor’s mark. Everything had already been arranged.

  One man forced his head to the block, against his frothing screams. Another took the sword, and in one sweep, separated the pleas from his petulant head. Blood coursed, the body sagged, and where it rolled, the first man set to it with a knife, to extricate the intestines from his putrescence. They called it drawing, beyond the execution, and it was rooted in something older and pagan, but the fact was this: it existed for the living, not the dead, for the dead co
uld no longer be belittled, but the living would suffer fear and mockery every day.

  For all that she now raged, this last injustice had been Ersili’s suggestion. Not now, but long ago, when their heads had laid against silk pillows and the spices of Ravonno still wafted in the windows.

  Look, she said, just look, my prince, for this is the way of the pillowed court: you talk, always talk, but there will come a day when you exhaust your words and all you’ve left is wind and men that clamber against it. There can be no hesitation, then. You must be swift and the moment must be perfect. Before he so much as thinks you’ve turned your eye to him, he should find himself alone, with coin already in the pockets of all the ones he loves, the roads and ports caged, and his money in your pocket. Before the sun rises on the pillow beneath his head, my love, for you and for your family you should already have his noose tied about your tree.

  Uncowed, Mauritz looked to him, smirked with his eyes at the absurdity of Leopold’s desires. A familiar cool settled on Leopold, and for a moment, for all that his heart raged and his breaths shortened, he remembered a piece of himself—the part that had always allowed him to act with deliberation, surviving where other men scrambled and fell in the Patriarch’s halls.

  “In time,” his uncle said in a dismissive manner, “all such things must be concluded. A lesson for us all you’ve made here, Leopold: we cannot run from our troubles.”

  There were soldiers on the steps. Soldiers in the streets. Soldiers in his palace. His wife had begged Leopold not to bring this creature here, not to watch this, not to stand so near to the throne. She had told him that, in the face of this man, he was an idiot and his uncle a prince—an immortal of their house, and of this place.

  Yet wonder forced his guess: how many men would lay down their lives for him?

  His other siblings? Their fates would follow in time. For the moment, it was time to adjourn. Since the incident, Leopold no longer had much stamina. Muscles shook in the pits of his legs, shivered up the length of his curving spine. For a moment, he feared another seizure, but the familiar taste—the sharpness of it—did not come. He was tired, and he felt no joy in any of this, though he told himself it needed to be done. Harmony…there was no sweet harmony here.