As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  Inwardly, he was shaking his head. As he had often done since the day of terror, he caught himself reflecting on the loss of Bertold, that half-breed mage. So many years they had known together. That one had been a master of plots, of terrible, wonderful subtlety. It hadn’t saved him, though. What had killed him had been the one thing for which Leopold was certain he should have never needed him. Fate was enigmatic.

  “To…anticipate dangers to your most…most…” The man’s lips fumbled with the words, though the priests had trained this one exquisitely in tongues. “August majesty.”

  “Where is Mauritz, then?”

  Makari tittered. “M’lord?”

  “Gone. Just say it. Gone, through the net, like the little worm he is. Fine. Where is Turgitz? What do you think the people shall say when they see the Lord’s Council has become a council so small? Two decrepit men and their emperor—it’s a sad play, not a meeting,” he roared.

  Makari wet his lips with his tongue, shuffled his feet. There was a defensive dullness in his eyes. “We have heard tell he went out on…on your ships, majesty.”

  Not chasing my brothers. Leopold trembled with the burden of his rage. They were gone, and so was his Master of Ships…presumably with his ships. The only question was, of course, how he had slipped the northern net, when the north itself was in open rebellion.

  Three bands of aswari scum—three!—had smashed his loyalists along the coast and thrown them into the sea. Men from the ships Turgitz had supposedly been retrieving from Effise.

  Aren’t rats supposed to flee from the ships?

  “It could be he’s—”

  “Silence!” Leopold spat.

  Men were never so quick to disassociate themselves from another as when they smelled an aspect of rage turned upon them. Makari, sweat lacing his brow, was a man beset, and his fellows knew it. Not a one took to his side—took, in fact, to the furthest rear of their emperor. Some sellswords, he thought lividly.

  “How long has it been since my uncle’s murder?” Leopold asked.

  “Almost one month, m’lord.”

  “Your men are not incompetent, Makari. I have seen them work. So how is it that you behave as idiotically and blindly in this as those black-sheeted dogs my father called palace guard?” He took a step closer, and though Makari towered over him, his demeanor made him seem the taller man. “Is it possible you did not think these things through, or did someone pay you higher, Makari?”

  The guardsman paled, swallowed. Perspiration stood like dew on his broad forehead.

  “Men, if Captain Makari does not kill himself now I order you—”

  “Leopold.”

  The Emperor whirled, stared at Ersili standing just beyond the retreated soldiers. His wife, he knew, had her own spies in his presence. She was to be a force at any meeting, regardless of whether she was there or not. Behind him, the scuttling presence of Makari became suddenly less interesting. Already, the rage eased.

  “What has happened?” she asked, though of course she knew.

  “I was merely instructing our men on proper decorum,” he said bitterly.

  There was something dark writ beneath her eyes. Something terrible. It made him forget himself for a moment in time. What has happened? The question all but bowled him over.

  “Do you wish to know my good graces once more, Makari?”

  The man blinked, nodded.

  “The northern lords are in open rebellion. They say they will not support me if my dynasty cannot protect them from traitorous aswari camps, discontent as to the food and water we have deigned to grant them.” He flicked his wrist dismissively. “Our northland dunes are not so different from the southern coast, surely.”

  Again, Makari nodded. “The Prelate will—”

  “Take a brigade of Prelate Bove’s finest. Ride north under a banner of truce and butcher those aswari dogs in their homes.”

  By the time he had turned back to Ersili, the man was already gone from his thoughts. His wife said nothing to his decision, only stepped close enough that he might reach out and touch her. He considered it, briefly. A cold, weary undercurrent to her stare stayed him. Something about her bespoke bleakness unbecoming.

  “Join me back at the palace, noble husband.”

  Leopold forced himself not to look back as they retreated to the carriage his lady had taken to him. He tried not to walk too swiftly, though, trying to focus on the burbling of the river, on the heat of the sun, on anything other than the oppressive silence in the men around him. Suddenly, he realized how horrified he was.

  These men have steel, a voice whispered in his head.

  He felt the skin crawling on his back, every inch of skin seeming to reverberate with the promise of a blow to come. Even in the carriage itself, the feeling did not abate.

  “Were you in any other position, at any other time, I should tell you to buy Urtz off with Mauritz’s position. Play the pair against one another,” Ersili said, almost casually. “Useless now, really. The pair are obviously working together. And if you were to give Urtz such offer now…he would simply take Mauritz’s place in time, in every regard.”

  “At least Anatole and Fiore are in the south.”

  The only betrayal of her distaste was in the barest shred of hesitation.

  “You are no longer behaving like yourself, Leo,” she said in her native tongue.

  “Is that so?” He snorted bitterly, sensing a jibe in her words. “And who would know better who is I, than I?”

  She looked away, as stone walls rose around them. “Those that love the man he professes to be.”

  They came into the palace through the main gate, under Ravonnen guard, and Leopold considered it generous that he still allowed the palace guardsmen the right to man the gate itself. Men scattered before their approach. The broad yards about the steps were cleared, plants wilting where the gardeners had fled—or, admittedly, been killed. Inside, men were more attentive, and servants rushed to make sure the halls were adequately lit for their passing.

  One of the Imperial Guard—Ser V, something—waited for them at the final approach to their apartments. He carried with him still the ridiculously large sword that was his calling card—Viltenz, that’s it!—as he bowed to them, an overwrought gesture of obeisance. Leopold scowled at him when he wasn’t looking, wondered how long until men like him might die and be replaced with men he could actually trust. That one, he knew, had been with his father at Leitzen.

  In a way, that made him responsible for Leopold being here now.

  He dismissed him out of hand.

  Instead, at the reception salon before his bedchamber, three Ravonnens waited. A smattering of servants waited there as well, bowing before their approach—Ersili’s creatures, one and all, handmaidens and eunuchs brought from Ravonno. There would come a time, he hoped, when all here was replaced with the culture of that distant land. Only then would he feel safe. Probably.

  “I have dissolved the council, officially, under your seal. In such dangerous times, say you, a man cannot be seen to doubt, to need the steadiness of others’ hands. A single voice, a single power. It speaks volumes, love.”

  These were the words that turned his thoughts beyond himself. He was alone in a room then, the door half-cocked, his wife by the window with the light behind her. A part of him wondered how he had come to be there, how any of this had come to be.

  A drastic action, without doubt. It was ruthless, just like her, but he had to wonder at the wisdom of it. It told him she feared something more than public outcry, something more than the burning ship to which they had been lashed. Mauritz, he murmured, as he thought of another uncle’s bloated corpse in a tower, with guardsmen all around him. This woman had danced with the greatest minds of a generation back home, but here, now, she feared the brute force of this one wayward prince of the blood.

  But love, he thought to cry, even in this backwater, they understand politics!

  “A true emperor, then.”

 
“A king among kings,” she whispered.

  “And when they call me tyrant? When they call me villain?”

  “You will have the power to snuff their voices before the second syllable falls.”

  “Do you truly think that?”

  Aristocratic was her beauty. Aquiline. He looked at her in profile as she turned the words, struggled with something deeper than them both. They had bested men. They had bested God. Yet what was this madness that they could but skitter before now? What were they?

  “Ersili,” he pressed.

  “We are what we are, my heart. We do what we can for those we love.”

  Avoidance. He gritted his teeth as the throbbing renewed. Would that he had ever known patience. Subtlety was the deadliest thing any man should ever know.

  “My love, look at me.” She looked, truly looked, startled and wan. “He would not dare. Not openly. I may not be the smartest, or the bravest, but Ersili, I tell you thus: that man would be fool to strike openly. The Ravonnen would turn on him, their supplies would cease, and he would seal this dynasty’s fate. Do you see? I fear no mortal man!”

  Lips moved, but the words behind them were but mouthed. “Nor will he.”

  “You doubt me?”

  Her eyes met his squarely, fiercely. “I could never doubt the man I love.”

  “Have faith. We still have that, and the Inquisition, too.”

  No one, he reminded himself, should ever be allowed to look on their emperor as anything other than a god. Or their empress.

  He took her hand in his, caressed it, raised it, kissed it. Then he turned aside.

  Filled with the fervor of his faith and the force of Ersili’s love, he reached out his mind to the entire world beyond their chamber’s doors. She shifted behind him. It was only a matter of time now. Devoid of council, devoid of pretense, they would force Mauritz into the light and burn him in its eternal fires.

  That thought of fire, of light, seemingly burst into a bleaching torrent.

  He shuddered as something drove into him from behind. Tried to scream but only wheezed. The fire wheezed out of him in liquid form. It seemed an impossibly long time that it held him as such, his mind revolving around the horrid thought that he was no longer whole.

  When he came back into possession of himself, he was already falling to his knees. A silver point protruded from his chest. By his own reckoning, it simply could not have been. To his wife, he reached, the world shrinking even as his eyes widened.

  “Ersili?”

  He retched, stricken by the weight of his own mortality. She looked down on him with tears in her eyes and it tightened his throat. Breaths came but raggedly as her eyes stayed with him, lamenting what, only now, he realized she had done. Something swelled in him as her hand withdrew the dagger from his back.

  Where did that come from? It struck him petty, that that should be his question of the moment. Not why. Not to what end. But where from.

  Ersili sank beside him, still weeping, and drew the blade around to his chest. He pressed at her, but she seemed a titan then, hushing him, whispering nonsense as she shoved the blade in a second time.

  “Wait for me,” she whispered, needlessly.

  He clutched at her hands and at the knife, and through some strength of will he did not think he still possessed, pushed them free. She fell back, onto her rear, her lips trembling. A breath fluttered out, long and heavy, between them, in what he had meant to be a question.

  “I will come for you. But first—I must do what needs be done for our children.”

  A dagger—a Ravonnen dagger—clattered to the floor. And outside his door, the muffled dying of one of his Ravonnen sellswords.

  Urine leaked down his legs. He could feel it staining the length of his robes.

  He buckled with his grief. Into nothingness. And the pain went with it.

  Chapter 14

  In the streets, the duped men cried, “We are free! We are free!” They did not know that one traded a tyrant only for a tyrant. Imperial riders went from post to post, and everywhere the tone was the same: The Ravonnen have shown their true colors. He Who Rides is dead—the Emperor is no more!

  There was nothing stranger than to greet a message for which there was two endings: bliss and destitution.

  It was quiet in the keep, despite the bustle in the streets below. What celebrations existed were kept to private affairs, locked in tapestry trappings and silken laughter. She would bid none of it in her presence, no matter who bore the news. What came to her thus was second-hand, muted—her father’s people dared not grace the tower into which she had taken residence.

  Sara’s tower. She would brook no other residents.

  “Do not do this,” Ser Edwin had begged her.

  She had ignored him, as she had ignored Dartrek before him. She had cordoned the place, staffed it with her own people in an earnest rebuke of her father’s protocols. None of her supporters wished her to tip her hand so soon. It was, they said, if anything a double victory for her father—not only had he rid himself of a troublesome ward, but exposed all of Charlotte’s confidantes in one fell swoop.

  There was no convincing her of its stake. Were Sara left in Walthere’s care, she would die. Sometimes things could indeed be so simple.

  Short walks beyond that tower were all she allowed herself, for a short walk was all it took to dredge up symbols of discontent. There was a certain hall, a place of silence and sun, barred windows but gentle paintings. It had been a nursery once, where wet nurses fretted—her father would not trust so important a thing as children to her mother. The wet nurses were gone, but the light remained, colored by shadows. They fell indiscriminately on the children captive there.

  All around them, the shade was colored by false depictions of plum and apple trees, the rolling hills behind them swept blue with a flash of sun-addled open sky and water, so much water, rolling carefree across the whole of the scene. Some artist had crafted it, left it nameless. A fresco to fill the minds of lonely children with friends and dreams.

  Every wall was touched by that vision. Thus it was made impossible for the subtlest man alive to remain subtle there, no kerchief in sight—a stunning revelation, that—and silk slippers to assuage his fattening toes. He was already in a half-bow when she entered, his smooth face guileless. Few things could strike her with more uncertainty.

  “Are you a wet nurse now, Boyce? That was one power I thought yet beyond you,” she said, haughty as she might, trying to keep the tremble from her voice.

  Anelise, the youngest of the Matair children, bounced her niece in her lap. She looked up at the voices, said nothing over the delighted squeals of her charge. Older than her years, Charlotte thought. So much older, out of necessity. Neither of them were more than a few feet from Boyce. Charlotte could not help but remember the last time he had been so close to someone, it had been with a blade in his hand and Usuri’s life dangling by its edge.

  With practiced grace, he rose, though his smile was a weary, bag-laden thing. “You yourself have made security a priority, lady. I exist but to show your father feels the same.”

  Other meanings, in that. Other voices, too.

  An unrecognized child careened past, startling her, the blonde hair a mess where the boy had met with water. He scrabbled with a girl-child at his heels, the barest carvings of a wooden sword dangling from his fingers. Their laughter was a drug, debilitating in its infectiousness. Anelie pulled her legs in as they passed, trying not to trip them. Her young charge, however, reached her arms out and cried, “I’m a princess too!”

  This whole castle was a place of imaginary friends.

  Their earliest memories will be of swords at their necks. And she hadn’t even the barest notion of who this new lot were. Nor, disturbingly, had she heard any rumor of their arrival. She looked hard at Boyce, as though by this alone she might chisel some meaning into his pale face. It gave nothing, nor ever would it.

  “Does the lady require something?” he asked, no
trace of concern to the tone.

  She looked away. “I merely was…” At the far edge of the room, her advance was mirrored by the children, their youthful play surrendered to uncertain examination of their new guest. Charlotte smiled at them politely, and turned something less polite on her father’s sneak.

  “Whose are these?” she hissed.

  “However willing the spirit might be, my lady, your father and I are in agreement that the hands and flesh must be kept from idleness. You have been…indisposed. I took it upon myself to find the ladies some company.”

  All lies, of course.

  She twisted then to the children and returned the kindly smile to her face. “Who are your new friends, Anelise? Surely I have not been gone so—”

  “I am not playing with them,” Anelise interrupted, without looking at her. “Would the question best asked not be straightly shot?”

  Chastised, she turned away from the child. Reasons I hate them small… Yet on Boyce, all she read was smug victory. It steeled her resolve, and she started toward the blond children, tiring of all this angling inward. She made it but a few steps before Boyce was there beside her, hands crossed behind his back to present as little a threat as possible.

  “I should not do that.”

  She gaped at him. Still, the face gave nothing. “Boyce. You will stand aside.”

  “Of course, my lady.” And he did, shuffling aside demurely. “I should think you recently learned a terribly valuable insight into the double-edged nature of knowledge, however.”

  They were close enough to the children that when a fleck of something wet struck her leg, Charlotte knew it was not leakage from the roof. Her nostrils flexed in disgust, but she did not give them ground, merely turned her attention to the youngest among them—to Kana, no longer bouncing on her aunt’s lap. The girl-child’s face was screwed up in a mask of hatred, and from the way she gargled, it was not hard to gather what her gift had been. Anelise sat beside her, one hand still gripping hers, but she made no real effort to stop the child.

  “A kindness in your visit, lady. Shall I return the favor later, when we might have more chance to talk?”