What had his uncle meant? He knew not, but as he called out his intent to depart, his uncle was the first to kneel in spite of his old bones and kiss his nephew’s hand. Even so, Leopold realized it was his own heart that could not stop thundering.
In the streets that night were men who showed that kneeling was not necessarily supplication. At a bar in the lower quarters of Anscharde, a drunken soldier from the former crown prince’s columns sang a desultory dirge that seemed, to many present, to belittle the house of Durvalle.
Though men later questioned would have some difficulty remembering all the words, the sticking gist seemed to be something along the lines of: “He wears rings about his neck, he wears rings upon his fingers; he wears rings wherever fool-men linger, even round his holy peck.”
Like most cities, the taverns in the tenement-lined alleyways of Anscharde’s underbelly oft grew raucous, but even there, such blatant disregard for crown and country were hardly suffered fare. It just so happened that, in that very tavern, were a squad of off-duty sellswords from Ravonno who took affront at the notion of ringed peckers. When they threatened the man, his drinking buddies—all men of Mauritz’s companies—cursed them.
Many still boasted the arms, if not the armor, of their office. Something exploded against one man’s jaw, and with the introduction of blood into the night air, they turned from men to dogs in heat. Teeth flashed, clamor roared, and by the end of the night their small skirmish had become anything but. It came to Leopold’s attention the next morning that half a dozen soldiers had been slain and twice as many wounded.
That did not take into account the littlefolk assailed in that same debacle. Nor did it quench the hot rush of blood in savage skirmishes throughout the next few days, Idasian against Idasian, Ravonnen sellsword against Imperial soldiers, terrified against terrorized.
To flatter another was to humble oneself.
From the prow of his great galley, Leopold stared across the still waters of the vibrant River Klein. Not so long ago, before his own time had come to Idasia, a man had drowned in these waters, victim of a frail, fetid body, or of a bitch-spirit dancing between the waves. The songs, however, seemed only to remember that frail or forced, the old sot was the only non-child to be given to the river in a decade or more. “Old bones got no sense to float” the youthful chimed. He might have laughed at the wit, of a time, but he needed just to glance into the waves’ reflections and know those words could just as easily turn to him. His mirror was that of a stooping ghost, even his fat sagging where once it had ridden proud.
“Soon,” he whispered to the river.
Behind him sat his wife, the Empress Ersili, the head of his bodyguard, Makari, and the Church’s ambassador, Prelate Bove, twenty years his senior yet looking every bit his equal. On its surface, the meeting was of a simple purpose: privacy, both literal and figurative. More practically, it got Leopold out of a viper’s nest and away from all the whispers of that place. For they knew, they all knew, what had become of him. Some, like the peasants, had expressed it more openly. Never had that been the way of the court. Busy little bees, always buzzing about.
“It is a beautiful enough land, when the frost is not upon it,” Bove commented for the second time that day. He seemed to revel in the fact that, even by weather, Ravonno was superior. As though Leopold had forgotten.
“We make due,” Ersili replied with a pat of the man’s arm. “But wait until you see the menagerie. I assure you there is nothing quite like it in all of Ravonno. Beauty, well—beauty comes in all forms.”
Leopold clenched the rail. Does even she mock me now? Never had he second-guessed his wife, but now, even this seemed sly, discontent. Either she goaded him, or she no longer cared. His head throbbed. Why is it so damnably hard to think?
“It is as though I am graced with two different pairs of eyes,” Bove confessed. “I am glad to have seen these banks. Wherever we might be headed, these alone have assured that not everything is as Anscharde. A touch of the mundane does one good, in the face of such discontent.”
“Politick…it does have a way of coloring stone,” Ersili conceded. “But you forget, eminence, that you speak to a native of fair Ravonno, and I know well it’s not wine running through their cobbles.”
“Wine, blood and seed; the true gifts of the Maker. But, Your Majesty, they are meant to be balanced between us—Ravonno has its flaws in the shadows, sure as any, but the scales remain perched upon the very solid hands of politics and religion, respectively. Our flock, well—they know their place.”
“How much longer, darling?” Ersili called to him.
As though I would know any better than you, Leopold thought.
“Not long,” he said.
Chances were, their children had seen more of the country than either of them. From the border to the capital, a straight, unveering line—this was all that Leopold knew of Idasia. So far as he was concerned, it was a morass of stunted grass, hills, and horseshit. Even more so now than before, the names of its places, its points of pride, jumbled in his head and were lost, where his wife could at least quote them. They had no grounding for him, no vision. They were but points on a map, even if they were points on his map.
Today, only a few names still mattered. Thorinde. Sorbia. Karinth. Every week, another name slipped from the list, to be replaced by some other, equally obscure piece of his heritage. They were the mantra by which he slept, the line that tethered him still to sanity. They were the places to which his children moved, week after week, in a circuit of the southern provinces, so that none would know where to find them, and none might enthrall them for too long.
What he would not have done to have Bertold returned to his side. In that one, masked dog he had invested more trust than a thousand of Bove’s sellswords. Yet even he, had been unable to stand against what stalked them now. Leopold doubted that anything could.
This land is wicked to its core. It is wicked. Wicked.
Only by fire, writ the Vorges, could the excesses of the world be truly purged. It was the basis for the death rite. By his own reckoning, it should be the basis of this whole bloody nation’s purging.
Something scraped at the bottom of the boat, gave it a lurch. He bumped forward against the rail, and for an instant, he had a vision of another old man drowning in a silent drink. For some reason, that pulled him back to his uncle, locked away, and he felt his stomach churn.
“Sandbar,” he heard Makari say.
Leopold turned back then, letting his prelates’ robes brush the deck before his steps. For an instant, he might have believed he was walking on air.
“Shall I see to it the captain recognizes his mistake?” Makari asked.
Bove groaned. “One begins to wonder at your inheritance, old friend.”
Such directness. Even in Ersili’s sidelong glance he could see the fact of it: brutish, impolitic. Leopold wished he could pitch the man overboard then and there.
“Do you find something amiss with my country, prelate?” Leopold tutted.
“I think it is clear we are past such games, Leopold. My people inform me you are past riots and insubordination at this point. You inherited a war and somehow you have found your way into three. His Eminence rightly begins to question the sense in supporting a man so clearly out of his element.”
“The southern lords remain, in their entirety, loyal to the crown,” Ersili interjected.
The prelate frowned. “With due respect, the southern lords remain loyal to their religion, empress. Your crown simply happens to have draped itself in that mantle.”
“Crown or religion, with them we have Cullick surrounded. And to reach us, our second war, as you so name it, must go through him. What is this truly about? Do not tell me this is about so crude a thing as coin.”
“Do you take us for bankers, empress? If so, I hope your weights are sturdier than your truths. Your Cullick has all the northern provinces. You have him surrounded and he has you surrounded. Charming arrangement. And
yours call you a child-killer; especially after yesterday’s unpleasantness, what exactly do you think they shall say? And what, pray tell, is happening with your uncle?”
Ersili patted the man’s hand with a shrewd smile. “I did accounts for the Church on behalf of my husband, excellency. I have never taken you for bankers.”
They talked as though he wasn’t even there.
“Have you ever heard the parable of the boulder, prelate?” Leopold asked.
The balding husk of robes and discontent quirked an eyebrow, smiled, but ultimately shook his head. “To my perpetual embarrassment, I am afraid not, Your Majesty.”
“Then indulge me a moment. I’ve never been much for them, but it seems appropriate today.” He let his hands sink back into the folds of his own robes—he could not bear for Bove to see them shake. “Long ago there lived a prince.” The actual story called for a king, but he thought a prince might strike more closely to home for the troublesome prelate. “For too long, this prince had lived, day after day, with the whispers of discontent in his court. Yet good or ill, no matter what he did, the whispers were always there. So one day, he left the court. He ordered his men to dig a hole in the road—the only road through his country. Then he hid himself afar, and sat in waiting over the trap that he had lain.
“Time after time, despite the burden it brought them, merchants and courtiers, priests and bankers, all pushed their trains from the trail and simply walked around it. What’s more, many of these blamed not the heavens, nor the earth, but rather, the prince himself for the hole—blamed him for not keeping the roads up, for not journeying from his castle and making their travel easier. Yet not one of these men made any effort to fill in the hole themselves.
“Then one day, along came a lowly farmer, with a bushel of wheat for market. Despite his burden, upon seeing the hole, he set his livelihood aside and dug his hands into the dirt. Bit by bit, hour by hour, pushing and pulling and prodding the dirt, he managed to fill the hole. By the time he had turned back to the hole, though, with his bushel once more in hand, he saw that a chest had appeared in its place. It was filled with gold and silver and gems, but it also contained a note. Do you know what that note said, prelate?”
The man turned up his palms. “I am sure I would have no idea.”
“Let this gift go to the man who took upon himself the burdens of the road.”
There were a few moments of silence before the prelate kindly cleared his throat and looked him in the eye. “With respect, what does this have to do with your uncle?”
“Every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve our condition. You have seen our obstacles. I think it time we look at crossing them.”
“What do you intend? We have given you soldiers, arms…and the only ones to see their use have been your own people,” Bove rebuked him.
“Compose yourself, prelate. You forget yourself.” Leopold looked at Makari blankly. The leathery man-at-arms sat forward, not openly hostile, but fingers close enough to his sword to make a point. “It is not about intentions. It is about action. Only a fool rushes before he knows the lay of the land. We have it now, and so we move. Together with your men, our lords, and the weight of the Inquisition—” How Bove stirred at the mention of the last! “—we shall restore this nation to what it was meant to be. I am Emperor. Even my godless family knows this now.”
The man folded his hands into his lap and seemed to sigh into them. “While the Patriarch would see your familial relations repaired, he recognizes that is your place, not his. He would not let his personal concerns jeopardize the soul of a nation. What do you need, Leopold?”
That name. From anyone else, at any other time, he should have seen that disrespect for what it was and ordered him cut down on the spot. His own fears needed what the man provided, though. That recollection, no, that whim—these were the only things that kept him from killing, as his brother Joseph might once have done.
“There is something dead in you now, sweet Leo,” his wife had told him as they lay in bed. “Where is the glorious story we once shared? The needs, the wants, the expectations that I once loved—they’ve all been shorn away into this remote abscess of humanity. It might make for the perfect ruler, but it makes you far from the perfect man. Is this what fear has made of you?”
There was no force on earth that could make the healthy understand the broken. To them, they would always be smooth abscesses, upon which the whole world slipped past.
As did the boat, with a heaving of the oars. “Finally,” Ersili murmured, as though it were his fault they had beached. In the periphery of his vision, he could see the lingering shade of the foolish captain, hat in his hands. Rather than berate him openly, and further reduce himself before Bove for the need of it, he let him agonize in silence.
He locked with Ersili, and in her eyes, a warning: What have you given?
His thoughts leapt. “I need a holy war, Bove. Give me this, and the bodies will follow. Give me this, and even the most half-hearted lord will not dare turn against me. Give me this, and I will make Her Holy Idasia once again. All the world fears the heartlands united; let me have them and I will cease all these petty madnesses.”
“Fine words,” Bove said guardedly, “But words all the same, majesty. I must carry something more significant to the Patriarch.”
“Unlike my father, I have never broken off communication with the Effisian court, prelate. Bezprym himself has given his seal upon a peace. It will be sealed by the marriage of my sister Kanasa, when her betrothed comes of age.”
Leopold saw no need to mention that they still had not found Kanasa.
“And on that day, we will all of us journey to Ravonno for the honor, and I will kneel before the Patriarch, as the old emperors did.”
The violence of Ersili’s response shocked him. Certainly, she was too practiced a soul to leak discontent, but her lips seemed to leak a hiss, and her eyes—there was violent disbelief in them. Weakness, he heard them say. Tremors shook his own fingers, but even Makari, whom he might have hoped to be a bedrock of support, had turned aside, sensing the discontent.
At last, Bove smiled. “As a gesture of our goodwill, emperor, I gift to you the men that I have brought with me, excepting the Patriarch’s own bodyguards. Though I am but an instrument of the Patriarch’s will, I think that I can freely say that he shall be pleased by this arrangement, as he has ever been pleased by you, L—Your Majesty.”
In Ravonno, in the palace of the Holy Seal, he had often kissed the Holy Father’s ring. It was as intimate as the old buzzard had ever been with him, but Bove had the measure of one thing true—he was, utterly, an instrument of the Patriarch’s will. Now, more practically: a thousand more bodies dedicated to Leopold’s endeavors. It would secure his hold on the capital; perhaps it would even give him the weight necessary to throw against Usteroy.
“The Patriarch honors me, prelate.”
“Honors us,” Ersili corrected icily.
He repeated it obediently. Then he turned back to the river, a smile on his sagging face, the air rife with the sound of his rowers’ shouts. For a moment, he almost felt the peace he had known in Ravonno, in the pleasure boats that often plied the multitude of rivers there. Steadily, a shape was coming into bearing on the shore. Where its skin touched the skylight, he beheld the foundations of a temple mount, built by shreds of the wealth he had plundered from Portir. This was what they had come to see, and before it, the statues of two marble children stretched their hands over the work, forming an arching gate of youthful welcome. This was the pinnacle, the monument that would survive his reign.
His brother might have raised a statue of himself. For Leopold, it was the future that mattered, it was family that mattered—all the rest was nothing but the shavings a mason’s steady hammering chipped away. For an instant, very real tears trickled down his drooping eyelids.
When he returned to their coterie of whispers, though, there was no remnant of those tears. In these creatures, he cou
ld see none of the admiration he felt, but then, nothing of this day was about them. This was for him. All for him.
But it did not ease the discomfort of a question that remained.
“And prelate? Why do you keep bringing up my uncle?”
The prelate, hands folded in his lap, had the audacity to look smug. “He has asked to meet with me in private. Given where your family stands with you, of the moment, I did not think it so likely a course that his sending was your doing.”
Nor was it. Once his uncle’s men were bloodied on the fields of Usteroy, though, those words would be enough to turn a hero into another traitor. Then, at least, the brothers would have each other. Sweet, precious family.
For a moment he did not recognize the dead man. What is he to me? Not family. Not heart nor soul. Blood, perhaps, but what is blood, save all too easily spilt? This fat, stinking creature had hair like his father—Like father had in death, he corrected himself—but this was not that giant of a man, for whom half a world had wept. It was not the man for whom Leopold had been sent, crossing out of all that he had ever known into the unfamiliar madness of home.
Fools flooded the room, their voices all in whispers, as though they observed a waking vigil. What are they doing here? Everywhere he looked he saw creatures that made no sense, guards and sycophants that smelled blood and came running. They wanted something. Each and every one of them wanted something.
He held the cloth tighter to his nose as he stooped over the body.
This was not his father, he told himself. This was not his blood. Yet was it not as close as he could come in this damnable place? This one had brought him here at the first; not even his father could claim that.
As Feathers Fall Page 21
