Treason's Shore

by Sherwood Smith

  Inda paused, looked up, then down, and back to Evred, and again, his gaze was too painful to meet. Evred walked to the window, and closed his eyes as he listened.

  “If I took those harbors, I’d spend the rest of my life killing people to keep ’em. Not just strangers, coming at me with a sword. People I knew. Fought alongside. Who didn’t want us ruling them, while I forced them to it. I’d probably win because we’re stronger, but I’d lose their trust forever.”

  “Their convenience—their trust, as you say—took precedence over mine, over the trust of your peers at Convocation?”

  Inda sighed. “Don’t you see? To the Jarls those other kingdoms don’t matter. They don’t care about the strait. Most of them couldn’t name a single kingdom along there if you asked. They wanted me to win glory, and they would never understand that our glory to the people on the other side of the continent was . . . was . . . was the beginning of an evil empire to replace the Venn.”

  Evil empire. Where had Evred heard that phrase? Vedrid, years ago. My mother, too, telling me that in the eyes of the world, I was wrong.

  Wrong. Could he be wrong? He’d read enough of Sartoran history to discover what people thought of the circular thinking of some kings: the king could not be wrong because he was the king.

  His father had said that the people had to be able to trust the king to hear the truth. So what was the truth here? Evred knew he was not evil. He made no decision for his personal pleasure. Everything he did was for the kingdom.

  And Inda had broken his oath.

  Anger burned through Evred, and he felt the words form—the words that would lead, inexorably, to Inda ending up against that post, bleeding out his life in the sands that should have soaked up Rajnir’s cursed blood. Again that twist deep inside, the distortion of the sexual urge he had never permitted himself to express before Inda.

  He struggled to control it, to reach for reason. He was poised on the knife edge. “I have to keep my promises,” Evred began, feeling the pull of will, of his own righteousness . . . then paused at the prod of memory. Promises . . . The words I promise.

  Where he spoke them: the road to Andahi, spring of 3914. Standing in the mud, staring at Jeje sa Jeje’s defiant face. What had he said? If I am ever angry enough to throw a kingdom at Inda . . . I promise I will halt long enough to summon you to defend him.

  Evred stilled. He had made a promise.

  Instinct prompted him to dismiss it. But as clear as the memory of that promise were Jeje’s reasons for the promise: she hated kings because their personal emotions could be made political with the wave of a hand. She had expected Evred to betray Inda on kingly whim.

  Aside from the profound stupidity of that assumption about kingly whim, was his anger really personal? Yes—and no. It was a question of treason, which was political, but the treason had been committed by the man Evred trusted most. That was personal.

  He would not send for Jeje sa Jeje. But the brief, bleak flicker of near humor that accompanied the image of keeping the entire kingdom awaiting the arrival of one short black-browed pirate woman, enabled him one more time to grip his emotions, just enough to control them. That control would eventually exact a cost in nightmares and sleeplessness, but for now, he could think.

  Fact. Inda had refused a royal command, though he had sworn before the entire kingdom, twice, to obey the king in all things.

  Fact: Inda had never changed in the way that mattered most. If Inda did not believe what he said was right, he wouldn’t say it. And he trusted the king enough to expect him to listen.

  Evred had been staring at Inda all this time, but only now became aware of it, and for the very first time he met Inda’s brown gaze straight on. Inda glared straight back at him, not in anger, or the same kind of anger. It was too full of pain for that: in hot anger, the kind that destroys, you don’t feel pain. You give it.

  Evred had seen that pain once before, and though the world had changed since that day so long ago in the prison on the other side of the castle, he could still remember Inda’s face in the torchlight, sick, miserable, but honest and steady, and Evred heard himself whispering, On my honor, on my soul, you will have justice.

  Evred said abruptly, “Sit down. You look terrible.”

  Inda sank down into one of the great raptor chairs, and gave a long sigh.

  Evred paced to the door then back to the window. He glanced over his shoulder. “Did you also imagine conversations with me, over and over?”

  “Every night. Since I threw that locket overboard.” Inda lifted his hand, then dropped it. “I was angry—I couldn’t get the words right to explain.”

  Evred gripped his hands together, then flung them apart. “I won’t waste breath with the subject of disobeying orders. It smacks of my uncle, sticking to form, without ever acknowledging meaning. Do you realize that what you have done, and why, makes a wrong of everything my forefathers have done? Everything I have done?”

  “Everything,” Inda said, “I have done.”

  Evred made a negating gesture. “Do they really see us as the enemy?”

  “They were ready to.”

  Evred said, “You never saw my father’s records. Among his papers were captured Idayagan treaties, secret agreements, letters, coded and uncoded: their king was weak, bribing and threatening by turns, the lords squabbling with one another. Ineffective, all of them, but there was no peace. Not until we came and forced it on them.”

  “Forced it on them,” Inda repeated. “I don’t pretend to understand kingship. But is it really peace if people don’t choose it?”

  Evred paced again, then said, “I see the moral necessity for the strong to protect the weak.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even when one of the reasons the weak are weak is that they don’t know how to protect themselves, they can’t because they are too greedy, too short-sighted, too indolent to stir outside of their immediate desires. They don’t see danger until it overtakes them. By being vigilant to the threat of danger we protect them.”

  Inda said, tiredly, “They’d say they have to choose that protection or it’s still the use of force. Under whatever guise.”

  “But they did ask us to protect them. You and I were both here when that Pim woman came on their behalf with her petition.”

  “Yes, and then they trusted us to go away again. That’s their definition of an alliance. Band together for the common good, and when the work is done, return home. One party doesn’t take the place of the former threat as a new enemy.”

  “Are we enemies?”

  “The enemy I recognize is the one who comes at me with a knife.” Inda opened his left hand. “Other than that, I—” He looked down at his feet. “I don’t know.”

  “Enemy.” Evred paced again. “When I make a mistake, lives end.” Again he thought of Jeje and turned away, as if to leave her image behind. “Did you know that the women have almost a secret language? Not just different slang, like us saying, when we part with lovers, that we leave them at the stable, and they say that they put them out to market? A secret language, made up of Old Sartoran glyphs, partly. My father tried to tell me once, but I didn’t reflect on it until I stumbled on old records, in my aunt’s hand, that Hadand had transferred to the archive.”

  Inda dangled his hands between his knees, head forward. “I never knew Ndara-Harandviar. But Hadand? How could you find someone more loyal?”

  “I couldn’t. Yet there they are, busy trying to find out the secrets of magic, and writing back and forth, not just to one another, but to Joret over the mountains, and apparently even farther afield.” Evred rubbed his chin. “Did Cama tell you that Starand got hold of his scroll-case? This was just at the end of winter, she was bored, and wanted to whine to Hadand. Too easy to imagine her reading all my notes to Cama, and reporting what I said to Ola-Vayir. I called all the scroll-cases in and destroyed them.” Evred made a negating motion. “I don’t mean to imply that that idiot Starand is at all typical of the women.
I came to the conclusion that the best of them are loyal to an ideal kingdom, and to individual kings when they are deemed to represent that ideal.”

  Inda thought, Signi and Valda were just the same, loyal to an ideal.

  “It sounds good, doesn’t it? But what if the ideal is impossible? What if it’s seen as evil, like the Venn ideal that their glory and honor required them to conquer the world?”

  Inda sighed.

  “I’m tempted to burn the last of the lockets, too. Everyone will be on an equal basis, relying on Runners. Same as we’ve done for generations past.”

  Inda thought, It’s not equal, and nothing is ever the same. Runners can be killed, messages taken. And someone, somewhere, is going to find their way back to magic.

  Evred was watching closely, and as always, Inda was unaware of what showed in his face. Evred took a step toward him again, and this time stood squarely on the crimson rug, where his father and brother had bled out their lives. “Inda, do you think I have become my uncle, seeing shadows as enemies?”

  Inda frowned at the carpet worked with its golden eagles. Then he looked up, his mouth wry. “Seems to me that I have become the enemy.”

  And there they were, back to the first fact: that the sworn Harskialdna had refused to obey an order of the king. Probably the most important order ever given, one that was meant—Evred still believed it—to establish peace, at last, over this half of the continent.

  Inda had refused.

  Evred paced a third time. Inda had explained everything. Evred could just comprehend what Inda saw as a moral imperative . . . and he could comprehend it because . . . swift images flitted through his mind: Taumad’s refusal to make an oath he could not believe in. Jeje sa Jeje’s stubborn hatred of kings because they were human, but could wield inhuman power. The freely given loyalty that Inda never asked for, and others never defined because Inda had become a leader without ever having had ambition.

  Against Inda? The iron-hard Marlovan rule: you obey orders or die.

  Evred turned around, and stared into Inda’s scarred, tired face. The steady gaze, the resignation in the line of his mouth, Evred could feel as viscerally as if he’d been there how terrible the choice had been for Inda, out in the middle of the strait on his pirate ship: choosing between moral right and Marlovan law.

  Between moral right and me.

  Evred whirled away, but he could not outpace that one. If there is a choice, it’s between right and . . .

  Wrong.

  Here was the truth. On his side he had the absolute right of Marlovan law, and the absolute power to enforce it. His people would not rise against his execution of justice, nor would his Sier Danas. Inda would walk to the post and pay the price of treason because he had chosen moral right over all.

  Twisting the knife was the personal betrayal and its result: Inda’s choosing what he saw as moral right over Marlovan law meant that Evred could no longer trust him.

  As he had so many times over the past weeks, he addressed the memory of Tau in his private room at the end of that summer. Am I insane?

  “Go home, Inda.” He did not turn, but gazed sightlessly through the window. “Pack up your things and go home.”

  As soon as the words were out, he wanted to lunge after them, to grab them out of the air again. But then he saw the impact in Inda’s face, and there was no going back.

  He must protect what he had left.

  And so he spoke rapidly, as the ideas came. “You will even go home as Adaluin, because the piece of news I had waiting for you was Branid’s death. It happened just after New Year’s. I’d saved the news so that I could consult you on whether or not Whipstick should be promoted to Adaluin, or you had another man in mind.”

  “Branid? Dead?” Inda repeated witlessly, thinking: I’m to live? I can go home? Tears leaked from his eyes, unheeded.

  Evred turned away from those tears. “You owe me something, I think.”

  “What? Anything I—” Inda stopped, because anything was no longer true. He’d had anything as a choice, there out on the water.

  Evred said dryly, “This next Convocation, you are going to stand up and lie. How many know you threw the locket away?”

  “Only Tau. And Barend. Most didn’t even know I had it. Oh. And Cama—”

  “You may leave Cama to me. You will tell the Jarls that your orders changed and that you signed the treaty in my name. I am going to approve this thing, whatever it says, which means there is no treason, therefore there is no need for war.” Evred picked up the rolled scroll, and cast it down on the desk. “I will write to my mother, and ask her to propagate my agreement through the world. We will leave the strait to itself. Our ships will attend to our shores.”

  Inda wiped his coat sleeve across his eyes.

  Evred walked again, everything falling into place. “Yes, and because there is no more need for war, there is no more need for a Harskialdna. Or for a Harvaldar. I will become Evred-Sieraec, and the Convocation will be, no doubt, relieved to return to five year oaths, except those who have displeased me. I will put my cousin Badger Yvana-Vayir in as Sierandael, and confirm Beaver as Jarl of Yvana-Vayir. Badger has discovered a taste for military command, and we might as well make my experience a custom: future kings, and their Shield Arms, will serve two years at Ala Larkadhe, just like I did, and Badger after me.”

  “So . . . I’m to go home.”

  Home. They both heard it, how Inda said “home,” and for a moment Evred did not see Inda sitting there, cradling his useless right arm, face tight with pain, lined from months of unspoken tension. Memory forced him back to the pass above Ala Larkadhe, strike, smash, the exquisite bliss, so deep, so fierce, watching unleashed strength, grace, skill, hewing Venn warriors into blood-spewing wreckage. The insight, just touched at the moment of release, and fought ever since: Was this, then, the driving desire behind my forefathers? The pleasure of commanding the kill?

  See, Taumad, I am not insane.

  “Go,” Evred said, though anguish made it nearly impossible to speak. But he had once promised justice. Not love nor lust nor ambition would gainsay that promise. He forced himself to speak, though it took all the strength he had remaining. “Go home. Take up your life, Indevan-Adaluin. Of Choraed Elgaer.”

  Evred could not forbear watching hungrily for a sign of regret, but In da’s reaction was, though soundless, too unmistakable for that: release.

  Inda saluted and walked out, leaving Evred alone.

  Tdor waited in the Harskialdna suite, her whole body tight with anxiety, which flared into terror when she saw the tears on Inda’s cheeks.

  “We’re going home.” Inda walked into her arms, and she sobbed in relief as they hugged. Then she felt his head turn. “Where is Signi?”

  “She is gone. She got the call, and she had to leave.”

  He stilled against her. “Is she coming back?”

  “She said she would not.”

  He murmured into Tdor’s hair, “I’ll miss her.”

  “I will, too.” Tdor’s gratitude and affection for Signi poured through her, intensifying her gratitude to have Inda home and safe. She prepared to say more, to even break her promise if Inda should ask about a child, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t, she realized—it would never occur to him. I will tell my daughter, Tdor thought. When she is grown. So instead, “Before she left for Sartor she gave us a precious gift, which she wrote out herself, a book of magic fundamentals.”

  Inda thought of Evred’s recent words, and pursed his lips, then loosened his grip on Tdor.

  She observed his change of expression, and guessed correctly at his thought. “Hadand sent it to Shendan Montredavan-An, where it can stay until such a time as magic studies are acceptable in Iasca Leror. Signi promised to speak on our behalf before the council.”

  Inda noted that she had not said they were not using it, and he thought of women’s secrets, then dismissed the matter with an internal shrug. It was his sister’s affair. He knew she would never do
anything that would harm the kingdom.

  “Show me our son,” Inda said, and together they walked into the nursery and looked down at the napping babe, their fingers intertwined tightly. Then they walked out, and he glanced around with a vague air. “There isn’t much here I want to keep. Most belongs to the king. Can you be ready to leave in the morning?”

  “Watch me.” She grinned.

  For the rest of the day and evening Evred kept busy with constant affairs, but his ears were always on the alert for Inda’s step, for his voice. He found himself pausing in the middle of a task to arrange his words taking Inda back as Sierandael, or even as Harskialdna, whichever one he wanted.

  But when he returned to his rooms shortly before the midnight watch, he found a gold ring sitting on his desk.

  He was still sitting there, turning the ring on his fingers, when Hadand knocked a long time later.

  “I saw your lights burning,” she said.

  He made an effort to gesture welcome.

  She entered softly, but instead of stopping just inside the door, she came around the desk and stood a pace or two out of reach, looking down into his face with those eyes so like Inda’s, yet unlike. He looked away, unable to speak.

  “Did you have to send them to Choraed Elgaer?” she asked softly.

  Evred had meant to keep silence, but the words wrung out of him, “He broke his promise. I can’t get past that.” And in a stronger voice, “He could have stayed. If he asked. But he wants to go home. Home being Choraed Elgaer. Not our home.”