The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Never had she appreciated her husband’s strong leadership more. In the early days, when her boys were young, Dannym had flourished beneath Gydryn’s rule; but since losing their sons to treachery, since sending Dannym’s army south to honor an age-old pact that few still willingly upheld, dissent, hardship and loss had forged a simmering resentment among the people.

  In addition to losing brothers, fathers and sons to another kingdom’s conflict, Dannym had lost precious Healers and other Adepts—not to mention knighted heirs of the nobility who were leading the military units. Now, in Gydryn’s absence, the heretofore quiet yet widespread resentment was finding its voice through a multitude of fractious outlets.

  “The attack last week on Minister val Kess has given us a possible lead.” Morin shifted and replanted his feet in a position of parade rest, hands clasped behind his back.

  Errodan had yet to discover where the spymaster had learned the many specialized skills of his craft, but he often gave her reason to believe that he was neither as young nor as inexperienced as his apparent age would imply.

  “Lord Mandor thinks he recognized one of his attackers from among the King’s Own Guard, but he couldn’t recall where he’d seen the guardsman and didn’t know his name. He gave us a description. Unfortunately, it fits half of the guard and a number of soldiers in our own duke’s employ.”

  Errodan looked to Gareth. “Do you believe this campaign of intimidation is being spearheaded by someone in the Guard?”

  Gareth shrugged. “Anything is possible. Before we can determine from where the treason springs, we have to find the operatives and follow them to the source. We know there are factions in the guard who are loyal to Morwyk, and probably more who’re spying for coin or the promise of privilege. I’ve secured the loyalty of perhaps three quarters of the leadership, but the rest are proving difficult.”

  The man the Lord Captain Rhys val Kincaide had named as his replacement had met an untimely end in a tavern brawl that got wildly out of hand. Morin suspected foul play but had been unable to trace the knight’s death back to any source.

  Now the Guard had no clear chain of command and too many lesser officers happily enfranchised with newfound power. The only way to corral and command all of them would be by a showing of force, and Errodan feared such would only result in driving a wedge more firmly into the existing fracture.

  She let out a tense sigh. “We can’t allow the Guard to descend into lawlessness, but we cannot turn the army into a police force to make the Guard comply.” She turned her gaze to the spymaster. “I need Gareth’s men protecting city and palace from the larger threat, Morin. You have to stop this internal splintering and get mortar in the gaps between the ranks. Do whatever is necessary to align the whole of the King’s Guard behind us.”

  Morin exhaled a slow breath. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  Errodan nodded. “Anything new from Bastian?”

  Bastian val Renly, a lieutenant in the King’s Own Guard, had stepped off a ship many moons ago, claiming Errodan’s treasured middle son still lived. He’d told a wild tale of Trell’s purported survival, even claiming the Akkadian Emir had taken her son into his own household for safekeeping.

  Morin had the lieutenant in polite custody, certain his mind had been tampered with. Unfortunately, they had no truthreaders on hand to confirm or deny Bastian’s claims, for the aging Vitriam o’Reith had passed more than a year ago. So the lieutenant was sitting in a well-appointed cell, awaiting his fate.

  Errodan felt they were all sitting in cells awaiting Fate’s judgment. Hers just had a better view.

  Morin rubbed his temple. “The lieutenant still claims he’s telling the truth. We confirmed that he had indeed been staying at the residence he mentioned in Rethynnea, along with the Lord Captain Rhys val Kincaide, but no one has seen or heard from the captain, Lord Fynnlar, or any of their men since shortly after val Renly boarded a ship back to us.”

  Errodan frowned. While Bastian’s news seemed impossible, just as improbable was what anyone could think to gain from claiming her treasured middle son was alive when he wasn’t. Surely no one in their right mind would expect her to believe it.

  She and Morin had wasted too much time already trying to puzzle out who might’ve been behind the subterfuge, and all the while the poor lieutenant swore his mind was his own. The entire affair was enough to keep her up at night.

  Not that she was short on fodder for sleepless nights.

  Errodan pushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “What else? Any progress with the Marquess of Wynne?”

  Gareth and Morin exchanged a look, and the duke answered, “He...appears loyal.”

  “It’s the ‘appearances can be deceiving’ part that troubles me,” Morin added.

  The Marquess of Wynne had an enormous presence at court, despite his minor title. Besides his own charismatic demeanor and an absurd amount of wealth, he commanded a small but well-trained army. Five hundred of his own men augmented the Duke of Towermount’s forces, protecting palace and city. If Wynne threw in his lot with Morwyk at the last minute, it would devastate their defenses.

  Errodan shook her head. “I just can’t see what Colin val Rothschen would stand to gain by putting Morwyk on the throne.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Your Majesty,” Gareth said.

  Morin made a face. “If val Rothschen is in league with Morwyk, he’s the smartest seditionist I’ve ever encountered.”

  “I maintain the deceit sits with the Veneisean wife,” Gareth rumbled. “She’s a Valdére viper, that one.”

  “Rumor and misinformation is leaking out via some quarter,” Morin told her. “We just don’t know yet how, or how deeply Wynne may be involved in any plots against your rule.”

  Errodan sighed heavily. “We need someone inside the marchioness’s confidence.”

  Morin nodded. “I’ve made several attempts to gain an informer among the Wynne household, but Ianthe val Rothschen spent too much time in Queen Indora’s court. She eats and breathes duplicity and can smell its stink a mile off.”

  Gareth grunted introspectively. “I may have an idea.”

  At their inquiring looks, he said, “My daughter, Katerine, has been reporting to me on discussions she overhears between the Dowager Countess of Astor and the Marchioness of Wynne. So far it’s just a lot of caterwauling, but mayhap Katerine could be of more direct use to us.”

  Errodan considered him gravely. “Thank you, Gareth, but I don’t want to put your daughter in harm’s way.”

  Morin dragged a hand back through his hair. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, we’re all rather irrevocably in harm’s way here. Gareth’s son Tad is proving invaluable to me,” and he added with a glance at the duke, “I’ve no doubt his daughter would display equal intelligence and discretion in managing sensitive matters.”

  Feeling ragged already though the morning had just begun, Errodan couldn’t summon the will to argue. “I suppose we need all the help we can find. As you will then.”

  Morin bobbed a bow. “Very good, Your Majesty.”

  The queen exhaled a long, slow breath. She felt a figure of brittle sticks bound together by overtaxed determination.

  They’d had years to anticipate Morwyk’s plans, to work out his possible strategy for taking Calgaryn. All of their plans depended on having accurately predicted Morwyk’s...but this game of Kings was being played on a real landscape now. One wrong move, and thousands would die.

  Errodan looked between the two men. “Still nothing from Gydryn?”

  They would’ve told her instantly if word had come in, but she had to ask nonetheless.

  “He won’t send word ahead of his return, Your Majesty,” Gareth told her for probably the thousandth time.

  Morin nodded his agreement. “His Majesty knows it would place you in too much danger. Our best plan is the strategy we’ve followed all along—we must allow Morwyk to believe His Majesty is dead. To this end, Radov’s actual attempt on Hi
s Majesty’s life worked in our favor. Otherwise His Majesty would’ve had to carry out some subterfuge—”

  “Morin, I’m well aware of Gydryn’s plan.”

  And she certainly didn’t need to be reminded of Radov of M’Nador’s treachery against everyone she loved.

  Morin took notice of her tone and offered an apologetic grimace. “I only meant, Your Majesty, that if Morwyk thought his claims to the throne would find any legitimate opposition—”

  “If Stefan val Tryst had any inkling His Majesty was on his way back here with his army in tow...” Gareth inserted in support of Morin’s point.

  “Then Morwyk would redouble his efforts,” Morin finished. “He’d make his army sprint to reach us instead of taking a leisurely stroll through the kingdom.”

  “Social calls to every duke and earldom along the way,” Gareth muttered.

  “Gaining support,” Errodan said with a wary frown.

  “Buying His Majesty time,” Morin stressed, “whether Morwyk realizes it or not. My contacts in Tal’Shira confirmed that no Dannish forces were present during Radov’s recent defeat at Raku. Doubtless Viernan hal’Jaitar is beside himself wondering where His Majesty’s men went, but we know the truth: His Majesty has done what he set out to do. He’s bringing his army home.”

  Gareth grunted by way of agreement. “We have to keep faith that Gydryn will push through whatever barrier falls in his path to keep to the plan, even as we are.”

  “We must trust to our champions,” Errodan breathed softly, casting a knowing look at Gareth.

  He nodded. “No definitive news is good news.”

  Even so, not knowing if her husband lived or had perished in the attack made a constant turmoil in her heart. Errodan pushed on, day after day, because she had to, because there was no one else to take her place in this perilous game of cat and mouse that they were playing with the Duke of Morwyk.

  Well...no one said it would be easy, her father’s voice admonished. Her self-recriminations always resounded with his implacable tone.

  Errodan felt herself in a holding pattern, trying to keep the rudder hard to starboard, sailing a wide, circuitous course through tempestuous seas, round and round, while a leviathan moved in to seal off any escape.

  They were all just bait for the monster.

  Epiphany give her strength to stay the course.

  Forty-eight

  “Doubt is not the opposite of faith;

  it is a critical component of it.”

  –The Adept truthreader Cristien Tagliaferro,

  arguing with Maestro Markal Morrelaine

  Trell regained consciousness to the sounds of moaning.

  At first he thought the sounds might’ve been his own—certainly his body ached in enough places to account for it—but as his sight adjusted to the dim light in the chamber, he saw another man stretched out on the dirty stones.

  As Trell slowly pushed up to sitting, the heavy weight of manacles dragged at his wrists. They were linked to chains connecting to the wall. At least they’d given him enough slack to lie down. An unexpected mercy. He took hold of the chains, tested their strength, and found them regrettably adequate.

  The details of his capture were fuzzy. His mind still shied from recalling the experience, still trembled at the depth of the violation. He felt as with the after-effects of a drug: displaced, maladjusted, unable to focus. His thread of binding to Alyneri just vanished into a fog. He couldn’t reach her. It should’ve disturbed him, yet he found himself oddly ambivalent.

  It had to be the lingering effects of the compulsion, remnant commands still fading away, as the morning-after poisons of too much drink needing time to wear off.

  What must this experience have been like for Sebastian, day after day? Waking to this haze of hardly knowing himself—or worse, trying to make sense of what had happened while lost in the throes of compulsion, to make sense of what he’d done...

  How many such disassociated wakings could one man endure without losing his sense of self? And Trell had only been compelled, not tortured and compelled, not compelled to torture himself—

  Shade and darkness, he couldn’t let his thoughts twist like this. Perhaps it was better not to think much at all, under the circumstances.

  He rested his head back against the stones and sought the calmness of breath and that solitary stillness all swordsmen are taught to find. Released of responsibility, his attention wandered like a child in an empty room, peeking out windows and into cupboards with idle fascination.

  It was too dangerous thinking of Sebastian, but thoughts of Ean brought a faint smile. He’d been recalling times with his younger brother more often of late. He wasn’t sure why, but certainly with the pressures of his recent mission, he had found catharsis in remembering happier, easier times.

  He and Ean had been so close as children, then estranged for a while as adolescents. Losing Sebastian had shaken the entire family, damaged them far more than any of them had wanted to believe. The structure of their solidarity had been compromised.

  Yet Trell and Ean had found each other again at the end, in those bittersweet months leading up to Trell’s fateful journey on the Sea Eagle. And more and more recently, Trell had thought he could almost sense Ean on the field, his distant teammate in the Mage’s game.

  But he could barely sense anything in that moment.

  Compulsion still fogged his mind. Now that he’d had time to test the boundaries of his thoughts, he could feel the malevolent presence of subconscious commands shadowing his every decision, waiting to attack his will should he dare to think incorrectly.

  It should’ve frightened him, losing the rights to his own determinism, but here again, all he could find was a strange and unsettling indifference. This in itself was analytically terrifying. Yet feeling anything about it...he simply couldn’t. The emotions just stood remote.

  Trell had the vague recollection of having been chained somewhere else first. He had glimpses of the wielder’s cadaverous face inches from his own, blurred visions of pain and protest, fury...defiance. Whatever the wielder had done to him, he couldn’t access such emotions anymore.

  These were not mercies but torments, and something told him that the wielder had learned enough of his mind to know that.

  To be unable to cry when he desperately desired that release, to be denied even rage over the injustice of his treatment, to be so dominated as to be prevented from finding even the smallest ounce of causation—that of defiance...

  When all else fails, a prisoner can at least rage against his tormentors. He can cry out, weep, struggle, protest. Yet the wielder had denied him all of these.

  An ache on the inside of his arm had been steadily complaining and it finally pierced the fog of his attention. Trell pushed up one sleeve. A round mark of blackened flesh stood where Tannour’s tattoo had been. The wielder had burned it out of his skin.

  Swallowing, Trell laid his head back against the wall, sensing a sort of hysteria he couldn’t actually feel—panic was banging on unbreakable glass walls, unable to reach him, watching in solidarity with grief while he suffered.

  Trell saw how this would go. The wielder would lead him obediently by the hand into act after act that defied his instincts and brutalized his honor until Trell’s mind broke from the strain. And he would break, of this he had no doubt. Sebastian had broken, and his older brother had been far more resilient and courageous.

  Taliah would’ve given her left arm to have such expertise.

  Trell’s only consolation was the belief that he was somehow, some way still walking his path. How he could think that while shackled to a wielder’s compulsion was anyone’s guess. The path appeared to be leading him into hell—Shade and darkness, things had never seemed more hopeless!—but he had to believe that no matter how hard it became, if he just clung to hope, the light would return, as it had for Sebastian.

  Trell took solace in the knowledge that he was keeping his side of the bargain. He had to believe th
e gods would hold up theirs.

  “Please...”

  Trell opened his eyes to see his cell mate looking at him. The latter’s cheeks were hollowed–by starvation or perhaps some sickness that had taken him. Trell couldn’t say which. Deep bruising surrounded the man’s eyes, and their whites were so bloodshot as to be almost nonexistent. He looked not long for this world.

  “Please,” he whispered again in the desert tongue, locking eyes with Trell. “Please...kill me.”

  The horror conveyed in the man’s gaze roused a distant echo of Trell’s unease even as the man’s heartfelt plea elicited shadows of a vague compassion whose emotional shape he could no longer clearly recall.

  The prisoner started crying.

  His shoulders shook, and his eyes shed blood-stained tears. “Please...I don’t want to be one of them. If you do it now, there’s still a chance...” With great strain, he lifted his head to look down at his feet.

  Trell had thought them terribly dirty, but now he saw the flesh itself had blackened. The man’s hands were the same.

  “Please take pity,” he begged hoarsely. “I’m a wielder...was a wielder. If I die like this...” his already strained voice broke, and he had to force the words in a threadbare whisper, “I...won’t Return. It’s permanent death.”

  More tears followed this confession, dry sobs that left him heaving. “All I ever did was serve my prince loyally.” He rubbed his bloody eyes on his sleeve. “How do I deserve this? It’s not fair!”

  Trell could move no farther away from the wall than the width of his shoulders. It occurred to him that perhaps the reason they’d chained him there was so he couldn’t help his fellow prisoner, only observe his suffering.

  He lifted his arms as far as they would move, clinking the chains taut. “I’m sorry.”

  The man saw this and resumed his weeping. For many hours, the only sounds Trell heard were the man’s agonized sobs.

  Trell was no stranger to dungeons. He’d languished for weeks in a Shamshir’im cell, longer still in Darroyhan. He’d been repeatedly tortured and healed so the torture could continue anew; he’d been bled and battered and his body compelled against his will...