The Winter Duke

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

  The way things were going, Sigis would become the arbiter of all magic and use it to obliterate everything.

  “We could give you the secret,” the duke said. “We could help you win the trials. In exchange.”

  “You’ll cheat.” Even Below was up to its neck in our politics. The duke inclined his head, dark eyes unblinking. Don’t ask. Just say no. “In exchange for what?”

  “Reexamine your father’s declarations. Widen trade. Make our countries equally prosperous again.”

  Why not just do it? Make the deal, do the trade. Get the power. “I can’t,” I said, sounding less like a grand duke than ever. “I—I swore I would give the throne back to my father the way he left it. If I were grand duke, I wouldn’t hesitate, but…”

  “I see,” the duke Below said. “We do, naturally, wish for his recovery.” His dark eyes were impossible to read. “And we hope you will tell him how we assisted his daughter.” He bowed again. “May I give you some advice?”

  “Of course.”

  The staff spun in his hands. “You think it is barbaric, what I did to our traitors. But this is what it is to rule, Ekaterina Avenko.” He sounded a little sad. “Sometimes you must be brutal and unforgiving, even to people you once considered friends.”

  Inkar waited in my rooms, reading a Kylmian grammar book and rubbing one hand against her temples. “Why do you always wander your palace with wet hair?” she asked. “It is a wonder you have not taken ill and died.”

  “Cheerful sentiments, as usual,” Aino grumbled as she went to my wardrobe. “Which dress, Ekata?”

  “The most imposing one,” I replied. The one that said Don’t touch me, don’t even look at me. As Aino retrieved it, I studied Inkar. She had controlled a thousand men on horseback; maybe she could help me now.

  Inkar mouthed a few words, then ran her hand through her hair in frustration. Then I saw a hint of red in her cheeks. “You are looking at me.” The blush was joined by a sly smile. Inkar closed the book and tilted her head.

  “I want to ask you a question.” I tried to ignore the sick feeling in my belly. “When you led the Emerald Order, did you ever execute anyone? One of your own?”

  The smile dropped from her lips. “When I had to.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  She hesitated, then shook her head. “What is necessary is necessary,” she said. “And sometimes people need to know that you will take that final step.”

  Yes. People had to know that I could be brutal. Maybe they’d take me seriously if it was Yannush’s blood spilling all over the floor of the Great Hall.

  Eirhan knocked on my door as I was getting dressed. “You asked me to assemble the council,” he said, frowning as he took in my severe look. I wore a high-necked black velvet dress with a skirt that had room for three people. Silver and sapphires were strung over my arms and chest.

  “Have the council convene in the Great Hall.”

  Eirhan’s expression flickered. “The Great Hall is a public space, Your Grace.”

  “Did Father hire you to point out the obvious?” I asked. “Tell your guard to release Annika, and have the council convene in the Great Hall.” Don’t make me tell you again. I picked up the tiara and slid it onto my head. Strength. Pride. Rage. This was the legacy of my family, and if I had to use it to win, I would. Grand dukes made grand statements. I paused at the door. “Inkar? Will you come?”

  She said nothing, but she slid out of her chair and took the arm I offered. A grand duke and her consort. Aino arched an eyebrow in disapproval.

  Eirhan’s lips pursed momentarily before he smoothed them. “What of Reko, Your Grace?” he asked as I exited my rooms.

  “Reko can stay in prison,” I replied. Until he learned that grand dukes were to be feared, not defied.

  Eirhan disappeared down the hall ahead of us. I shoved down my fear until I could barely feel it tickle at the back of my spine, then began to walk. I had to be swift and brutal, as the duke Below had been.

  Aino’s pace increased slightly, and I felt her hand brush my shoulder before she spoke in Kylmian. “Are you sure you should be mixing Inkar in with politics?”

  “She’s already mixed in,” I said. And it felt better to have her support. A partner, even if she was a temporary one.

  We came to the Great Hall. I walked toward the throne with trepidation, but without hesitation. The guard was silent; the only sound I could hear was the swishing of my dress and the scrape of our ironclad shoes against the ice floor. I took a seat and rested my forearms against the armrests, then I lifted my chin and sucked in my cheeks, trying to give myself the hard, angry face of a grand duke. I resisted the urge to touch my crown. You’re the most powerful person in the room, I told myself. Everyone here should fear you. And by the end of this meeting, they would.

  My ministers slunk in one by one. Itilya wore her usual unruffled expression, but her eyes did not reach mine. Urso’s face was the color of day-old fish. Rafyet looked bewildered. Whispers spun around the room as Annika entered, and intensified when Sigis came behind. I clenched my fists as he winked at me.

  Eirhan hurried to me. He leaned low. “What is your intention?”

  “Take your seat,” I said. I don’t owe you anything.

  “If you’re going to make some grand pronouncement, we need a strategy—”

  “No,” I said, loudly enough to get the attention of everyone in the room. Silence dropped like a curtain. Eirhan leaned away from the vehemence in my voice. “I have something to say, and everyone’s going to hear it.” I shifted. The sick feeling in my stomach grew. “My family isn’t ill. They’ve been cursed.” This didn’t get the gasp I’d imagined. Instead, the silence deepened, as though everyone had stilled every part of themselves to make sure they heard what I said next. “I think Minister Yannush can say something about that.”

  The silence extended a moment longer, so still that I thought I could hear the winter roses growing on the other side of the room. Then Minister Yannush said, “I cannot,” with a confidence that didn’t reach his too-large eyes.

  “You cursed them with magic you bought personally when you went Below.”

  That broke things. Whispering flew through the room. Inkar turned to me with questioning eyes. I shook my head slightly.

  “That’s impossible,” Yannush said in a high voice that shone with fear.

  “Your cohorts Below admitted it was you,” I said.

  “And you believed them?” He tried to snort, but his bluster was gone. People began to shift away from him. Sigis wore the shrewd, calculating look I’d seen on him when he’d entered the hall the night of my coronation. Recalibrating.

  I turned my attention back to Yannush. “Why shouldn’t I? Who else would they have identified?”

  Yannush swallowed. I watched his eyes, hoping they would dart toward a coconspirator. But they remained steadily, disappointingly on me.

  “You have committed treason. The price for that is death.” My words echoed in a cold, quiet hall. Why was it that my ministers could never keep so silent in private?

  They were waiting for me to say but. They were waiting for me to commute his sentence.

  “You’ll be escorted from your rooms tomorrow morning for the execution. I suggest you put your affairs in order.”

  Then came the uproar. “You can’t!” cried Bailli. Other voices joined his.

  “Wait,” said Yannush, who stumbled forward. I glared at two of the guards who lined the wall, and they hurried to meet him. “I have allies. There are others!” The guards hesitated, looking back at me. I waved for them to continue. “I have the cure.”

  His voice was almost lost in the crowd. Urso stood, pale as the outer wall, with his hat pressed to his chest. Some had elected to shout abuse after Yannush; others proclaimed the need for mercy, as Bailli had done.

  “Get them under control,” I told Viljo. His halberd came down on the ice, hard. Crack. More guards joined him, from all around the walls, setting up th
e familiar rhythm. But this time, the rhythm was under my control. Even Eirhan looked nervous.

  When the hall was silent again, Viljo thrust his halberd in the air. The guards froze. “Minister Olloi,” I said. Olloi gaped at me. “You lied to me. I told you what would happen. Make your peace by the morning.”

  Olloi swayed on the spot. He didn’t resist as a guard led him out. Whispers swept the hall again, but at one crack of a halberd on the ice, they died away.

  This was power. This was what I’d needed. I’d merely had to sign two men over to death to get it.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon speaking with delegates—those who weren’t too terrified to keep their appointments. I kept Inkar with me, a move that made Eirhan shake his head.

  “I hope you’re making her unhappy,” he muttered in Kylmian. He paced around the room frenetically, something I’d never seen before from him.

  Inkar was fast becoming my best ally. “Everything’s going according to plan,” I replied, neglecting to mention that the plan had changed.

  “Arlendt has a suggestion for a replacement foreign minister,” Inkar said when the Baron of Arlendt had gone.

  Eirhan stopped pacing and contrived to look so astonished I thought he’d fall back into his chair. “And how is his opinion relevant, Your Grace?”

  Inkar shrugged, took a sip of my coffee, and wrinkled her nose. “I did not say his suggestion was relevant. I said that he had one.” She looked at me. “You will have to choose a new minister, will you not?”

  Yannush’s arrest left a power vacuum, but I had no notion of whom to fill it with. Nor was I invested in making what my father would perceive as a power play when he woke up. “That’s not my first priority.”

  Eirhan’s shoes clicked on the ice like clockwork. “You’ve demonstrated that you’re Kamen’s daughter at last. Now you need to consolidate—immediately. Pick an aristocratic second child for foreign minister. Then they’ll owe you something. Then move on to trade discussions with Urso. Terrify him sufficiently and he’ll be too afraid to bring a mediocre deal back for you to sign.”

  “What trade discussions?” The pit in my stomach was morphing, changing into something too close to panic again.

  “Any trade. Particularly trade with Below.”

  I shook my head. Even as I did, a small part of me marveled at the girl who could order the taking of two lives but couldn’t decide basic policy. But I knew what made me so afraid. Father would have expected me to kill his cabinet if they’d even hinted at treason. Making these decisions would make me his enemy.

  “You can’t leave us in a precarious position because you think Kamen might wake up,” Eirhan said. Was that fear I heard in his voice?

  “You can make the agreements if you’re so keen,” I muttered.

  I hadn’t intended him to hear or to take me seriously. But Eirhan said, “Your Grace has refused us parliamentary representation. You can’t order me to take the power you’ve denied me.”

  As if he could convince me he was powerless. “You declared me provisional grand duke. My father’s condition isn’t better, but it’s not worse. I can’t pretend he’s as good as dead after four days, and I won’t do anything—anything—that I can’t guarantee he’d do.”

  Inkar looked between us. Eirhan stopped his pacing. “A deadlock is a dangerous thing, Your Grace.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” He reached back to retie his slipping horsetail with shaking hands. “It’s advice. People will start taking drastic measures, and dealing with them may be worse than making the decision in the first place.”

  I had to wait until after dinner to slip into a servants’ corridor. I followed it to a staircase and sneaked up to the second floor, hoping that Viljo and Aino wouldn’t get into too much trouble for my absence.

  If the guards outside Yannush’s door were surprised to see me, they didn’t indicate it. “I haven’t been here,” I told them coldly as they let me in. I considered giving them something; Inkar paid servants in silver from her own arms. But grand dukes didn’t make bribes. They received obedience.

  Yannush looked awful—half his horsetail had come undone and hung in knotted tangles around his face. His skin was sallow in the firelight, and his eyes were dark pits. His beard looked dull and untidy.

  He swayed as he registered me. Then his face twisted bitterly. “What are you doing here?”

  Maybe it was a bad idea I’d come alone. “You said you had a cure.”

  For a moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me. Then he began to pace. “I didn’t want to do it, you know,” he said, as though he’d been rehearsing.

  I could tell him to shut up and give me my answers, but I held back. Maybe he’d reveal his allies. According to Annika, I hardly lacked for candidates.

  “My hand was forced. Your father went mad, and we had no alternatives to stop him.”

  “We?” I said.

  “We’ll go bankrupt if you don’t do something,” Yannush said. He ran his hands over his arms, and I saw the scratches in his leather coat where his nails had scraped carelessly. “Not to mention that you’ve led us to the brink of war.”

  I almost laughed at that. “You’re the one who tried to give Sigis the keys to the country.”

  “We need his power. We need his strength.” Yannush stared me down. “We need his allegiance. Your father risked revolution and worse. Sigis might take some measure of independence, but he’ll offer stability. We need this. The Avenko line is selfish. You could have made an industry out of refining magic, but your father hoarded the secret. Sigis will make us a trading center. Sigis will make magic relevant, not just a curiosity for kings. And Sigis, unlike you, knows how to run a country.”

  “Such a hero,” I sneered. “I’m sure you didn’t spare a thought for the rewards Sigis would give you. Land, titles, powerful positions in government. Did I miss anything?”

  The fervent light in Yannush’s eyes guttered. “I’ve only done what I think must be done. And I didn’t do it for Sigis, but for Kylma.”

  “Liar.” I stepped forward, testing my limits. Yannush fell back. Excellent. “How willing are you to die for him?”

  For a long moment, all I could hear was the moan of the wind outside. Yannush’s hateful gaze gave way to something more desperate. Finally, he said, “What other option do I have?” in the hoarse voice of a man who had thrown his lot in with the conspiracy and lost.

  What would Father do? Rage at him? Promise a painful death? Or would he act as Yannush’s friend right up to the point at which he killed him? “The illness is magical. Which means if you had something to do with it, you know how to manipulate the magic. You have the secret.”

  Something flickered in his face. Hope, cunning, fear? “You want me to give it to you.”

  I tried to keep my face blank. “I want to know how you got it.”

  “And if I said it was your own father?”

  “I’d call you a liar again.” I regretted not bringing Viljo along; the only way I could think to threaten Yannush was with a fire poker, and that didn’t seem fitting for my station. So I tried to soften my voice instead, to use pretty words instead of dire threats. To start from a different direction. “Tell me about the curse, Yannush. Tell me who worked on it with you, and tell me why you cursed them all.” All except me.

  “We need the Avenko line to survive,” he said, grudgingly. “Whatever magic binds Above and Below relies on your line. We hoped we could keep you all… sleeping.”

  “But you chose not to.”

  Yannush wouldn’t look at me. I felt ice melt into my blood, and I was taken back to that night, standing in the servants’ corridor, listening to Sigis hiss at his unknown accomplice in the law library. We’ll wake up a different one. They’d wanted to replace me with a more pliant Avenko.

  But why hadn’t the curse worked on me?

  Focus. I needed answers, not more questions. “So you kept them all alive, in case you n
eeded them again.”

  Yannush swallowed and dipped his chin.

  “You can wake them up.” I could wake them up if I could unlock the secret of using magic.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall outside, brisk and purposeful and loud in a way that servants were never loud. I bit back a curse. “All right. Give me the cure, and your death will be private and quick, with no shame to your family.”

  The footsteps stopped at the door. Yannush’s eyes flicked toward it. The corner of his mouth turned up. “Counteroffer: I cure your family, I live.”

  Fists hammered on the door, and I jumped. “Your Grace?” The guard sounded remarkably unfriendly for someone whose job was guarding my life. “Your Grace, you must come out immediately.”

  “Final offer: You provide the cure, you provide a list of names. And in return, you get a sled and I’ll never tell my father where you went.”

  A key grated in the lock. “Your Grace!”

  Our mirrored looks of desperation were almost funny. Both of us were seeing our lives slip away, though not quite in the same way. Yannush grabbed my wrist, nearly grinding my bones together. “Done,” he said hoarsely. “Send the alchemist. Prepare the pardon.”

  The guard broke in.

  I was marched back to my rooms under a cloud of discontent. The entire trip from Yannush’s apartments was punctuated by admonishments like, “You can’t leave like that, Your Grace,” and, “You’ve put the entire palace in an uproar.” As if I’d stopped putting the palace in an uproar since I became the duke.

  Aino and Inkar sat inside—Aino by the fire in the antechamber, Inkar on my bed. Aino shook her head. “I know,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder as I passed. Ever since I’d become the duke, her worry for me had increased tenfold. I ought to try behaving, for her sake if not for my own. But I didn’t regret what I’d done.

  “Where did you go?” Inkar had a blanket pulled over her knees and the Kylmian grammar book propped upon them. Her hair fell in front of her face, making her look smaller somehow, more vulnerable.

  I should have lied to her. The trial marriage would be over in four more days, and she would be gone by then. Instead, I shut the bedroom door and went to my wardrobe. “I was visiting Yannush. He’ll help me in exchange for exile.”