“Tus! Tus, you get out here!” the queen called, strutting out into a vaulted and ornate hallway still under repair after the assault on Castle Verril.
Among the many lessons she’d yet to learn was what her chief steward called “regal decorum.” This covered such things as wardrobe and conduct. The fine gowns expected of the queen were unquestionably beautiful, but they weighed her down terribly. Caya had long been active, always certain to keep herself fighting fit in the event she would be called to duty. As such, she’d swiftly commissioned the royal seamstress to prepare something suitably royal, but that didn’t require a team of handmaidens to dress her. The result was an assortment of silken masterpieces in the three shades of Alliance Blue. Each were extravagant by her own standards and positively austere by courtly standard, but they were simple enough that the young queen no longer felt stifled by them.
She’d also been slow to warm to the concept of deploying a herald to announce her presence or a messenger to deliver her orders. Frequently she chose to bellow out her commands until she could find her way to the individual they were intended for, and had made a terrible habit of entering rooms and buildings completely unannounced. It complicated matters for the palace staff, but they were slowly learning to adjust.
“Coming, Your Majesty,” replied a thundering voice.
The head of her honor guard, and thus her personal bodyguard, thundered out of a side hall and fell into step beside her. He was a mountain of a man, thick of build and tall of stature. Unlike the queen, he had quickly embraced the uniform of his position, mostly because it was composed chiefly of fine leather and steel. The armor, save for the extreme quality, wasn’t so different from the equipment he’d worn in his prior role as her second-in-command in the rebellious Undermine.
“Has my father sent the cider or the wine yet?” she asked.
“No,” he replied.
“That’s two days late. I knew we should have kept a larger stock. If I’m going to be meeting with barons from up and down the coasts, I want to make sure we fill their goblets with something that’ll put hair on their chests.”
She glanced to him, eying up a small, simple ax hanging from the man’s belt.
“Is that another new ax?” she asked.
He nodded.
“What happened to your good one?” she asked.
“Missing.”
“Missing,” she hissed. “For how long?”
“A while. A few weeks.”
“So since not long after the coronation?”
He nodded.
“And we are talking about the one from the battle of Verril.”
Again he nodded.
“Well… that’s just about all of them, isn’t it?” she fumed. “My sword is the only weapon left from that scoundrel’s ‘donation.’ The man said he’d take them back, but I didn’t think he could manage it. This is the palace, for heaven’s sake. How am I supposed to protect my people if I can’t even keep my armory intact? And where does he get off stealing from the crown?”
“They were his,” Tus remarked, accepting this as he accepted most things: with a dull stoicism.
“I know they were his, but they were in the possession of the queen. Stealing them, even stealing them back, is treason unless I say otherwise.”
“You want him dead?” Tus asked. He tended to be swift to the simple and permanent solutions.
“No, I don’t want him dead, but I think it is about time he learned he can’t do as he pleases without regard for the throne. How am I going to keep the respect of my people if they find out that I’ve let someone steal from me unanswered? And how am I going to hold this alliance together without the respect of my people? He needs to be held accountable.” She lowered her voice. “And, for that matter, someone with his skill should be in the direct employ of the crown.”
Her hand absentmindedly dropped to her side, where she’d worn her satchel in her rebellion days.
“Blast it. Give me my flask,” she muttered, holding a hand out.
Tus passed her a small pewter tin with a corked top. She plucked the cork and took a swig.
“What do you want to do?” Tus asked, taking the flask back when she was through.
“I’d say get the Elite after him, but the Elite are in a shambles. Still… They’d been after the Red Shadow for ages, and I’d much rather have them active and in the field than letting them sit idle, or worse. The longer the Elite rests without a task, the more apt people are to suggest they be deployed against the Tressons again. I’ll tell you what. Round up some of the other honor guard. The ones who fought good and hard back in the Undermine. Heaven knows as far north as I am I don’t need the whole castle guard and the whole honor guard looking after my well-being. Assign them to the Elite and get the Elite after Desmeres. We want him apprehended, not executed.”
“They need a new leader,” Tus said.
“Ah, yes, I suppose they would… Blast it, I can’t very well just appoint one my honor guard to lead the Elite. It is supposed to be a war veteran.”
“Promote one.”
“No, no. I’ve met them. They’re good soldiers. Fine soldiers. The best. Well-deserving of their place of honor. But a good soldier doesn’t always mean a good leader, and besides, I don’t want to give up an able hand so that he or she can stay behind and deliver the orders. We need someone they’ll respect and follow, but who won’t be missed on the field. Who was the captain that we met at the coronation? The one with the bad leg?”
“Captains are captains,” he said with a shrug.
“Captain Anrack! That was his name. As I recall, the fellow has been chomping at the bit to get back into action in some way or another.”
“Wants a fight. Misses the war.” Tus said.
“You teach a dog to hunt and then keep him on a rope and he’s bound to pull. We’ll put him to good use. Just keep me apprised of his actions. If he can’t handle things, I want to know immediately. Go. Prep the Elite and send the scribe to draft a proclamation.”
Tus nodded and quickened his pace.
“Ho there,” she called to him. “Leave the flask…”
#
Several hours and most of the second bottle of wine later, Desmeres was still scratching at the bit of glass. His guest for the evening had consumed enough to loosen her tongue as well. The result was a far more candid and pointed conversation. It had woven through a number of topics, but she seemed fixated on one in particular, and kept circling back to it.
“You honestly mean to tell me that you’ve been stealing from the Alliance Army?” she said.
“Not stealing. I’m merely recovering items which I had loaned to them. They were quite aware of the terms of the loan. They shouldn’t have been surprised.”
“But they’re after you now. You’re being hunted by the Alliance Army.”
“Such is my understanding. Normally it wouldn’t be an issue. I’m quite accustomed to slipping through their fingers. It was—to a degree—part of my professional role until recently. But as we’ve established, I’ve been rather out of sorts. It’s been difficult to work up the… oh, what’s the word I’m looking for… the motivation to wipe away the trail.”
“Maybe that’s for the best. Maybe that’s your heart telling you it’s time to pay for what you’ve done,” she said. Her words had begun to become a bit sloppy.
“I’d like to think my heart has a greater sense of self-preservation than that…”
She took a long sip from her glass. “Listening to you, I don’t hear a man who’s interested in self-preservation. What’ve we learned? You worked with a man who was a killer, and you double-crossed him. Then you loaned some top-quality weapons to the Alliance only to steal them back. That’s not self-preservation. That’s a death wish. And if you ask me, and you are asking me, then I say it’s because you feel bad about what happened to your woman. You blame yourself for it.”
“But it was her fault, not mine,” he countered.
; “You don’t like my ideas, come up with better ones.”
He grinned and blew some dust from the ring of glass before going back to his etching. “You seem a little agitated.”
“A man hires me for the night. He’s loaded down with knives and he won’t stop toying with them. He admits to working with what I can only assume is a mercenary or an assassin, and then he comes clean about being a fugitive! It’s not the sort of guest that’s liable to set me at ease! And if you’re an enemy of the throne, I hope you realize that any promises of secrecy just went out the window. We keep secrets from jealous wives. We don’t protect traitors.”
“I’d suspected as much.”
“And if that’s giving you any ideas about how you might silence me with those knives of yours, remember that you’re a hell of a lot drunker than I am. I’ll be out the door before you can do anything.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I’ll be keeping my eye on you just the same.” She sipped again. “Now, as I was saying, one way or another this is about your woman. The heart does crazy things when it’s lonesome. Maybe that’s your problem. Maybe you need someone to spend your days with, as opposed to just your nights.”
“In a place like this, that’s a rather expensive proposition.”
“You know what I mean. You lost someone you clearly cared about. From the way you talk, she might have been the only person aside from yourself you respected.”
“That’s entirely untrue. There are at least a half-dozen people I respect.” He tipped his head. “Well… fewer now, I suppose.”
“Regardless. You lost her and then you plunged yourself headlong into all of this madness. There’s a piece of you missing. You’re either going to have to replace it or throw away the rest. And it is pretty clear what you’ve been working toward.”
“Mmm…” He twisted the knife before his eyes. “There may be the kernel of truth to that… I’d put little thought into such things, spending my days with someone, but when I did it was always with the assumption that Trigorah and I would find our way to one another again. Still, even if losing her is the source of my malaise, it doesn’t do me much good to know it, does it? A soul mate isn’t something that one simply trots out and finds a replacement for. Either the wound heals or a new love kindles, correct?”
“Such is the way of things.”
“Then I’m left with the same issue I started with. How to muddle through the days until then? How do I fill my time in a worthwhile way?”
“Well, contrary to what you seem to think, based on how you’ve been filling your time until now, I’d say you ought to consider spending some time making amends.”
“I really don’t think you understand.”
“And I don’t think you understand. You must feel the need to make amends for something, or I doubt you’d be here seeking forgiveness from a stranger.”
“I’m not seeking forgiveness, I’m seeking counsel. My worst crime was aligning myself against a group I knew to be working on the side of good, but even that sin should have been wiped clean. I offered my own weapons—weapons I swore to myself I would never allow to be used by any but the very best warriors—to a horde of untrained, talentless ruffians in order to liberate Verril and end the war once and for all. I violated my most sacred personal principles in order to be certain that those I had wronged had the equipment to face their final challenge. Surely that was an adequate redemption.”
“Obviously not.”
“Obviously…” he muttered.
“Look, you picked me because you thought I might have some wisdom to share with you, right?”
“Indeed.”
“Listening to you, it seems to me you’ve got two problems. With your hobby more or less complete, you’ve got nothing to do, and your conscience is twisting and turning over whatever it is you used to do. My advice to you is to make a right out of those two wrongs. From here on, you set yourself to doing right. Fix the things you broke. Help the people you hurt.”
Desmeres rolled his eyes. “A quest for redemption? Life is not a storybook. The solutions aren’t so simple.”
“If you want something deep and profound, a brothel was the wrong place to search for it.”
“A fair observation… Let us consider that solution for a moment. What evils have I done that can be undone? I facilitated the murder of hundreds of men and women, but my role was little more than setting the price and providing the equipment. In each case, the one seeking the assassination had the money or the influence to finance the transaction. Had it not been my associate to do the deed, it would have been some lesser agent. And my betrayal may have slowed the wheels of justice, but it did not halt them. The forces of good vanquished the forces of evil in spite of, or perhaps even because of my treachery. I can think of no simple stain that remains to be blotted up.”
“Then maybe it isn’t something you’ve done. Maybe it’s something you haven’t done. Maybe your spirit aches because others have done so much and you’ve done so little, or because something someone else started will now never be finished.”
Desmeres sat silently for a time, turning the bit of glass in his fingers and scratching at it with his impossibly sharp blade. Despite being scraped across the dense crystal of the wine bottle for all of this time, there was no evidence that it had in any way dulled. His guest peered at the circle of dark blue, trying to make what exactly he was working at, but his fingers and blade moved too swiftly. Even the abundance of drink had not lessened their skill and precision.
After a minute or two he let the glass slip into his palm and sheathed the blade again. He poured out two generous glasses of wine. The woman took hers and he took his own, swirling it and gazing introspectively into the rich, dark ripples.
“Something left undone…” he mused aloud. “It seems what we’ve come to dwell on is the concept of debt. What is owed, how best to repay it… It may seem odd to you, but debt is a rather recent concept for me.”
“Really…” she said, doubtfully.
“Indeed. Where I was raised, we didn’t have any use for money. What we needed was provided for us, and what we wanted we made ourselves, or sought out someone who could make it. It was simply assumed that if someone asked, you would oblige.”
“Sounds like quite a place.”
“It is nothing short of idyllic, but all things considered, it can be a bit stifling. Once I came here, I found myself suddenly in the need of gold and silver, but I had skills enough to earn it in abundance.”
“Must be nice. Around here, you’re born with debt, and if you’re lucky, you die with it.”
“Why might that be lucky?”
“It means the person holding your debt won’t be getting his money.”
“I would have thought the debt would simply pass on to your offspring. That’s how…”
His voice trailed off and his eyes drifted vaguely to the wall. Slowly he lowered the glass.
“Something strike a chord?”
“I had a thought… Perhaps not a solution to my problem, but a worthy distraction at least.”
“Seems like that’s all you were really after.”
“Indeed.” He raised his glass. “I thank you for your help, your company, and your wisdom.”
She raised hers. “And I thank you for the meal, the wine, and the night off my feet and my back.”
They each drank to their unusual toast.
“Well, with that you’ve fulfilled your obligation to me. I believe I shall finish this glass and call it a night. If you wish, you may join me. And in any case…” He flipped the loop of glass from his palm to his fingers. “… for you.”
She took it from him and turned it in the light of the nearest lamp. What once had been the lip of a very expensive bottle of wine now was a truly exquisite glass ring. He’d managed to smooth and shape it into something that wouldn’t have been out of place in a jeweler’s window, except for the fact that no jeweler outside of the wealthiest citie
s could ever hope to find a buyer for such a piece. Near the edges the sweeping curve was thin enough to let the light dance through, and across the rim there were simple but fascinating designs and shapes. The angular and oddly familiar pattern of the ring caught the light of the lamps gloriously.
“You make weapons and jewelry?”
He jingled the chains on his neck. “I dabble. I’d remove these to show you, but that would defeat their purpose. And the removal of some of them would be… exciting. At any rate, past a certain point, crafting with this material or that is all the same. Metal is metal. Crystal is crystal.”
“But… I thought one worked crystal with files and chisels and wheels.”
“Typically one does, but typically one doesn’t have one of my blades at their disposal. It could stand a polish. Perhaps a few moments in a strong flame.”
“But it’s gorgeous… Where have I seen this design before?”
“Presumably the same place I did, but at present I cannot seem to recall.”
His guest watched him for a moment, for the first time distrust and tension easing from her expression. It was replaced with a measuring look. Behind her eyes, calculations were running, and from the look of her, his value had suddenly and sharply risen. She sipped her wine.
“You know… you haven’t asked my name,” she said.
“It didn’t seem necessary for such a brief association.”
She slipped on the ring and admired it against her pale flesh. “My name is Genara. And this needn’t be a brief association. Many of our clients request the same girl upon each visit. And it isn’t unheard of that a man might take a—”
“Genara, I appreciate that you see in me something you’d like to lay a claim to, but I’m afraid it isn’t to be,” he said.
She shrugged. “So be it,” she said, not terribly surprised. She sipped again and held her hand out to gaze at the gift. “But if you ever need a bit more insight, remember where you found it.”
“That I certainly will.”
#
Some hours later, Desmeres fought his eyes open. The room was mercifully dark. A few bottles of fine wine may have formed a luxurious road to inebriation, but an expensive aftermath is an aftermath nonetheless. His head pounded, the room pitched slowly side to side, and his mouth was wretchedly dry. As he unwillingly allowed the reality of morning to seep into his ailing mind, he became aware of a soft, warm breath on the back of his neck and a delicate arm draped across his chest.
The Redemption of Desmeres Page 3