The Broken Throne

by Christopher Nuttall

  “You summoned me,” Emily said, disdainfully. One did not summon one’s social superiors, as if they were common-born servants. It simply wasn’t done. “Is there a reason you summoned me?”

  “Yes, My Lady,” Hansel said. “Please, be seated.”

  Emily sat down in one of the sinfully comfortable chairs, making sure not to take her eyes off him. She’d taken him by surprise, even though he’d summoned her. Had he thought she’d ignore the summons? Or wait outside? Cat would have kicked the door down within seconds of being made to wait and she would be surprised if he didn’t realize it. Did he think her reputation was something she’d acquired through luck?

  I was just walking along the corridor and a necromancer fell dead in front of me, she thought, with a flicker of amusement. And I was minding my own business in Farrakhan when another necromancer just happened to give me the keys to an old school and then cut both of his throats.

  Hansel took a long breath. “Why did you offer so much to those... those peasants?”

  “Technically, I didn’t,” Emily said. “Alassa offered them the Great Charter, as you well know. I merely followed orders.”

  His face darkened. Following orders from one’s superior, no matter what the orders actually were, was a perfectly legitimate excuse on the Nameless World. A man could do anything and be forgiven, as long as he was following orders. And Emily was technically following orders too.

  “You didn’t have to give them the Great Charter,” Hansel said, finally. “And you...”

  “They already know about the Great Charter,” Emily said. “I saw copies in one of your bookstores.”

  “Which bookstore?” Hansel leaned forward, angrily. “All new papers and broadsheets are to be cleared by my people before they’re distributed.”

  Emily ignored him. “If we had not shown them the Great Charter,” she said, in a reasonable tone, “they would have wondered why. It would not have taken them long to decide that we were planning to cheat them out of the rights and benefits they would enjoy under the charter, which would tip them against us. There’s no way we could have hidden it from them.”

  “My censors have powers...”

  “It’s too late,” Emily said. “Even if you shut down all the printing presses within the city, even if you issue harsh punishments for anyone caught with so much as a scrap of paper, you’re not going to keep word from spreading. They knew about the Great Charter before we met them, Viscount. There was nothing to be gained by trying to short-change them.”

  She smiled, feeling her patience starting to snap. “And there is no one in this city who will fight for you without being paid to do it. Is there?”

  Hansel’s face purpled. “If you were a man,” he hissed, “I would kill you for saying that.”

  Emily cocked her head, silently readying a spell. “For telling you the truth? That might explain why you got into such a mess.”

  She half-expected him to throw himself at her, right into the teeth of a killing spell, but instead he calmed himself with startling speed. It was impressive, so impressive that Emily wondered if he’d pretended to lose control. Sergeant Miles had taught her that it was sometimes important to pretend to lose one’s temper before one actually did.

  “They’re my people,” Hansel said, finally. “I’m their lord!”

  “And you have long since lost their loyalty,” Emily said, sharply. “You have to make some concessions now” – she kept the thought that it was too late to make concessions to herself – “to save everything else.”

  She met his eyes. “How long can you keep paying your mercenaries? And how long are they going to stay here when Randor is offering two or three times the asking price for mercenaries who will go and fight for him? They don’t have to take your money, do they?”

  Hansel said nothing. Emily suspected she was merely putting into words something he’d known for months.

  “And they might not want to stay with you once they realize just how bad it’s going to be,” she added. “The advantages of training and discipline are minimized in a city, particularly one their enemies will know far better than themselves. Mercenaries are a highly-practical breed. They won’t commit themselves to a desperate last stand. We didn’t see any of them in Farrakhan, did we? There’s no money in fighting necromancers.”

  “They won’t fight again if they abandon me,” Hansel said, with the air of a man clutching at straws. “I’ll...”

  “... Complain to the guilds?” Emily laughed, harshly. “If you survive long enough to make a complaint, the guilds will probably lose the paperwork somewhere. And it strikes me that anyone who wants to gamble on you not surviving would be making a pretty safe bet.”

  She shook her head. “Make some concessions now, Viscount. Pledge to uphold the Great Charter. Do... do whatever you can to bring more food into the city and see to it that it gets distributed. Give up some power now or lose everything when your people rise up against you.”

  “I have a duty to pass my lands to my son,” Hansel said. “I cannot...”

  Emily frowned. She’d never had the impression that Hansel was married, let alone that he had children. She certainly should have been introduced to the viscount’s wife, if indeed she actually existed. “Do you even have a son?”

  “No,” Hansel said. “But I must. One day.”

  Assuming you live so long, Emily thought. You might not see out the end of the year.

  She would have been sorry for him, if he hadn’t been a giant pain in the neck – and the system itself thoroughly screwed up. Hansel was in a tricky position: high-ranking enough to require a bride from the aristocracy, low-ranking enough to make the aristocrats reluctant to offer him their daughters. A common-born wife would never be accepted by the aristocrats, her children treated as de facto bastards even if their parents had been married. And Tobias had it even worse. She wondered, idly, who would inherit if both brothers were dead. She had no doubt that Hansel knew his heirs all too well.

  “You don’t have a choice,” she said. “Like I said, give up some power now or lose everything.”

  Emily stood. “And you swore an oath to Her Highness,” she added. “Do you really want to become known as an oathbreaker?”

  She swept out of the office before Hansel could formulate a reply, marvelling at herself. Had she been channelling Lady Barb? Walking straight into an office, taking a seat, forcing someone to discuss something openly with her... it was very like Lady Barb and nothing at all like Emily. Or, perhaps, nothing like the person she’d been. She was an adult now. She couldn’t afford to let herself fade into the background.

  Even though I want to fade into the background at times, she thought. There were definite advantages in being underestimated. If I could go back to Whitehall and stay there...

  She sobered as she walked down the stairs. She’d been in no real danger. Hansel would have had to be completely insane to take a swing at her, even if she hadn’t had magic to protect her. Killing an ambassador was a declaration of war, war without any rules. Alassa would be quite within her rights to burn Eagle’s Rest to the ground to avenge her representative. And Emily wouldn’t have been killed. Indeed, removing Hansel – and his brother – could hardly have made things worse.

  Perhaps we should, she thought, morbidly. We wouldn’t have to kill them. We could just turn them into statues or... or something until the war was over.

  Cat opened his door as she approached. “Emily? What happened?”

  Emily ignored propriety and walked into Cat’s suite. It was, incredibly, larger than hers, one wall dominated by a strikingly erotic painting. She took a look at the handful of figures performing acts that one would need to be a contortionist to perform, then looked away. Cat might be perfectly happy with that on his wall, but she had more refined tastes.

  “We talked,” she said, dryly. She tested the wards, then outlined everything they’d said. “Do you think he was planning to cheat them?”

  “Probably,”
Cat said. “Our friend is not the nicest of people. And even the nicest of people can get very... grasping... when there is so much at stake. It’s certainly hard to accept that the world is changing and your place in it might be going down.”

  “It is,” Emily said, flatly.

  “Quite,” Cat said. “There were a handful of families – magical families – who resisted the urge to invite newborn magicians to join them. They saw their presence as a threat.”

  Emily’s eyes narrowed. It was the first she’d heard of that. “What happened?”

  “Their magic slowly dwindled,” Cat said. “They knew it was happening. And yet, it was years before they conceded their mistake and reversed course. They were so terrified of losing what they had that they came very close to losing it anyway.”

  “Hansel isn’t a magician,” Emily said.

  “Perhaps not,” Cat agreed. “But tell me... what would he be, here and now, without a title?”

  “A drunkard,” Emily said. “No, it would be worse than that. He’d have had his throat cut by now.”

  “Exactly,” Cat said. “If you were stripped of your title tomorrow, so what? You’d still be a magician, you’d still be a genius inventor, you’d still have a place in the world. People would still like you and respect you. Hansel? Not so much. Some people cling to their ranks, Emily, because they’re all they have.”

  “I know,” Emily said, crossly. “Cat... what happens if we need to remove him?”

  “Then we do it,” Cat said. “But we should wait until the Levellers have an army. Right now, the last thing we need is another civil war.”

  “Within the civil war we already have,” Emily said. “That would be very bad.”

  “Yeah,” Cat agreed. He gave her a hug. “And Alassa’s army won’t be here for weeks.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “WELL,” CAT SAID. “THEY’RE NOT TRAINED, as such, but they are keen.”

  Emily nodded as they watched the Levellers go through their training. She’d expected Hansel to try to find a way to make it difficult, or slow it down, but he’d done nothing to make their lives harder. Instead, she’d barely seen him over the last week. Tobias had been ever-present, watching calmly as the Levellers slowly started to turn into an army, but his brother had been absent. It made Emily wonder what he was planning.

  She allowed her gaze to wander over the young men as they were put through their paces. It was a very mixed army, apprentices and runaway serfs mingling with the sons of merchants and even a handful of very minor aristocrats. The shortage of firearms meant that they had to practice with brooms and sticks rather than muskets and flintlocks, although more weapons were arriving every day, but they were taking it seriously. Sergeant Rotherham seemed to be having the time of his life.

  “They’re very keen,” she agreed. “And they think they’re ready to fight.”

  Cat snorted. “It will take time. I’d be surprised if we managed to get them ready before Lord Burrows moves against us.”

  Emily sucked in her breath. There was no hope of concealing the preparations from Lord Burrows. There had to be spies in Eagle’s Rest. She’d wanted to close the gates, to keep people from leaving the city, but it would have condemned much of the population to starvation. People kept moving in and out of the gates... and some of them, she was sure, were carrying word directly to Winter Flower. She was surprised Lord Burrows hadn’t done anything yet.

  Maybe he’s hedging his bets, Emily thought, although she doubted it. Randor was a good judge of character. He wouldn’t have given such a wealthy and powerful heiress to a man he didn’t trust completely. Or maybe he’s building up troops of his own.

  She put the thought aside as she heard women cheering on the men. Like Swanhaven, like Cockatrice, the local women had come out to encourage the trainees... and shame any man who refused to join. It had led to more than a few nasty fights, Emily had heard; farmers and craftsmen had been forbidden to join the army, which meant they were lambasted as cowards and openly mocked in the streets. Nothing, not even public speeches from the army’s leaders, seemed to be enough to put a stop to it. She was starting to understand how a society could start falling down the slippery slope to war.

  “They’ll have some fun tonight,” Cat predicted, as the training session came to an end. The trainees grabbed food and water, taking a quick break before moving on to the next training session. “I wonder how many marriages will come out of it.”

  Emily felt cold. “I wonder how many children will never know their fathers.”

  She nodded to Cat, then strode off towards the walls. It was astonishing how much the city’s attitude had changed over the last few days, now that the Levellers were out in the open and the mercenaries were keeping their distance. The townspeople seemed united by a desire to fight for their city – and for their rights. Copies of the Great Charter had been posted everywhere and men and women were reading them eagerly, the slower readers parsing out the words one by one. Eagle’s Rest was looking forward to the days after the war, no matter what its aristocratic rulers said. They’d be powerless and they knew it.

  Unless they decide to go into trade, Emily thought. Who knows? They might make a fortune.

  She snorted to herself at the thought. Aristocrats disliked the thought of sullying their delicate hands with trade, which explained why so many noblemen had hovered around King Randor’s court rather than doing anything useful, but Hansel and his fellows would have no choice. Alassa was already planning a cull of noblemen on the civil list, assuming any of the real parasites survived the civil war. Randor had been putting his impoverished noblemen on the front lines, offering them a chance to earn lands and wealth of their own... if they survived. Emily had the feeling that Randor, too, was quietly hoping that most of them would die. They’d been nothing more than a burden on the kingdom for too long.

  And many of the others joined the Noblest, Emily reminded herself. They won’t survive, one way or the other.

  She stopped at the inner wall and studied the barricade. Hundreds of men swarmed over the wall, doing everything in their power to make it stronger. Sergeant Rotherham had given them a lot of good advice, but he’d made it clear that there was little they could do to strengthen the wall against cannons – or magic. Emily knew she could blast a hole in the wall without resorting to anything particularly unusual. Randor’s mages would have no trouble taking the wall down themselves. But, just inside the walls, the outer edge of the city was being turned into a nightmare of strongpoints and booby-traps. The enemy would have real problems if they were forced to storm the city.

  It depends on how patient they feel like being, Emily thought. And how seriously they take a half-ready army.

  She recalled the laws of war that Sergeant Miles had beaten into her head. Technically, a city – or a castle – could be surrounded, then the defendants given a certain amount of time to wait for an outside force to lift the siege. If they weren’t relieved by the deadline, honor would be satisfied and they could surrender gracefully; if they refused to surrender, the attacker would be within his legal rights to storm the city and put everyone inside to the sword. But would Lord Burrows offer such consideration to the Levellers? Or would the Levellers be well-advised to dig in and fight to the death, knowing they’d be executed anyway if they tried to surrender? Emily barely knew Lord Burrows, but she knew Randor. Alassa’s father wouldn’t feel inclined to honor any deals made with rebellious peasants.

  “Alassa will get here in time,” she reassured herself. “And then we can move on to Winter Flower.”

  She moved from place to place, inspecting the preparations. It was astonishing just how many people were working to improve the defenses and prepare for war. Young women were sewing uniforms for the army, while older women were carefully salting and preserving meat and fish for the hard days to come; a handful of magicians, sitting in one room, were practicing spells over and over again until they could cast them perfectly. They wouldn’t be able
to stand up to a combat sorcerer, Emily knew, but they might give the attackers a nasty fright. She’d already taught them a handful of spells that would catch most magicians unawares.

  Gus was making a speech to a crowd of workers on the main street, only a few hundred meters from the manor itself. Emily stopped to listen, wrapping a glamour around herself to keep from being recognized. It was a fairly long-winded speech – she was starting to suspect that Gus liked the sound of his own voice – covering everything from the rights of man to the brave new world that would be born after the war. He said nothing about the rights of women, Emily noted; it would take a long time, even after the war, for women to attain equal rights. But the Great Charter was a step in the right direction.

  Women will hold property and money and they will be able to inherit, Emily thought. And that will change their lives.

  A handful of mercenaries ambled out of a pub, looking extremely drunk. One of them was being held upright by a prostitute, who had an expression on her face that suggested she’d seen it all before. Emily would have smiled at their desperate attempt to march in formation if she hadn’t known just how dangerous a drunkard with a sword could be. Sergeant Miles would have sentenced the men to run the gauntlet, if they managed to make it back to the camp. Getting drunk was bad enough, although understandable; getting drunk in enemy territory was far worse.

  Emily braced herself as the crowd slowly started to turn towards the mercenaries. The prostitute took one look, then shoved her charge towards the nearest mercenary and fled back to the pub. Emily felt a flicker of sympathy for the elder woman. She’d be tarred and feathered for sleeping with the enemy, yet what else could she do? It wasn’t as if she had any other choice but to sell her body in order to survive. The sense of violence grew stronger and stronger, the crowd muttering angrily...

  “They will leave our city, after the war,” Gus said, quickly. “Let them go sober up in peace.”

  Emily blinked in surprise as the crowd turned back to its leader. It seemed to be working! Gus spoke calmly but firmly, outlining the promise of the future. The angry muttering quietened down, just for the moment. Emily mentally saluted Gus, then turned and walked away. She needed to meet up with Cat before they returned to the manor for dinner. The taller buildings closed in around her as she walked down the alleyway. It was surprisingly clean and empty.