by M. C. Planck
“Sorry,” she said. “I did not realize you knew the kingdom’s age. In our field notes, it says this is a controlled truth for your realm.”
He stared up at her for a long moment. Finally, he felt he could speak without growling. “Are there any other secrets I should know?” “Hmm. No, you invalidated them. The Iron Throne’s subversion of the Gold, the suspicion of direct hjerne-spica involvement.”
“A bit more than a suspicion.”
“Which is why I am here. Forgive me, I would have been happy to visit you solely for the company, but the truth is that I was dispatched to investigate.”
“Fair enough.” Christopher could hardly take offense. He had been happy to see her for his own selfish reasons.
“So you did it?” She hid her excitement under a layer of reserve. Apparently discussing death and destruction wasn’t supposed to be fun. The naughtiness was positively flirtatious.
“I did,” he said.
“An astonishing feat for one of your rank.”
Christopher found her honest appreciation far more alluring than the artless seduction she had tried the first time they had met. This was getting out of hand. Especially when he realized that no one could ever know what they did or said here.
“I cheated,” he said, trying to deflate himself.
“There is no such thing when dealing with hjerne-spica,” she laughed. “Even we are allowed to lie without compunction to their horrid faces.”
“It told me they never lied.”
She cocked her head in disbelief.
“While it was under a truth-spell. I talked to its corpse.”
“Why,” she said in amazement, “would you do that?”
“Because I wanted to make a deal.”
She sat down heavily, staring hard at him. At this point, he had very good odds of either seducing her or getting himself killed. It was hard to tell which.
“It told me the location of its lair. And the password for entering.”
Understanding flooded across her face. “And you would like to sell the information.” Despite the mercenary accusation, she didn’t seem any less impressed.
“Sort of. I know I can’t do it alone. I was hoping to persuade Alaine and Lucien to help.”
She laughed, skeptical and unnerved at the same time. “Lucien wouldn’t walk into a goblin keep with you, and this is a thousand times worse.”
“Oh,” he said, crestfallen. “So that’s a no?”
“On the contrary. My mother will leap at the chance. If your information is genuine, the Directorate will pounce on it. You may not appreciate their zeal, however. Understand that they will consider the destruction of your entire kingdom acceptable collateral damage for an operation of this magnitude.”
“Um,” he said. “Is that likely?”
“I assume not. Yet you must know the truth. Do you still wish to proceed?”
The kingdom was going to be destroyed by the hjerne-spica anyway, once they were good and ready. Christopher would rather deny them that. He nodded.
Her excitement was unsuppressed now. “Give me something to convince them with.”
He traced the sigil in the air. She got it in one try.
“Does that mean anything to you?” he asked.
“Not at all. But when I show it to mother, she will either laugh at me, or she will get that look she gets when she thinks you don’t know what the Dark you’re getting yourself into.”
Christopher knew that look well. He was glad he wasn’t going to be the one exposed to it.
“And,” Kalani said delicately, “your price.”
“I have to go along,” he said. “I have to bring my retinue.” She looked exceedingly dubious, so he explained. “I kind of promised to do that as part of the deal. I’m not sure what happens if I break that. I’m worried it will invalidate the password or something.”
“Probably true,” she agreed. “Very well. They will explain that you will be in great danger. Then they will let you do as you like. If you are part of the attack force that implies, you will reap the regular rewards. For a man of your rank, that is probably half a share—out of many.”
“Is there likely to be a lot of treasure?”
“There is,” she said. “Although there might not be. The raid might fail or only be partially successful. The cost might exceed the gain. We know nothing of the size of this nest; it could be three young egg-mates playing at being Masters or it could be a dozen full clans with tenthousand-year-old elders.”
Christopher pulled himself together. This was no time to surrender to greed. “What I need is my seventeenth rank. And a free hand out from under their control. The rest . . . I don’t care about the rest.”
“You drive an easy bargain.” She looked at him with concern. “Too easy. It smells like a setup.”
He shrugged. “Alaine will understand.”
She smiled wryly. “Still playing at secrets, even now? I know the answer. You wish to reach to your own world. You wish to be the pathmaker for your people. Against that glory, what are a few ranks here or there?”
That was not what he had meant. He had told Alaine that she did not have the power to return him to his wife. Watching her with her forbidden dragon boyfriend, he assumed she would understand that some things were more important than power.
Kalani turned away but not before he saw tears in her eyes.
“Forgive me,” she said, before he could react. “I am sick with fear. Everything you say is everything I ever wanted to hear. It all seems too neat and tidy. It is too beautiful to trust and too precious to pass by. It shakes me to my bones. I feel as if this one act will unleash a future I have hoped for all my life but never dreamed of because it is too large for the imagination.”
“Well,” he said, casting about for something comforting. “We still have to defeat the nest. If that fails, nothing changes.”
She shook her head. “How contrarian, that failure should seem like the less fearful option.”
From that comment alone, Christopher understood that, however many years she had been alive, she was still young.
“You can’t speak of this outside this room,” he said.
She winced at the obviousness of the rebuke. “Fair enough, as I was about to warn you of the same. Perhaps we should stop treating each other like tyros. After this you will truly be on the stage of the world. The rank you seek is uncommon even among elves. Far more so for other peoples.”
“What about among hjerne-spica?” The one he had killed had been equivalent to a seventeenth rank, going by the tael it had yielded.
“Oh, no. All of them are Legendary. They come that way from the egg. But I was not counting them as people.”
“Hold on.” Christopher sat up straighter. “If every single hjerne-spica is a legendary spell-caster, how is it they don’t run the whole damn world?” She looked at him with curious sympathy. “Your answer is in two parts. First, to create an egg is as expensive as promoting you to that rank and thus requires the decimation of whole civilizations to achieve. Hence, their numbers are limited by necessity.”
He paused, trying to process the magnitude of her words.
“And the second part?”
With a gentle shrug, she said, “They do.”
Kalani was gone in the morning, her room empty and neat. She had made the bed before she left or perhaps never slept in it. One window stood open, looking out over the three-story drop to the courtyard.
Christopher could do nothing but wait. He had been doing plenty of that, but this was worse. He had thought that the elves were at war with the hjerne-spica. It appeared that they were more of a resistance force. Saboteurs fighting to weaken the ruling class, rather than an invading army. That cast humans in the role of oppressed citizenry. If the hjerne-spica were a traditional government, they would simply replace the nest and severely punish the entire region for its rebellion.
However, Kalani had said it was expensive. It might take them decades
or even centuries to produce new overlords. He had to believe that two hundred years of freedom was worth a war.
He took to riding out of the city almost every day. He kept hoping for more birds to contact him, and if nothing else, Royal loved the exercise. The trips seemed to inspire his people, too. They all but cheered him on the way out and back in. Cannan finally explained that they thought he was going “On adventure,” and they were hoping he’d gain more rank by killing random monsters around the countryside. The sheer disconnect between that view and reality was too large to bridge.
In the end, adventure came to his castle. A wandering band of minstrels, a dozen men and women of various ages dressed in the motliest collection of outfits he had seen outside of a Salvation Army store, capered at the castle gates as he rode in for dinner. He tried to ignore them; Lalania arranged for whatever entertainment was appropriate for state dinners, and he was learning to stifle his impulse to give random people money.
But as his horse passed the small, shabby wagon that served as the troupe’s impromptu stage and probably their home on the road, he saw a woman caring for the donkey in its traces. She looked up at him with a face that dared him to comment on the ridiculousness of it all, if he happened to feel suicidal.
The eyes and hair were the wrong color, the ears hidden under black curls, but there was no mistaking Lady Alaine’s minatory glare.
Royal stopped moving of his own accord. Christopher scrambled to play his part. “Ah.” He turned to Cannan, who was staring at the troupe suspiciously. That didn’t mean anything, however, because he stared at everyone that way. “Maybe we should have a show tonight.”
Cannan gave off staring long enough to be amazed. “This lot? Lala would have them strung up. They’re not even in key.”
“Pardon me, Ser,” said the smallest one. She appeared to be a child of nine or ten. “We are only practicing. Once we come together in tune, we will put on a show worthy of lords.”
“Um. Who’s in charge?” Christopher asked, looking at the back of Alaine’s head. She had turned around and was ignoring the conversation.
“Today it is my turn,” the little girl said. “I shall broker our wages and our services, if it please my lord.”
“That’s the oldest trick in the book,” Cannan told him. “They think you will be more generous with a child.”
“’Tis no trick, Ser. It really is my turn.” She faced Christopher and curtsied. “And I shall not cheat you, my lord. I offer a night’s work, with all the amusement, diversion, and dare I say wisdom we have to offer, for a flat fee. Seventeen silver pennies to make your dreams come true, at least for a little while.”
Cannan rolled his eyes. “That’s a ridiculous price.”
“It is,” she agreed. “And yet it is what was offered.”
Christopher grit his teeth. Elves were as bad as troubadours, always speaking in codes. “Sure,” he said. “I accept. I’ll send my bard out to show you where to set up.”
The girl curtsied again and stepped out of his way. Christopher and his cavalry escort rode past them and through the gates. His guts clenched in anticipation. Anything that could make Alaine that unhappy was bound to plunge the depths of misery.
15
SHOW AND A DINNER
The troupe performed with disparate skills. The little girl did a dreamy, languid dance that might have been sensual if she had been older or if the movements had been at all comprehensible. Several of the others sang like angels; one had trouble hitting the right notes. Half of them played a variety of musical instruments, again ranging from rank amateur to virtuoso. Lalania sat through the whole performance with a fake smile cemented on her face. The audience applauded politely when Christopher did, but he could tell many of them were wondering why their tax dollars were being spent on this.
After the show, the troupe was given a table at the end of the room. Christopher was amazed at the quantity of food that went to their table and disappeared. Then they went out to the stables to sleep.
Their sheer ordinariness made him wonder whether he’d made a mistake. He leaned over to Lalania to ask.
“A normal lord,” she said conversationally, although her voice was pitched so low no one else could hear, “would send a footman to invite one of more attractive members up to his chamber.”
“Should I do that?”
“You’re not that normal. Not yet, at least. You can go look in on your horse. Everyone knows how you favor the beast.”
He put down his fork. His appetite had not recovered yet. “Only if you come with me.”
“I would be delighted.” Her false smile had not budged.
So it was a party of three that eventually wandered into the stable. Christopher, Lalania, and Cannan, the usual group, although Lalania was sometimes absent for days. He seemed to spend most of his time around these two. Gregor, Torme, and Karl had other duties; they were often in the field training their regiments. Faren had a church to run, and Fae he avoided. Did this mean he could claim only these two as his retinue? The wording of his deal with the hjerne-spica was troublingly vague.
He fed Royal an apple, stroking the big horse’s head. Eventually, the little girl from the troupe joined them.
“Did you like my dance?” she asked with the guilelessness of a child.
“It was unique,” he said truthfully. “Although I’m not sure what it meant.”
“Meaning is a secret revealed only by long acquaintance. Perhaps you should join our troupe for a while.”
He chuckled. “Sadly, I have a kingdom to run.”
She looked up at him. “Kingdoms are like sandcastles; they come and go with the tide. Wisdom lasts forever. And yet a wise kingdom lasts longer than a single tide. Your realm can spare a few weeks while you gain wisdom.”
“Weeks?” He didn’t have that kind of time to waste.
“Ambitious projects require ambitious plans.” She smiled serenely.
There was a lot to unpack in that statement, including the suggestion that teaching him wisdom was an ambitious project, but Lalania didn’t let him.
“You must take the concept seriously,” the bard told him earnestly. “A good king knows when to indulge his subjects.”
“Indeed,” the girl said. “Take leave of your counselors tonight and slip out with us at daybreak to travel your realm in our company. We shall disguise you, so bring nothing but the necessary; your sword, cloak, and perhaps a nice tunic. We will teach you to sing for your supper, and you may learn surprising things about yourself.”
Cannan stepped forward to glare down at the girl. “He goes nowhere without me.”
“Of course,” the girl agreed. “Although I have no hope of making an entertainer of you, still our hostler can use help with the donkey.”
“And myself,” Lalania said.
The girl nodded. “We could use a cook.”
Lalania grimaced briefly before replacing it with a resigned smile. Christopher gaped at her. “Really? All this . . . really?”
She touched his face, glad for his sympathy. “Yes.”
His armor and cloak were packed into a small chest. Cannan’s scaled armor was folded and stuffed into a strong canvas duffel bag. Both their swords were wrapped in a thick blanket and tied up with string. He was wearing ordinary workman’s clothes, scrounged up from somewhere deep in the bowels of the castle. Cannan had been the harder one to clothe; in the end, Lalania had to stitch two tunics together with magic to cover his broad chest. They stood in his bedchamber, saying their goodbyes.
“I don’t like it,” Gregor said. “I don’t like you being gone, not knowing where you are or when you will come back, that you are going out with this lot, and that you have to travel like a beggar. I don’t like any of it.”
“That is rather the point,” Lalania said. “These . . . people . . . are not particularly impressed with pomp and circumstance.” She was wearing the plainest clothes Christopher had ever seen her in. Her only luggage was the lyre. “A
ll those years you practiced humility will pay off now,” she told him. “For a normal lord, this would be exquisite torture.”
“If that minx tries to make me sing, you’ll all know what torture is,” he said.
Torme shook his head, agreeing with Gregor’s displeasure. “We can say you are on adventure. That will buy us a season at most. Any longer and we will face difficulties.”
“She said a few weeks,” Christopher reassured him. “My patience won’t last much longer than that. And in any case, the year’s almost over.”
Lalania cocked an eye at him. The rest of the room stared.
“Oh. I guess I shouldn’t have said that last part. Well, there it is. If we aren’t back by the end of the year, we won’t be coming back.”
Faren snorted. “You won’t get out of it that easily. I will drag your corpse back onto that throne with my bare hands.”
“I can’t believe I’m not going with you,” Gregor said. “How did this happen?”
“The kingdom needs you,” Lalania said. “The Blue think you are on their side. They support the throne because they assume you look out for their interests.”
Christopher couldn’t help himself. He glanced at Torme. The man always seemed to be left out.
“He is needed, too,” Lalania said. “The Green fear him. They assume he will see through their plots.”
“You are too kind,” Torme told her. “There are more important matters than my feelings. Christopher must name a successor in case he does not return. The nascent church of Marcius should not suffer rivalry for its leadership.”
It shouldn’t have been a hard decision. There were only two choices.
“Um. Torme?” He made it a question, in case anyone objected.
“Of course,” Gregor agreed. “He outranks me in divinity. So much is obvious. But what about the kingdom?”
Christopher looked around the room.
“Not I,” said Faren. “Nor, sadly, our esteemed Karl. The realm is not ready.”
“The logical choice is Duke Istvar,” Gregor said.