The Councillor

by E. J. Beaton

  Within seconds, Lysande found herself jolted through the next door. Rayonnant Palace’s observatory felt even larger than she had expected—in Castle Sapere, the top-floor viewing room had been bounded by a glass wall, yet this room opened to the air at the far end. Reflecting the Lyrian philosophy of connecting the soul to the sun. It was funny how even at a time like this, the scholar in her head would not quiet, bolts of facts snapping into place, reverberating. With the darkness of the night facing her, she faltered. The chandelier above her dangled crystal daggers in the torchlight, quavering in the breeze.

  Yet the steel border around the room provided the real air of menace: at least two dozen guards stood shoulder to shoulder along the left and right walls, and as Derset strode in, they straightened and raised their hands to their chests.

  “At ease,” Derset said.

  The whole group lowered their hands again. Light glanced off spiked helmets and Periclean armor, the bronze plates thicker than those of the mercenaries who had poured off the second chimera. Surely, these soldiers were not fodder for swords. The weapons in their belts bore rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, cut in the pear-shaped Periclean style, and one woman held a dove in her hand. The man with the very ordinary smile stood at the end of the observatory, a vast collection of ropes and stirrups sprawled at his feet.

  A chimera was coming back, Lysande deduced. Either that or a mule big enough to carry a half-hundred soldiers would be landing here. She felt the tremor in her hands and wished that she had imbibed even a half-dose of the blue mixture. No; that was the thought of a weakling. She tried to resist the current of nervous energy.

  It was strange: not long ago, Derset had been lying beneath her, his fingers tangled in the blue silk of her bedsheet, leaning into her palms and taking her direction. Had he ever wanted her direction? I like what you like. Her mind moved past that, humming along at a frenetic pace. It was as if she had skipped past fear. Shock could be a drug, too—could it not?—and she shepherded her thoughts into order.

  Two daggers remained in her doublet. Maybe three, if she had miscalculated. There had to be fifty or so blades among the guards in this room, from longswords to daggers. How long would it take to draw a dagger from her doublet and throw—five seconds, perhaps?

  A small table with chairs whose backs were embellished with solid gold suns stood in the middle of the floor, and into one of these garish creations she was pushed, smarting. Derset strode past to the end of the room and looked out into the night, facing the blackness for a few quiet moments. He turned and walked back to take the chair opposite her. “Has the Iron Queen’s pet anything to say?”

  “I should have guessed. You’d been in the west for years. That should’ve been a sign,” she said, quietly. “Mea Tacitus was moving around in the Periclean States. An envoy to the foreign lands would make the perfect correspondent. Diamond thread on the purse, too.” It was all so easy to see, now. Being thrust into a chair and ringed by armed guards provided a dose of lucidity. “You had it made when you were dealing with Royam, of course. The panther—that came from across the sea too—I suppose you met someone who could train it while you were abroad.”

  “You worked this out in seven flights of stairs?” His voice did not betray anger.

  “The high collar and long sleeves, and the skinbrace—a costume for hiding a brand, of course—but you were always so austere, so modest in your behavior. My suspicions were focused on the city-rulers.” The words came from her in a stream; she was speaking out of the frenetic energy running through her. Deduction felt easier when it served to dispel craving, to ward off anger—to tie up the frayed ends of his deeds instead. No flicker of reaction passed across Derset’s face.

  “You were so skillful, planting the seeds to make me suspect Luca,” she said. “You made me second-guess everything he did. All those hints and suggestions, which you took back as soon as they’d taken root in my head. I presume the White Queen told you to direct the blame to him, because of his image.” Derset’s nod came without hesitation. “The clever prince, who planted archers behind tapestries, who kept his strategies veiled in a cloth of ever-changing words. A man whose very blood seemed to grow tongues and speak of conspiracy. She chose her target well.”

  Derset remained impassive.

  “And that queensflower, left at the Valderran table. You distracted half our number by sowing suspicion, stirring up the north and south.”

  “They do make it easy.”

  “I see now that I have been blind where my scrutiny was most needed.”

  If she had not been so busy watching the city-rulers at the banquet, might she have noticed him slip a silent-sword into a cake? If she had not been focused on Luca, Cassia, Jale, and Dante in the box in the Arena, might she have seen some accomplice unlock the door of the wolf cage? She should have been surveying the whole vista, not a small slice of it. And then there was the casual construction of her own humiliation: she had allowed herself to take comfort the only way that she could, aside from drinking scale. Derset had only needed to seize the plum that she dropped into his lap. She tried not to score her palms with her nails. Two daggers, she reminded herself. Five seconds to throw.

  “Even failing to kill the Council didn’t induce you to give up on Luca, not when you could hire a sword and wash your hands of the blame. I can see why she used you.”

  “A servant cannot help but follow orders,” Derset said.

  “That letter you received.” She looked into Derset’s eyes. “The White Queen coded it with the Legilium. A prince might’ve had a copy lying around, of course, but you knew it by heart—after all, you studied the law. There was no need to lug along a book.”

  He leaned across the table, resting his hands on the wood. “You of all people understand the importance of planning. I did what I had to do.”

  She shook her head. Hiding the mixture of self-loathing and fury that was simmering beneath her skin, she looked into his face. “Clever. You were very clever. Everything was meticulously organized so that you could act quickly, right from the day Sarelin died.”

  “A glorious day,” he said.

  It was hard not to flare up, to reach over and slap the satisfaction off his face; but this was not Luca Fontaine. Derset would not enjoy being struck.

  With such strain that she could feel her teeth grinding their outer layer, she forced herself to return to the subject.

  “Those busts were your doing, too, in the prayer-house. The only bit I can’t figure out is the attack on the Grandfleuve . . . those weren’t your people, were they?”

  He rubbed the chimera brand on his neck with one finger and closed his eyes for a moment. “Usually, I find that it is when one waits in stasis, between enterprises, that luck strikes,” he said. “Fear breeds fireballs. In one way, the shameful neglect of our people was a gift.”

  How keenly she felt that. “You could have let me burn.”

  “Why not tighten the bond between you and your dear, patient advisor: the man who always listened to your problems? Once you knew he was willing to risk his life for you, you’d trust him in any crisis, surely. True friendship and warmth . . . of many kinds. Don’t all scholars crave that?”

  It was humiliating to have the last piece nudged into place by the same hand that had designed the puzzle. She fought the quaver in her voice. “And what was it all for? Why do this to Sarelin, to the realm, to me? All those clever moves—I see it’s some kind of game, but what are we playing for, Derset?”

  “Henrey.” Derset pushed his chair out, the legs screeching against the stones, and stood up. “My name is Henrey. Perhaps you’ve forgotten it; it doesn’t glitter quite like Cassia or Dante or Jale. Or Sarelin.”

  He walked over to the soldier at the end of the line who was holding the dove. The bird cooed into his fingers as he lifted it. The pellets of dark eyes amid the dirty gray feathers regarded Lysande with in
difference, and she watched Derset trace a path down the back of its neck with his thumb. Not long ago, she had traced a path down his chest.

  “As soon as I send this dove, the White Queen will come.”

  “I suppose she likes to do her slaughter up close,” Lysande said. “The personal touch.”

  Derset smiled; for the first time, her remarks had prompted some emotion, even if it was only amusement. “To offer you a choice.”

  A glance at the ropes laid out on the floor told her that there were enough of them to rig the black chimera that had attacked the enclosure first. If it had flown back to its mistress, there was a good chance Derset was not bluffing. Lysande felt her chest tighten.

  Derset sat down opposite her again. He stroked the dove’s head. As he did, she felt a twitching in her palm—the slightest flicker of an itch. “Do you remember what Her Majesty was called by the populace after the war?” Derset said.

  “You mean the White Queen, not the Iron Queen, I presume.”

  “I mean the only true queen for people like us.” His nostrils flared slightly. “You’re an elemental. You know who I mean.”

  Lysande recalled how he had looked at her when she winced in pain on the ship; how he had asked after her health in the palanquin, after she clutched the cushion. And he himself had winced—but not in pain—just hours ago. His hair had been splayed across the Lyrian silk of her pillow as he gasped, smiling, giving in and writhing under her touch. How long ago that seemed. Before the Conquest, time had not been charted in arbitrary numbers of days, Kephir wrote. When enough people felt that their lives had changed, they named a new season: whole decades chosen by emotion, ages streaked with the black ink of grief or suffused with the dye of love.

  “Answer the question,” Derset said.

  “Usurper.” She remembered Sarelin’s sharp ejaculation of the term, in the palace vault, before she blocked Lysande’s view of the woman painted on a crag.

  “It’s an oily word, usurper. Some names wash off with a little effort, like mud, but not that one. You can try to scrub it away, but once it’s on, the word stains. Like bastard. Or commoner.” He patted the dove on the head. “The White Queen found that out the hard way. I watched her reputation plummet and plummet until it lay among the base company of thieves and petty murderers. I knew she needed a thinker who could manage her name.”

  “You.” Lysande could not keep the bitterness from her voice.

  “Changes are a tricky business.” Derset’s tone was still hard stone, but there was an edge to it: an urgency that implored her. “You can cut away all the roses in the garden, but you’ll prick your fingers on those thorns.”

  He placed the dove on the table, and as he did so, she saw his hand tremble—a movement so faint that it could almost have been a trick of her mind, yet she knew that she had not imagined it. No one shivered from cold in the Lyrian delta.

  It’s her, she thought. He’s scared of what she’ll do to him if he fails.

  The map of scars on Welles’ face, Six’s burned cheek, and Three’s white hair . . . they returned to her anew.

  “The White Queen wants you, Lysande,” Derset said. “Not Dalgëreth, not Chamboise, not Ahl-Hafir, and certainly not Fontaine, the slinking adder. But you, it seems, are different. I can’t say why she fixates on the orphan Councillor. Still, if you want to avoid the stain of usurper, you need someone to introduce you to all those bleating sheep across the realm . . . and who better than a member of the old regime to make the announcement?”

  “You wish me to convey legitimacy upon the White Queen?”

  “Think of it as an honor. You will be the herald of our new dynasty.”

  Of course. It was always a dynasty, with silverbloods: always the family name falling like varnish down the decades, coating everything beneath it. That was what the realm needed, according to the nobility, because nobles had been raised to believe that commoners yearned for them. But she had seen the bone people with her own eyes, had stood before the elementals on the back of the executioner’s cart, and knew that what they yearned for was not a dynasty.

  Our dynasty, Derset had said.

  “You don’t have any status in her ranks, you know.”

  His eyes glistened. “All of us have status, by nature. Elira has always belonged to elementals. We were the ones who ruled here before the Conquest—and Her Majesty means to take the realm back to the beginning of the calendar, Lysande.”

  “Trying the Conquest all over again but with the winners and losers interchanged. I can’t say she lacks ambition. But if she does succeed and uses our neighbors to invade us, what makes you think she’ll share this realm with you?”

  Derset chuckled. “Oh, Elira is the prize, I’ll give you. The homeland. All those climates and the goods they produce will prove useful for our rule. But Bastillonian troops . . . and Royamese mines? Do you really think she means to pick our neighbors up and drop them down again?”

  “Sun and stars,” Lysande said quietly. There had to be a name for a moment like this, when everything fell into place—epiphany did not convey the horror of a chasm opening before your feet, to a place where every piece of light rattled around between walls of solid stone, a place too deep to plummet into. “It’s an empire, isn’t it?” she said.

  Too easy to imagine Bastillón thinking it had made a new ally, only to discover too late who that ally was. All too easy to imagine Royam taking an ambitious line, joining with another to go after Elira’s resources and losing its own sovereignty in the process. The neighboring lands would not know they were sowing a disaster. They would stumble, and the White Queen would be there to seize them.

  Derset placed a hand on her shoulder. “Good. Now choose.”

  She drew a deep breath. An empire. It was still sinking into her mind. At times like this, rumination was expensive. But she had a feeling that she held the key to why this was the White Queen’s goal. Was it not possible that Mea Brey, in serving her cousin, had nurtured the seeds of martial expansion with a desperate need; that after being overlooked for so long, she had decided never to be forgotten? The aims she pursued, even now, suggested that she needed the glorious recognition of becoming Mea Tacitus, the White Queen, instead of Mea Brey.

  A desperate need could be a weakness if you learned how to turn it to your advantage. If she strained her mind to the utmost, maybe she could slide her remaining pieces across the board.

  “Dole out my support, in public, or be a meal for a chimera,” she said, as evenly as she could manage. “As far as I can see, that’s not much of a choice.”

  “You’ve misunderstood me.” Derset stroked the dove again. “The choice is not whether you’ll do it. The choice is how you’ll do it. Will you appoint her of your own volition—or will you do so under the White Queen’s control, your mind in her grip?”

  Her mind. What was it Sarelin had said to her, when she escorted her to the target range at Axium Palace for the first time? I’ll teach you to throw daggers if you’ll teach me to fling words. She had never doubted what her real weapon was.

  I won’t give it up, she thought. And nor will I hand Mea Tacitus her empire. Forget fear, hesitation, and the swordlace vines of possibilities that twisted ahead. Determination pooled in her.

  Use logic. There was a reason why the White Queen had chosen her to be the liaison, even if she did not know it. It had sustained her this far.

  She stared unflinchingly at Derset, ignoring the strands of hair that had fallen into his eyes—the same way that strands had decorated his brow when she had kissed him the last time, pressing him into the sheets and watching the last remnants of his guard give way. Details molded memories. The length of a sigh or the fall of soft hair gave your past a form, and what could create for you could also unravel you entirely.

  “How long do I have?”

  “I can allow you a few minutes.” Derset was w
atching her with a hint of melancholy in his expression. “But I suggest you think quickly. The White Queen has waited over twenty years . . . she is renowned for many things, Lysande, but patience is not one.”

  Lysande felt the itch in her palm again. The sensation passed in less than a second. It could have been a spasm under the skin, a fleeting twitch of the muscle, but surely it was stronger than before.

  The warrior Titarch, in the Silver Songs, had journeyed through the dunes until she was captured at a waterhole. She had kept her captors talking, grabbed a sword, and slaughtered them. Titarch, Lysande thought, had not been faced with the choice of trying to reach within her doublet without attracting attention or using a scarcely matured weapon that might kill her if she couldn’t get it under control.

  “Why are you doing this?” she said. “Even beyond this splintered thing between us, you told me you owed Sarelin everything you had.”

  “Oh, I owed her what I had, all right,” Derset replied, his eyes narrowing. “Seven years in the cultural wasteland of Belága, bending my knee. Twelve years in an outpost by the western wall, making excuses for the exploits of drunken border guards . . . sweating over agreements that would be forgotten when Sarelin Brey changed her mind. Removed from every comfort of Axium, every friend I had, in a job I could never rise from. A third child, with no glory.” He gave a harsh laugh. “I doubt she thought of me, between hunting and drinking. After spending my whole childhood studying law, I was pushed out to serve those barbarians as envoy—and your queen made Pelory Mistress of Laws. Pelory!” The utterance of the name was almost a curse. “The woman whose biggest sacrifice for the crown was giving up her gold-stitched doublet!”

  She hated Pelory, Lysande thought, remembering the day that Sarelin had agonized over the appointment in her suite, weighing up the talents and shortcomings of each candidate. As she looked at Derset, she recognized the flush in his cheeks.

  “When you spoke of her, it was like hearing of a goddess,” she said.

  “Perhaps I loved her. For half a spring. And still longer than she loved me. Love was a new colt to her; she rode it once and then changed it when she knew its moods. She was never without a fresh mount.”