Leodan suspected that Sire Dagon would soon come to him with proposals for a series of measures they could use to weaken Aushenia. They could smuggle more mist across their borders. They could send agents to foment intrigue or to entrap key persons into shameful scandals or remove them by innocent-looking means: an unfortunate accident, a fever, one ailment disguised to look like another. Leodan felt his hands trembling at the thought of it. His nation had used such tactics in the past. They would be proposed again.
Unless…What if he managed to bring Aushenia into the empire quickly? What if he secured them as an ally in a plot of his own? What if he received them as a partner to aid him in revoking the Quota, in wresting power back from the league, in breaking the ties with the Lothan Aklun? It might mean war on several fronts—first against the league and the conservative forces of the council and then, perhaps, against the Lothan Aklun, if they made good their centuries-old threats—but there might never be another moment of such opportunity in his lifetime.
There in the library, book in one hand and tea in the other, Leodan pledged that he would meet in a private council with Aliver and Igguldan. He would tell them both everything he knew of the crimes of the empire. At the same time he revealed these things to his son, he would ask him to be a partner in overturning them. He would give Igguldan a chance of achieving the dream of his long-dead queen Elena. If now was not a moment of change, when would be? A man cannot wait indefinitely to awake as the person he believes himself to be.
Leodan heard a servant enter the library through the far door. Without turning, the king followed his progress through the shelves of books, down a short staircase, between the reading tables there, and then up toward the alcove in which he sat, coming to stand a little distance away. The man spoke in almost a whisper. The time for the banquet was near. The king’s tailor awaited him, should he wish to have his evening’s garment fit to form. Leodan pressed the book to his chest and followed the servant.
For the next hour a team of men worked around him. His tailor had him raise his arms out to either side. Leodan stood with drooping wings of fabric hanging from his arms. As with all such occasions, the king had to dress in a particular garment, with even the smallest details in keeping with tradition. Acacian kings always hosted Aushenian dignitaries wearing a flowing green coat, with intricate gold thread woven through the material below either arm. The garment was meant to produce several different, eye-pleasing images. Viewed from the front with arms outstretched it created a mural of the marshlands of central Aushenia, the home of several varieties of migrating long-necked waterfowl and the inspiration for much of the nation’s early poetic lore, including their legend of Kralith, a god in the shape of a white crane, born out of the marsh’s primordial muck. However, with elbows brought in to his sides and hands clasped together at his breastbone, the exposed material falling from the forearms contained illustrations of Acacian soldiers in armor, striding forward in heroic postures. It managed, through the careful placement of national symbols, to suggest to the viewer that no matter the acknowledgment of another nation’s history Acacia still had the breadth of reach to surround it all in one embrace.
The double doors at the far end of the chamber swung open with a slam. Mena and Dariel poured through the opening, one at each door, a contest they had been at for a few weeks now, testing which of them had the stronger push. Just behind them Corinn strolled through, garbed in her evening’s finery. Aliver and Thaddeus entered last, engaged in a conversation. Seeing his children rush toward him—each of them of differing sizes with varying temperaments, bits and pieces of Aleera revealed in random features and gestures—the king was flushed with joy. He tried not to think of how and why similar joy had been denied Thaddeus. He would admit it to him one day, he promised himself. One day.
He had to raise his arms above Mena’s hug, tight around his waist. He rolled his eyes at the tailor but did not dissuade her. Corinn, with paper-thin composure, kissed him lightly on the cheek.
“Father, it’s snowing!” Dariel said, his face open with childish excitement. “It’s snowing right outside! Have you seen? Can we go out in it? Come with us. Can’t you? I’ll beat you at snowball fighting.” This last he cast as something of a threat, head cocked, one finger pointed at his father in warning.
There followed the sort of exchange he so often stood in awe of, observing from the vantage point of his age, from the privilege of his position not as monarch but simply as a father. Dariel jumped as if his legs were composed of springs, calling on every persuasive tool he had mastered in nine years of life. Aliver explained that the king did not have time to play in the snow. He was the heir being mature again, instructing, bearing himself with a regal posture he must have modeled on the bust of the kings in the Great Room. Behind this Corinn snapped something about the banquet they—the adults—were about to attend. In all of this he heard her ambition, the tone of voice that set her apart from the younger children but that at the same time had something of a girlish beseeching directed at her father. And Mena stood back enough to listen to them all. She glanced through the moving mass of childish energy and smiled at him. When she did that, he saw Aleera in her, not so much in the shape of her features but in the patient, knowing mirth behind her eyes.
“Dariel is right,” Leodan said. “This is a special night. Let’s do as he asks. We will run across the rooftops and wage war with snowballs. All of us. We’ll war by torchlight. And then we will huddle together in a single room. We sleep too far away from each other, anyway. These old buildings are vast. They break us apart. Do not look like that, Aliver. You can spare a few moments for your old father. Pretend you are still my young boy. Pretend you want nothing more than my love and to be near me and to hear me tell stories late into the night. Soon you and I will speak of graver things, but let me have tonight.”
“All right,” Aliver said, speaking over Dariel’s delighted cries. “But expect no mercy from me. Before the night is over I will be crowned Snow King.”
“I will see to tonight’s banquet briefly,” Leodan said. Corinn seemed on the verge of protesting, but the king smiled at her. “Not too briefly. I will slip out after the third course is served. They will barely miss me, and then we will have our war.”
Chapter Fourteen
Thasren Mein stood for some time in the street, feeling snowflakes light upon his skin and melt. How fine it was to feel snow kissing his upturned face. It was beautiful, righteous, and—in this land—remarkably strange to behold. The night air was just barely cold enough to snow, so very still, sounds muffled, footfalls of passersby pressing flat the moist layer of ice crystals; in all of these things this was a very different experience from a storm on the Mein Plateau. Still, the message and significance of it was easy to read: it was a blessing from home, encouragement sent by the Tunishnevre to remind him that the thing he did now he did for many. Snow fell on Acacia; so the coming change was marked by the heavens.
By the time he mounted the last staircase and approached the banquet hall across a stone courtyard, the other guests were already entering. He touched the wig with his fingers, noting the placement of the pins that fastened it in place. His garments were in order, his cloak one of the ambassador’s finest. There was a time, he knew, early in the Acacians’ rule when no one got nearer the king than a hundred paces, when the royals looked down upon social gatherings from a distance, like spectators at a play. They stayed safe behind a barricade of Marah guards, soldiers with swords drawn, each of them on one bent knee, dressed and dusted with bronze to take on the appearance of statues, ready to spring to life should a threat appear. They, he had been told, were trained as much in observation of body motions and demeanor as they were in martial arts. But that was long ago. Luxury cannot help but make a people soft, forgetful. It was a very different banquet he entered on this occasion, one that those first kings would hardly have recognized.
He nodded to the guards at the door. They greeted him by the ambassador’s
name, no hint of suspicion behind their smiles. As Gurnal had told him, he had to walk through a long reception chamber to reach his goal. Both walls were hung with paintings of the early Acacians. Closer still stood statues of men he presumed to be kings. Behind the shoulders of these, soldiers shadowed them in similarly formal postures, arms tight to their bodies, hands crossed over the hilts of their swords. The soldiers were as still as the inanimate personages they protected. At the far entrance to the hall a few men congregated—the official host and his guards. Thasren walked, knowing that each stride was observed, each motion of his hands, his demeanor, his features. He had cut a slit inside his vest, a passageway to the weapon fastened there. He had to say a calming prayer to keep his fingers from twitching, so keen were they to find the hilt and puncture the first throat that voiced a complaint to him.
At the opening to the hall the chief Marah guard smiled in greeting, blocking entry in a gracious manner with two soldiers at either wing, these not inclined to smile. Beyond them, Thasren saw a room lit by hundreds of lamps, crowded with people; the air a clamor of voices and the music of stringed instruments, fragrant with the evening’s rich fare. The Marah touched him in two places, one hand on his shoulder and another on his opposite hip. He greeted Thasren by Gurnal’s name, asked him if the weather suited him, but as he did this he looked past him to the guards of the outer chamber. He spoke with his eyes, with a thrust of his chin, telling them that with the last guest inside they could seal the outside doors. He turned his attention back to the man within his embrace, who—despite what passed for calm—was coiled and ready to spring, to cut a path of chaos from this point forward if it were necessary.
Before the guard began the probing hug that would have cost him his life, a horn blast sounded at the far side of the hall. It was a loud note, followed by a milder tune, which the strings picked up on. The officer said something merrily, patted him, a cursory dance of his fingers that didn’t touch upon his weapon. He motioned Thasren inside.
With this, the greatest hurdle blocking his success was already behind him. Now he had just to sit through the opening moments of the banquet. He watched the king emerge, his entourage all around him, his son and daughter, the Aushenian prince, the chancellor Thaddeus Clegg, the guards that flanked them all. Though the party was called intimate there were perhaps a hundred people in the room, many of them between him and the monarch. For the first few moments he did not move at all. He felt his pores blooming with moisture, but he tried to think himself calm, to breathe slow breaths. He stilled his mind and focused, as he had been taught to do. He had to create the moment of his prey’s death, had to bring together myriad moving forces in the world and pierce through them all like an arrow shot through rings thrown in the air. He registered the various players in the room: how they carried themselves, what they looked at, in what proximity they were to the king and behind what boundaries.
When he moved he did so as part of an inhalation in the crowd, others being drawn with him toward the royal person. He sidestepped twice, jostled his way to open territory, and from there saw the moment he needed. Leodan answered a greeting thrown from the crowd. He sought out the man in question with his eyes, and then strode forward, the smile on his face suggesting recognition of an old friend. The king slipped between two tables and momentarily placed his guards single-file behind him. Leodan’s arms came up to embrace the other man, the birds on the wings of his garment rippling as he did so.
Thasren drew his dagger from hiding. He sliced it diagonally away from his body, a movement so fast it drew many eyes. The blade reflected shards of lamplight, a sharp thing in a hand that should bear no sharp thing. He dashed the last few steps forward. The king’s eyes turned toward him, puzzled, mouth puckered as if about to pronounce the ambassador’s name. Thasren tilted the curved blade of his dagger to puncture the man through the left eye socket. This he would have accomplished had not one of the guards bounded up onto the tabletop, his sword cutting upward aiming to slice off the attacker’s hand mid-wrist. Thasren snapped his arm at the elbow and the guard’s sword missed him. During the moment the man was off balance, Thasren swung around with his free hand and yanked him into the air by one ankle. He angled the falling man’s body in such a way that he flew back onto the other guard, knocking loose his drawn blade.
The king’s friend stood in front of the monarch, protective and gape mouthed in fear at the same time. Thasren high stepped and slammed his heel into the man’s knee at an angle. His body swiftly crumpled to the ground. Another guard came at him from the left, sword lifted. Thasren thrust his dagger in the air, a punching motion. When the guard raised his weapon to parry whatever odd attack this presaged, Thasren spun into a squat. He rotated one full time and slammed the butt of his dagger’s hilt into the soft spot below the man’s armpit, the barbed spike of it more than an inch inside his flesh. He yanked down and carved a jagged gash that pulled free only when it broke through his navel.
He heard a high-pitched voice yelling—the king’s son, he realized. Whatever command the young man gave went unacknowledged. Thasren still had not used the blade of his dagger, but he did so now. In the brief moment before anyone else could attack him he stepped the last few strides to the retreating king. Watching his stunned face, he stabbed him through the upper left chest, right through the eye of one of the embroidered Aushenian cranes. It looked little more than a fencing move. As such it drew a small spot of blood, covered over almost immediately by the king’s palm. And that was it, done. Easier, actually, than Thasren had imagined it would be.
He stopped all aggressive maneuvers. He pulled himself upright, out of his fighting posture. He stood still within the center of the ring of bodies surrounding him, the wounded and living both, a bristle of sword points aimed at him now. In a matter of seconds the Elite had surrounded him. They would have killed him that instant, but there was nothing like unexpected passivity to confuse overtrained soldiers. They paused when he did, and Thasren had time to glance around. He settled his gaze on the king, who was now pressed against the wall behind a barricade of guards. Looking directly at the monarch, he named himself in his language, speaking as if he were the character in a legend of old. He said that he was Thasren Mein, son of Heberen, younger brother to Hanish and Maeander. He said that he died with joy in his heart, for he had done a just deed. He had slain the despot of Acacia. This was a blameless act, long overdue. Because of that he wished nothing more for his own life.
“Many will praise me,” he said, speaking these words in heavily accented Acacian. “Many will praise and follow me.”
He pressed the curved tip of his dagger against his neck and yanked the blade clean through his main artery. A moment later he lay on the smooth stones, taking in a skewed view of a world in chaos. His body crumpled in such a way that the pumping of his heart shot gouts of blood into the air above him, coating his face and chest with a mist of red. Blinking, he peered through this curtain. The king was hurried from the room at the center of a mass of men, like workers around a queen bee. They ushered him out of the chamber, supported between them in a half-seated position, their hands all over him, some holding their palms against his bloody chest. For a few seconds when the sightline between them cleared, Thasren saw the oval of the king’s mouth. Pain shivered across his cheeks. His eyes were two bewildered questions, full of dread.
Watching this, Thasren thought of his eldest brother and wished he had beheld this deed, hoped that the tale he eventually heard of it would make him proud. He felt a voracious emptiness eating up his body, extinguishing him inch by inch. He whispered it through the blood in his mouth, a taste like liquid metal. He felt possessed by awe. He had accomplished at least one great act in his life. With it behind him, he felt no fear. He had unleashed a great deal of it, but he himself went to the afterdeath without fear, as a soldier of a righteous cause always should. Before fading from consciousness he began to recite the Prayer of Joining, the praise song of the Tunishnevre.
> Chapter Fifteen
Mena would never again be able to look at the eight-sided dice of the children’s game called rats running without feeling sick to her stomach. It was this game that she and her younger brother had been engaged in at the moment Leodan was attacked. Dariel had feared that their father might not honor his promise to entertain them after the dinner, and the princess had agreed to sit near the door with him so that they could pounce on the king as soon as he was free. They tipped the dice from their palms, watching time and again as the green glass octahedrons rolled to stillness, nestled into their bench’s silk contours. Mena did not particularly care for the game, nor see the point in being so involved with a simple act of chance, but she did enjoy the feel of the dice bouncing around within her loosely clasped fist. She often shook the dice long enough that Dariel grew impatient with her.
It happened no more than a few moments after the great doors had been closed. Mena had half registered the muffled sound of commotion inside the hall, but she jolted when the doors burst open again in one great thrust. They swung fully around and banged hard against the stone wall. Mena’s hand, which had been about to toss the dice, jerked so that she spilled them on the floor. For a moment she watched one of them roll across the carpet, feeling embarrassed and ready to spring up and retrieve it. But then she saw the huddle of men press through the door. They were close together, bent around a burden, their legs shuffling and awkward as they tried to speed along, one shouting to another and all in confusion. A voice rose above them yelling to make way for the king, make way for the stricken king! Mena had not yet fully registered the words when she realized that the burden they carried was a man. Her father…
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