Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  Which means I know at least one of the two people watching us.

  A year ago, the queen had—against my protestations—slid down the top of her gown to reveal the shadowblack markings she’d kept hidden from almost everyone. I hadn’t known it at the time, but even then there had been two marshals in the room. One of those had been Torian Libri; the other a man who, devoutly believing that this revelation of the queen’s defect made her ineligible to hold the throne, tried to persuade Torian that they had a duty to inform their superiors.

  I’m told you can still find pieces of his corpse in all four corners of the country.

  So who was the second person in the room with us now, standing in the shadowy alcove at the back of the sanctum? The queen almost certainly knew why I’d come here. She wouldn’t allow anyone to observe us unless she completely trusted them.

  I still wondered how she knew I’d pull the resignation gambit.

  “I’m rather busy,” the queen said, fingers rifling through one of the stacks of paper resting on the arm of her throne, “and unlikely to see my bed before morning. So if you’ve come to yell at me about my many failings as monarch, master card player, it would be helpful if you could give me a little warning so that I might prepare myself for the experience.”

  It’s… possible that I haven’t always displayed the courtesy expected of a servant of the crown.

  “Oh, you’re going to get yelled at,” Reichis chittered as he sauntered over to hop up onto her lap.

  “I rather expected as much,” she said.

  The queen is the only person other than myself who seems to be able to understand the things Reichis says. Whether this is because she really is the two-thousand-year-old spirit of the royal line inside the body of a twelve-year-old or because both of us are actually deranged has never been clear to me.

  “Actually, I came with a simple question, Your Majesty.”

  “Go on,” she said, suspicion evident in her tone.

  “Are you ordering me to assassinate the boy living in the great temple of Berabesq?”

  “Have I issued any such order?”

  “Your Murmurers are clearly intent on forcing me to do it, and apparently they can command just about anything they want. I’m having trouble believing they would be operating without your consent.”

  She gave me an arch look. “You’d be surprised what my subjects do without seeking my consent. For example, one nearly threw away his life just a few weeks ago trying to outwit a lord magus in a tavern.”

  I was getting tired of people throwing that in my face. “I see. Well, thanks for your time, Your Majesty. I’ll leave you to your paperwork.”

  I turned and started to walk away. Turning your back on the monarch is also a crime in Darome, though not necessarily one punishable by death.

  “Bow before you leave, card player,” Torian Libri bellowed.

  Damn it.

  “Calm yourself, lieutenant,” the queen instructed. “My tutor of cards meant no offence to me.”

  “He didn’t?” the marshal asked, stepping out of the shadows.

  “No. He was trying to provoke my other guest into revealing themselves. Isn’t that right, master card player?”

  I turned back to face her. “I’ve been set up enough times in my life—most recently by your own loyal servants, Your Majesty—to warrant a certain amount of caution. I’ve also been ordered to commit a murder on the grounds that I’m both the easiest person to disavow if things go wrong and the most likely to get through the Berabesq border because of how weak and irrelevant I am. Oh, and my mother died not too long ago—you may have gleaned that from the funeral? Turns out she caught a rather fatal curse after my father sent her to spy on a god. So I apologise if my manners are lacking, but I’m feeling a little pissed off right now!”

  Queen Ginevra gently lifted Reichis from her lap and set him on top of one of the stacks of papers before rising from her throne, but she didn’t approach me—just gazed back at me with so much sorrow and compassion that I instantly felt horrible about how I’d behaved.

  “I’m sorry, Kellen,” she said. “I hadn’t meant for our encounter to go like this. I’m just… The things that are troubling you are troubling me as well, and when you walked in with that angry swagger of yours—”

  A cough came from the second alcove.

  A flash of irritation crossed the queen’s young features. “I’m getting to it.”

  “Not hardly fast enough,” said a female—but not typically feminine—voice.

  Jan’Tep sanctums are designed with unusual acoustic properties meant to enhance the harmonic frequencies of reverberations. This is particularly useful when practising complex incantations, but also has the effect of lending an eerie, preternatural quality to the echoes within. Maybe that’s why, for those first couple of seconds, I wondered if my ears were playing tricks on me.

  Please, I thought, ancestors, please let it be her.

  The scratch of a fingernail against a match. The flicker of orange flame. The rise of a beautiful, blessed blue-black smoke which, until that moment, I hadn’t realised I’d missed so badly.

  I was running to her, practically falling over my feet, even before she stepped out of the alcove to reveal herself.

  Ferius Parfax.

  20

  Royal Commands

  An inexplicable feeling of shame knifed its way through my joy at seeing Ferius again. I was eighteen years old. A grown man. I’d killed people, saved people, seen and done things most never would. You’d think I’d’ve hardened a little in the process. But I was still soft. A boy.

  “It’s okay, kid,” Ferius whispered, still holding tight to me, keeping me from drifting away.

  I thought I’d never see you again, I wanted to say, but that would’ve led to blubbering, which was a bridge I wouldn’t cross. I hadn’t cried for my mother, and the confusion and guilt that left me with surely made weeping at my mentor’s unexpected arrival a kind of crime.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked instead.

  “Oh, you know, walkin’ the path of the wild daisy.” Ferius let go of me, pressing her hands to my shoulders to hold me at arms’ length. “You look fine, kid. Real fine.”

  I suddenly felt awkward and pretentious in my idiotically shiny silver court shirt and dark blue leather trousers fitted to me by the royal tailor.

  “Put some meat on your bones too,” Ferius went on, evidently unaware of how much she was embarrassing me.

  “Kellen has adapted well to court life,” the queen said, a little too proudly for my taste.

  She couldn’t know how oddly unpleasant that sounded to my ears, nor could I have explained why, but it did.

  Ferius was staring at me. “Nah,” she said at last.

  “‘Nah’?” the queen repeated.

  “He ain’t adapted at all,” Ferius said. She tapped me in the chest. “Not here.” Her fingers rose to tap me in the centre of my forehead. “Not here neither.” She leaned in to peer into my eyes. “I can see it plain as day.”

  “See what?” the queen asked.

  “The Path of Endless Stars.”

  Sometimes—albeit incredibly rarely and with no predictable pattern—Ferius says just the right thing to save your soul. She grinned at me as if she knew exactly what I was feeling. Maybe she did know. Maybe she didn’t.

  “They want me to kill a boy,” I said. “They say it’s the only way to protect the queen and stop the Berabesq from starting a war.”

  Ferius nodded but said nothing.

  “Is that why you’ve come? To stop me?”

  “Do you want me to stop you?”

  I thought about that for all of a quarter of a second. “Yes, very much.”

  “You know I can’t though, right?”

  I’d known she was going to say that. “Ain’t the Argosi way. Can’t mess with another’s path,” or some other such nonsense.

  “We should talk,” the queen said, rising from the throne and stepp
ing outside of the ring of columns to walk towards one of the tables beneath the gallery that ran the right-hand length of the sanctum. “All of us,” she added, and Torian Libri finally stepped out of the darkened alcove where she’d been standing guard.

  Once the four of us were seated, the queen quickly took hold of the conversation. “While I do not condone the methods demonstrated in recent times by the Council of Murmurers—” she glanced at me with just enough guilt in her expression to take some of the edge off my anger over that particular experience—“and certainly there will be… adjustments to their remit within my court, nonetheless, the threat is real.”

  “Which threat is that?” Ferius asked.

  Torian Libri took offence at the question. “The Berabesq have a population three times the size of the rest of the continent, with hundreds of separate household militias—well trained and disciplined. If they should unite, they could field an army larger than any the world has ever seen. They could sweep through Darome like—”

  “Army that big ain’t gonna fall apart just cos one kid gets killed.”

  “That’s why we can’t let it form in the first place,” Queen Ginevra said quietly. Uncertainty played across her features, making her seem all too young to be facing such a dilemma. “And while I appreciate the irony of the situation, we cannot treat the target as a ‘kid.’ He is, for all intents and purposes, their god. Whether we believe it or no, it is their faith in that which now binds them, and leads them to war.”

  Ferius shook her head and stamped out her smoking reed on the surface of the table. Torian Libri didn’t appear to like that particular display of disrespect for the throne.

  “Stare all you want, girl,” Ferius said. “That snake-charmin’ of yours ain’t gonna get you nowhere with me. Won’t work on the kid neither.” She snorted, “Parlour tricks for simple minds,” and absently gestured to a spot about four feet away where Reichis was now seated on the floor gazing up at Torian longingly.

  “Gonna eat that stupid tongue of yours, Argosi,” he muttered dreamily, still entranced by the marshal’s eyes.

  But Ferius and Torian weren’t done posturing, apparently. My mentor leaned in closer. “And the answer to the question I see written all over your face is: no.”

  “‘No’ what?” Torian asked.

  “No, you can’t take me. Couldn’t have taken the kid either, if it weren’t for him lettin’ you take advantage of his trustin’ nature.”

  How had she known about that?

  Ferius gave me a sideways grin, somehow knowing that would be the question on my mind. “Marshals love to brag, kid. Especially about one of their own beating a famous outlaw in a fair fight.”

  “It wasn’t a—”

  She turned back to Torian. “Now listen up, girl. Either you slide that little knife of yours back in its sheath or I’m gonna whup you up and down this throne room until you start singin’ the Argosi anthem note for note.”

  “There’s an Argosi anthem?” I asked.

  “I’ll write one for the occasion.”

  Before Torian could reply, the queen rose. “That will be enough, both of you. This gathering was clearly a mistake. Leave us now, Lieutenant Libri, Lady Ferius.”

  “I ain’t no la—” Ferius stopped and swore in a language I didn’t recognise. “You did that on purpose.”

  The queen kept a smile from her lips, but not very convincingly. “Something your arta loquit would have told you were you not a little too hot under the collar, which is why I wish to speak with Kellen in private now.”

  “Your Majesty,” Torian began, “the law forbids—”

  “There’s an antechamber at the back of the sanctum with refreshments. I will summon you both when I have further need of you, assuming either of you is still alive by then.”

  Neither of them looked particularly happy about the situation, but they complied nonetheless.

  Once the queen and I were alone—at least as alone as we were ever going to be—she took my hands in hers. “I’m sorry about your mother, Kellen.”

  I stiffened. “That’s kind of you, Your Majesty.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Could we…? That is, it seems there are more urgent matters we need to discuss.”

  She held my gaze awhile, but eventually nodded. One of the things I’ve always liked about the queen is that she never shirks her duty, no matter how unpleasant. “Kellen Argos, it is my royal command that you travel to the Berabesq lands, sneak into their capital and then use whatever tricks or ruses are available to you in order to break into their most sacred temple. You will find this young god of theirs, Kellen.”

  “And when I do?”

  Back when a group of nobles had tried to take the throne from her, in the midst of all the chaos and bloodshed, when a particularly nasty fellow who called himself a white binder was controlling me through the shadowblack, it was Queen Ginevra who’d found a way to free my soul. She’d told me not long after that she didn’t want me killing for her.

  She squeezed my hands tightly. “Do what must be done, Kellen. Do the right thing.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.” She held my gaze a moment longer than was natural. “Do you understand?”

  Arta loquit is more than the skill of eloquence. It’s the art of listening. In this way it is closest to arta precis—the Argosi talent for perception. Do you understand? The queen had asked, and in that question had encoded much more than the words themselves would allow.

  I spoke quietly then. “If I refuse to go, or if you fail to command me to go, the Murmurers will simply send someone else—someone who would get the job done.”

  She nodded.

  I glanced towards the antechamber. “Torian.”

  “She would be an obvious choice. Certainly more likely to follow through on their orders.”

  “But they like the idea of sending me because I’m far easier to disavow than any other imperial agent. I’m not even Daroman, after all, and I’m a former outlaw to boot.” Something darker occurred to me then. “I imagine it helps everyone’s cause that the Berabesq appear to have murdered my mother.”

  “I would never use th—”

  “None of that is why you want me in particular to go, because I think we both know I’m… unreliable as assassins go.”

  “Entirely unreliable,” she said, a small smile breaking through her composure. “But you have other virtues.”

  “Torian says I have a pretty face. Is that what you meant?”

  “Don’t make me laugh!” she hissed. “And you know that’s not what I meant, so stop teasing me.”

  I did, in fact, know exactly what she meant. She was sending me because she was convinced I was the only person she could trust to find out the truth before I committed a murder on her behalf, and just maybe find a way through this mess that didn’t involve assassination.

  All this time, the queen had still been squeezing my hands so tightly I was surprised at her strength. Tears had begun to form in the corners of her eyes. It took me a moment to understand why.

  The Argosi say that no one can ever see all the paths in front of them—that there’s always one more than you believe. But right now every road I could envision led away from the queen. If I refused the mission, I’d have to leave. The Murmurers would never allow me to stay in her service. If I went to Makhan Mebab—and odds were pretty good I’d get caught long before I even made it past the Berabesq border—if I actually managed to sneak into that temple and somehow murder their god, I’d be the most reviled man in the history of the Berabesq theocracy. I could never set foot in Darome again or would risk starting up a whole new war. Of course, the most likely outcome was that I’d die long before that would happen.

  And if somehow I survived all of this?

  “I can never come back,” I said at last. “Whatever happens, people will be hunting me and Reichis all over this continent. I’ll never be abl
e to set foot in Darome again.”

  The queen was silent, but even she couldn’t hide the tears sliding down her cheeks. “What about Torian? You and she—”

  “Twelve years of age is perhaps a bit young to be playing matchmaker, Your Majesty.”

  My attempt to lighten her mood provoked the opposite response. “Oh, because your extra years have brought you so much wisdom in matters of love? Pining away for that charmcaster girl from your clan? How convenient this must all be for you, tutor of cards, that you now have the perfect excuse to abandon my service the moment the Berabesq matter is resolved so that you can go off in search of this ‘Nephenia’ who has such a tight rein on your heart, despite clearly having better things to do than be with you!”

  It was an impressive display of outrage, and the closest thing to a temper tantrum I’d ever seen from her. She almost reminded me of Shalla for a moment there, which made sense, because my sister only ever talked this way when she was afraid of losing me.

  “My entire life I’ve felt inadequate, Your Majesty. Weaker and less clever than my sister, nowhere near as wise and determined as my mother. Even as a young boy I knew I’d never be half the man my father was.” I brought Ginevra’s hand to my lips. “Until I entered your service and, for a little while, I found looking in the mirror every morning wasn’t so bad after all.”

  “Then come back to us!” she cried, pulling me to her. “No matter what happens out there, I’ll protect you. I’m the queen, remember?”

  I gave no reply, just kept my arms around the twelve-year-old girl with the two-thousand-year-old spirit and the freshly broken heart. One of the things Ferius had taught me is that fighting sorrow is like boxing your shadow. No matter how hard you hit it, the heartache keeps coming back for more. I glanced over to the far end of the sanctum and the open door to the antechamber. Torian Libri was there, keeping an eye on us from afar. Somehow even in the disapproval of her gaze I saw that the queen had been right about us. If I’d stayed here, we would have ended up a couple, even if we’d likely never fall in love, just as I’d likely live out my days in Ginevra’s palace, even though it would never be my home.