The Lost Daughters

by Leigh Grossman

  Since I hadn’t really played a direct role in any of the “keeping people alive” part of the journey except in having a knack for avoiding death, I found myself watching people and their reactions during the speech. Talye and Kern looked satisfied. Sperrin looked torn, perhaps not surprisingly. I knew the return to killing troubled him, especially with the prospect of so much more killing implied in Nemias’s words. But a big part of him loved what he had done, and lived for it.

  Sperrin

  After the speech the celebration started in earnest. The band started playing again, and when the honor guard was dismissed, there proved to be tables of food and drink behind their line: enough for the whole audience to eat well.

  Nemias hopped down from the platform and walked over to embrace me.

  “It’s been too long, friend. I know it wasn’t your will, but I’m glad the storms blew your here. We need you, friend. I need your skills very badly, and your friendship.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ve missed you. Sorry I couldn’t warn you before I left. I never knew—”

  “Later,” Nemias said. “We’ll talk tonight. Tonight we’ll toast our friendship and exchange news. But it needs to wait on a sadder piece of business first.”

  “What—” I started, but with a pat on the shoulder, Nemias turned away. Burren had walked up as well, and with an unspoken acknowledgment the two commanders walked together to where Ketya’s father stood, the nervous captain still at his elbow. The nervous captain’s sergeants and a few soldiers had rejoined him and stood nearby. They seemed to be waiting on his word before joining the rest of the troopers at the feast tables.

  The chancellor watched the two men arrive, a look of displeasure on his face. I assumed he intended to use their snub of him to gain some advantage, and wondered why they had left him the opening. They must have known that not even mentioning him to the crowd would be seen as a deadly insult—it wasn’t the sort of mistake that either Nemias or Burren usually made.

  Which meant, of course, that it hadn’t been a mistake.

  Nemias preempted whatever the chancellor planned to say with his own words. Unlike the booming speech he’d given from the stage, Nemias pitched his voice so even I could barely hear it, a half dozen steps away.

  “Lord Chancellor, I heard you speak once at Davynen, and then again on your tour of southern military installations. The first time you pushed us into a victory we had no business winning. The second time you spoke for two hours without notes, and you gave one of the most moving speeches I have ever heard. I have never been so proud to be Ananyan as I was when I heard that speech. So you must understand that it is with more than a little regret”—he nodded slightly to the no-longer-nervous-looking captain and his troopers—“that I give the order for your arrest.”

  They took hold of the chancellor by each arm, and the captain produced a set of irons from inside his tunic and clicked them into place. The chancellor didn’t struggle or seem very surprised.

  Very few in the festive crowd noticed anything, but I saw Ketya whiten next to me. I touched her hand to caution her but she shook me off angrily. “On what charge,” she said, her voice very cold, “do you arrest the Empress’s Chancellor?”

  Burren turned from her father and looked at Ketya closely. They had known each other for years, the harbormaster and the chancellor’s teenaged daughter, though I doubted Burren had seen her since before Ketya left for the Empress’s Academy. Nemias glanced over briefly but deferred to Burren, who seemed to consider his words carefully. Finally, he answered quietly. “If I spoke the charges out loud, that man”—he nodded to her father—“would be torn apart where we stood by this crowd. I will tell them to you later, in private.”

  Chapter 20

  Sperrin

  Whitmount: Five weeks after the Loss

  We met again that night, Nemias and Burren and I, after the chancellor had been seen to his cell. I had wanted to bring Ketya along, since she would have a role in the events to come. But she remained furious at what she saw as an unexpected betrayal—and I still didn’t know the reasons for her father’s arrest. But I trusted Nemias, and I knew neither Nemias nor Burren would make such a move without compelling reasons.

  So I asked that Ketya be assigned chambers next to mine, where I could tell her what I found out tonight, and where I could keep an eye on her to be sure she didn’t try to once again rescue her father. Then I had asked an orderly to escort her to the kitchens for a bit to eat—not surprisingly, Ketya had skipped the feast in the Great Yard—and then escort her to the hospital so she could visit Guthre and make sure the scout was well cared for.

  By then a messenger had arrived to tell me that the Governor-general and Captain-general would be pleased to see me at my leisure. Moments later the messenger ushered me into a high tower chamber with tapestried walls and an expansive view of the valley that fronted Whitmount.

  A broad oval table topped with polished gallowwood dominated the center of the room, piled high with maps and diagrams. A matching set of straight-backed chairs lined the wall to my right, with two aides standing unobtrusively by them. The people I’d come to see sat near the window in three overstuffed chairs. A low table with sweetmeats and cordial glasses sat in easy reach.

  “Over here,” said Nemias, waving me to the fourth overstuffed chair. In addition to Nemias and Burren, the man I still thought of as the nervous captain occupied the third seat.

  “I believe you’ve met my aide, Captain Geriald?” Nemias said. The captain no longer wore a Mountain Cougars uniform, but a well-worn Threecastle Tomcats tunic. As an overcaptain, Nemias had commanded that regiment—he’d accepted the command shortly before I had left for the palace. Presumably his aide had been with him since then, and promoted along with him. Geriald looked much more relaxed now.

  “I commend your acting skills, captain. The chancellor is not an easy man to fool.”

  “I was well coached, ’Captain Sperrin,” answered Geriald. A short brown beard, neatly trimmed, framed his round face.

  Burren laughed. “I took the liberty of suggesting a few mannerisms that might be helpful. It was the least I could do after the way the old schemer outmaneuvered me.”

  “Outmaneuvered you? Betrayed you is more like it,” said Nemias. “Betrayed all of us.”

  I glanced at the two aides near the door, but Nemias caught my eye and nodded slightly. Everyone in the room could be trusted.

  “Betrayed is a strong word,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. If Nemais said betrayed, then there had been a betrayal. But we were still talking about the Lord Chancellor of Ananya, and no evidence had yet been presented.

  “A strong word it is,” Nemias acknowledged. “Perhaps Burren should explain.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “Overcaptain, I believe we’ve known each other for six or seven years, and you know I am not prone to exaggeration,” said Burren. He had an odd habit of tugging his red-brown whiskers when he felt nervous. Soldiers’ gossip in the palace held that Burren had given up games of chance because of an inability to shed the habit.

  “I know your word was well thought of in the palace,” I answered. Again, as neutral as I could manage.

  “So I thought,” said Burren. “I took my job seriously. Perhaps I guarded my privileges and appointments fiercely, but I guarded against waste and mischance in my department just as fiercely. No one honest had grounds for complaint. They said that nothing escaped me, which perhaps overstated the case. But I kept close watch on all that happened in the harbor.

  “When I was transferred it surprised me, especially since the chancellor denied me an opportunity to speak with him about it, and asked me to leave immediately. He wouldn’t even allow me to complete exit reports before leaving: He told me to send them later in the cable-carriage packet.

  “None of that is evidence of wrongdoing, I know,” said Burren, seeing my skeptical expression. “I know the ways of palace politics, and I assumed I had offende
d the Empress or someone very close to her. The betrayal had probably happened already by that time, but my evidence of it came later.”

  Nemias reached over and took a sweetmeat. He offered a cordial glass to me, and I sipped it while listening. Yellowfruit brandy warmed my throat as Burren continued.

  “My replacement was given two weeks leave before having to report to the Drowned City. So there was no harbormaster at all on the night of the attack. My former subordinates carried on according to standing orders, but without oversight or enough authority if something should go wrong. One of those subordinates, Cerne—I believe you’ve met her, Sperrin—took it on herself to do the sort of sweep of the harbor defenses that I had done routinely. It troubled her that the entire Home Fleet had been loaded down with fireworks and dispatched on some sea-monster hunting expedition with no harbormaster in place to coordinate between the Home Fleet and the fishing fleet.

  “On Cerne’s sweep, she found that the harbor guards had been dismissed from their posts. The only people with the authority to do that are the chancellor and the harbormaster. Even the captain of the walls doesn’t have that authority. And there was no harbormaster that night.”

  Burren held up a hand to forestall me. “She saw something more. Cerne saw the chancellor himself ordering watchers from their posts. Following him unseen, she saw him enter the empty Harborgate room and turn the wheel to release the tension on the great chain. The chancellor himself opened the harbor to our enemies.

  “Cerne escaped unseen,” he continued. “She thought to report what she had seen, but who could she tell? Only the Empress had the authority to countermand the chancellor, and who was Cerne to see the Empress? Even if she had tried, the Empress was in the middle of the initiation ceremony. And before that ceremony ended, the Empress was dead.”

  Burren reached for a glass himself, and drained it. “So you see, we have reason to accuse the chancellor.”

  “One question,” I said. “How do you know this? I just got here, and I don’t think anyone from the Drowned City could have been ahead of me on the Mountain Road. Anyone moving faster would have been exposed to attack on the road.”

  Captain Geriald cut in, “Messenger birds.”

  I looked at him quizzically. Messenger birds had been a staple of the Holy War, long outmoded by the arrival of more modern means of communication. Imprinted with old magic, they could be sent between any major fortress with reasonable speed by anyone who knew the proper commands. For that reason every fortress had kept a coterie of the things until the signing of the treaty and the advent of the Empress’s magic had turned them, overnight, from weapon to nuisance. Most of them were released, only to have their descendents infest eaves and foul rooftops ever since. Some of them had been eaten.

  “He’s right,” Nemias said. “Captain Geriald knows messenger bird commands, as do many—I suppose you would call them hobbyists—throughout Ananya. The birds can still be used. Of course, they’re only helpful if you want to send to a thousand-year-old fortress, or something sitting where there used to be a fortress. After the disaster, after that first night of fighting, Geriald here had the idea of sending messenger birds to every fortress we could think of and seeing who responded. Whitmount is lousy with the things. We heard back from enough of them that we got a picture of what happened, and we have since been able to reestablish communication between military commands. We are still filling in details, but one of the people we heard back from was Cerne. She survived the fighting and helped organize rescue and repair efforts along with a former dancemaster of all things—a man named Dulcet who’d recently returned to court from the Empress’s Academy under some sort of cloud, I gather, although whatever the scandal was likely died with the Empress. But even with their efforts, what’s left of the city is in dire shape. I think that unless the magic is restored quickly, they will need to abandon the Drowned City soon.”

  That all made sense, and I nodded in acknowledgment. “I may be able to contribute some pieces to the story. I was in the palace when the attacks came.” I saw Nemias registered my use of the plural. “The chancellor and his daughter were the only two I was able to rescue. Although I am beginning to think I actually only rescued the daughter.”

  I recounted the fighting in the palace, including the unexpected Alliance soldiers waiting with packs and frames on the landing below the chancellor’s room. They had known about the Alliance ships that had entered the harbor after its defenses had been dismissed, but not the purpose of those ships.

  Burren took the first stab at putting it all together. “So you think the chancellor had advance warning of a god’s attack on the Empress and her family, and arranged an escape to the Alliance for himself rather than try to prevent it? That seems overly complicated, even for him.”

  “Unless,” Nemias said, “he had something to do with the attack by the godservants as well.”

  I nodded ruefully; they all had much the same reaction. “It’s nothing we can prove.”

  “How would you even do such a thing?” Burren asked. “And why? What could he hope to gain?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I only know one person other than the chancellor who might have an answer to that question, and I don’t think you’re going to like who it is.”

  “The daughter.” Nemias had already guessed the answer. “But we can’t trust her a bit, can we? Her behavior this afternoon....”

  “I trust her.” They looked doubtful. “Not on the subject of her father, but in other matters.”

  Burren seemed skeptical. “That would be a big chance,” he said. “I agree that she is not a creature of subterfuge like her father, unless the Academy greatly changed her. But he owns her, and has never let her be her own person. She would try to tell you the truth, but in the end she would tell you what he wanted.”

  “I would have thought so, too,” I said. “But I saw her take the Talisman of Truce when he would have left it in the palace, and she brought it all the way here without revealing it to him.” I told them what had happened in the mountain hideaway, and how well she knew the nuances of the treaty.

  “That’s promising, I agree,” said Nemias. “But perhaps trust is premature. Let’s keep watchful over the next few days; she’ll give us grounds to trust her—or grounds not to.”

  I didn’t press the point hard. “The sooner we find out what her father did, the sooner we can start planning how to fix it,” I said. “But I agree that a few days of caution may be best. And we may have a battle to plan before that.” I told them what the wolf-creature had said to me, which fit with other things that had been seen near Whitmount.

  “They will never rest until we are gone from the mountains,” said Burren.

  “Then they will never rest.” Nemias laughed. “Sperrin, we have a battle to plan, and win. Let me tell you what we know of where things stand in Ananya, and what we have available to fight with. Then we can speak of how to put it to best use.”

  First Burren laid out where things stood generally: They retained a fragile hold on the empire, only because the Alliance attacks and fey attacks were not coordinated. The fey wanted all humans out of the mountains. When Ananyan fortresses had repulsed two Alliance attacks on the mountain passes to the north, the same giants and wolves and griffins and other fey creatures that had massacred Drowned City refugees had feasted on retreating Central Alliance soldiers. The Ananyan forts might no longer have magic to aid them, but the fey certainly did. At the same time, Alliance naval forces had sunk or driven off the Home Fleet, its weapons and engines crippled by lack of magic. Alliance ships now harassed the Ananyan coast at will, and it was taken as a given that a fleet was assembling to transport the armies that couldn’t fight their way through the mountains. Only in the oldest and strongest mountain fortresses, able to communicate but not support each other, did Ananya maintain her power. And the fey were determined to eradicate those fortresses.

  * * * *

  Burren and Geriald excused themselv
es after the general introduction, mostly to give me and Nemias some privacy to catch up on a decade of separation. They agreed to meet us again the next morning, after I had time to rest.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Nemias said when the two of us were alone. “These troops will need all the help you can give them.”

  “Do you think the chancellor was behind your appointment here, the way he was with Burren’s?”

  “Maybe? Who knows. I don’t really care. As it turns out I get to be in the thick of the fighting, and I got to see the miserable old bird arrested, too. Always sure he’s the smartest one in the room...we both know the type.”

  “He helped at Davynen.”

  “Of course he did. He got to lord it over everyone and watch while that idiot trooper’s head got blown off. If the ’general there hadn’t been incompetent, we wouldn’t have needed him. You and I have never had any trouble getting soldiers to fight.”

  “Have you had much fighting here?”

  “We beat off two attacks on the town the first night, and since then it’s been just harassment. It hurts them to come too close to the fort, so they won’t do it until they’re sure they can win.”

  “What do you have here?” I asked. “One of the regiments at the review I didn’t recognize.”

  “We have two full regiments and some odds and ends. Not good regiments but they’ll do. They follow orders, they fight when you tell them to, and they don’t run. They’ll be good troops before this is all over. The full regiments are the Mountain Cougars and the Red City Catbears. Elements of the Riverhead Scouts. Four companies of the Whitmount Home Guard. There are also some other scraps and refugees with military experience who have come in, which I’ve used to plug holes and as replacements. All told, call it eight companies of what you might call line infantry on a good day, and six light companies. Plus I’ve got about a regiment’s worth of engineers who are trying to adjust to the lack of channelers. I have them shoring up defenses and helping with the farms about equally. It’s a bit less than five thousand trained soldiers in all. I’ve been running them through drills on fighting without magic, when the fey give me time.”