by Sonia Lyris
In doorways, rags moved, becoming scrawny children who scrambled to their feet and called out to him, promising everything from the impossible to the unlikely. One small boy pulled off his shirt, shivering in the morning chill, rubbing his tiny chest, describing in detail what he was offering. All, he assured in his high-pitched child’s voice, for only three nals. Less, the boy cried out, as Innel passed him by.
A girl stood on the street reciting the names of tinctures at prices far too inexpensive to be sanctioned. There was something not quite right about her expression and distant stare that put him in mind of his sister, Cahlen. Would his sister and mother survive this day, if he did not? It seemed to Innel that he should care, one way or the other, but he was not sure he did.
The king’s laws were supposed to prevent children from shielding black-market outlaws by setting the same penalties for the young as for those who hired them, yet it was still children calling from doorways, filling the prisons, and being sold to slavers when it was clear that no one was coming to pay their fine.
There was an upside, of sorts, he supposed; Innel had studied the empire’s books and knew how much of the crown’s income could be attributed to the sale of those barely old enough to count on their fingers, let alone make binding contracts. The king’s accountants were fond of joking that children were one of Yarpin’s most lucrative exports.
Except that it was true. Those backing these urchins could afford to bribe whomever they needed to. The city was soaked in such dealings, from the slums to the Great Houses. So many palms to which coin could stick.
And that was where the money went, on its way to clean the city, or to repair streets and water pipes. Another thing he and his brother would remedy when they—
Again he looked at the body in front of him.
A crow flew across the horse’s path, squawking loudly, and Innel tensed, momentarily gripping the reins. The mare stopped, and he pressed her forward again.
The scent of baking bread caught his attention, making him realize how hungry he was. Absurdly he imagined stopping for rolls and herbed butter while the challenge before him simply waited until he felt like it.
Maybe someone would steal the body from his horse while he lingered, enjoying the bustle of the morning around him.
But it was just imagination, and he did not stop.
As his horse climbed the steep hill, the foul air cleared, replaced by briny ocean breezes. The Lesser Houses rose high and wide on either side of the street. Finch and Chandler, Glass and Bell, their familial sigils worked into patterns of trim, mosaic, groundstone, the dual-color flags of their patron houses flying high and bright in the rising sun.
In this prestigious neighborhood, House patrols kept beggars and other lurkers away. One patrol watched now, not recognizing Innel as one of the Cohort. The man looked him over; the fine black horse, anonymous cloak, body across the saddle. He appeared to weigh the evidence, then nodded a little and turned away.
From the palace, deep bells chimed the hour of dawn. Perhaps he should have arrived at midnight instead of at the start of the day, which he now realized would mean far more eyes on him.
No, there was no good time to arrive with this package.
At the summit, the street opened into a huge square at the center of which was a sizable fountain. Water poured from the mouths of a hundred carved marble flowers into the open beaks of a hundred carved birds standing on rocks in the pool below.
An apt model of the convoluted House Charters, he had always thought, the many streams of water—some parallel in effort, some at cross-purposes—that assigned contracts and Lesser Houses to the Great Houses. Few could make sense of all the relationships involved, even among the Cohort, even though most of them hailed from the Houses. He and his brother, though, they—
He veered from the thought.
The side streets were lavish with rows of trees and gardens fronting the gated compounds of the Eight Great Houses, each painted and jeweled in its two-tone colors, the roof lines sparkling brilliant in the sun’s first rays.
And then the palace walls, beyond which was the Jewel of the Empire, dwarfing even the Great Houses with its size, stonework, and high towers, pink and alabaster stones sun-touched and glinting. The Cohort had sometimes been tutored in those towers, using the view of the ocean and surrounding forests to discuss the crown’s history and economics, but most tower rooms were reserved as lodging for inconvenient royals, like the king’s mother, whom no one ever saw. Housing for those the king didn’t want to see but whose missteps weren’t egregious enough for execution.
Not the worst outcome, he supposed.
No, he thought. He wasn’t important enough. A mutt did not rot in the towers.
At the gate, his mare strained forward toward the promise of food, trotting to the front of the long line waiting for entrance, staring at him intently, as were the guards and bowmen two levels overhead on the parapet wall. He was recognized and waved through. One guard nodded sharply at another, who took off at speed.
Well, at least his welcome would not be overly delayed.
At the stables he dismounted. Stablehands took the reins, reached for the body.
“No,” he said sharply. “Leave it.”
With stiff fingers from the long ride and cold morning, untying the knots took frustratingly longer, but he would accept no help. He pulled the long bundle off the horse and onto his own shoulders, holding the legs and arms of the now-rigid body out to either side.
His mare was led away. Tired and hungry, but no worse for the journey.
Unlike his brother.
He met the widening eyes of stablehands. That he and his brother had left within hours of each other, very much without permission, was no secret from them. In their looks he saw them draw conclusions, step back.
Afraid. Of him. Of what he carried. Of what it meant.
A young woman rushed to the doors ahead of him. At a glance he took in the balance of her loyalty to the crown versus her allegiance to her House; dressed in the monarchy’s red and black, only the yellow trim on her boots and cuffs marked her as a child of House Elupene. She yanked open both doors, dropped back and away.
Belatedly it occurred to him that it would have been prudent to have taken off his cloak to reveal his own red and black. To do so now would mean putting his brother down. He would not.
As he walked the path from stables to the palace’s back entrance, he passed faces he knew. A green-and-cream-liveried servant. A pair of red-uniformed soldiers. A cook. A triad of scribes. All backed away, gazes flickering from his face to what he carried.
Srel, out of breath, dashed to his side.
“Ser, what. Ah—”
The smaller man fell suddenly quiet, his gaze solidly on Innel’s burden.
Innel and his brother had rescued Srel from the streets many years ago, when he’d been a scrawny, starving teen, and Srel had given them his stubborn loyalty since.
“What—” Srel began again.
“Talk later,” Innel managed. He wondered if Srel’s loyalty would survive the day.
Irrelevant, though, if he himself did not.
The door of the palace back entrance opened inward. He climbed the steps. Scullery and laundry servants stared, gape-mouthed, hastily retreating back into doorways to make room.
Innel considered the various routes through the many-floored structure that would get him to the royal wing where the king might see him.
Or might not. Might have him arrested and thrown in the dungeon to await judgment. Might have him tossed into commoners’ jail down-city.
Might have him questioned to find out what had really happened. Innel had witnessed a number of the king’s interrogations over the years and had finally come to realize what should have been obvious all along: the king didn’t torture people to get answers, but to make sure that those watching knew how willing he was to do so.
Palace life was all about who saw what, and certainly the fewer who saw
him and his burden today, the better. With that thought, he took the servant’s staircase up to the next floor. A tight fit in places, so he turned sideways.
As he walked another corridor, he realized it wasn’t just his brother’s body that stank, and wondered at the wisdom of seeing the king before cleaning up.
No. Worse to delay.
Again, his mind raced over what the king might do, the legalities involved. Innel had just killed a man directly sworn to the monarch, making Innel’s actions closer to treason than mere murder. That he was similarly sworn might prove irrelevant.
Innel could end up at the northern end of the Dalgo Rift, counting the king’s distant flocks of sheep and goats, lucky to still be in possession of all his limbs.
He shuffled forward over smooth marble floors, adjusting the balance of the heavy weight on his shoulders. This time of day, the palace ought to be bustling with servants and retainers, children of Houses and tutors rushing to make appointments. He might have a nod or a smile from a guard or aide. A moment’s conversation about matters of the day. A Cohort sibling might have words for him, plans for a game of two-head later. Whispered politics. Favors offered, demanded, bargained for.
None of that now. Everyone was clearing the way before him, watching as if he were being paraded to Execution Square, another not-inconceivable consequence. With no House to back him, carrying a dead man on his shoulders whose identity anyone could make a reasonable guess about, despite—or possibly because of—his membership in the Cohort, he could think of no precedent.
He was contagious with implication, and no one would come near him until someone told them what they should think. That someone could only be the king.
Passing the eating hall by the kitchens where the Cohort had often taken informal meals with the king, he wondered if he would see the inside of it again. If he had eaten his last meal.
Once he and his brother, not much older than thirteen and fifteen, had arrived in just this spot, late for the meal, which would earn them a reprimand from the headmaster. They had needed the time to clean up. Even so, their faces were thick with purpled bruises from the beating that five of the Cohort had given them after luring them into a deserted basement hallway.
Pohut had taken Innel’s already bruised arm in a hard grip, holding him back a moment from entering the room.
“You look like a whipped dog,” he hissed.
“A good description of us both,” Innel whispered back.
Pohut pulled him closer, speaking into his ear. “Act like it and you become it.”
“Brother, we have nothing. No House, no bloodline, no patron—”
Another shake for his attention. Innel gritted his teeth at the pain, but Pohut’s charming smile somehow gentled it, melting his anger. It was a trick that had opened many doors for his older brother.
“No House means we are freer, Innel. Lighter. A fast freighter. A pointed dirk. Beholden only to the king. We do what others cannot, say what aristos dare not. We’ll win this.”
This. Meaning Cern. The reason for the Cohort.
Innel had snorted in reply. “Your eye is purple and yellow, your toe broken. I think my forearm bone is cracked. We should tell the king.”
“Say nothing.”
“But—”
“Five on two. What does that tell you, about how they fear us? Think, brother. Think.”
Innel tilted his head and considered. “That they do.”
“How many of the Cohort has the king sent home, to the dishonor of their Houses, while we two remain? One of us will be consort; believe it. We will survive.”
Survive they had, and more than that. Pohut was right: they could move and act more quickly than those with somewhere to retreat to if they failed.
Innel had never asked his brother which of the two of them he believed Cern would choose. Until last year it had been enough that it would be one of them.
The next time that those five Cohort brothers had found Innel and Pohut in that same deserted cellar hall, the brothers had been ready. They had put their attackers on the ground, leaving them there with broken bones, bloodied and bruised. One had a piercing headache that did not go away. A month later he was returned to his House.
No one tried it again.
Every year someone left or fell out of the Cohort. In one case, literally: a rooftop duel led to one boy tumbling to his death on the stone courtyard three stories below. The survivor of that duel had been sent back to his House, not because of the death, but because otherwise the two Houses would be at each other’s throats, threatening to snuff lamp-oil deliveries to the entire city. Home the boy went.
By Innel’s eighteenth spring, the Cohort had dwindled to eight boys and three girls. Then Innel and Pohut were separated, sent on campaign, assigned to serve various province governors, or kept close to serve in the palace.
But not together.
Innel sent Pohut letters by messenger bird, but his brother’s replies were terse, demanding, critical. They saw less and less of each other, then not at all. Until Botaros.
A child’s screaming laughter brought him back to the moment. A naked toddler had run in front of him and frozen, forcing him to a heavy stop to avoid plowing the boy over. The boy gaped up at him, then grinned widely, drooling with pleasure, as if nothing could delight him more than this large, grimy man, a dead body slung across his shoulders.
Out into the hall dashed a head-wrapped green-liveried servant who snatched the child up into her arms and stammered apologies, darting back into a doorway. The child’s howl was muffled by a slammed door.
Innel struggled forward, keeping his expression as composed as he knew how. A colorful array of servants, clerks, and aristos in their House dual-tones stepped quickly out of doorways to line the walls to watch him go. Though it was usually a loud time of day, all he heard were his own footsteps.
Meat and bread and cheese, he thought, with sudden craving. A drink of something to clear the nasty taste from his mouth. A carafe of wine to clear the unpleasantness of his thoughts.
His brother’s counsel.
A large, stocky figure stepped solidly in front of him, one foot and then the other, the high collar of the man’s pressed red and black sharp against his doughy neck, gold trim on his neckline and down his arms catching the morning light from high windows.
“By the Eyes of the All, what have you done, boy?”
Innel felt a rush of anger at having to stop suddenly again. His shoulders ached.
More were gathering against the paneled walls to watch, quietly whispering to each other.
“Lord Commander,” Innel said, choosing his next words with care. How to keep this conversation short? “I am on my way to see the king.”
At that, surely the man would move aside. Anyone with sense would. But he did not. Lason, the king’s brother, commander of the Host of Arunkel, did not much like Innel. Had not liked either of the mutts.
“What in the seven hells is that on your back?”
“The king, ser,” Innel repeated.
Lason looked him up and down with a disgusted look.
“You’ve gone far past the line this time, boy.”
Innel bit back all the words that came to him and buried his all-too familiar desire to pummel the other man into senselessness. He could probably take him now—sixty-something, gone soft and slow since the days he had taught weapons in the Cohort by hitting them full force when they didn’t get out of the way—but it would be the last thing he did. While Innel’s friends in the military might hesitate, or even feel remorse, they would cut him down if Lason ordered them to.
Restraint, he reminded himself.
More importantly, the king.
“We will see.” he said. Then with some effort he stepped to the side and around the Lord Commander, who turned in place to watch him go.
Lason spat and loudly. “You insolent, stupid, mongrel pup.”
That would garnish the best dish of the day’s news—possibly
the year’s, depending on how the rest of this day went for Innel—spreading as fast as feet could dash and tongues could twirl, from west gate to east wall. A half hour at most, he would wager, for the tale to reach everyone inside the palace walls, from royals to servants, aristocrats to soldiers, bathhouse to scullery. How Innel brought a body home and the Lord Commander had spat on him and insulted him.
Innel suspected that not much work would get done today.
For a bizarre moment, he imagined dropping the body and walking out the huge front doors of the palace and leaving. He wondered how far he’d get.
Probably not even to the doors. Far too late to change his mind.
Now his spectators were past pretending to be on some other task, but simply stood and watched. From the Cohort he saw the curly haired Mulack, entirely in the purple and white of his House. He stood by a smirking Sutarnan, who was claimed by two Houses and yet dressed entirely in palace colors. They were whispering to each other and would, Innel was sure, be more than happy to see his body laid out by his brother’s by day’s end.
A servant held a covered dish smelling like duck that made Innel’s mouth water and stomach grumble. Just past him stood Tokerae, another Cohort sibling, slouching against the wall, his heavy chain of copper and charcoal iron his only nod to his House. The same age as Innel, Tok was finally thickening after years of being painfully thin and overly tall.
As Innel met his look, Tok gave him the smallest of nods.
Well, so, there was at least one person in the palace who even now supported Innel. He would not forget that.
Three years ago Tok had quietly told the two brothers he would no longer court Cern and would back the two of them instead. Still, Tok had said, it would be best if that didn’t get back to his mother, Eparch of House Etallan, who was still harboring fond hopes of having a son married into the royal Anandynar line.
