His mother put a gentle hand on his arm. ‘Come, let’s go inside and you can tell us what happened.’
Chancellor Lithor snapped a sharp salute to Ran. ‘Sir, I’ve sent word to the duke’s advisors, garrison marshals, and ministers to meet us in the Blue Room.’
‘Oh,’ Ran said and awkwardly returned the salute. The chancellor didn’t offer him the chance to reply, spinning on his heel and striding through the yawning palace entry.
A long portrait gallery dotted with formal receiving rooms stretched to the central atrium of the palace and a soaring dome of carefully carved stone and glass. Daylight filtered through the panels to illuminate several floors and galleries, and wide hearths lined the walls of each floor, distributing heat through the palace as a heart pumps blood to the limbs.
Ran and his mother followed the chancellor as he turned left along the north wing towards a platform lift. When they were inside, Lithor closed the iron screen across the lift’s entry and pulled three times at a cord hanging from the roof of the lift compartment. The platform began to slowly ascend as a counterweight dropped towards the bowels of the palace on a complex system of pulleys and ropes.
Between the first and third floors, Lithor turned to Ran and lowered his voice. ‘Your Grace, I should warn you. This meeting will be long and difficult. It will be your final chance to withdraw, but you must appoint a delegate to your authority if you do.’
‘I’m sorry, Chancellor; I don’t understand,’ said Ran, frowning.
‘The circumstances here are… unusual. The Imperial Army have never pushed any further into our lands than the Disputed Territory, and if their advance is not halted, someone must be appointed to act in your father’s stead until he returns. The palace and city must move to a heightened state of readiness. As the duke’s heir, you hold his authority in his absence. As we speak, the banner of the Palace Command is replacing the Olseta house standard at the gates.’
Ran’s blood turned to ice at the mention of the Palace Command; a term he’d only ever read about in the endless books Perce forced him to study. It was a power enacted only in the direst of emergencies, when the city faced an extreme threat and the duke was unable to lead his government or the garrison.
Lithor went on in his low, careful tone. ‘This is not the usual state of play, and a far more serious situation than when your father is commanding the army at the front. It is important people see the palace in control, especially if anything, er… happens to the duke. You’re the Palace Commander, by right. However, if you wish to defer the role, then you must do so swiftly and without hesitation.’
A quick glance at his mother told Ranoth everything he needed to know. He’d seen that face many times as a child, and as recently as when his father finally agreed to let him take a command at the front; worry tinged with disappointment. But there was something different now. Something more in how she looked at him. Necessity warred with frustration like a sailor bailing out a boat with a leaky bucket. She did not think him ready, but knew she had little choice but to accept what was about to happen.
He hardened himself against the anxiety creeping up his spine. Now was not the time to allow fear to take over his heart. Now was a time for decision and strength. He’d failed in the Territory. He’d lost the Hill and close to a hundred good soldiers, but he couldn’t turn away from this. The cold reality was that he had to be capable and willing, even if his heart quailed at the responsibility.
‘No, Chancellor. I will not defer.’ Ran lifted his chin and steadied his voice. ‘I accept the Palace Command.’
Chancellor Lithor slapped Ran on the back and it took all his strength not to topple forwards. For all his eagerness to prove his worth, the news stunned him and he held his silence for the remaining journey to the Blue Room. Events were moving at such a pace he hardly had time to grasp one before the next was thrust his way. Lithor opened the screen when the lift arrived at the third floor, bowed to the duchess, and disappeared across the corridor to the Blue Room.
Ran stopped his mother before she could follow.
‘Ma…’ He wanted to ask her opinion, to ask if she thought he was making the right decision, but the words failed to form. All he could see was the concern etched in the lines of her face. ‘I don’t want you to worry…’
For a moment his fingers felt as though they were on fire, then the sensation faded as he squeezed his hand into a fist. He must have sprained his wrist a little at the house of bones.
‘Oh, Ran…’ Merideth let out a long sigh through her nose and gently pressed her hand to his chest just above his heart, covering the Olseta house crest embroidered in thick silver thread on his filthy black tunic. ‘I’m your mother. Worrying about you is my job. And while I have my reservations, there will never be a more opportune moment to prove to these people what you are capable of. You’ll be fine, Ran. You’ve got your father’s blood in your veins; all you need do is remember your lessons.’
Ran took a deep, shaking breath. The idea of commanding his father’s advisors made him significantly queasier than commanding a company of soldiers, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why. He tried to shrug it off as he crossed to the Blue Room, and hoped his confidence would last the day.
*
‘We’ve got no one to send, Lithor!’ Palace Marshal Gregon slammed his fist into the table and glared at the chancellor. ‘If you can find a few thousand men in this city fit enough to wield a sword or bow without killing themselves, then you have my blessing to ride to the Territory and save the day. But mark my words, I’ve scoured these streets down to the gutters, slums, and prisons and there’s no one left. And there’s not nearly enough time to call next year’s divisions back from the villages.’
‘Shall we lock the gates and hope for the best then?’ Lithor countered, arms wide as though inviting the Empire to do their worst.
‘We cannot sacrifice the garrison by sending them to the front,’ the marshal repeated, pushing his dark auburn hair behind his ears to reveal a long scar on his neck. ‘They’ve trained to defend the city, not scamper about in ranks on a field. Put them in streets and alleys, rooftops and plazas and they’re as deadly as mountain lions, but on flat ground they’ll die as quickly as new recruits.’
Two hours of back and forth arguing and shouting had the gathered government ministers and advisors no closer to a plan and succeeded only in grinding the remaining functioning parts of Ran’s tired brain to a pulp. The argument went around and around the same points, never straying far from the kernel at its centre; there simply weren’t enough soldiers in the city to send reinforcements to the front without leaving the capital undefended.
‘Could we survive a siege?’ Ran asked. ‘If they push through Father’s forces and make it as far as the city, could we survive a siege?’
He shifted in his seat and tried to ease the ache in his knotted muscles. He needed a bath and a meal and decent sleep to make any sense of the situation, but none of them seemed likely in the immediate future. This would go on for hours more unless he found a way through the thorny briar of the problem.
Alber Frain, the country’s finance minister, licked the tip of his finger and leafed through the pages of a wide ledger open on the table before him.
‘With the winter stores full and the livestock penned for the season, we’re in a good position. However, if the Empire severs our trade routes to Marlow and Isord, then things become tight. We have enough food to last until spring.’ Frain looked over his wire-rimmed spectacles; his frank, steady gaze dropping the weight of decision squarely on Ran’s shoulders. ‘After that…’
The finance minister’s eyes shifted to Lithor, who nodded.
‘We can’t let them set a siege. Once the snow thins in the Morgen passes, the Woaden will reinforce their supply lines and send fresh troops to the city. Even if we last through the winter, they will break us in the spring.’
At the opposite end of the table the privy secretary, Iiana Frain, listened
carefully to her father and recorded the meeting minutes with a swift hand in a code only the duke’s administrators could decipher. Ran stared into the coils of steam rising from his mug of tea and wished heartily that it was a huge tankard of ale. It was the same tea Perce made for him in his library, assuring him its bitter aftertaste was worth enduring for the focussing effect it had on the mind. Chewing at the inside of his lip, he let their words and warnings sink in, and let the tea do its work.
‘So,’ he began slowly, ‘we can’t ride out to meet them and we can’t let them set a siege. Somehow we have to find the middle ground…’
His weary mind began to turn the problem over, examining it from all sides, rolling it to the light to reveal as many angles as he could. The tea took hold and his mind began to fizz, trawling through memories and snatches of thought to find the solution he needed. It was in there, somewhere; hidden in shadow and obscured by time, but the answer was there. There was a way through all this, a plan caught up in the cobwebs of his fatigue, waiting to reveal itself, he just had to reach in and shake it out of hiding.
Never is a battle won on an unprepared field…
A half-remembered image flickered to life; hazy at the edges, blurred and stuttered. Perce mumbling to himself in a dusty corner of the palace library, warm shafts of summer sun cutting through the shadows to lay across piles of old papers and velvet bound volumes.
‘Never is a battle won on an unprepared field, young Ranoth.’ Perce dropped a long folio of maps in front of Ran, who lifted the cover and sneezed at the dislodged dust. ‘Every fight, every skirmish, every negotiation ever undertaken in the history of Coraidin, was won by he who fixed the field to his advantage.’
‘Negotiations?’ Ran asked, wiping his nose on his sleeve and readying his notebook of bound blank pages. ‘Don’t they usually happen in a hall or a tent somewhere?’ He was only twelve at the time, so Perce gave him some leeway for stupid questions. He was less accommodating now.
‘Ah, they may, but even a war of words must be planned and strategised. Failure to prepare the field for even the most benign confrontation will, without doubt, lead to defeat.’ Perce wagged his finger and settled in a high-back chair with worn red cushions. ‘You tell me, from those battle maps, who won and how they prepared. No supper until it’s done.’
Prepare the field…
A plan, once buried in the shadows of his mind, unfurled in the light of the memory. Suddenly, the blackened fields of the Disputed Territory gained an entirely new purpose. They weren’t empty and ruined because soldiers enjoyed the sport of destruction. They were in such a state because both sides sought to prepare the field of battle to their advantage. Removing trees and houses, digging trenches and foxholes, had warped the ground of the battlefield as the warring forces tried to outwit their enemy and preserve their troops.
Ran sat back and let a knowing smile spread across his lips. Lithor frowned and Iiana prepared her nib, poised ready for the word of the newly minted palace commander.
‘We have no choice but to prepare for the worst with what resources we have,’ he told the gathering. ‘We’ve got troops trained to fight in the city but we can’t wait for the Woaden to breach the walls before we mount a defence. We need to take the fight to them, but we can’t send the garrison soldiers to the front. We have to find a middle ground, somewhere that allows our forces to do what they know best without risking the city.’
Across the room, his mother sat sewing by the fire, the twin of his smile dancing on her lips.
He continued on as Lithor and Gregon shared a glance and their eyes widened with understanding. ‘We need to prepare the field to advantage our troops and cripple theirs. We need to cut the field. We have a little time and a city of citizens to help. We might just be able to do it, if we start now.’
Chapter Eight
Hummel, Tolak Range, the South Lands
The squeal of children and the thump of running feet reached Lidan across the cold morning and the sound of excited birds in the trees. The trees didn’t seem to mind the cold lingering in the shadows of the common, hardy branches that were waving bright yellow and red cage blossoms at the sky in defiance of the dry season and the plummeting temperatures.
‘They should be back by now…’ Lidan said to Master Rick as he emerged from the back of the forge with a barrow of tin ore. In the neighbouring workshop, potters worked lumps of clay into urns and bowls for firing in an earthen kiln, while Lidan practiced her symbols without her father’s guidance.
‘Hunts take time, First Daughter. They’ll return when they’re ready.’
While the frigid cold of the dry season closed around Hummel like an eagle’s talons, a turning of the moon had come and gone, and Erlon’s hunt party still hadn’t returned. Scouts came back to the village each evening, shaking their heads with deepening frowns and shrugged shoulders, and after two weeks the stocky gateman, Jac, doubled the watch on the wall on the dana’s order. It made Lidan begin to wonder if something was wrong, but no one seemed willing to speak of it.
She sat by the forge fire wrapped tight in a shawl, unable to concentrate, watching the tine-women hang damp clothing in the lazy wind blowing down from the snowy high country. Built from plans traded by a north-man, the forge made metal not seen south of the Malapa. Rick called it bronze and said in the south the two ores needed were as rare as hen’s teeth. The castings didn’t always work, but the forge master had managed to find enough to make knives for the rangers and a huge axe for the daari.
Lidan liked to watch the rock turn to liquid then pour like thick, glowing water into the moulds, certain as the sun shone that Rick worked magic, not metal, in those flames. On bad days, when the moulds cracked and the casting failed, Rick cursed the earth and kicked his workbench, muttering about what he’d give for a few barrows of iron instead of tin and copper.
Iron was some northern thing, a secret her people had yet to unravel from the earth, even with Rick’s help, and the only iron Lidan had ever seen was in the sword above her father’s audience chair. The forge was the undoubted envy of the other South Lands clans, unrivalled, and its workings a mystery to them. Even if the other clans discovered an ore deposit, they wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do with it. The Tolak rangers’ arrows were still tipped with flint, despite the arrival of the metal-working magic, which kept the knappers busy in the training yard; Rick unwilling to waste ore on a weapon so easily lost.
While she laboured at her symbols, four of her sisters played in the kitchen garden. Iscah and Hanne were digging holes in places they probably shouldn’t, uncovering bugs and earthworms from deep in the soil where moisture could still be found. Beside them, Cerise squealed and Abbi cackled, throwing a worm that dared wriggle too enthusiastically against her fingers. A craw swooped and snatched the worm mid-air, not fool enough to miss a free meal.
‘Have you taken that horse out yet?’ Rick asked, inspecting the length of a ranger’s knife blade and preparing to sharpen and polish it.
Lidan rolled her eyes. ‘Not a chance… Mam won’t hear of it.’ She’d done nothing but feed and brush Theus since her father left and she felt sure if she brushed him anymore his hair would fall out completely and she’d rub his skin raw. ‘I’d break my own fingers to get out of weaving another basket.’
‘So, you’re hiding here with us?’ Rick’s brow rose and she shrugged with a smile.
‘You’re the only ones who’ll have me. The knappers say I get under their feet!’
‘Where is everyone today?’ Behn dumped an armload of clean tools on his master’s workbench and wiped sweat away with a sooty hand. The only apprentice of five boys to last more than a year working by the furnace, Behn never complained about the heat. Lidan was fairly sure he enjoyed the sweltering forge and its smoky shed, even in the humidity of summer.
‘Farah isn’t well,’ Lidan nodded at the living quarters at the back of the hall. ‘All the women are seeing to her and the children. Even Mam has to
muck in and help.’
‘What kind of sick?’ He waved his hand as if to mimic vomiting and Lidan nodded, scrunching her nose. Their quarters stank of bile, hence her perch beside the forge, well away from the stink and risk of being corralled into chores. ‘Ugh, yuck…’
‘I know… I was trying to eat my breakfast—’
‘Open the gate!’ A gateman on the wall shouted. ‘Damn it, get the gate!’
Lidan’s words vanished and her mouth ran dry at the audible alarm in Jac’s voice. She found her feet as Rick took off, rushing to help the people swarming into the common from inside huts and pens. Together they lent their shoulders to lifting the locking beam faster than the winches could shift it and women rushed to string bows and nock arrows, snatching spears and waving for anyone untrained to seek shelter indoors.
The gate groaned open and Lidan’s knees buckled at what she saw on the other side.
By some blessing of the ancestors, Behn caught her before she hit the ground, then ran after Rick. She wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t crossed her line of sight. Her senses were completely overwhelmed by the blood. It was dry and dark, caked on torn cloth and ruined leather armour, clumped in hair and around festering wounds. It was everywhere, and under it all, her father hung limp from Titon’s saddle.
‘No…’ A watery veil of tears blurred her vision.
Titon came through the gate and waited on shivering legs. His foam-flecked flanks and frothing mouth vanished behind a wall of shoulders and Lidan lost sight of her father as he slipped from the saddle to the waiting arms of those rushing to help. Her eyes flicked to the gate behind him and the rangers following on their worn horses. Siman rode among them, his arm strapped against his chest and a man sat behind him sharing the saddle. Their horse staggered and collapsed and the common erupted into panic.
Blood of Heirs Page 7
