Corinn indicated that she had heard enough. “Fine. Life is exactly as you’d wish it to be. I don’t believe that, of course, but I’ll not argue the point with you. Tell me this, then—what do you think of my brother’s return?”
Tell her about Aliver? He almost asked her why she wanted to know. The reasons were obvious—although they were also contradictory. He’s my brother and I love him, she could say. But that was not what he wanted to hear for a variety of reasons. He was a threat to Hanish, she could say. But that, despite the safety it suggested in respect to his current allegiances, wasn’t quite what he wanted to hear either. So he tried to keep his answer neutral. “He remains a mystery, Princess. I cannot—”
“Don’t lie to me. You don’t have to and I wouldn’t lie to you. The truth is, Rialus, that I don’t have a single friend in this palace. Not a single person cares what becomes of me. Hanish is not my friend, understand? He can never know that we’ve spoken or learn even a word that passes between us. Swear to me that you understand that.”
He nodded, though he did so in a hesitant way that was meant to indicate he was not agreeing to the entirety of whatever deception she might be proposing.
If Corinn noticed the vague caveat he intended she gave no sign of it.
“Rialus,” she said, “I very dearly need a friend—a powerful friend. That’s why I’m speaking to you now. Do you, Rialus, also want a friend?”
He answered before he had time to censor himself. “Yes, very much.”
“Then I will be your friend. We will give each other things, as friends do. First, tell me of my brother. Hanish tries to keep me ignorant, but he’s just cruel. It does you no damage to tell me things everybody else knows already. Just help me understand what’s happening in the world.”
He could do that, he thought. She needed him. She had said so herself. What would it hurt to tell her things that everybody else knew anyway? He was not ready to accept her empathy, but he could do this.
He spent the next half hour filling her in on everything he knew. He found his voice surprisingly nimble as he detailed Aliver’s movements, his troop strength and makeup. He told of the myths swirling around him, rumors of sorcery and such. Little of this impressed Hanish, however. The chieftain was annoyed by the timing of Aliver’s return. He would have much preferred to see the Tunishnevre’s move completed. Hanish had drawn in all the troops he could from the provinces and concentrated them around Bocoum. The Numrek had not joined them yet, but they were ready to march and planned to do so the moment he returned. The war, he said, was only days away from beginning.
He was surprised by the manner in which Corinn questioned him. Again and again she asked for details, specifics, and explanations. He gave them as best he could. When she asked him what posed the greatest threat to Aliver’s army, Rialus answered, “Why, the Numrek, of course. The very ones to whom I’m ambassador.”
“Yes, the undefeatable Numrek…Are they truly so fierce?”
Rialus spent a few moments singing their praises as regards martial matters. He was aware of the irony of this—considering how much he hated them—but the more Corinn asked of him, the more he was compelled to offer.
“If the entire world turned against them, of course they’d be defeated,” he concluded, “but not without doing a great deal of damage. I’m sure Hanish Mein considered moving against them. But that was before. Now he’s quite happy to call them allies again.”
“So he needs them?”
“Very much so. Hanish may have tricks up his sleeve, but he most definitely needs and relies upon my wards.”
Corinn’s face went troubled, hesitant, and unsure. She seemed to forget Rialus for a moment. She placed a hand upon the windowsill in a way that highlighted the curve of her breast. Reaching out seemed almost a measure to keep her from fainting. Her eyes stared through the window in a way that suggested she was thinking hard enough that she was not actually seeing. She chewed the corner of her lower lip.
“Rialus, what do you want most in the world?” She turned toward him. The resolve on her face and in her voice indicated that she had settled whatever had been bothering her and was ready to move forward. “I think I know. You want to be respected. You want to be rewarded. You want Hanish to acknowledge that you helped him and Maeander triumph against my father. You want the sort of spoils men like Larken received. You want to never have to wake without a beauty beside you, one who’ll do exactly your bidding. These are some of the things you want. Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t any ambitious man crave such things? I’m right, aren’t I?”
Rialus opened his mouth, but Corinn did not wait for his answer.
“Hanish will never give you any of those things. He laughs at you. He thinks you’re a fool, a coward, an idiot. He once joked that if he didn’t make you ambassador to the Numrek—a job he considers most foul—he’d have made you a court comedian. You wouldn’t even have to practice your act, he said. You’d only have to be yourself. That’s what he thinks of you.”
“I—”
“You know I’m telling you the truth. You’ve always known it, and you hate Hanish for it, don’t you?”
“Ha-ha-hate is not the word I’d use,” Rialus said. “Princess, I was under the—the impression that you quite loved Hanish. That you—”
Corinn threw back her head and laughed. She opened her mouth so widely he saw straight to the back of her throat. Most disconcerting.
“You are a funny man,” she said, once she had gotten control of herself again. “I don’t love Hanish. Do you?”
Rialus was relieved that she did not pause for him to answer that question.
“Of course you don’t. You’re like me.” She pressed the wedge of her hand between her breasts, somehow a belligerent, not sensuous, gesture. “You and I are done with love. I’ll never give this heart to a man again. Not even to you, Rialus, charmer though you are. You may think whatever thoughts of me you like. I cannot get them out of your head and I don’t care what you fantasize. But you’ll never have my love; nor do you want it, do you? You’d like the shell of me, but not what’s inside. Anyway, there will be others for you, many others. Others more beautiful and vacuous than I. Understand?”
He nodded. He did understand. She was not, as she pointed out, the empty beauty that he had imagined her to be. There was much behind her face that he’d not been aware of before. She was, he realized, something he’d never considered her to be. Dangerous. That’s what she was. He did not know exactly how, could not imagine what power she wielded, and yet he now believed she was not a woman to be crossed.
As if answering this thought, Corinn said, “Hanish betrayed me in ways that I can never forgive. In ways I won’t forget. Not this time. Rialus, I hope you’ll be truer than he. I have a message for you to take to Calrach. I have an offer to make him. I’ve looked into getting off the island myself, but I can see no way to do it. I’m a prisoner here, Rialus. But with your help…If we succeed in pulling off what I have in mind, you’ll be a very lucky man. You’ll be rewarded after the war with everything you’ve ever felt you deserved. I, and my brother, will make sure you have it.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SEVEN
Thaddeus Clegg could not have been happier with the man Aliver Akaran had become. Perhaps nobody but the former chancellor recognized how much the prince resembled his father in his features and timbre of voice, in the intensity and intelligence of his brown eyes, and the upright carriage of his torso. He was very much like Leodan had been in his youth. But Aliver had taken all these traits and honed them to a greater level of sharpness. Leodan had dreamed of and cogitated on action, reform, justice, but never truly acted; Aliver now lived and breathed all of these things and strove to shape the world accordingly. Thaddeus had been concerned over Aliver’s initial reticence to fully take up his mantle of responsibility, but that seemed ancient history now. Since returning from his search for the Santoth, the prince had not faltered. When he asked to again wear
the King’s Trust, Sangae did not hesitate to retrieve it for him. With it hanging from his side Aliver Akaran looked every bit a hero in the making.
Aliver’s first task—that of winning the Halaly to his cause—had not been an easy one. He refused to join them in a petty war to exterminate their neighbors. Instead, he convinced them to put provincial squabbles behind them. They shared a common enemy far worse than any threat one Talayan tribe posed another. Defeating Hanish Mein, he argued, would be the single greatest thing any of them could do to change their fortunes. He promised that when he was king he would remember every deed done for him and every deed done against him. He would reward them all in manifold ways. The Halaly, he had said, could be leaders among Talayans, or they could be the sole people left without a say in the coming world. They’d be laughed at by future generations who would look back with ridicule on a people so blind to the changes at hand, who had been rendered inconsequential because of it. It could not have been easy to look Oubadal in the face and say such things, but Aliver managed it.
The chancellor had first heard reports of all of this from others. When the prince returned from Halaly and began to march north, he witnessed it himself. Aliver held forth to the ever-increasing throng flocking to him. People gathered to hear him each afternoon, when he issued rambling discourses to whomever sought him out. He spoke with a prophet’s fervor and made greater and greater leaps of vision each day. He detailed beliefs and intentions that Thaddeus had not expected, had not planted in him, or imagined himself. Yet they were ideas of such nobility that he could not fault the young man in the slightest.
When Aliver said he would reward those who aided him, he did not mean to do so in the old ways: with riches, by bestowing power on one tribe instead of another, by elevating one upon the shoulders of another. He wanted to break the old way along its twisted spine and throw the pieces out. He asked tribes—whether in Talay or Candovia, Aushenia or Senival or anyplace else—to think of one another as members of extended families. They did not have to love one another unquestioningly or agree upon everything or give without the expectation of receiving. But he would have them sit down at council together and seek out ways that they could mutually gain from policies meant to benefit them all. Each of them could find prosperity themselves, and smile upon their neighbors’ boons as well. Why should it be any other way?
“Edifus was wrong,” Aliver said one afternoon, in words that played again and again in Thaddeus’s mind afterward. “Tinhadin was wrong. Too many generations following them accepted the same inequities. My father, Leodan Akaran, even he could not see how to break free from the tyranny of his own stature in the world. He knew it to be wrong. I felt this to be so; I knew it without knowing it; I fought not to see it because I knew nobody wished me to see it. But then came Hanish Mein. Then came the greater evil that burned through the land and left it charred and damaged in so many ways. I abhor Hanish Mein for the suffering he inflicted upon the world. I hate that even now I must ask for thousands to give their lives in fighting him. But for one thing I thank him. When Hanish Mein broke the chain of Akaran rule he set the stage for a shift in the fortunes of the world. Hanish himself is not the beginning of a new age. He is only the pause between two sentences. The earlier Akarans spoke the first sentence and it was a disappointment; I and those who come after me will speak the second sentence and it will be one of justice.”
Hanish Mein nothing but the pause between two sentences…Thaddeus had never imagined laying the situation out so boldly. Nor did Aliver stop there. He promised to do away with conscripted labor in the mines. He’d cancel the Quota and never trade for the mist again. He swore his ultimate responsibility would be to rule in a manner that benefited as many as possible. He did not accept the belief that the natural order of humanity was that of a few benefiting from the work and suffering of the masses. He loved his ancestors—let no one say otherwise. They were wrong to have structured the world like this, but they also made him possible. In his name—and in theirs—he would shape a better future.
Whatever hesitancy Aliver may have had as a youth had vanished. He had burned it away like baby fat from his lean body, and during the daylight hours he moved with unflagging vigor. Sometimes, at night, in close company, his face and body showed fatigue, worry. But that, Thaddeus thought, was to be expected.
By the time they reached the open plains that stretched all the way north to Bocoum many were calling Aliver more than just the Snow King. He was proclaimed a prophet of the Giver. Nobody, people said, had ever spoken such noble truths to so many ears. The Giver worked through him. With this war the Giver was testing the world for righteousness. Perhaps when they triumphed, the Giver would return to the world and walk among people again.
Aliver never made such proclamations himself, but the ideas caught like flames touching the dry Talayan grasslands. It flowed from person to person, village to village, into and out of different languages. It leaped mountain ranges and sailed across seas. The people were hungry for a message such as this one. They ate it with ravenous mouths and received it with clear eyes, especially as person after person shook off their mist dependence. Thaddeus sometimes woke in the night, fearing that events were rolling forward too rapidly, but there was no going back now.
The old man still counseled the emergent king, but increasingly he found himself carrying out Aliver’s wishes instead of the other way around. Thaddeus handled communications with the wider world through all the channels he could. He alerted the hushed resistance in every corner of the Known World that Aliver Akaran had announced himself. They need not be hushed any longer. He imagined the scenes being played out as the news spread. Quick guerrilla strikes against Meinish interests. Trade convoys attacked. Outposts torched. Miners rising in rebellion. Soldiers picked off by ones and twos. Aliver wanted life made hard for the Meins in every way possible and in every place possible. But these acts of resistance should be kept small, he said. He wanted to sow clear-headed discord in every distant corner, while at the same time building his army and pushing up from the heart of Talay. He would arrange it so that his force was such a massive wave, Hanish Mein would have no choice but to meet him in what promised to be as great a battle as anything fought in the first war.
Aliver’s new army spoke different languages, had different customs, made war in differing ways. They were young and old, men and women, experienced soldiers and rank novices. They were fishermen and laborers and mine workers, herders and farmers; they were of all professions imaginable. Unifying such diverse groups into a fighting force posed an incredibly complex set of problems. Hanish did not contest their northern progress, but he drew his provincial guards in toward a central point. They received reports that he was massing troops along the Talayan coast. The time when the two forces would clash was very near.
Fortunately, Leeka Alain was itching to be in military command again. The legend of the rhinoceros-riding general had not been forgotten. Leeka was, after all, the first man to separate a Numrek head from the neck that supported it. He had outlived an entire army and fought in battle after battle throughout the first war. Though a few years older now, he was still a general whom others would follow into the fray. He threw himself into ordering and training Aliver’s growing army.
He broke them into units meant to use their diverse talents. He instructed the officers beneath him to think creatively about how each person could be used to strengthen the whole. He simplified the battle commands, selecting the best words from a variety of languages so that the calls were crisp and understandable and so that each people heard at least one of their words spoken on their officers’ lips. He trained them through drills that got them used to functioning as units. By staging mock battles in which newer troops faced an onslaught of veterans, he accustomed them to the close-up tumult of two armies smashing together. He worked them hard but always left them just enough energy so that they could march the day’s allotment as they moved north. New troops were accepted the very mo
ment they offered themselves and were thrown into the routine without delay. He might not get them completely ready to face units of Punisari or hordes of Numrek warriors—who could be truly ready for such things?—but he would have them as prepared as humanly possible, even if he had to throw out much of Acacian military tradition and rethink the entire endeavor.
More than any other thing, though, Dariel’s arrival had done a great deal for Aliver. It bolstered him like no other single thing had. The night of Dariel’s arrival, Thaddeus had rushed to the council tent and found the two brothers locked in an embrace. They must have been holding each other for some time. They sat on stools, arms entwined, speaking to each other in whispers. Shyly, Thaddeus drew up close to them. He was not sure what to do until Aliver’s eyes touched on him. The prince reached out with one hand and pulled the old chancellor in to hug. Dariel—his face that of a man now, though the child was still there in the shape of his eyes—welcomed him with a sad smile. Thaddeus managed to whisper a greeting to the young prince before emotion choked his words away.
In the days that followed, the brothers got reacquainted amid the flow of daily events. They were together often during the day, touching at elbows, listening to the same councils, making decisions together, weaving the years they had spent apart into the fabric of their daily, busy existence. Thaddeus had wondered if there would be any friction between them. Would they be strangers to each other? Would they size each other up, men now and perhaps competitive, considering the possibility that one of them might soon be king? Would the years apart have damaged their relationship in ways not easily remedied? But Thaddeus saw nothing like this. There was a great deal of catching up to do, yes, but neither of them seemed at all awkward with the other. Perhaps Leodan had shaped them, in those early years, to be better siblings than most.
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