The Empire's Ghost

by Isabelle Steiger

  She smiled at him. “Now suppose you journey to Issamira. You will be faced with a choice. No one will tell you about it, but you must make it nevertheless. It is a choice between an intelligent coward and a charming fool. They won’t ask you to choose, of course—if I know those two at all, they have yet to realize a choice exists. But even if you win their sympathy, neither of them will be able to help you in their current position. And the longer their stalemate continues, the more time the vultures around them have to draw up battle lines, to eat away at the neutral ground in between until nothing remains. If you are seen to be on the wrong side when a victor finally emerges…” She swept one finger sharply across a shelf, as if checking for dust. “No, if you take my advice, you won’t venture there until they hold a coronation ceremony of their own, one way or another.”

  Kel tried not to look as despondent as he felt, but his crutches wobbled despite his best efforts. “Prince Landon wasn’t a fool or a coward. Prince Landon was—”

  “Ah yes, Prince Landon. The one person who might actually have been able to solve this mess—and so, naturally, he’s nowhere to be found. I must admit, I never met the man myself, but my father thought he was nothing special, which by itself is almost a guarantee of greatness.” She spread her hands. “I’d like to find him, but if the Issamiri elite can’t turn him up, I doubt it’s for lack of trying. If he doesn’t want to be found, why go looking for him? If he’s dead, then there’s definitely no reason to look for him. And if he does want to be found, whoever’s keeping him hidden must be a genius.”

  Kel gripped his crutches hard, forcing himself to meet her gaze. “Are you saying there’s no hope for Reglay?”

  She considered the question with total dispassion, but by now that didn’t surprise him. “Little hope, but there’s seldom none. Especially if you keep your wits about you. Now, are you going to let me look at that correspondence from Second Hearth or not?”

  Kel took a deep breath, but he knew what he wanted to say. “If I give it to you, then I want to know too. Whatever you find out, no matter what it is.”

  She tilted her head. “And you trust me to tell you?”

  He gave a shrug of his own. “I might find some of it out myself, I guess. And if I’m unimpressed by what you say, I can always stop sending you the letters.”

  “Mm,” she agreed, but her attention was half diverted again, focused on the most recent tome she had drawn out. “I don’t suppose it much matters if you know—it’s Elgar I’m trying to outwit, and he’s probably already found out more than I have.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He conquered Lanvaldis, didn’t he? That means he’s almost certainly gone through all of Eira’s papers himself. He can’t get at the other pieces of it yet, though, so we’ll have to hope he needs them.”

  “But you said your father was part of it as well, didn’t you?” Kel asked. “Then you and Elgar are on equal ground.”

  “Unfortunately not.” She replaced the book she’d been holding, but before she drew out another one, she added, “I did bring something with me, in the event I decided it was worth giving to you. You may as well have it.”

  The parchment she handed him had once been crumpled, but since then it had been smoothed out and neatly folded. He would have known the handwriting anywhere, and he laid the letter on a table so he could read it, gripping the edges of the table for balance. “Caius,” he said aloud, for Lessa’s benefit, “I beg that you will see sense—”

  “Always a hopeless proposition,” Lady Margraine muttered.

  “I beg that you will see sense, and cease this hopeless quarrel with Eira once and for all,” Kel continued. “He is closer to it than any of the rest of us, and your determination to make an eternal enemy of him only weakens your own position that much further. Draw a new border that you and he can find it within your pride to accept, and let us turn our attention to our true enemy, whose power waxes daily in the west. I do not know how far we can rely on Jotun in the future—I know he is of one mind with us, but his son, in whom he confides everything, has expressed his distaste for our plans in the most strident terms. Jotun is wont to be stubborn where his heir is concerned (a tendency, if you’ll forgive my saying so, with which I am sure you are familiar), but in the end he sets great store by Landon’s opinion, and the prince may yet sway him. And if he does, you and I must depend on Lanvaldis even more than before. I will entreat you once again: retract this foolish refusal to have dealings with Eira, and let us move forward together in this. Would you rather have to kiss Eira’s hand or the point of Elgar’s sword?” When he had finished, he swallowed hard, and added, “It’s from Father.”

  Before Lessa could make any reply, Lady Margraine said, “Well, it’s clear the previous Kelken never shared any of this with you—maybe he didn’t want to make Jotun’s mistake. But it’s a curious thing, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you like to know what this plan of theirs was?”

  “I’m still not convinced that sharing anything with you would get me closer to the truth than just going through whatever letters my father kept on my own,” Kel pointed out.

  She closed the book she’d been flicking through, but she didn’t replace it, just tucked it under her arm. “Whatever you find, I strongly doubt you’ll be able to interpret it without my help. I will share my information with you, so long as you do the same.”

  “You said yourself I couldn’t trust you,” Kel said slowly.

  “Oh, you certainly can’t. But you don’t have much choice. I’m sure your advisor is learned, but … well, let him try to solve it for you, if you like. Before long you’ll send it to me regardless, and any scraps of knowledge I feed you will seem a marvel.”

  Kel didn’t know what to say to that. “I will certainly look through my father’s letters. I will have them brought up from Second Hearth.”

  She nodded. “You ought to look at them anyway. It’s … an odd thing, I can tell you that from experience, but … well, you’ve already buried him, haven’t you?”

  “I did not bury my father,” Kel said. “I closed my hand around all that was left of him, and gave him to the wind.” He bit his lip. “And I let his murderer go unpunished.”

  She looked neither mocking nor sympathetic, just … blank, as if she could not understand his words or his feelings. She took out another book. “Well, you won’t catch him now. The murderer, that is.”

  “No,” Kel agreed. He had given that up, at least for the present.

  “Hmm…” Lady Margraine might have mumbled something against the page of the book, but Kel couldn’t make it out. She was turning the pages so rapidly, she couldn’t possibly be reading them, and yet she nodded vaguely every so often regardless. Finally she snapped it shut. “I’ll be taking this one, Kelken, with your permission.”

  Kel squinted at the cover: Wardrenfell of … something. Her arm was covering the rest. Anxiety prickled at the back of his neck, but he tried his best to tame it—it was just a book, wasn’t it? It wasn’t worth trying her ladyship’s patience about it, not when she was being so strangely civil.

  “Are you taking that one as well?” he asked, nodding at the one she’d tucked under her arm before.

  She drew it out, brandishing it before him. “No. This one is for you.” She must have realized it would be hard for him to hold on to it and keep his balance at once, because she relented slightly and laid it on the table next to the letter. “You should find chapters seven and twelve of exceptional interest.”

  Kel cocked his head. “You’re … ordering me to read?”

  “I am strongly advising it—even in a general sense, it’s a good policy to follow. People who don’t read tend to grow up like my father. But no, I don’t much care whether you actually read it or not—it’ll be your loss, not mine.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll take the book.” This one was called King Arvard and His Campaigns—an ancestor, then.

  Cadfael fidgeted. “Are we quite done here?”<
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  “I’d be happy to spend another month here,” Lady Margraine said, “but I know it is not to be. I’ll have to content myself with this book alone.”

  “Can it really mean so much to you?” Kel couldn’t help asking. It wasn’t exactly polite, perhaps, but she seemed so indifferent to everything else.

  He ought to have expected that she wouldn’t take offense. “This world used to be very different, you know,” she said, only half as if she were talking to him. “All the skeptics will tell you that questions of magic are only that, that there’s no proof any of it ever existed. But books give the lie to that, as they do to so much else. It’s not just spell books—more than a few ancient diaries survive, in which a fishwife takes her son to a healer, or a farmer is unimpressed by the tricks of a traveling mage who passed through his village. The skeptics will say that people were simply more gullible back then, but the truth is much simpler: magic was part of their lives, and they hardly blinked at it, no more than I am startled by the fire in my grate of an evening. And then magic went away.” She shook her head. “I am not a particularly god-fearing individual, but even I have to admit there’s a certain poetry to the concurrent fall of magic and the rise of our once-illustrious empire. And they ruined everything.”

  “But if magic was already gone by the time they—”

  “Not magic, Kelken, books. They destroyed books by the thousands—perhaps by the hundreds of thousands. The Ninists hated any god that was not theirs, and so we know almost nothing of the religious traditions before the empire, only whatever scraps could be copied and saved by courageous dissenters. And as for the rest of them … perhaps they could not bear it, living in a world without magic and knowing that their ancestors had possessed it. Maybe they sought to destroy the books of magic because they were too painful. But it was not their right.” She stroked the cover of the book she held. “The way the world is now, we’re all cut off from where we came from—from who we are, and what we’re capable of. But that just makes me that much more determined to find out.”

  They were all silent for a moment, and then Alessa said, “I don’t know how much good it would do to rediscover a past we can never reclaim. But I can’t fault you for wanting to find out.”

  “How do we know we can’t reclaim it, if we hardly know what it is? Why did magic leave this world to begin with? We don’t even know that much. The Ninists told a ridiculous story about a suggestible genius and a perfidious woman, and everyone just accepted it for hundreds of years.” She fell silent, staring at the rows of books. “But I waste my breath. This is not the time or place to go into such matters.” She walked to the center of the room, then suddenly turned back. “By the way, I do have one more piece of advice for you, before we part.”

  Kel bowed his head. “I’d be honored to accept it.”

  “You’d be wise to obey it.” She jerked her chin at Lessa. “Hide the girl away better, or else don’t treat her so well, at least in public.”

  Was that a joke or an insult? “What are you talking about?”

  She sighed impatiently. “To the eyes of the world, that is your bastard sister, and you are expected to feel about her the way people generally feel about their bastard siblings. Therefore, when you dote on her the way you do, people mark it. You don’t want them to mark it.”

  Kel gritted his teeth. “Why, because it’ll look bad if I’m kind to her?”

  “No, because when you are kind to her, so excessively and so publicly, you do your enemies the favor of pointing out your weakness. You tell them exactly how to hurt you. And unless that sweet sister of yours is hiding remarkable swordsmanship underneath that delicate veneer, you put her in quite a bit of danger.”

  He understood her, then, and his anger faded, but a kind of exasperation took its place. “All right,” he said. “I see what you’re saying well enough, but … everyone’s got to love someone, and sometimes openly. Everyone shares that weakness, don’t they?”

  “I don’t share it,” she said. “And I’ll bet Elgar doesn’t either. There is no one in my family left, but even if there were, we cannot live as others do. Those in power do not have friends, not truly.” She nodded at Cadfael. “This one is going to desert you for sure, and that is hardly out of the ordinary. That is why we tend to have servants, rather than friends.”

  “So Seren is not your friend?” Kel asked. The woman in question stood right in front of him, as unconcerned as ever. “Captain Ingret is not your friend?”

  “I should hardly call either of them that, no.”

  “Then how can you trust them?”

  She smiled. “Captain Ingret despises me, and it is for precisely that reason that I can trust him with … well, almost everything, and everything with which it is necessary to trust a man in his position. Seren I can trust because I know the reason why she serves me, and so long as that reason holds, she will not betray me. You will find as you grow, Kelken, that friendship is a very weak reason for trust, as it is for loyalty. That is why you must be stingy with your love, and extend it to as few people as possible—preferably none, but we all have our failings, I suppose.”

  “But you can’t help it if you love someone,” Kel said.

  As cold as her smile always was, it was always amused; there was nothing kind about it, but nothing polite or forced, either. “Can you not? How unfortunate.”

  * * *

  He dreamed of his sister, as he so often did. He dreamed of her, and they were training again, in the grounds behind the house—that stretch of beaten and dry earth their father had laughingly called the courtyard. He looked at her, hair tousled and falling in her face, her sword held out in front of her, quivering just a bit. This isn’t how I do it, Cadfael, she said.

  He ignored that, as he’d ignored every other protest, and swung at her again. She moved out of the way, and he frowned, swung again harder; his sword clanged against hers, and she staggered back, wincing.

  And the third stroke would’ve killed you, he said. Don’t dodge—block. I told you to block.

  I know, she muttered, rolling her shoulder. I heard you the first hundred times.

  You heard, but you didn’t listen, he said. Try it again. Plant your feet and block.

  Again he swung, and again she tried to move; this time he simply reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her back into place. If I have to tie stones to your feet to keep them on the ground, I will do it. Block my sword.

  You’re stronger than I am, she protested. But I’m fast. That’s how I’ll be good, not by out-bludgeoning you.

  You are fast, he agreed; she was as quick as anyone he had ever seen, with a blade or without one. But you can’t dodge everything, and sometimes blocking puts you in a stronger position. I don’t need to teach you how to dodge—you’ve taught yourself that well enough. But blocking has to become second nature; you have to move so quickly that your arm is faster than your mind. And you are far from that point. Again.

  No matter how much she strained or sweated, no matter how many bruises she bore, he never heard her complain about the training itself. He was always the one who finally said, “Let’s stop here for today,” and even when the sun had long since died away in the sky and she was panting as if her lungs would burst, a look of disappointment never failed to cross her face. It was not that she didn’t want to work hard; she simply didn’t want to do as he told her. But she did, in the end, or tried to. She always tried to, in the end.

  You don’t teach me anything truly impressive, she said, after several halfhearted blocks. You’re not Eira’s best man because you block so well, are you?

  He frowned at her. I am nothing of the sort to His Grace. Who told you that I was?

  Everyone says so.

  I doubt that—

  They do. They say they’ve seen you in the arena, and—

  The arena, he said, as I’ve told you many times, is no place for you—no place for you to be, and no place for you to think about.

  She looked
troubled, then, her eyes dark and serious. If it’s so bad, then why do you fight there?

  If only he’d known the answer then. Because His Grace wishes it, he said, just as he had said at the time. And it was true, but he had not marked it, had not realized what it meant.

  Sister, he said suddenly, because he remembered what she wished, listen to me. You are talented; you know you are, and you will do much with it. But you must remember—

  Sister, she intoned, in a grave, deep voice, you must remember to forswear fun wherever you find it, to engage with it, if you truly must, only as with a deadly foe.

  I don’t mean to scold you always, he said. I only want you to take care.

  A real hero doesn’t take care.

  Are you a hero, then? he asked her, holding her gaze until she looked away, blushing.

  Well, she muttered, scuffing at the earth with her foot, not now. But I want to be—or at least I want to try. Like the hero in your story. She looked at him again, and smiled sheepishly. I want to be like her, one day.

  Before he could say more, the dream pulled her away from him, and in her place was that woman, whose name he’d never learned but whose face he’d never forget. The dust-dry courtyard was gone, and in its place was the long grass of that meadow, crystalized in the morning frost. The wind whistled about his ears, just as it had that day, and her face was just the same. Sadness lurked behind her eyes, fathomless and unchanging, even in the face of all the fury she leveled at him.

  Why did you not cut deeper? he might have said, but didn’t. He wanted to know what she would say.