He knew his wasn’t the most exciting kind of life, spending his days with a broom in his hand—especially in a place like Sheath, where most everyone was up to some reckless scheme. But he found himself almost happy at times—or maybe this was happiness, this lack of dismay at the passing days, this knowing you would see the people you loved again and again, so that there was never any need to feel sadness at parting. Whether it was or not, he didn’t want it to change; he knew it was better than the life he’d had before.
But if he could be content with no more than this, what had plagued the citizens of the fallen empire, who had lived with wonders as if they were ordinary things? What did they suffer from, that they commissioned artists to build things of such beauty just so they could forbid themselves to look upon them?
* * *
“I knew it was shaping up to be a bad night. Roger damned Halfen was here earlier, asking about things that were obscure fifteen years ago and bloating everything he said with his usual damned nonsense about this or that—did I know about his great-uncle on his grandmother’s side, there was a fine story involving a barrel of wine and a stray horse—and so on until I was about to beat his nose back into his face. If I had a piece of gold for every time that swindler talked my ears to bleeding, I’d— Are you listening to me, girl?”
“Aye, Tom,” Marceline said, drumming her fingers against the table. “I’m always listening.”
“Then stop slouching, why don’t you, and look like you’ve got a head on you. Even my charity only goes so far.”
Marceline sat up, incensed. “Your charity? Whose thanks is it you could eat today?”
He screwed up his face. “That don’t count.”
“Doesn’t,” Marceline said. “That doesn’t count.”
“Well, why doesn’t you let me speak the way I like, eh?”
He only did it to be obstinate, Marceline was certain. Seth had come from the countryside too, or at least he’d spoken as if he did, but he wasn’t in Sheath half a year before you couldn’t tell his speech from anybody else’s. And if he could do it, Marceline had no doubt that Tom could too. He just wouldn’t.
“What did Roger want?” she asked, finally.
“Halfen? What’s it to you? That bastard never pays me enough, no matter what he’s after.” He sat down heavily, drawing a hand through his long, matted hair and getting it tangled halfway. “Get me a bottle from the back room, will you?”
Marceline folded her arms. “Get it yourself.”
“Get it for me, girl, and I’ll tell you what I found today.”
Marceline got to her feet in spite of herself. “It better’ve been good, old man.” But she’d only just pushed past the tattered curtain dividing the two rooms when someone started thumping on the door. She decided to pay it no mind—if Tom thought she was going to answer his door and fetch his wine, he was already drunk.
The banging continued, and she heard Tom lurch to his feet. “All right, all right, don’t break your fingers.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Or do.”
Marceline’s hand closed around the neck of the closest bottle, but then she heard the door swing open, the stumbling of feet as someone hurried inside. She stepped sideways so she could see through the doorway, and caught her breath. Luckily for her, Tom had done the same thing, and much more noisily.
Full plate was prodigiously expensive—and, common wisdom held, not always worth the added weight, given the current state of weaponry—so only a very few of Elgar’s elite guard wore it. The lower officers wore boiled leather and the occasional brigandine, and the common soldiers whatever protection ordinary leather or thick wool could afford. But all wore the deep blue-black that marked them out as Elgar’s creatures. Those in plate trailed the color behind them with thick capes, and the others, like this one, wore plain tunics, devoid of a single ornamental stitch.
This guardsman was a guardswoman, with tight, brittle brown curls and a nose that looked like it had seen a break or two. There was a small vertical scar along the side of her face, just shy of her left ear, but Marceline’s gaze moved quickly from her face to the sword in her hand, drawn and pointed right at Tom’s upper lip. “Tom Kratchet?”
Tom raised his palms, taking a step back. “Now, now. No need for that, is there?”
“Are you Tom Kratchet or aren’t you?”
Tom chuckled nervously. “Eh, well, that depends what you want him for.”
“I’m a customer,” the woman said, but she moved the sword point closer. “You sell information down here, don’t you? I’m buying.”
Marceline saw the way Tom’s throat worked as he swallowed, but he didn’t flinch. “Well enough. What do you want to know?”
The woman drew the sword back just an inch. “Deserters.”
Tom frowned. “Deserters? Like from the army?”
“Is there another kind?”
He laughed. “See here, I don’t know what you’ve heard, or how you found this place, but I don’t deal in gossip, for you or anyone. If you want to know something ancient, something forgotten, something that’s truly a mystery, I’m your man. If you want to know about the last brawl at the Dragon’s Head or who your fellow’s fucking while you’re down here wasting your time, I don’t know no more than anyone else.”
Any more, Marceline thought reflexively. You don’t know any more than anyone else.
The woman didn’t gut him immediately, and Marceline supposed that was something. “We are prepared to pay you fairly for good information, but also to kill you for any attempt at subterfuge.”
Tom didn’t blink. “Well, I wish I had good information, as I dearly like being paid. Truth is, I don’t.”
“Not a word?” Her eyes narrowed. “Not even down here?”
Tom waved a hand at her. “It’s as I said. What more do you want from me? I’m no deserter.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, and the guardswoman finally shrugged, sheathing her sword. “Well, if you do get your hands on something, any one of us can pay you.” She ducked out the door, but turned back at the last moment, curling her fingers around the edge of the doorframe. “Take care,” she said, and then she was finally gone.
Tom waited a few moments before he shut the door, but it was only after he’d latched it that he looked in Marceline’s direction. “Well?” he asked, slumping back into his chair. “Were you just going to stand there gaping and watch her slice me up?”
“She had a sword,” Marceline pointed out.
He threw up his hands. “This is the thanks I get. This is my reward for offering shelter to some scrawny orphan out of nothing more than my own goodness—this is the loyalty I’m owed, eh? Don’t know why I ever bothered with you.”
Marceline scowled. “She had a sword, Tom.”
“Aye, and I thought you were so fearless.”
“Not against guards.”
“Well, you sure proved that.” He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “You’d better bring that bottle, girl. And so help me, you’d better bloody pour.”
CHAPTER THREE
Varalen struggled through yet another interminable corridor, trying to arrange his robes into some semblance of order without slowing down. Not for the first time, he cursed the architects of the Citadel, whoever they were—he didn’t doubt there was something to be said for magnificence in a palace, but did there have to be so much of everything? Four libraries, half a dozen kitchens, sixteen armories, five floors of dungeons, surely more staterooms than there were dignitaries on the entire continent, and enough damned corridors to line the road to hell. You practically needed a horse to get from one place to another on time. And he hated horses.
He finally skidded to a stop before the heavy double doors of his destination, and took a deep breath before pushing his way through. The room might have been large and airy, with a row of windows in the far wall that looked out onto the Citadel courtyard, but it always felt like a prison to him.
Imperator Elgar looked
so small whenever he sat at his strategy table, his thin shoulders hunched over, his sleeves rolled up to reveal his slender wrists and long, spindly fingers. It didn’t help that the room had been designed to seat a council—had sat the Council, in the days of Elesthene—with a high vaulted ceiling and so many extra chairs that they’d been shoved against the far wall to gather dust. “You’re late,” he said when Varalen walked in, barely looking up. “This is the third time you have been late in as many weeks. Tell me, do you do this on purpose?”
If only I had so much courage, Varalen thought. Out loud, he said, “My apologies.” His own accustomed chair was not dusty, but it sat a foot or two farther away from the table than it should have been; had Elgar vented his frustrations on it in its owner’s absence? Varalen corrected the chair’s position without commenting on it. “I will do my best to keep it from happening again.”
“It’s on account of those robes he wears,” came a voice from the only other occupied chair, and Varalen turned with extreme reluctance to face Captain Nathaniel Wyles, who was—gods, who was actually eating a leg of chicken during a damned strategy meeting. As Varalen watched in disbelief, the captain tore off a strip with his teeth that was so long, he had to jam it into his mouth with two fingers. After licking them clean with a noise that surely didn’t need to be half as loud as it was, he continued, “Too fancy by half, those things. One of these days he’s going to trip on the steps and break his neck.” His cheerful tone indicated just how broken up he would be if that ever came to pass. “Besides, robes went out of fashion with magicians, eh? That makes you … what, centuries out of date?”
“Robes, Captain Wyles,” Varalen said, tugging at the sleeve of his own, “have long been customary in advisors, and since I serve the imperator as such, I hardly find them inappropriate. You cannot seriously expect me to dress as you do.” That is, like a thug, he added mentally. Wyles was not uncommonly tall or uncommonly broad-shouldered, but he had fingers like overstuffed sausages and a jaw like a marble slab; Varalen wouldn’t have been surprised to see him unhinge it, like a python. He also had the imperturbable calm and cold-eyed smile of a veteran torturer, which, not coincidentally, was the position he had held before Elgar promoted him. Varalen didn’t doubt that he could hurl the inhabitants of the nearest orphanage over a cliff and retire to bed untroubled by anything worse than indigestion.
At least his verbal sparring with Wyles helped him hide his disappointment that the captain was present at all; Elgar set far too much store by his brutish opinions. Captain of the city guard was admittedly a prestigious position, but that hardly meant Wyles had anything worthwhile to contribute on the subject of actual warfare. He was meant to keep the streets in order—what did he know about the movements of entire armies?
Elgar scowled, but decided to hurl a roll of parchment into Varalen’s lap instead of making whatever curt remark was running through his mind. “The latest report from the southeast,” he said. “You’re going to tell me how to fix it.”
Jevran had the southeast, and he was no fool. A surprising number of Elgar’s commanders were—or had been, when Varalen first arrived—but Jevran was one of the ones he had kept on. Besides being able to tell a battle formation from the inside of his own ass, he knew how to write reports. Varalen finished reading and set the parchment down with a shrug. “It’s nothing so bad. Nothing I hadn’t warned you about, certainly.”
“Not so,” Elgar replied. “You said the border between Esthrades and Reglay would be clear.”
“I said it would be relatively clear, in the north. Commander Gerd apparently decided that meant ordering Jevran to charge down the border like a madman was a good idea, and he was predictably caught between outlying patrols on both sides—it’s to his credit he managed to withdraw at all. And now the border won’t be clear, since both countries know we’re thinking of pressing forward that way.”
Elgar ran a hand through his hair—still thick, and mostly black, though it was starting to gray right above his ears. “Then how should we press forward?”
Varalen gave another shrug, a much unhappier one. “My lord, you’re like a man who’s just been disarmed asking whom he should stab next. Jevran would have been your best choice to lead the charge into Reglay, but with so many wounded—”
“The charge into Reglay?” Elgar looked up sharply. “You have already decided so much?”
“You asked me to tell you where we should attack, my lord, and I am telling you. We were fortunate that Eira and Caius Margraine fought each other while they lived, because it allowed us to continue poking at Esthrades’s northern border on the pretense of claiming land that rightly belonged to Lanvaldis. But we have failed to secure any kind of victory, and this state of affairs simply cannot continue. It is a waste of men.”
Elgar shook his head fiercely, curling his fingers around the edge of the table. The wood was faded ebony, doubtless older than both of them put together. The table could easily have seated twenty, but it was otherwise plain. Varalen wondered idly what had happened to the table the Council had used, made for seven and only seven. “When I first called you into my service, you nearly begged me, despite my many misgivings, to move against Esthrades at once. And now you would have me simply abandon the campaign?”
“I don’t wish you to abandon it—just to set it aside for the moment,” Varalen insisted. “Reglay is an easier target. They have less land, and fewer men in a less-disciplined army. King Kelken is not hated, but he is not loved, and he is certainly no great commander. The harvest has been bad—the common folk are malnourished and discontent—”
“And they’re all cravens,” Wyles put in, still chomping away at his chicken.
“Which is why I know they won’t come to Esthrades’s aid, if we attack there instead,” Elgar finished. “But if I move to take Reglay, I expose my flank to that bitch in the Fellspire—and who’s to say she won’t join the fight just to spite me?” He wrinkled his nose, the snuffling sound he made as he inhaled somehow dismissive. “If it’s a choice between Esthrades alone or Reglay and quite possibly Esthrades anyway, the correct course of action seems clear enough to me.”
Wyles wiped his mouth. “It seems to me, Varalen, that you should want Esthrades down quickly more than anyone. The little marquise has been giving you quite the run for it, hasn’t she? But even you could tie up Reglay into a nice enough present for His Eminence without much trouble. What threat could possibly come from that quarter? That weak-kneed cuckold King Kelken?” He laughed. “Or rather, I suppose it’s that son of his who’s got the weak knees, eh? The little cripple? Is it either of them who’s got you so concerned?”
It took all of Varalen’s restraint to ignore him, but he knew that was the wisest choice. He turned to Elgar instead. “My lord, let us agree Esthrades is the greater threat. You are right that, as much as I would urge caution, the time to attack”—since you insist on doing so, he thought to himself—“must be soon; the situation in Issamira will most likely never be as favorable as it is now, and it cannot last forever.” To emphasize his point, he swept a finger around Issamira on the map, a wide arc that encompassed the entire south. It was the largest country on the continent that Elgar had not conquered, and King Jotun had left it in a state of financial and military prosperity. Varalen was not looking forward to the day when Jotun’s children finally decided which one of them was going to rule it. “We both likewise agree that a conquest of Reglay would be simple, provided we would only be attacking Reglay, and not Esthrades, Issamira, or, gods forbid, all three together.” Another sweep, this one including a sizable chunk of the east—all the territory Elgar had left to conquer, and all he was determined to. “But I assure you that Lady Margraine will not follow you to Reglay—I am sure she would like nothing better than to snap at your heels as you charge, but she simply does not have the men. And she will not have them, if you attack now.”
Elgar scratched at his beard—short, black, and impeccably maintained; Varalen had ne
ver so much as seen his whiskers glisten when he drank. “Yet she has enough men to defeat us?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, if she doesn’t have the men to defeat us, why should we not take Esthrades and be done with it?”
“My lord, you are being—” Petulant or childish would try Elgar’s patience needlessly, and even deliberately combative wasn’t safe enough to risk. “I cannot convince you of the wisdom of a plan you are determined to disdain,” he said at last. “Reglay is weak now. We know, beyond a doubt, that it is weak, and you can take it with little trouble—and without anyone else attempting to stop you. Why not simply take what is within your grasp, rather than risking more on something harder to obtain?”
“You seemed to think it would be easy enough before.”
“Because I knew the Esthradian army as it was, not as it is. I never dreamed that woman would be able to do so much with it, and never so quickly. They say she hasn’t so much as seen a battlefield.”
“So you’re afraid of her, then,” Elgar said.
It was probably best not to answer that. Instead Varalen spread his hands along the table, brushing at the edge of the nearest map. Elgar had an ancient one, he knew, one that still depicted the Empire of Elesthene. He never took that one out when they discussed strategy, but it was among the piles of other documents heaped upon the smaller table on his far side, and Varalen had often seen him close his thumb and forefinger around the rolled-up parchment, as if he could encompass the world he wished to make just so easily.
“My lord,” he said at last, “I am not sure of her. I am not sure of what she might do, and that … unnerves me. I am sure of King Kelken, and I am sure of Reglay.”
Elgar stared hard at him, as if the correct answer lay in the lines of Varalen’s face instead of in his words. “I mislike this,” he said. “You say she does not have the men to harry me in Reglay. Yet in her own land we send enough men to outnumber her three to one, and she routs us five to one. If she can do so much with so little, how many men does she need to be a nuisance?” He bit his lip, and it turned white against his teeth. “And what if it is more than men we must concern ourselves with?”
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