The boy Emperor wilted under Helspeth’s glare. And was no happier when he turned to his older sister.
Katrin was less inclined to the scandalous life. Helspeth had taken up arms and armor during the Calziran Crusade, getting into desperate straits under al-Khazen’s wall. Katrin was more willful, more determined to preserve her prerogatives and independence.
Lothar was strong of mind, if not of flesh. He did not remain cowed. “We have decided that our princess sisters shall withdraw into their households till suitable marriages can be negotiated. Silence!
Both of you.” Helspeth had been about to explode. She did not see Katrin’s reaction because her own focus had become so narrow. She was sure her sister was equally outraged.
The Grand Duke all but sneered behind his short, gray-tinged beard. His eyes were icy. “It’s the Emperor’s will.” Meaning Lothar had been bullied until he gave in.
Helspeth reminded herself that Hilandle, till Johannes forced his Act of Will and Succession upon the Electors, had counted himself the leading candidate to succeed.
The boy Emperor then demonstrated that his advisers did not have him as neatly under thumb as they might want to believe. “Katrin, we convey to you the Imperial holdings at Grumbrag, with all the rights of Eathered and Arnmagil.”
Members of the Council were so aghast they failed to sputter. There were snickers amongst the lesser lights.
The boy continued. “To our sister Helspeth we convey the City of Plemenza and its dependencies and trust that she will lake the opportunity to further her education.”
Plemenza was much the lesser prize. Eathered and Arnmagil, now unified into a single Imperial province, had been kingdoms in their own rights scarcely a century gone. But Plemenza had been Johannes’s favorite city. He would have shifted his capital there from Alten Weinberg had the Firaldian city not been so far from the heart of the Grail Empire. He had spent a lot of time in Plemenza, often for his own pleasure, not just because Imperial policy focused on Firaldia and the difficult behaviors of Sublime V
and the Church. Johannes’s daughters had enjoyed much of their schooling there.
Helspeth flashed a grin. Lothar flashed right back.
Hilandle had been outmaneuvered. Two score witnesses, few congenial to the Grand Duke, had seen the Emperor convey Imperial holdings to members of his family. If Lothar was clever indeed, the patents were ready now, prepared by someone he knew was not Hilandle’s tool.
The Grand Duke’s face turned stony. He would never underestimate the boy Emperor again.
Helspeth glanced sideways. Katrin seemed pleased. Eathered and Arnmagil was a plum, a fine, fruitful country — and Grumbrag was known for its craftsmen and ingenious artificers. A suitable city and province for the Crown Princess of the New Brothen Empire.
The fleeting look Katrin sent Helspeth’s way was only slightly less venomous than the one she had given Hilandle.
She was jealous! Of Plemenza! Because her time there was filled with happy memories, too. Perhaps the only such memories she had accumulated in her twenty-three years.
Johannes Ege — variously known as Johannes Blackboots, Hansel Blackboots (“Little Hans” because he was not a man of great physical stature), or Hansel the Ferocious — had been elected Emperor of the New Brothen Empire before the birth of any of his children. Katrin’s mother, Hildegrun of Machen, had just turned nineteen when she married the new Emperor. She was tall, blond, and beautiful. Gossip at the time suggested she had caught Johannes’s eyes when she was just fifteen. The Imperial nuptials antedated the birth of the Princess Katrin by a scant five months.
The alliance with Hildegrun’s family solidified Johannes’s hold on the Grail Empire. She was a devoted wife with numerous knightly brothers who served the Emperor faithfully all his years, remaining friends and allies through several bouts with misfortune. Hildegrun often accompanied Hansel on his progresses through the Empire. She made herself beloved immediately everywhere, even by the wives of the Emperor’s enemies.
When Katrin was four months old, while her father was campaigning amongst the countless states of Firaldia, Hildegrun died in a riding accident.
An accomplished equestrian, Hildegrun loved to gallop with the bolder women of her household. On the evil day her mount stumbled as she raced along the bank of a canal. The Empress was unable to leap clear. The horse fell on her. The animal thrashed its way down the bank into the water, rider unconscious and still entangled in harness. Horse and rider drowned before they could be dragged out.
Patriarch Clemency III, the Collegium, and the Five Families of Brothe sent up praises to God. The Patriarch’s forces had been defeated in detail everywhere that summer. The Emperor was marching on the Mother City itself when the news reached him.
Hildegrun was not in her tomb many months when Hansel wed Helspeth’s mother, the Dowager Princess of Nietzchau. The Princess Terezia was his senior by ten years. The alliance further strengthened Johannes’s position among the Electors. The Dowager Princess, at thirty-four, had been a woman possessed of considerable carnal appetites. Her new husband satisfied them sufficiently to subject her to two miscarriages, a son, Willem, born live but who died within two weeks, and, finally, Helspeth. Who never knew her mother.
The Dowager Princess died of childbed fever three days after Helspeth’s birth. She was interred beside Willem in the family tomb of her first husband in Wortburg, in Nietzchau.
Before her death the Dowager Princess transferred all her family honors and obligations to the Emperor.
Leaving him, in his twenty-seventh year, the third most powerful man in the Chaldarean world, exceeded only by the Brothen Patriarch and the overlord of the Eastern Empire. Among the tasks she left him was the humbling of the worldly power of Brothe. That he prosecuted with skill and success.
But never again did he come as close to breaking the temporal power of the Church as he had before Hildegrun’s death. In part, that was due to despondency over his own losses, in part because he had to cope with pro-Brothen sentiment among his own nobility. He did not show much vigor in the field for nine years after Terezia’s passing. By then bribery and treachery had undone half his earlier successes.
Then a stubborn new Patriarch, Sublime V, assumed the mantle of the Brothen Episcopal Church.
Eighteen months after the death of the Dowager Princess, Johannes wed Margaret of Eathered in an alliance arranged by Hildegrun’s father. Margaret, the spinster daughter of Johannes’s predecessor, was a devout woman he respected but never loved. She worshiped him. The marriage brought Johannes the territories endowed upon Katrin by her brother. It joined the Ege line with that of the family that had provided the majority of past Grail emperors.
Margaret of Eathered was never a well woman. Nor was the one son she bore her beloved Hansel.
Nevertheless, Margaret survived longer than either of Johannes’s previous wives. But when Lothar was seven a plague swept through the Empire. It carried off most of the elderly and sickly. The Crown Prince himself was preserved by being sent into ferociously enforced isolation at the first hint of the outbreak.
When Margaret died Johannes swore he would not marry again. He contented himself with courtly romances ever after.
Each of the Emperor’s children favored their mothers in appearance and their father in intellect. Katrin might have been Hildegrun at twenty-three had she lived. Helspeth, everyone said, was the image of Terezia in her youth. Katrin had a bevy of uncles who doted on her and still bore their love and admiration for her father. Because of those hardened warlords, and the families of Johannes’s subsequent wives, the Council Advisory of the New Brothen Empire would not dare dispute Lothar’s gifts to his sisters.
Lothar failed to win one point. Johannes’s daughters would not be permitted to behave as though they were sons. They had come into vast new estates. Now they would have to go to them and behave like other women of the stature and time.
Helspeth was not pleased. But she was duti
ful.
Katrin, she could tell, was going to cause trouble.
The Grand Duke’s faction had a powerful bolt in its quiver. Marriage.
Lothar could not ignore marriage indefinitely. Neither his own, nor those of his sisters. It was his bounden duty to provide an heir, despite the past Imperial tradition of election. And his sisters …
Marriage would clip their claws. Though they would not lose their places in the succession till Lothar produced a son who survived, any husbands they took would have strong legal rights to control them.
Helspeth sneered. Law and character could come into conflict.
She knew of no man with a will more powerful than her own.
She had no desire to wed but if circumstances so compelled, she would make sure the gentleman involved regretted his ambitions.
Anyone who wed Katrin would be even unhappier.
Still, the daughters of Johannes Blackboots were among the greatest prizes in the marriage market of the Chaldarean world. Because every month that Lothar Ege survived was another amazement to that world.
Lothar could not possibly live long enough to provide an heir.
Alter what he had done tonight, Helspeth wondered if Mushin was not at risk. The Grand Duke sometimes acted before he thought things through. Action against Lothar would not be bright. Katrin had less love for Hilandle than did Lothar. And she had attained her majority.
She should be a terror to the Grand Duke’s faction.
Unless she failed to win the allegiance of Ferris Renfrow.
Katrin did not like Renfrow. Helspeth did not know what Renfrow’s feelings might be. Ferris Renfrow never revealed himself.
Sometimes Helspeth thought Renfrow was like the Night: a fact of existence. A force of nature. Part of the weather. Always to be reckoned in any strategy.
Ferris Renfrow might be the most important man in the Grail Empire.
And no one knew where he was.
Helspeth Ege stared at the back of the Grand Duke’s head, willing him to fall down dead.
As so often happened, the object of her anger failed to respond to her will.
The universe was stubborn that way.
The Emperor dismissed his sisters with the direction that they claim their new possessions immediately.
He assigned a small company of Braunsknechts, the Imperial lifeguards, to each. Helspeth thanked God for small favors.
Her captain would be Algres Drear, long close to her father and well known to her. Johannes had entrusted Drear not only with his life but with special missions outside the competence of Ferris Renfrow.
Drear was intimately familiar with Plemenza.
Even so, Helspeth wished she could sit down with Renfrow. Renfrow would restore her courage and confidence.
Helsepth tried to talk to Katrin as they returned to their quarters. Katrin refused to speak. Katrin had changed. Katrin was no longer her friend.
Katrin was afraid.
Katrin was a heartbeat away from the throne of the Grail Empire. Katrin was caught in the eye of a growing cyclone of intrigue. Everyone wanted to manipulate or control her. She trusted no one. Not even the little sister who might someday want to replace her.
Where, oh where, was Ferris Renfrow when Johannes Blackboots’s girls were in desperate need?
4. Winds of Despair
Brother Candle followed Count Raymone Garete from Caron ande Lette down to Antieux. The Count gave him no choice. He was suspicious of the Perfect Master. He was suspicious of Maysaleans in general, though he had Seekers After Light in his own family. The Count was not a warrior of faith, he was a devout Connecten nationalist who refused to permit outsider mischief in his motherland.
Count Raymone’s determination animated Antieux as well. Despite disasters wrought by a succession of corrupt Brothen Episcopal bishops and two invading armies, the city was busy, defiant, and increasingly prosperous. Much of the destruction wrought by the more successful siege had been undone. The cathedral remained as the invaders had left it, ruined by fire, with a thousand dead women, children, old people, and innocents entombed inside. Count Raymone had decreed that the cathedral would become a monument, “Sanctified to the Usurper Patriarch by the blood of those he claimed are his flock.”
That massacre would undermine the Church in the Connec for centuries to come.
No one who had not been there ever fully understood how deeply the massacre scarred the survivors.
It was burned black on their emotional bones. And on Count Raymone more than most because he had been unable to prevent it.
He had powerful support throughout the End of Connec.
Duke Tormond failed to understand how much the hearts ol the people of Antieux had been darkened.
Brother Candle said, “I’ve known Tormond since we were boys. He’s not a bad man. He means well.
He’s just disconnected from everyday reality. Despite his daily opportunities and a suite of advisers.”
Brother Candle became one of those whenever he visited Khaurene.
Count Raymone snapped, “He’s a fool. As well meaning is Aaron of Chaldar himself, possibly, but a blind fool.”
The discussion of the Duke’s capacities had been occasioned by a letter ordering Count Raymone to appear beforet the Duke to explain his bad behavior. There had been complaints from Sublime V and Bishop Morcant Farfog of Strang.
Brother Candle did not argue. “Sometimes Tormond does act like a man with a sorcerous caul across his eyes.”
“I believe it. I’m not going. He wants me, he can send Dunn to arrest me.” Sir Eardale Dunn was Duke Tormond’s military chieftain, a refugee from Santerin who had not returned when the latest shift in succession fortunes there had made that possible. “I’m sitting right here.”
“You sure you want to do that?” Brother Candle meant defying the Duke.
Count Raymone answered a different question. “You’re right. I need to get back into the field. My spy in Salpeno says Anne of Menand has started trying to raise another invasion force. She hasn’t gotten much support. Yet. Because of the confusion in Salpeno, Santerin is pressing its claims all along the marches.
Too many nobles are protecting their own towns and castles to come steal ours.”
Brother Candle nodded. He had visited Arnhand last spring. And remained healthy only because local Seekers warned him whenever the Church sent men to arrest him. “True. And they still send their third and fourth sons, and too much treasure, to the Crusader states in the Holy Lands.”
Past crusaders had carved a half-dozen small kingdoms and principalities out of the Holy Lands. Those always needed more men and money to keep going. They were not natural entities and were under continuous pressure from the neighboring Praman kaifates.
In Arnhand the crusades were considered a religious obligation. Knights and nobles from elsewhere did try to make an armed pilgrimage once during life, but Arnhanders often went with no intention of returning.
“You need to think in longer terms, young man.” Brother Candle was old and respected. He would be given the opportunity to speak. Getting Raymone to listen would be the real challenge. “You have to consider what consequences your choices might visit on you and Antieux both tomorrow and far into the future. Right now, just as a mental exercise, forecast for me some possible consequences of you refusing to see the Duke.”
The question did slither into Count Raymone’s mind. It began to turn over clods of wishful thinking.
Brother Candle said, “Suppose Anne of Menand assembles another gang of adventurers and, by some misfortune, she recruits a competent captain. Perhaps someone honed on the harsh battlefields of the Holy Lands. Say Antieux is besieged and that Captain is smart enough to expect competent resistance.”
“Enough! I get your point, old man. If I refuse the Duke, he could refuse me later.” That would not set a precedent. All feudal rights and obligations ran both directions. “Considering that’s a situation where he might actually do something.
I must be getting old.” Count Raymone was on the cusp of thirty. “I have to admit you’re probably right.”
When Brother Candle departed, dismissed, Count Raymone sent for the Rault family. He had dragged them back to Antieux, too. Brother Candle suspected he had taken a fancy to Socia.
Brock Rault had been included in the Duke’s summons.
***
“THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU,” BROTHER CANDLE TOLD his traveling companions. Count Raymone scowled, ever suspicious. The Perfect feared the Count’s dark outlook was opening.
Brock Rault grinned. He was excited. This was his first visit to Khaurene. “See you at the castle, Brother.” Then his face darkened, too. He liked to point out that Raymone Garete had reason to be suspicious. His city had been attacked. More than once. He had been attacked himself. The Brothen Church kept sending priests to foment trouble in his territories. Hanging them did not dissuade others from coming. And, more than once, he had caught someone close to him conspiring with Sublime’s agents.
Brother Candle watched the column wend deeper into the city, destination Metrelieux, castle of the Dukes of Khaurene.
Brother Candle went to the home of Raulet Archimbault, a leader in Khaurene’s Seeker community. His eyes watered. He was surrounded by tanneries. Archimbault was a leader in that community, too.
The tanner’s daughter, Kedle, admitted him.
“You’ve certainly grown, child.”
She reddened, lowered her gaze. He remembered her bolder, holding her own when Seekers After Light gathered.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
He did not understand that he was a demigod to Kedle. The Perfect were rare, even here in the heartland of the Maysalean Heresy. Brother Candle thought of himself only as a wandering teacher.
“We didn’t know you were coming.”
“I had no way to send word.”
“You’re always welcome, Master.”
“Brother Candle. Just Brother Candle. Or Teacher, if you must. Ah. I sense a but. You’re here instead of at the tanning shed. I expected your little brother. He can’t possibly be working yet. Can he?”