by M. C. Planck
Yet it was necessary for Christopher to have asked. The question told Karl that Christopher knew he was doing wrong. To assume Karl’s loyalty would have been to lose it as surely as demanding it would have. Like a chess match, he had to push his pawn so far but no further. He had to leave room for the future to shape itself to his ends.
Every move had costs, however. This one had made him a liar. The promise he had given D’Kan was worthless. Karl would never betray him.
The rest of the kingdom was a different matter. Faren’s weekly divination warned of a minor incursion on the western border days before it would happen. Christopher should have dispatched Gregor or Torme to deal with it, but he was tired of doing what an ordinary ruler would do. Instead, he did what a stupid ruler would do and went himself.
Not alone; an entire company of cavalry followed him. Eighty men on horseback with carbines and half a dozen multibarreled rocket launchers on wheels. The launchers were shorter range than a cannon but much lighter to transport. The speed of his troop meant he could set out only the day before. By the time the city figured out he was gone, he was already halfway to the border. After a cold night camp, they were back in the saddle all day, reaching the expected trouble spot just as the sun was going down.
Cannan came with him, of course, along with Lalania and four priestesses of the Bright Lady. The troop was led by Major Kennet, one of his first recruits. The boy had grown into a frightfully competent young man. Lalania had spent the journey flirting with him and apparently had won him over. While the soldiers laid out their ambush, picketing the horses in a little forested hollow and digging a line of foxholes, she lectured Christopher with Kennet at her heel like a welltrained dog.
“We are in agreement: you must not reveal yourself until the enemy principles are identified. If this is a trap, you must run away. By the way, it should be a trap. Your head is the single most valuable object in the kingdom. Lopping it off would be a prize worthy of a dragon.”
“The realm can replace a company,” Kennet agreed solemnly. “It cannot replace a saint.”
“Faren said it was minor,” Christopher said, trying to find a plausible excuse for his presence.
“Then we should be able to handle it on our own,” Kennet said.
“Agreed,” Christopher said. “I’m just here to observe.” It was close enough to the truth. His real goal was to not be on the throne while nobles glared at him and commoners avoided eye contact.
Lalania was having none of it. “If you wanted to watch, you could have scryed the battle. That is what any normal ruler with your resources would have done. Your mere presence denotes command, and command has its privileges. Specifically, the right to plunder. By leading this mission yourself, you have denied the Lord of Montfort any claim to the tael. He will view it as a theft rather than a favor.”
Montfort had been slow to commit to a side and hence had mostly missed the civil war. Christopher had never figured out if that meant he should reward Montfort for not opposing him or punish the lord for not being a supporter. “I’m allowed to respond to threats to the realm,” Christopher argued.
“A threat you just declared as ‘minor.’ And therefore, by definition, within the competence of the local lord.”
“My lady,” Kennet said earnestly, “this is the first significant incursion during the Saint’s reign. We set precedent here. Defense of the realm is a national matter, not some lordling’s adventure.”
Lalania glared at the young man. “You can stop helping now.”
“Yes, my lady,” he said politely. With a crisp salute, he marched off to see to the disposition of the rocket launchers.
She turned her glare to Christopher. “You’ve ruined all of them. No one ever called me ‘lady’ to my face before you came along.”
“Well now,” Christopher started, and then bit his tongue. He was about to mention the fact that Lalania was older now than she used to be, which might account for why men treated her with more respect. This would not be wise. He had come here for a battle, not a war.
“It was always there,” Cannan said. “You bards only played at blurring the line between noble and common. They only played along because they had no choice. Now . . . now they think they have a choice.” She ran her fingers through her hair, dislodging a handful of dirt and gravel from the road. With a grimace, she agreed. “True enough. I never thought I would appreciate the overweening pride of the nobility before. But now blindness saves them. If they had a clue about the faces the common make behind their backs, they would reach for a whip, the commoners would reach for a rifle, and you’d have a problem genuinely worth your time.”
A pair of soldiers approached, carrying carbines. “My lady,” one said, his voice barely above a whisper, “the Major has called for silence.” Lalania put her hands on her hips and glared at the rebuke. Christopher turned away to stifle his laugh. Night fell; the lightstones were stowed away, and the men were invisible in the dark. With their stillness, the normal forest sounds began to return. An owl hooted in the distance, answered by several crows. The herd of horses was far enough away that Christopher could not hear them. In any case, they were probably going to sleep, much like his own was. Royal stood with his head hung low and his eyes closed. The warhorse was disciplined enough to remain quiet and valuable enough to keep at hand. He was still saddled after the long ride, which would cause blisters. Fortunately, that was a problem Christopher could easily solve.
The two soldiers sat down and made themselves comfortable, cradling their guns. Cannan silently joined them, squatting on the ground. Lalania paced about, trying to keep warm without making a sound. Every time Christopher moved a muscle his armor rattled, and the entire group would stare at him. When he sat down on a stump, he made so much noise that Royal briefly opened one eye. After that he stayed still. His tael wouldn’t let the cold do any real damage to him regardless of what it felt like.
Several excruciatingly boring hours passed by in silence, giving Christopher ample opportunity to reflect on all of his mistakes to date. Chief of which, at the moment, seemed to be the decision that sitting in a cold forest all night would be better than staying in the city and having a nice hot dinner.
A light flashed, fifty yards to the front. Christopher’s stomach flipped. They didn’t actually know what kind of monster to expect. The last few hours had allowed his imagination to supply any number of horrific options. He prepared himself for the roar of gunfire.
“Ser?” a voice called out. A lightstone revealed itself. In the circle of illumination, Christopher could see three armored horsemen. Major Kennet and two other soldiers stood up and advanced.
“Name yourself,” the lead horsemen commanded gruffly.
“Major Kennet,” the young man answered. “On border patrol. We did not think to see you here, Ser. It is Viscount Conner, is it not?”
“It is,” the horseman replied. “And I did not expect to see you, either.”
Christopher let out a disappointed sigh. He had come all the way out here to face an interesting and new monster rather than angry nobles, and now he was facing one he already knew. Not a friend but technically an ally and in the employ of a neighboring lord. He had learned respect for the man’s competence during the war, if not his friendship. Presumably Ser Conner had already defeated the monster and was on his way home. Lalania had warned that divinations were not guaranteed.
Beside Christopher, Lalania whispered a furious curse. He looked at her, but in the dark she was only a silhouette that communicated nothing.
“You were on adventure, were you not?” Kennet asked, the distant conversation clear in the still forest. The major seemed well briefed on local conditions.
“I am,” Ser Conner corrected. “And I do not intend to return until I am prepared to restore the kingdom to its traditional ways.”
“Yet you are here now,” Kennet said coolly.
“I find myself only a few souls short of my next rank. Before I journey furth
er into the Wild, I intend to avail myself of the kingdom’s resources one last time.”
“The Saint will not sell you tael to carry into the Wild,” Kennet objected.
Christopher was suitably impressed with the political acumen of his army officer. Lalania, in contrast, seemed to think it was a terrible response. She darted forward to intervene, racing through the woods silently.
Cannan rose and took a half-step after her, then stopped and turned to Christopher. Before he could ask what was going on, it went.
“I do not intend to buy,” Ser Conner said, and with an effortless motion drew his sword and decapitated Kennet. “Yours will do.” One of his companions uttered a spell, and the other two soldiers collapsed instantly.
Lalania stopped running. “Dark take it,” he heard her swear, and then finally the sound of thunder. Rifles blazed from all over the forest. Conner’s two companions fell; the man jerked from the sting of bullets and reared his horse. In the flash of fire and smoke, lanced by countless shots, it pawed the air and died.
Man and beast fell to the ground. Conner took cover behind its corpse. Half a dozen men advanced out of the woods. Before Christopher could call out a warning—the knight would kill anything that got within sword reach—two men threw grenades.
The blasts forced Connor to his feet. The rifles cut him back down.
A priestess dashed forward to attend to the fallen soldiers. They were already rising, woken from their unnatural slumber by the din.
Christopher stopped running. He had started when Kennet fell. Now he stood next to Lalania, robbed of urgency and bewildered. “I don’t understand,” Christopher said. “We came here to fight a monster from the Wild. But Ser Conner was one of us.”
“Ser Conner no longer thought of himself so,” Lalania said. “Thus, neither did the spell.”
12
A DISH BEST SERVED COLD
He could not remember whether this was the second or third time he had brought Kennet back. That seemed like a detail he should recall. Probably Kennet knew, but he didn’t feel like asking. In any case, the man was back at his duties within two days of having been murdered.
Lalania was unhappy with the entire affair. “It looks like a trap,” she complained. “As if you had laid out bait.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Christopher objected. In the end, his role had been purely observational.
“Which makes it worse. Like a lion watching its cub maul a rabbit, ready to pounce should the prey risk escape.”
Christopher frowned at her. “He wasn’t a rabbit. He was a murderer looking for victims.” Unstopped, Ser Conner would have undoubtedly slaughtered dozens of peasants for the tael in their heads on his way out of town. Instead his tael was in Christopher’s vial, thanks to the Cardinal’s warning.
“Yet if you had made your presence known, Ser Conner would have stayed his hand and would still be alive today.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out there in the first place.”
“And yet you did. This is a stark reminder that knights are merely a harvest of tael to you. Conner was Green and he still felt driven into the Wild. I will be surprised if we have any knights left by year’s end.” They were sitting in the throne room again. It was the best place to have a private conversation lately, as traffic had been drying up. The nobility had stopped complaining as much, which was worrisome because it meant they were plotting more. The common petitioners had also slowed to a trickle for reasons less clear.
He looked around the empty room. “Where is everybody? Am I becoming less popular?”
She shrugged. “Treywan almost never had commoners at his court. Nobility is normally far too capricious for the small folk. You are achieving your goal of being perceived as ordinary.”
“This . . . can’t go on much longer.”
“On the contrary.” She tilted her head at him. “It can go on forever. So it has always been; so it shall always be. Your rank is enough to hold the throne, as it was for Treywan. Your rifles only make it obvious. It is clear that you will not rest until you have reduced every profession save for the priesthood, and yet there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.”
She pirouetted on the long red carpet that stretched from the throne to the huge double doors, making a show of the emptiness. “It’s been years since we had a ball. If you’re going to be normal, at least we can dance.”
“So . . . no rebellion?”
Cannan wandered over to a chair and sat down. “There are never rebellions. The throne changes hands through duel or assassination. Your civil war was a function of your theology. Just an extended argument between you and the Gold Apostle.”
Lalania spun, still dancing. “Peasants are what wars are fought over, not with.”
“Until now.”
She stopped and stretched. “Half the kingdom thinks your rifles will stop working when you die. No one is going to use peasants against you.”
His efforts to spread the scientific worldview were definitely a work in progress.
“We should not sit here and wait for them to strike.” Cannan sat with his massive sword standing between his knees, point against the ground. Christopher hated when he did that; the blade left gouges in the stone floor. Sometimes Christopher would use magic to repair the stone but only when no one was looking. “Identify your enemies and destroy them first.”
That was the problem. Christopher didn’t know how to find his enemy.
“Without cause? You forget his affiliation.” Lalania’s lecture struck home; Cannan grimaced, acknowledging that preemptive murder was not really the sort of thing Christopher could justify. “And whom would you have him slay? Knighthood already withers; the other churches beg for scraps.”
“I can think of two places to start,” Cannan said. “At least one of which has given me sufficient cause.”
The red knight was obviously referring to the Witch of the Moors and the Wizard of Carrhill. Christopher sighed. He actually liked both of them despite their respective inscrutability and moral flexibility.
“If you can think of two, then two can think of you.” Lalania bowed, ending her performance. “Take a care of what dinner invitations you accept.”
When it came, it was at the hands of a friend.
Christopher was riding down the winding road from the spire of Kingsrock to the plains below. Royal needed regular exercise, and Christopher was always glad to get out of the city. For a day trip like this, he could get away with an escort as small as Cannan and six cavalrymen. He would never be out of sight of the spire; if worst came to worst, he could just fly back to the castle for reinforcements.
There was of course the danger of a magical attack, but he had taken precautions against that a while ago. He wore Lalania’s amulet under his tunic. It was a calculated risk because he would have to take it off before he could cast spells on himself—such as the flight spell. On the other hand, it would stop his instantaneous and immediate destruction by a variety of horrific spells.
It would also keep the Witch and the Wizard from doing anything he would have to kill them for.
Thus, he watched the sparrow approaching him with curiosity. It flew around his horse several times, working up the courage to come closer. It might be a lost pet looking for rescue or a spell-trigger of arcane death. The first possibility stopped him from having it shot, although in retrospect that was a poor decision.
When he held out his hand, it landed on his gauntleted fist and chirped at him.
“It’s carrying something,” he said. He cupped his other gauntlet, and the bird dropped a feather in his palm. Then it took to the air again, circling.
Cannan rode closer and plucked the feather from Christopher’s hand before it blew away on the wind. “D’Kan’s token. He invites you to meet; the bird will guide you. I did not think he could do this trick. His explorations must have been profitable.”
“Should we follow?”
“Of course not,” Cannan snorted.
“The boy has outgrown his boots if he thinks he can summon a Saint to his whistle.”
“On the other hand, he might have something to say.” Their last meeting had been impromptu, discreet, and informative.
“Or he just wants to brag. Ignore him and he will come to court, if he has anything of value for you.”
The thought soured Christopher. The last thing he wanted was another surly noble in front of his throne.
“I think we should go,” Christopher said.
Cannan shrugged and tapped his heels to his horse. Royal surged to keep ahead, and the cavalrymen perked up their horses to follow, all of them chasing a sparrow across the fields.
After a mile, the bird flew into a copse of trees. Kingsrock was still visible behind them, and the sun was high and bright in the sky. Christopher and the men dismounted at the edge of the woods, loosening the saddle straps so their horses could rest. They took off their helmets for the same reason. One of the men passed around a skin of wine; Cannan took a swig and handed it to Christopher.
“Well met, my lord.” D’Kan strolled out of the trees to greet them.
Cannan eyed him critically. “For a Ranger you spend an inordinate amount of time in Civilized lands. One might almost think you like it.”
The Ranger smiled superciliously. “I don’t have a mattress strapped to my back. Yet.”
The red knight’s eyes narrowed. Christopher was slightly taken aback and mildly impressed. It was a sophisticated insult, subtly implying that Cannan had become utterly domesticated and soft. D’Kan had grown sharp thorns.
“How was your adventure?” Christopher asked before Cannan could continue the sniping.
“Mildly profitable.” D’Kan turned his smile on Christopher, who discovered he did not like it all. This new version of the young Ranger was not an improvement. “And you? How have your fortunes faired in my absence?”
Christopher had made a handsome profit off Ser Conner’s death, but he didn’t really want to count that as a win. He shrugged.