Time for me to teach by example. I march up directly behind Silon, spread my feet, and drop into a perfect parade rest. To restore symmetry, there’s only one place left for Wen to go—directly behind the commodore.
Under the thunder of the welcoming drums, I hear the slight whistle of her sighing between her teeth. But Wen steps into place, making it look as deliberate as possible, even though she doesn’t spare me a consternated sidelong glare.
She’ll thank me later. The commodore needs to see that this mistake doesn’t rattle Wen, and the easiest way to show she’s still got her fire is to keep making bold choices like this. Wen can’t shrink to the back of the line—she can’t afford to. If one mistake knocks her off the game, it’s clear she’s not cut out for this kind of work.
I don’t realize my mistake until the general’s already at the top of the ramp.
Maxo Iral cuts a striking figure. I’ve always thought the Archon general was either lifted from the pages of a storybook or grown in a lab to meet the exact mental image one conjures when told of a great general. He’s built tall and broad, his skin a rich olive tone and his long hair bound back in a series of intricate, loose braids. He wears a decorative set of armor trimmed in light threads of platinum, though he’s traded the usual Archon emerald for combat black. The sight of him sends a fresh thrill of fear coursing down my spine. My mind runs wild with the possibilities of what this man could order. If he phrased it in the right way, he could probably get these people to skin me alive.
But at present, he just strides down the ramp, flanked by his retinue, every step leaching pure confidence. This man has known the most harrowing defeat in the galaxy and still kept his head high.
And that makes him even more terrifying. Against Iral, I feel like a worm. What good is anything I’ve done in the universe when this man has resurrected a dead empire almost single-handedly? If it weren’t for Ettian, I’m almost certain Iral would have had an ax in my neck, captured from a thousand different angles, just a few hours after he found out my identity. For all I know, he’s still keeping an open slot in his extremely busy schedule, just for my execution.
I haven’t faced him in person since the day of Ettian’s coronation. On that day, I’m certain he saw me as nothing more than a prop meant to further legitimize the new Archon heir. Now I’m not sure what he’ll think when he sees me again. One thing I know for sure—Maxo Iral is a keen strategist, and he’ll play whatever hand he’s dealt to maximum effect.
So I strengthen the angle of my spine, praying I present enough of a challenge that the general will be having second thoughts. I dare myself to look him in the eye as he reaches the bottom of the ramp and dismisses both Esperza and Silon with a cordial nod. “Commodore, Captain,” he says, his voice a low rumble that carries over the deck—or maybe it’s just the hush his presence inspires. “Congratulations are in order, I believe.”
Silon jumps on the thread of conversation before Esperza even has a chance to inhale. “It was hard-fought, general, but we won the day in the end.”
“No doubt the general noticed,” Esperza says pleasantly, and Silon’s expression twitches. “Sir, we’re pleased to have you aboard.”
Wise words—probably the only thing both she and Silon can agree on.
“Thank you for accommodating my arrival on such short notice,” Iral replies. “Truly, I don’t warrant these kind of formalities, but I appreciate them.” His gaze slips over Silon’s shoulder and finds me. “Well, most of them,” the general says, his expression darkening.
Stand tall and look your enemy in the eye, my mother’s voice orders in my head. I brace myself with the years of training it took to turn me into a practiced actor, capable of sustaining the long con of shadowing in an Archon territory. But even with all of that, I feel like the general can see right through me. No blank expression I wear against him can make up for the fear he saw in my eyes on the day his soldiers dragged me out of the Ruttin’ Hell. Iral has seen the heart of me and known my lowest moment in a way few other people in the galaxy have.
And the look he gives me is impossible to mistranslate. Two years after the War of Expansion ended, my mother hung his twin brother on an electrified crucifix before the Imperial Seat. From the steely glint in his eyes and the slight sneer he gives me, Iral is biding his time until the moment he can finally pay her back in kind.
Silon’s and Esperza’s composure slips when they follow the line of the general’s gaze and discover me standing behind them. The captain’s full lips pucker just a little bit tighter. The commodore’s metal hand twitches toward a fist. It’s Esperza who jumps on the recovery when she realizes I’m flanked by her protégée. “General, I’d like to officially introduce Lieutenant Iffan,” she says.
Wen steps forward to clasp Iral’s hand, and I pay careful attention to the way he greets her. Iral’s spent five years being touted as Archon’s savior by everyone around him. I think it throws him a little bit, to face someone who barely understands that context. For the commodore, Wen has stammering idolatry. For the general, she’s almost underwhelmed.
It bolsters me. My shoulders loosen, and I can feel the edges of a smile twinging in my cheeks. Iral nods curtly, but there’s a slight crease in his brow that speaks volumes. “The famous Flame Knight,” he says. “I’m honored you’ve decided to take an official rank.”
Now it’s Wen’s turn to be slightly thrown. If she objects to the general’s use of the word “decided” like she so clearly wants to, she’s going to be left struggling to explain her whole situation in front of not only her boss but also her boss’s boss—neither of whom really need the explanation. “Knighthood’s just a hobby on the side,” she offers casually.
At that, I catch at least three sharp inhales from the people surrounding and fight against my own intake of breath. I’m guessing Ettian never explained Iral’s history with the Archon suited knights to Wen. Or maybe he did, and she just forgot how seriously the people around her take the notion of knighthood. Maxo Iral was once the lover of Torrance con-Rafe, a young knight stationed on one of the Archon borderworlds up until Knightfall.
Sometimes I wonder how much less brutal his campaigns against Umber would be if he had never lost her.
Iral’s forehead crease deepens. “Well, I’m not sure the concept of a hobbyist knight will take particularly well in this empire, but I appreciate whatever effort you manage to devote to it.”
Wen knows it’s too far gone to salvage. She steps back, ducking her head and muttering a faint “Sir.” Fortunately Silon sweeps in to fill the space she left, prattling some meaningless fluff as she leads the general toward the shuttles bound for the command core. The rest of the aides move with her, but when Wen makes to follow, a metal hand latches onto her upper arm.
“Iffan, if you would hang back a moment,” Esperza says. The threads of steel in her voice could weave a suit of armor. “You might as well stick around, too, Your Highness.”
I freeze, astonished that I’m being addressed directly. Ever since I’ve taken up my gig as Wen’s shadow, Esperza’s treated me like a patch of dead space, for the most part. She’s caught my eye from time to time—scaring the hell out of me in every instance—but she’s never bothered to say anything.
The commodore notes my surprise as she releases Wen’s arm and recognizes it for what it is with a shrug. “As today has made abundantly clear, ignoring you doesn’t make you go away.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” Wen says. “Bringing him to the bridge in a battle was a mistake. I was focused on my orders and missed the damage it would cause.”
Esperza nods. Her eyes are locked on a vector for Silon’s retreating back, her lips slightly pursed. “I will, of course, also be speaking to my subordinate about how she allowed herself to be distracted. A good captain should be able to notice a security threat like that and delegate, not make it her own personal problem.
This falls on her shoulders just as much as it does yours. But you’re the one who could have prevented it all in the first place.”
“Understood. It won’t happen again.”
Esperza pulls Wen around to face her. Wen stiffens in the commodore’s grasp, immediately tilting her head to give her superior more of the inscrutable burn. But Esperza’s gaze holds steady on her protégée, seeing through any attempt Wen makes to avoid it. “You lost lives today. So did I. That’s a reality of command. Look me in the eye and tell me you understand that.”
Wen’s eyes steady on her commander’s. “I do.”
Esperza gives a short nod, patting her firmly on the shoulder. Then she hitches a chrome-plated thumb at me. “Now, tell me why this one had the nerve to call your shots.”
Pinned under the commodore’s gaze, Wen has no way of dodging the order. “I…He wasn’t…” she stammers.
“She’s smart enough to take the help she needs, no matter the source,” I interject, and Esperza’s eyes snap to me, narrowing.
The commodore’s grip on Wen’s shoulder tightens a little, a gesture I’d find almost adorably protective if I weren’t facing down Esperza’s wrath. “Your calls were good, princeling,” she says. “At least from what I heard. You were clearly trained well at your academy, and it seems Iffan is lucky you’ve chosen to pass on what you’ve learned. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’ve decided she would benefit just as much from your tutoring as she has from mine.”
“The prince is an asset,” Wen says, straightening her spine and looking Esperza dead in the eye. “If no one else is gonna utilize him, I will.”
“That’s fine for your personal edification,” Esperza replies firmly. “In fact, I think it’s produced a marked improvement—which is why I’ve allowed it. He’s clearly done you some good. But there has to be a line, and that line is a direct engagement with his people. On the bridge, in battle, he does not get a say.” The commodore lets out a long breath, glancing between us. “At any point during today’s engagement, did you ask yourself how much of what you were doing was because he wants you to do it?”
“I’m not sure what you mean—”
“If he’s influencing your decision-making in battle, it must be serving his motivations somehow. Imagine yourself in his shoes. Imagine what he wants from you. Now ask yourself if he’s getting it.”
“My motivations are my own,” Wen says firmly.
Esperza gives her a weighty, considering look. “And what are your motivations?”
I throw Wen a warning glance. The moment’s come—and this time she can’t spur her treadmill a little faster and try to literally run away from the question. I warned her this would happen. I hope she’s thought about it since then.
“I’m here because Et—because the emperor needs me. I’m here to fight for him the same way he’s fought for me.”
Esperza takes Wen’s reply like a weight on her shoulders, a flicker of disappointment in her features. If Wen had run that answer by me, I could have warned her this would happen. “An empire is more than its leader,” the commodore says, a warning edge in her tone. “And as a soldier, you serve the empire above all else. Single-minded devotion to one person is for friends and lovers. What inspires your devotion to all of Archon’s people?”
“Bullshit,” I groan—partly because it is, and partly because Wen looks like she’s on the verge of tears. “A leader is the empire. The empire’s the machinery that spins around him at his whims.”
Esperza rolls her eyes. “Please don’t tell me he’s been feeding you that Umber-minded garbage.” After a beat, her expression softens. “Look, I get it. I didn’t start out with Archon drums in my heart either. It took me a while. It took…”
Wen’s focus sharpens abruptly, and I feel myself leaning in despite myself. I’ve always been curious about Esperza’s history—I know part of it involves a knight, and even though I swear I’m not one of those Archon kids who gets swept away in knight stories, the prospect of one fills me with a sort of dreaded thrill.
Esperza stares off across the deck, scanning the array of ships berthed here. “I grew up in petty crime on an Umber borderworld called Jobal. By the age of fifteen, I was out on my own, stealing ships and making as much trouble as I could muster. I felt like my whole life was a kind of dare—to see how much shit I could get away with before a reckoning kicked in. I just wasn’t expecting my reckoning to come in a powersuit.”
The commodore pauses, drawing a deep breath as she closes her eyes. When she opens them again, there’s a slight glint I didn’t notice before.
“I was eighteen years old. Had just gotten myself a slick new hand that I was still kinda getting used to, and it had a few trick components I was very eager to try out on some patrol ships. There were rumors that a well-appointed system governor’s kid from the interior had been exiled to command one such patrol for a little character building, and I was keen on finding out what kind of luxuries the bastard had packed for the trip.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t look too closely into his command’s activities. Didn’t know his ship was doing a little bit more than patrol at the border. I chased him into Archon space and didn’t even realize it. I’d just boarded when the knight came to call.”
I catch myself bracing for the turn most Umber stories take at this part. The knight comes aboard, the vibrosword snarls to life, and the bloodbath starts. All of it aboveboard according to the Archon administration that sponsored them.
But this isn’t an Umber story.
“As I was tearing my way through the ship at one end, she was doing the same from the other. Imagine my surprise when I met her in the middle—Lietta Omoe, the Nova Knight, in all her shining glory. And then—gods, it still feels like a whirlwind—all of a sudden we were back to back as the rest of the ship came charging in to avenge themselves on us.”
I try to picture it, but all I can think about is the terror of those people. They gave no quarter, even against the inevitability of a suited knight. The only mercy they could have received was an honorable death.
“We took the ship in record time. Of course, then we had to sort out the reasons our paths crossed in the first place. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she realized I only had eyes for the captain’s lockbox. Started going on about noble purposes and the greater good and the worrisome Umber encroachment that had been happening with greater and greater frequency. I told her to cram it up her ass and thank me for the assist. I think she took a shine to my irreverence—she swapped contacts with me, and who was I to argue with that? I told her I’d call her if I ever needed some help with pirate business.
“Turns out she needed my help more. Less than a month later, she met me at a borderworld bar—this time on the Archon side of things—and told me she was running a mission that would go a lot easier if they had a pirate to pin it on.”
It shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. The suited knights were icons in part because they were able to maintain an uncomplicated public identity. Their deeds were always noble and heroic. It makes perfect sense that they outsourced their dirty work to maintain that image.
“I took the gig, of course. We had a mutual interest in knocking the Umber military presence in the borderworlds down a peg, and having five hundred pounds of powersuited muscle to back me up if things went south was the best insurance policy I’d ever had. Lietta was…Well, she started out difficult to work with, but I came to rely on that difficulty. There was nothing better than kicking back in a seedy bar with an honest-to-gods knight, bickering over multiple glasses of polish about the jarring gaps in our world views.”
Esperza takes a long pause, her eyes tracing over the intricacies of her metal hand.
“She was always trying to convince me to go straight. To take up an official role in the Archon military, where I’d have both the resources and the leg
itimacy to do more. Tensions were brewing at the border—in hindsight, war seemed inevitable, but back then there was a consistent hope that the unrest in Umber wouldn’t spill over as drastically as it did. I guess Lietta might have seen it coming. Her hopes for me never made any sense—my utility to her lay in the fact that I was a complete scoundrel. But without fail, every time we met up, she’d raise that subject. Every time, I’d shut her down. For two years it was almost a joke between us.
“Then Knightfall struck. And it turns out the persistent wish of a dead woman is a whole lot more difficult to ignore.”
Wen frowns at that. “Are you saying someone has to die to give me some convictions?”
Esperza chuckles softly. “I’m saying don’t wait like I did. It took me far too long to see the value of the Archon Empire—to understand why it was something worth fighting for. If I had joined up for Lietta alone, I wouldn’t have lasted a month in the ranks. To this day, I wonder if there was something I could have done—if I had gotten to that point sooner, if maybe I had been there, fully outfitted like she’d always wanted…Well, I suppose the point of Knightfall was that it was impossible to stop. Props to your mother, of course,” the commodore says with a bitter nod in my direction.
I resist the urge to snap that Omoe had it coming. I’m not keen on finding out what it feels like to get punched with Esperza’s prosthetic.
Wen doesn’t seem entirely convinced either. She looks like she’s biting the inside of her cheek to keep her doubts from spilling out in plain sight of her commanding officer. “I’m here because I want to learn, ma’am. I have been learning, in part thanks to bunking with the emperor’s pet prince. And helping Ettian is helping the Archon Empire. I don’t think Gal’s too far off the mark when he says they’re one and the same.”
Oaths of Legacy Page 14