“Do not seek to lecture me on my own history, Ambassador. You go too far.”
“No offense intended, Highness, for the princess merely intends to honor your history and knows that by it, Oriosa will be fair to the man she has taken as her husband.” Svoinyk glanced at Gapes. “The new trial will have to be conducted before a tribunal of his peers, of course. King Augustus is already on his way here to serve. Queen Carus of Jerana is also coming to Meredo. Oriosa will, of course, be represented on the tribunal. Perhaps the king himself will stand in judgment?”
Alyx bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling as Scrainwood fidgeted. Svoinyk had warned her as they rode through the snowy streets, that he would inform the king that plans had already been set in motion. Augustus and Carus would be beyond reproach, which put Scrainwood in the minority. Whether or not Scrainwood would join them would be a decision that would be made after a lot of agonizing thought. The expression on Scrainwood’s face, albeit half-hidden by his mask, did mark the start of that process.
“Moreover, Minister, the trial will be, of necessity, secret. We shall not want to poison the relations between our nations through any parades or other demonstrations that would suggest Okrannel is harboring and protecting a national enemy. While the trial will allow you to present evidence that Crow is indeed Hawkins, these charges must undergo rigorous scrutiny and, therefore, should not be reduced to fodder for gossipmongers.”
Gapes frowned. “Surely, Ambassador, you cannot expect that news of the capture of Hawkins should be kept a secret?”
“Ah, but Minister, did you not already assure me that you were taking steps to see that this was indeed going to be the case?”
The white-haired minister hesitated for a moment, then glanced back at King Scrainwood. “My lord, I have failed you.”
“Indeed, you have, Gapes, most tragically.” The king looked at Alexia. “Shall we dismiss these two to work out the details, Princess? Your man is more than capable of winning what you desire, and Gapes will give it to him.”
Alyx nodded. “And your Marsham shall try to steal it back. You know he will spend secrets faster than a sailor spends gold on shore.”
“I will deal with Marsham.”
“Or I shall.”
Scrainwood’s eyes narrowed, then he nodded. “And likely would do me a favor in doing so. Gapes, take the ambassador to your chambers; do what must be done.”
Svoinyk looked at Alyx imploringly, but she just nodded. “Go. You know what we want.”
“Yes, Highness.” Svoinyk left in Gapes’ wake.
Scrainwood sat back in his throne, then steepled his fingers, his elbows resting on the arms. “It might appear I have underestimated you.”
“You’re not convinced?”
The Oriosan King slowly smiled. “My remark about your being of the weaker sex stung, didn’t it?”
The sly tone of his voice would have surprised her, had not Crow told her in midnight whispers about Scrainwood and his actions on the first Norrington campaign. Crow’s right, the man thinks he is smarter by half than anyone else.
Alyx lifted her chin. “I did take offense, yes.”
“But you held your tongue. That was good.” Scrainwood gestured toward the far end of the room, whence the two men had recently exited. “That earned you your victory, though it was effort spent needlessly. This alleged marriage is to protect Hawkins. You needn’t have resorted to trickery. You could have come to me. Accommodations could have been made.”
“I don’t believe you, Highness.” She regarded him coldly. “I believe Crow would have been slain attempting to escape from Call Mably somewhere on the road to the capital. It would have denied you a public execution, which would be difficult to engineer in any regard, since he saved your sister’s life by leading her from Fortress Draconis.”
“That is a point with merit, though no orders were issued to have Crow slain.”
“Not by you, but I would be more than willing to bet Cabot Marsham would have managed to get word to Mably in time.”
Scrainwood smiled much too easily. “Your concern for Crow is almost enough to make me believe you do love him. How can you love a man like that?”
“He is a good man. He is brave, loyal, and selfless.” Alyx frowned. “Why do you hate him so? Because he slapped you? Because he denied you a sword and a place in history? You know what happened to Leigh Norrington. You were there. I only know it from the songs, but I know enough of songs to know the tragedy was true, though details are lost. Would you truly have wanted that?”
The king’s voice sank into a growl. “Are you Okrans all intent on scourging me with history? It was a different time then, different demands.”
“I’ve fought Chytrine. I’ve slain sullanciri. I know what you knew then.”
“No, no, you don’t. I never grew up under the threat of Chytrine. She was a monster from the past. She was something used to frighten children. Her minions, the vylaens and gibberers and frostclaws, they were real enough, but rare—so rare that they seemed things lost from an ancient time when we found them roaming our lands. We were unprepared for the threat thrust upon us.”
And you found yourself wanting. Alyx shivered. The man she saw before her had grown bitter and afraid through the decades, but she also knew he had been weak before his generation ever went out to fight Chytrine. She remembered the message his son Erlestoke had asked her to deliver to him, and knew it had been born in a boy’s view of his father—before Hawkins had earned Scrainwood’s ire.
“By the gods, is that it, then?” Alyx began to pace back and forth before the throne. “You, the prince of the realm, are thrust into a conflict for which you are not prepared, and here come Bosleigh Norrington and Tarrant Hawkins and Kenwick Norrington, an obscure march lord of your realm. They’ve found gibberers. They’ve found a magic sword. There is a prophecy concerning them. Your nation is at the forefront of the effort to save the world and defeat Chytrine, and you are not part of it. You go along, of course, but you shy from the work, hiding behind your status as the crown prince.”
“No!” Scrainwood rose quickly, his fists balled, his protestation echoing through the hall. He looked as if he would attack her. His eyes blazed beneath his mask, then he coughed and his eyes tightened.
He sat back down. “I am not now as I was then. It was a different world, and I had been raised to deal with that world. Alliances, secrets, trade . . . These things I knew and could master. It had been a century since the last invasion, and with each year we allowed ourselves to believe Chytrine had died or lost interest. I knew I had nothing to fear, and then the world changed. My rightful role was usurped and I was shamed by some marcher-stripling.
“But in the death of the heroes, I read the future, Princess. I was back in my realm of alliances and secrets, politics and trade. I was in the world of power, and I could see what would happen if word of Chytrine’s survival, of Chytrine’s threat to the world, were known. Upheaval. Refugees fleeing. What happened to Okrannel happening on a grand scale. I made the others see it. I was truly the one who saved the world, because the mere threat of Chytrine would have destroyed it.”
Alyx shook her head. The logic worked, but it was predicated on a complete disregard for reality. A man who could not rise to the challenge on the battlefield shifted everything onto an arena where he was the master. He had convinced himself—perhaps not wrongly—that he had saved the world. The problem was that he had saved it only for a time—the time Chytrine had granted him. Her return threatened everything, and the truth about Crow and his delivering her warning revealed Scrainwood’s efforts to have been corrupt.
A spark of fury flashed through her, and Scrainwood toyed with his ring. Alyx recalled having been told the ring had an enchantment that picked up the hostile intent of those near him. She smiled. He’d not intuited that his remark made me angry; the ring warned him of my anger. The snake.
She kept her voice calm and even. “There is something you have to
understand, Highness. You were not ready for the things thrust upon you a generation ago. I am. Crow is very important to Chytrine’s defeat, and if you thought about it, you would see that clearly. But since I doubt you will think clearly on it, I shall give you something else to think about.”
“A threat, Princess?”
“No, not a threat.” She kept her face impassive. “When last I saw your son at Fortress Draconis, Erlestoke asked me to pass on to you a message. He asked me to tell you that, for the sake of your nation, you shouldn’t live your whole life as a coward.”
The words shook him, but not as strongly as she would have hoped. “There was a time he viewed me as a hero.”
“So, perhaps, what you want to think on is whether or not you can have him see you that way again.”
Scrainwood shook his head. “He’s dead. What he thinks does not matter.”
“If that is what you think, then you truly are in luck.” She nodded to him once. “Against the threat we face, if you are a coward, your nation will perish. There will be no one left to think on you at all.”
CHAPTER 11
I ’m dead. Erlestoke harbored no illusions about his chances for survival. For over a month the remnants of the Fortress Draconis garrison had fought running battles with the Aurolani horde. Control of the ruins varied depending upon the time of day. The invaders held sway during daylight and the defenders at night. Sporadic reports of draconette shots and the screams of the wounded filled the darkness as ragged bands of defenders ambushed their enemies.
Erlestoke knew that their strikes at the Aurolani troops were little more than flea bites. The most they could do was pick off patrols, destroy supplies, and otherwise make the occupation of the fortress unpleasant. By day the defenders hid in the warrens beneath the city, and repeated attempts by Chytrine’s troops to flush them out had ended badly for the Aurolani.
Chytrine’s troops never recoiled from employing even the most blasphemous methods to force the defenders from their sanctuaries. Fortress Draconis’ tallest tower still stood. The Crown Tower had been decorated with the skull of a dragon that had died there decades before. To that skull had been tied the body of Dothan Cavarre, the late Draconis Baron, and day by day carrion birds had feasted upon him.
At least two resistance squads had attacked the tower in futile attempts to rescue the baron’s remains. They had been cut down ruthlessly, and now their bodies hung from the remaining sections of walls. Chytrine meant for that display to intimidate the remaining defenders, but instead the survivors just took it as a challenge.
Erlestoke had stopped his own squad from making a similar rescue attempt by pointing out that their jobs at Fortress Draconis had not changed. The reasons they had been stationed there—men, elves, meckanshii, and urZrethi alike—was to protect the Southlands from invasion and to safeguard the fragments of the DragonCrown. “The best way we show respect for the Draconis Baron is not in saving his bones, but in continuing to perform the task to which he had devoted his life.”
The others had agreed, and their dedication to that mission had resulted in Erlestoke’s current predicament—one that was likely to cost him his life. Prior to its fall, Fortress Draconis had been positioned to prevent Aurolani troops from heading south. The garrison might not have been large enough to destroy any army itself, but cutting off the lines of supply would have been simple. Chytrine had to eliminate Fortress Draconis before any southern invasion could take place.
She had, and her troops streamed southward day and night. Erlestoke’s company watched the troop movements, tallied the information, then relayed it south via arcanslata—a magical slate that would send to its twin any information written upon it. Erlestoke had no idea where the twin of his unit’s arcanslata was—though Jilandessa was leaning toward Alcida or Valicia based on some of the brief replies to their information. His squad only sent troop information and had not let anyone know he lived, for fear that information might cause Chytrine to hunt him down for use against his father.
Two days earlier Erlestoke’s people had taken up one of their usual vantage points to watch troop movements and had seen new banners appearing within the ranks of the Aurolani hosts heading south. They’d gotten used to the large banners proclaiming the identity of a unit, but of late smaller pennants had flown above these. As they were studying the units, a storm had rolled in from the north, bringing with it a quantity of snow, which drove the troops into Fortress Draconis for shelter and sent Erlestoke’s people down into the warm bowels of the earth.
When the storm let up a day and a half later, passing to the south with its fury unabated, Erlestoke had led Ryswin and Pack Castleton up to scout things out, entering a nearby ruin they used as a lookout. As was common, a patrol of gibberers came through. All would have been fine, except that they paused to use the building Erlestoke sheltered in to protect them from a rising breeze.
Even their waiting there would not have been a problem, for the gibberers often lingered until the coming dawn signaled the change of a watch. The man-sized beasts had jutting muzzles and stout fangs, with mottled-fur coats of tan and black that served them poorly for hiding in the snow. Their tufted ears rose from thick skulls and flicked forward and back, though they seemed to rely on their sense of smell more than sight or hearing. The way they snorted in the room below him suggested to Erlestoke that the falling temperature was hard on the delicate tissues, helping to hide his scent from them.
He expected them to move on while it would be dark enough to get his men to safety, and their enthused yips seemed to indicate they would be doing that. But then a harsh bark that echoed down the street cut them off.
Their gibbering died quickly, and Erlestoke chanced to look out, barely peering around the corner of a shattered window casement. He saw a tall, slender creature stalking down the center of a snow-choked avenue. The wind swirled around it, dancing snowflakes curling its wake. It wore a white cloak that matched its snow-white fur. The being stalked forward slowly, turning its head side to side. While the strong jaw gave it the illusion of a muzzle, the creature’s face appeared far less bestial than that of the gibberers.
And the eyes. Erlestoke knew he’d seen their like before because they had no color to them. They were akin to a Vorquelf’s eyes, with no whites, no discernible pupil, but in this case they were entirely black. Even as he made that determination, however, he caught movement in those eyes, as if some malevolent force were trapped in their inky depths.
The creature’s head came up and Erlestoke jerked back, but he knew he’d been seen. As the creature hissed a command, Erlestoke blew on the slowmatch of his four-barreled draconette. In response to the order, the gibberkin snarled and started up the snow-strewn steps to the building’s second floor. Carrying an unsheathed longknife in its right hand, the lead beast came up and around the corner, charging straight at him.
Erlestoke pulled the trigger on the quadnel and the weapon belched flame and lead. A ball the size of an olive shot from the thick cloud of grey smoke and smashed into the gibberer’s belly. The impact spun the creature around and the longknife flew from its hand. Red blood splashed over white snow, then the creature crashed against the second gibberer.
The Oriosan Prince rose from his crouch and drew the saber he’d worn strapped across his back. The blade came easily to hand and weighed far less than it appeared because it once had belonged to one of Chytrine’s sullanciri and had been enchanted. Erlestoke cast the quadnel aside and engaged the onrushing gibberers.
The blade’s magick made fighting the gibberers all too simple. In his sight, color drained from the world, save where a golden glow, or red or blue, suggested the flow of energy. As a gibberer drew a longknife back before a thrust, red power would gather in the muscles needed to make the attack. Forewarned by the shift of color, Erlestoke could counterattack.
And counterattacking, or just attacking, was something the blade made easy. The edge did not seem sharp, and the blade’s light weight would hav
e suggested it could not deliver a heavy blow, but it sheared through thick limbs as if they were bundled straw. A quick cut would sever a wrist, flicking the paw and longknife away, and a blow with the saber’s handguard would crush a face.
His first slash spun a gibberer away with its face half-cloven, then a return cut stroked open another gibberer’s belly. It pitched through an open hole in the floor, crashing below while another leaped up the stairs at him. That gibberer had a two-handed grip on its longknife, looking to use it like an ax.
Erlestoke moved in toward the gibberer and ducked down so that the blow carried the creature over his back. It crashed down hard, but bounced up quickly, regaining its feet on his left with its back at the window. As he flicked his saber out to the right, the sword cut bit deep into another gibberer’s hip, dropping him to slide back down the stairs and ball up at the first snowy landing.
The prince turned toward the unharmed gibberer, but remained low, with his right foot actually a step down the stairs. The saber told him that a quick slice as the beast attacked would cut its legs from under it and send it through the hole in the floor. There was a chance he would be wounded, but the sword’s sense of the matter was that his foe would be dead, so personal injury was immaterial.
Erlestoke’s resistance to that last idea stayed his hand for a moment, but it did not matter. Starting far to the left and working right, little blasts suddenly opened holes in the wall, one after the other. Plaster and lath cracked and sprayed from four of the holes, and smoke rose from their blackened edges.
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