The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

  First, Mecilli’s name hadn’t been mentioned, and his house and honor remained intact. But beyond that, and more interesting, was the sense of comfort that the news seemed to bring. As if by repeating the form of last year’s betrayals, they had become familiar, and the story’s end always left the throne safer and more secure, the dangers lessened. There was even, she thought, a sense of anticipation. A looking ahead to the next traitor, the next betrayal, and the next act of redeeming violence. In one way, she thought the general willingness to embrace stories with that shape and pattern might ease her work of driving Geder’s best advisors away from him. But in another, she found herself complicit in the growing legend of Geder Palliako.

  “Clara?” Vincen said.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “My mind wandering.”

  “Shall I take you home?”

  Clara smiled and tugged on his arm. They walked together through the streets arm in arm. It was a small indiscretion. Even the last stragglers of the court were gone by now, and any who were there on winter business would likely be as pleased not to be seen as she would. Among her new acquaintances, an older woman with a younger lover was hardly cause for comment. Crows called from the eaves and sparrows darted down into the depths of the Division. She had the sudden memory of Dawson looking at Geder in his black leather cloak and the priest in his brown robes. Crows and sparrows, he’d called them.

  As they walked, Clara began planning her next letter to Carse. She could, of course, give a great deal of information about what had happened to Lord Ternigan, but she wasn’t certain that would serve her well. Perhaps it would suffice if she could simply repeat what she’d heard on the streets along with an additional fact or two that was private to her. She could also report on the levels of food in Camnipol, and the miserable state of things in Palliako’s prisons.

  She felt Vincen’s steps falter before she knew what was wrong. He drew his arm free from hers and stepped to her side. She followed his gaze. There before the boarding house, a grand carriage sat with footmen and drivers at the ready. The device on the side announced House Skestinin. Clara felt the air leave her body. Something had happened to Jorey. Or Sabiha and the new babe. She walked faster, not running. Not quite.

  Jorey sat in the common room like an emerald on dirt. His jacket was a pure white with silver buttons and his cloak was black leather. When she stepped through the doorway, he rose, smiling.

  “Jorey?” she said, fighting a bit for air. “What’s happened? Where’s Sabiha?”

  “Sabiha’s with her father by now,” her son said, stepping forward to take her hands. “And I’ve come to take you home.”

  The first taste of fear came to her. Vincen came in behind her, taking his place as a servant, and Abatha behind him, her mouth pinched and distrustful. Clara felt her face grow pale.

  “Home? I don’t understand. I am home. I live here.”

  “Not anymore. It would cause a scandal for the Lord Marshal’s mother to live in a rented room.”

  Clara sat down slowly, her head light. Jorey sat on the bench at her side, taking her hand in his own.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve heard what happened with Lord Ternigan,” Jorey said. “A messenger bird caught us at Sevenpol. After all that’s happened, Geder decided he wanted someone he trusts as Lord Marshal. And apparently he’s been waiting for the moment to help me redeem myself with the court.”

  “You? After all that Dawson did?”

  Jorey’s smile lost some of its brightness.

  “I repudiated my father in front of the court,” Jorey said. “And Geder … considers me his friend. Apparently that’s enough. He’s given me the army. I’m going to take control of the siege at Kiaria. And what’s more, I’m bringing Vicarian with me. Minster Basrahip has given permission for him to come and study under the priests in the field.”

  “My God,” Clara said, pressing her fingers to her lips. “This can’t … this can’t be right.”

  “It’s a gift, Mother,” Jorey said. “It’s everything we were hoping for.”

  She felt as though her heart were dying. A little hole had opened in her chest, and everything was flowing out through it like water draining from a basin. I don’t want to go. I’m happy here. I can’t be the woman I was before. Don’t go. Don’t do this.

  And then, Get a hold of yourself.

  She smiled and lifted her chin. Jorey wrapped his hand tightly around hers.

  “The last time you went to war with Geder Palliako, it ended badly,” she said. “Are you certain this is what you want?”

  Jorey kissed her hand. His smile was gone now, and the beautiful jacket and cloak seemed more like a costume than the clothes of the Lord Marshal of Antea.

  “It doesn’t matter what I want, Mother. It’s what I worked for, and it’s what I have to do,” he said. “Can you understand that?”

  In the doorway, Vincen Coe stood with his eyes downcast, his expression empty. The nights of sleeping in his arms were over. The mornings waking up beside him. In Lord Skestinin’s house, there would be no more walking arm in arm. He would call her my lady again, and not Clara. The injustice of it was exquisite.

  It’s what I worked for, and it’s what I have to do. She had raised him in her image after all.

  “I understand,” Clara said. “Let me gather my things.”

  Lord Skestinin’s manor had been closed for the winter, and setting a house in order wasn’t a simple task. When Clara stepped down from the carriage, she could already hear the voices leaking out to the street. Inside, the dining room was still draped in dustcloth, and the pale halls were damp from having only just been scrubbed. Three maids were turning down her new room for her. A widow’s room with beautiful view of the winter-dead gardens and a narrow bed. She sat on it as she might have on the creaking frame that she’d become used to. The mattress was so soft, she felt as though she were sinking into it. As if it were devouring her.

  “Will there be anything else, my lady?”

  Vincen stood in the doorway, and his face looked grey as stone. His hair was pulled back and he stood stiff and straight. He would have rooms in the servants’ quarters now. A bunk and maybe a small stove. A box for his things. I didn’t choose this, she thought. Forgive me.

  “Not at the moment, Vincen,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Always, my lady,” he said, and the tone in his voice made one of the maids look up in surprise. So not even that much was permitted. Clara watched him walk away. She waited for the space of two breaths, then rose, pretended to brush dust from her skirts, and strode out to the corridor as if she owned the house and everything in it. Vincen was walking slowly, his hands clasped behind him.

  “Coe?” she said. “Might I have a word with you?”

  He turned as if stung and stood there silently. She raised her eyebrows.

  “C-certainly,” he said.

  “Excellent. This way, please.”

  She walked toward the gardens, but instead of opening the iron and glass gate that led into the yard, she turned left into the gardener’s alcove. As she’d suspected, it was empty.

  “Close the door, please,” she said.

  “My lady …”

  “Stop that, Vincen. Stop it now.”

  He hesitated. There was fury in his eyes.

  “Clara,” he said.

  “Much better. Now close the door.”

  “It will ruin you,” he said. “I will ruin you. When you were disgraced, it was different. You were like us. But you’re rising again, and if we’re—” He stopped, and began again, his voice hushed. “If we’re seen alone together, it will destroy you.”

  “I have been destroyed,” she said. “It didn’t kill me.”

  “It will hurt your sons. Your daughters. Your standing in court. I won’t risk you. I can’t do that.”

  “Do you really think I would be the first woman in court to have an affair?”

  Vincen closed. She saw it
happen.

  “I’m sure many women in places of power have had affairs with servants,” he said. And there it was. The gulf she could not cross. He was a servant again, and she was a woman of standing.

  “You said you would follow me anywhere,” she said. “Perhaps you meant anywhere but back.”

  “I will go find my quarters, m’lady. With your permission.”

  She stepped over to him, reached past him, and pushed the door closed. His mouth was hard and unresponsive at first. But only at first.

  “I have not changed,” she said. “I am the same woman I was this morning. It’s only circumstances.”

  “I know, Clara,” he said. “And I’m the same man. It’s just … it’s just that I’m having a terrible day.”

  “I am too. But it won’t be the last day there is.”

  He kissed her again, and there was a real hunger in it this time. She put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. They stood there for a long moment and then stepped back from each other.

  “Find your rooms,” she said, “and then explore this house from the basement to the roof. Know it as well as you would a hunting grounds. Learn everyone’s name and their place and, as best you can, their schedules. I will do the same. I don’t know how we can make this work, but we will.”

  “And your letters to Carse?”

  “Those too,” she said. “Though it seems I won’t be trying to alienate Geder from his new Lord Marshal. Which is a pity as it went so well last time.”

  A distant voice caught her. A man’s voice calling Mother!

  “Vicarian’s come,” she said, opening the door again and pushing Vincen out before her. “Go. Now. I will find you later tonight.”

  She listened to Vincen’s footsteps fade and turned to look at the ghostly reflection of herself in the windows of the gate. The woman who looked back seemed almost unfamiliar. She smoothed her hair.

  “Well, then,” she said, and the woman in the glass looked back at her with a gentle smirk. She turned back to the main part of the house, slipping again into the guise of noblewoman and baroness, and followed her boy’s voice to the main part of the house. She found Jorey and Vicarian standing in the front hall grinning at each other. Vicarian’s robes were the brown of the spider priests, and his face looked thinner than when she’d seen him last, but also oddly bright. She had the sense that if she touched him, he would feel fevered.

  “Mother,” Vicarian said, catching sight of her.

  “No, stay there,” she said. “Let me look at you.”

  Vicarian laughed and took a pose. The initiation hadn’t changed him so much, then. She came forward and embraced him, and there was no strange heat, no sense that he had changed. It felt good having her boy back in her arms. Two of her boys.

  “So,” she said. “You’ve studied the cult of the spider goddess. Has she made you pious at last?”

  “You know,” Vicarian said, taking her arms in a way uncomfortably similar to Vincen, “I think it actually may have.”

  He led Clara down the corridor toward the drawing room. The servants scurried around them like mice.

  “A pious priest,” Jorey said. “That’s a miracle to begin with.”

  “No,” Vicarian said, his voice becoming serious. “No, really. There was nothing I learned in any of the studying I did before this that compares. The goddess isn’t just a set of stories we’ve gathered up and decided to guide our lives by. She’s real.”

  “I would have said thinking God was real was obligatory for a priest,” Clara said, stepping into the room. The dust covers had been removed and a fire set in the grate. Vicarian shook his head.

  “You would, wouldn’t you? But the seminary isn’t like that. We talk and we read and we pray, but it’s corrupt. It’s all empty and corrupt, because you only have to say that you believe. With the goddess, it’s not like that at all. It’s … hard sometimes. But she opened the world for me.”

  Clara smiled and nodded.

  I’ve lost him too, she thought.

  Geder

  Until he was set to travel across Elassae with three hundred sword-and-bows as his personal guard, Geder hadn’t understood how exhausted his men had become. They pulled themselves up in the morning, thin-faced and ash-skinned. They broke down camp, loaded the carts, and moved across the fields and hills where no dragon’s road led. Even the mounted men seemed to sag down in the saddles. They looked to Geder like the spirits of the dead that were supposed to ride with his armies. The short days and cold weather meant stopping to make camp when it hardly seemed past midday, and then long nights in his tent. Geder was torn between the tugging impatience to be with Cithrin in Suddapal and a horrified sympathy for the men, brought to this sad state by Ternigan’s mismanagement.

  “Do you think he meant this to happen?” he asked Basrahip one night after they’d finished a meal of chicken and rice. Peasant food, but more than the soldiers had.

  “I do not know, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said. “And he is beyond all asking now.”

  The leather walls of the tent popped and boomed in the wind. Outside, there were no trees, but a forest of stumps. Everything had been harvested for the fires of the army months before. The farms stripped, the animals slaughtered, and the countryside left bare. Even the low brown grass of winter seemed dead beyond reclaiming. It looked to Geder like the empty plates left after a feast. A world that had been eaten. He couldn’t imagine how it would be coaxed to bloom again in spring. The burned farmhouses would sow no seeds, the unturned fields wouldn’t raise up grain or fruit. If there had been cattle or sheep, they were dead now, or else spirited underneath the mountain at Kiaria. The war had left wounds on the body of the land that would take years to heal, and even then there would be scars. Geder found himself wanting badly to be away.

  Basrahip sucked thoughtfully on the bones of the birds, stripping the last slivers of flesh from them. His plate was a pile of pink sticks in a jumble.

  “I was thinking,” Geder said. “It might be wiser to go on ahead. We’re almost to Suddapal. If we took a dozen of the strongest men and rode fast, we’d be on the outskirts of the city in two days at most.”

  “If you would like,” Basrahip said.

  “But do you think it would be safe?”

  Basrahip turned his calm gaze on Geder and smiled.

  “It will not matter if we fall now. Even if we do, others will come and carry her banner. The will of the goddess is alive in the world. You are her chosen and I am her basrahip. And even we are—” He paused, looking around him. He picked up a thin, rubbery bone. “Even we are as this before her.”

  “Yes,” Geder said. “I don’t actually find that as reassuring as you might expect.”

  Basrahip laughed as if Geder had made a joke.

  That night, Geder sat up, unable to sleep. The only sounds were the wind and the moaning of his suffering men. He’d read reports of winter campaigns, and they had all sounded unpleasant, frankly miserable, but they hadn’t prepared him for this. Sitting at his camp desk with a small lantern, he watched his breath ghosting. He didn’t like to think of it, but perhaps Ternigan’s treachery was only partly to blame. Almost all the men of fighting age had spent most of a year in Asterilhold before they went to Sarakal, and now Elassae. Even with the will and power of the goddess working for them, there were limits to how much work a body could do. It was clear now that Ternigan, whether through incompetence or malice, had done the army terrible damage. There was a part of Geder that wanted to send them all home, to let them rest. Only that would leave the heart of the Timzinae conspiracy still safely in their stronghold.

  But perhaps there would be a way to send some home, at least. If they reduced the number of men in the field to only enough to keep the forces trapped in the stronghold from escaping rather than trying to assault the inner doors again, for instance. And there were more priests now, so that if the Timzinae decided at some point to accept parley—

  When he heard the firs
t shout, he thought it was only some guardsman, drunk and overly merry. Then another came. And another. The night was alive with voices. He rose from his desk, his heart fluttering in his chest. The unmistakable sounds of weapons came through his tent walls. He grabbed his sword and ran out more from fear than courage.

  Outside the tent, the camp was in chaos. To his left, down a gentle slope, the tents of his army were being knocked askew. He saw his own men flailing desperately at the dark bodies of Timzinae. To his right, a half dozen enemy soldiers were by the makeshift corral. The gate was knocked down, and they were whipping the beasts out into the night. His personal guard were all around his tent in a circle, their blades at the ready.

  “What are you doing?” Geder shouted at them. “We’re being attacked! Go help them!”

  Someone screamed from the encampment, but Geder couldn’t tell who or where. The pounding hooves of the escaping horses was growing louder. His guard didn’t move.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Geder screamed. “Don’t just stand there! We’re being attacked.”

  The riders came out of the darkness. Three men on horseback, barreling into the rough formation of his guard, swinging soot-black blades. Geder lifted his blade and danced away.

  “That’s him,” one of the riders shouted. “The fat one. That’s Palliako.”

  “To me!” Geder shrieked. “Assassins! To me!”

  His guardsmen outnumbered the riders four to one, but the mounted men had the advantage of height and power. Geder kept backing away into the barren lands. There was nothing to use for cover, no stand of trees or deep-cut ditch to hide in. His lungs burned with fear and cold. He could see a group of his sword-and-bows running toward him, and he tried to get to them and the safety of their weapons, but it was too far. He heard the pounding hoofbeats coming. He turned, lifting his blade with a cry of despair. The great black beast sped toward him, the rider standing high in his stirrups, a sword in his upraised hand that seemed to blot out the stars.