Gravis felt his fingers shaking, and curled them inward, clenching his fists. The creak of metal seemed overloud, wrong when everything else was so still. “Explain to me what it is you have done,” he said as firmly as he could.
Kern still looked at him blankly. “Captain, I—”
“There is no use telling me you do not know where Almasy has gone,” Gravis said, cursing every hint of tremulousness he detected in his own voice. “I already know you were the one who sent her from Stonespire, and the marquise has no knowledge of it. So you are, in fact, the only one who knows where Almasy has gone. You will tell me where she is, and then you will tell me why you have sent her there.”
There was nothing combative in Kern’s face, nothing in his voice. “Or?”
“Or?” Gravis repeated, confused.
“Or what, sir?”
Gravis hesitated only a moment. “Or I will assume you no longer wish to serve me or her ladyship, and I will act accordingly.”
“I will always wish to serve you, sir,” Kern said, with every bit of the earnestness Gravis had always loved in him.
“Then answer my question,” he said. “Where is Almasy, and why did you see fit to send her there?”
Kern’s eyes flicked away for the first time, but he pulled them back again almost immediately. “Almasy has gone to Saltmoor, and I sent her there because that is where she belongs. She should never have been here.”
“Am I to understand—” Gravis swallowed thickly “—that she will not be coming back from Saltmoor?”
“No,” Kern agreed. “She will not, if the gods are good.”
If the gods are good. Gravis could not tighten his fist any farther; the metal of his gauntlets would not allow it. “I would ask why you would send her ladyship’s primary defender to her death, but I fear I already know the answer.”
Kern looked at him intently. “Why do you fear, Captain? You need fear nothing.”
I fear too much. He held one fist in the other so tightly that the metal groaned in protest. “What is it that will happen here? What will happen, while Almasy is not protecting her liege?”
“Justice,” Kern said.
“Treason,” Gravis corrected, forcing the word out from between clenched teeth.
“It is no treason. I would die before I committed any treason.” He tilted his chin, setting his jaw defiantly. “Before the day is out, Captain, Esthrades will be free again, and ours.”
How can it be free and ours at once? Gravis thought vaguely. “What are you saying?” he asked aloud. “Speak plainly.”
“I am speaking plainly, Captain. You simply do not wish to understand.” Kern met his gaze easily, his eyes a clear and piercing blue. “There will be no vulgar violence; you mustn’t fear that. No harm will come to you, I’ll make sure of it. Lord Oswhent assured me that all will be as I order it—all the men await my command.”
Gravis fastened on to only two words. “Lord Oswhent?” The foppish man in the red robes that he’d met at Mist’s Edge? He was behind this? “What have you to do with Lord Oswhent?”
“He provided the men,” Kern said.
“The men.” His voice was practically stifled, but he forced it out. “The men you added to my lists. Elgar’s men.”
Kern shook his head. “Our men. In the service of our freedom.”
Oswhent would never give you men for such a purpose. “How many are there?” he said. “Tell me that.”
Kern shrugged, but that wasn’t uncertainty. “Fifty-three, by my last count. Word in the barracks is that they are expected soon—tomorrow or the day after, but you know how rumors are. No one will balk at their arriving today instead—and Gregg won’t balk either, not when I tell him you wished me to let them in.”
Great gods. “They are coming today?”
Kern’s eyes remained steady. “Within the hour, Captain.”
His head was going to burst; he could feel it. “They’re coming to kill—”
“They’re not going to kill her, Captain,” Kern said calmly. “You know that. What would be the point in it? It would only cause chaos, and no one wants that.”
“No,” Gravis agreed, numbly. He could see what they wanted, all too clearly. As to what Kern wanted, he had far less of an idea than he could have wished. He thought himself in the right, that much was plain; his motives were not cowardly or mercenary. But there was no time to divine what they were; these men of Oswhent’s, of Elgar’s, would be coming any moment, and—
He tried to scour his brain for some answer, but the only image that came to his mind’s eye was Lord Caius, bowed and broken on the day his wife had died. It was that man he had sworn to protect, but where could he find him now? My lord, he thought, help me. What should I do?
He looked through the arrow slit more out of helplessness than anything else. The portcullis was standing open: though this was the day the throne rested, they were in the habit of using the seventh day for delivering supplies to Stonespire. The lack of foot traffic from petitioners meant that goods could be transported more easily, but it still took some time—the stables were at the base of the hill, both because of size constraints at the summit and because it was damnably difficult to get a horse and rider up those steep steps, never mind a horse and cart. So all their suppliers pulled up their carts by the stables and carried their goods the rest of the way on foot; it was a process that easily took hours, but today it seemed they were nearly done.
There should have been nothing in all that to interest him, but his eyes fixed on a target immediately—Seren Almasy was staggering up the path to the hall. She looked terrible, haggard and weary, but she was, so far as he could tell, unharmed. He stared down at her, at the mysterious, solitary figure she always made, and he came to a decision at last.
“Captain?” Kern asked, and Gravis turned to him, smoothing his features into whatever semblance of composure he could muster.
“Yes,” he said. “I heard you. She won’t be killed.”
“And you—”
“I know what I must do,” Gravis told him, and there was no hesitation in his voice.
* * *
Lady Margraine was in her study—reading, just as he had left her. He stared at her a moment before he spoke. It was a strange feeling: for once he knew something she didn’t, and she suspected nothing.
Finally he cleared his throat. “Almasy will be up to see you in a minute.”
She barely looked up. “I hadn’t asked for her presence, had I?”
“No,” Gravis admitted.
“Then why is it necessary? All I said was that I hadn’t sent her on any errand.”
“I know that,” Gravis said.
“Mm.” She turned a page. “Was it your mistake, or another guardsman’s? A servant’s?”
“A guardsman’s,” Gravis said. “But mine as well, I suppose.” He placed a hand on the hilt of his sword.
“Fair enough.” She still wasn’t looking at him. “If that’s all you had to tell me, then you may go. I leave the discipline of your own soldiers to you—do whatever you see fit, or nothing.”
“I have already done so,” Gravis said.
“Oh?” She sounded, as ever, bored. “Then leave me to my reading.”
“I cannot, my lady,” Gravis said. “Not today.”
She looked up, finally, as he had known she would. How strange to remember that she was, in truth, scarcely older than Kern, though her eyes seemed to hold the cunning of centuries. He had seen her on the day she was born, the day of Lord Caius’s greatest loss. She had been a thing of bitterness to him then, a strange interloper who blinked quizzically and slept without fuss, as if oblivious to the grief she had caused. But he had pitied her then, because babes, so they said, were innocent, and he knew she would never know her mother. The bitterness remained, but he had stopped pitying her long ago.
“What is it you mean to say?” she asked, one hand pressed flat against the book but both eyes on him.
They were int
errupted by Almasy, who opened the door just a sliver and slipped quickly through. She bowed to the marquise, though the look she gave Gravis was still wary.
“Were you able to pass unseen?” he asked.
She nodded. “To the best of my knowledge. I do wish you’d found a better way to warn me, but I suppose it couldn’t be helped.”
Lady Margraine had relaxed somewhat when Almasy had entered the room, but now she glanced between them, tensing once more. “Clearly you two know something I don’t. When do you plan to tell me?” Then she frowned. “Seren, are you limping? How did that come about?”
“It’s nothing,” Almasy said, though she winced slightly as she turned her ankle. “It will heal soon enough.”
“I did not ask you whether it was nothing, I asked you how you came by it.”
Almasy acquiesced immediately, as she always did. “I was ambushed near Saltmoor, where I was sent on orders I had been led to believe were yours.”
That was anger, finally, on the marquise’s face. Gravis didn’t see it often, but he’d seen it enough to recognize it. “And who gave you these orders?”
Almasy hesitated, and looked to Gravis. “Well, I … I don’t precisely know. I assume it was—”
“My lady,” Gravis broke in, “you will know all in time, but there is something I must tell you, immediately.”
That got her attention. “Well?”
He swallowed hard. “There are more than fifty men within the city—men chosen by Elgar and Lord Oswhent. They were smuggled in—they were smuggled in by a traitor in the ranks of my guardsmen, and they are preparing to storm the hall and take you captive at any moment.”
For a single instant Lady Margraine’s eyes went wide—and then she began to laugh, curling her fingers around the back of her chair. “Gravis,” she said, “choosing and maintaining the members of your guard was the one thing I gave you complete charge of, and you’ve mucked it up.”
Gravis curled his fingers into a hard fist. “I am aware—”
“Oh, spare me your guilt; we don’t have time for it. You are certain this traitor told the truth?”
“No,” Gravis admitted, “but I suspect he did. Why would he bluff about such a thing? There’s nothing he could stand to gain from it.”
“That’s true enough,” she agreed. “Damn it all, how did he get them all in?”
“He added them to the recruitment lists,” Gravis said. Which no one but me will ever write in again, he thought.
“It’s brilliant, in its way,” Lady Margraine said. “Even I have to admit that. It’s far too brilliant to be Elgar’s idea; that Oswhent must be the one behind it. I am the last of my line, and the only one who has the ghost of a claim to the throne of Esthrades. Without me, this realm can only fall into chaos and civil war. But if he can capture me, he captures the whole of Esthrades at one blow.” She smiled. “Provided, of course, that he can keep me. But I think after Mist’s Edge he became certain that I was the sort of person who’d do anything to spare my own life. And who knows? Perhaps I would.”
Gravis shook his head. “Expounding on the reasoning behind his plan won’t help us figure out how to thwart it.”
She just kept smiling. “Normally I’d disagree, but in this instance there’s no time.” That was an understatement; they needed to come to a decision as close to immediately as possible.
Almasy’s face was drawn and anxious, one hand tracing the curve of the opposite arm. “My lady, I am prepared to fight—”
“Yes, you’re always prepared to fight, Seren,” Lady Margraine said. “But as good as you are, you haven’t a chance against fifty men.”
“She need not fight even one man,” Gravis pointed out. “They are expecting Kern to open the gate for them. We need only keep it barred—”
“And they’ll scurry away like so many rats, and we will never find them. And I will have fifty more traitors in my city than I had before.” She pressed her knuckles into the wood of her desk. “No. We cannot let them escape.”
“Then let us open the gate and shut it behind them,” Gravis said. “We will come to battle—”
“And they’ll slaughter us.” She laughed. “We don’t have fifty fighting men of our own in the hall—we barely have half that. In the city itself we have hundreds, of course, but how are we to get them here? If we send for them too soon, they’ll alert the rats that something is amiss; too late, and we’ll be killed before they can arrive.”
“We have the defensive position,” Gravis insisted. “We can station archers—”
“And you’re willing to bet all our lives on that, are you? How many men do you think we’ll lose?”
“You are only telling me what we cannot do,” Gravis growled. “What would you suggest? That we sit about at our leisure and wait for them to stroll in?”
Her smile was almost fond, and that put him more on guard than anything else had so far. “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps that is the best way, after all.”
Gravis opened and shut his mouth once before he could speak. “Are you—are you joking?”
“I’d say if I were joking you would know it, Gravis, but … well, the truth is you probably wouldn’t.” She shut her eyes a moment, thinking, and Gravis realized how drawn her face looked, despite her apparent calmness. “I have decided,” she finally said. “There is one way that is clearly best—a way to eliminate their threat forever, without risking the lives of our men.” She opened her eyes. “I will take care of this myself.”
Gravis balked, staring at her in stunned silence; Almasy looked hardly less shocked. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Are you saying you wish to command the men?”
“I’m saying there will be no men, Gravis, because I will handle this. I will handle it alone.”
“My lady, if you think you can somehow persuade them to leave, I assure you that even you—”
She smiled at him. “Do you think I wish to let traitors run free any more than you do? I assure you, Gravis, they will all receive their just reward.”
Gravis gritted his teeth. “My lady, you assure me of impossibilities.”
“Not at all, Gravis. You will simply have to follow a command you have never been able to follow before, and trust me.”
He spread his hands helplessly. “You truly think—all by yourself—”
“Hmm, perhaps you do have a point there.” She closed her eyes again, considering it. “No,” she said. “Not quite by myself. Seren will stay with me, and we shall await them in the great hall. The door will not be barred, and we shall open the gate when they call—let them think they’ve taken us unawares.” She looked at him sharply, and she did not smile then, just made sure her eyes bored into his. “As for you, Gravis, and all your men, and every last servant and hired hand currently in this castle, let no one else enter the hall until I summon you. No one, do you understand me?”
What could he say to such a command? Had she gone mad? He searched her face, her demeanor, but she seemed the same as always. She was still pale, and her mouth trembled just a bit, but a little fear, if that’s what it was, was certainly warranted at this point; he’d have been more worried if she had seemed untroubled. But how could he simply let her persist in this, without knowing what she planned?
He even wondered, for a moment, if she truly intended to surrender, and simply didn’t want any of them there to protest or witness it. But he could not believe it. Few men loved their wives as ardently as Arianrod Margraine loved her throne—she would not just give it up at the first signs of adversity. It was impossible.
“My lady,” he said, “I—”
“You are confused, Gravis,” she said, “I know. However, it is not my responsibility or my inclination to enlighten you. It is your responsibility to see that my orders are carried out, and I promise you it will go the worse for anyone who disobeys them.”
“But, my lady, we are not to take up arms at all? We are to sit here cutting cards while traitors enter our halls? I will not abi
de such an order. I will not.” He had prided himself, in some strange perverse way, on his obedience, even as he had prided himself on his defiance. His defiance allowed him to think that he did not just submit to her mindlessly, but his obedience was its own mark of honor, as if it proved she could not break him with her insolence, that he could bear the burden of his oath without flinching. This order, however, was one too far. How could he stand by while traitors marched up to Lord Caius’s very throne?
Lady Margraine sighed. “Though your continued obstinacy is truly starting to wear on my patience, I doubt I have the time to argue with you. Very well. You may remain with me in the great hall, if that is truly your wish. But then you will do exactly as I tell you, and not a thing else. And if I hear the slightest word of protest, I will have you beheaded, and promote Dent to the captaincy that very instant.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Gravis curled his bare fingers into a fist, grimacing. He felt naked without his armor, but Lady Margraine had insisted upon its removal. “I doubt any of these traitors have seen your face before, Gravis,” she had said, “but there’s only one man who goes squeaking and clanking about Stonespire in full plate no matter the weather or time of day. We can’t very well hide that Seren survived their plots—we may have women in the guard, but I am not accustomed to keep any so close about me. If they see you here in addition, they may grow skittish and turn their tails, and we cannot allow that. You must play the common guardsman for an afternoon.”
The three of them were alone in the great hall, the doors closed but not barred, as her ladyship had instructed. Outside, the portcullis remained closed, but Gregg—reliable, obedient Gregg—had orders to raise it upon their enemies’ arrival. They could only hope he would not be harmed, but it did not seem likely—for all the traitors knew, the other guardsmen thought they were new additions to the ranks. Why would they strike out at Gregg and betray the ruse so early?
Such thoughts gave him little comfort when he considered that Gregg knew nothing—they had thought it best not even to tell him to be on his guard, lest he give the game away. Gravis fidgeted, wringing his unarmored hands. Her ladyship was sitting on the throne, and she was reading. Almasy was standing at her right hand, stiff and straight as always, her eyes flicking from the marquise to the far doors and back. Finally she said, “My lady—”
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