Now he stood with his arms upraised as the squire secured the sword around his waist, a weapon considered his until his father was well enough to take it up again. He tried to wear it with an appropriate ease, ignoring the way it banged against his thigh with each step. He had not expected to take his place at council until his seventeenth birthday. Only a few days ago he would have considered it a great honor to sit among the generals and advisers he was about to. Now the guilt of it sat inside him like a rough-edged stone. He had watched an assassin stab his father in the breast, and he had not done a thing about it. The vile creature had named his father a despot. A despot! What reason was there in that? He knew evil men twisted the world to their aims and could not be trusted to speak even a single truth, but the fact that the assassin had uttered such a phrase within the hearing of so many, with such apparent confidence…It galled Aliver. It set his blood to boiling.
He so wanted to step back into that moment and grab the man by the throat. Why hadn’t he? Instead, all he had managed to do was yell again and again for someone to stop the man. He could have pushed the guards aside if he had wanted to. He could have vaulted over the table. He could have done so many things that he might now be proud of. But he had not. He replayed the scene and all the possible variations on it a hundred times before the sun rose the next day. None of it did him any good. It only solidified his belief that his father’s wound was his fault more than anyone else’s.
In comparison to the expansive grandeur of most Acacian architecture the council chamber was a cramped, claustrophobic space barely large enough for the oval table at its center, a low surface of polished granite, around which sat the ten advisers of his father’s kingdom. Light entered from a single slotted window high on the southern wall. The shaft of it fell in such a way as to illuminate the center of the table and to cast up highlights on the councillors’ features. The brilliant contrast of this effect made the walls beyond into a dim boundary that felt to Aliver decidedly like a chamber for some sort of interrogation.
The prince, after a moment of hesitation as his eyes adjusted to the light, took his place in his father’s seat. He wondered if he should commence the meeting. He looked around at the shadow-dimmed and creviced faces of the elders gazing back at him and at others whom his eyes drifted past. He took them in not as the individuals they were but as if looking upon so many stone busts. How to start such a meeting?
He did not have to. Thaddeus Clegg called the meeting to order by invoking the names of the first five Acacian kings, reminding all in attendance that they here partook in a discourse of the highest order. It was to them that they should look for wisdom. Them upon whom to model themselves as they faced the turmoil now confronting them.
“Before we proceed to the matters we must discuss here, I am sure you all wish to know how the king fares.” There were murmurs all around. “All I can tell you is what the physicians have told me. At this moment the king lives. If he did not, they would come to us and we would know immediately. But he was almost certainly poisoned. They believe the blade that cut him was of the Ilhach, the old order of Meinish assassins. I know-they were disbanded by Edifus and outlawed. But still it may be their deadly poison that drains the life from him.” The chancellor touched Aliver with his roaming gaze, locked on him for a minute. He looked away before he continued. “The physicians are doing all they can. The king may survive; then again, he may not. We need to be prepared for either eventuality. As you all can see, Prince Aliver sits in his father’s place this day. Bid him welcome, even as you pray he will soon give his seat back to his father.”
Aliver tried to look around and return the greetings directed at him, but his eyes faltered before long. He heard some of the kind words with his gaze fixed on the tabletop.
His eyes continued to roam over the grain of the stone as he heard Thaddeus’s secretary give his report. There was scarcely a person on the island who could confirm the assassin’s identity, he said. By chance an official who had lived a year in Cathgergen auditing the satrapy’s books attested that the man was, indeed, Thasren Mein. But the matter was not without dispute. Speaking via messenger pigeons, Meinish representatives in Alecia issued a denial, swearing the assassin could not have been Thasren. They insisted that it was a plot by some other conspirators, but not by the Mein. They even announced their intention to sail promptly to Acacia and plead their innocence. This may have been a ploy, however, for the only Meinish official actually on the island had vanished. Gurnal and his family had fled, leaving his house a tomb for several servants. It was, to say the least, difficult to make sense of.
As the secretary concluded, Julian, one of the more senior councillors, said, “This is not enough information to form action on.” A few voices, seemingly exasperated with the elder already, pointed out that nobody had yet suggested any action. Julian continued undeterred. “Hanish Mein sending his brother to his death…and for what-to start a war he cannot hope to win? I can believe neither what my eyes saw nor what I’ve been told since. Hanish is barely more than a boy. I saw him at the winter rites a few years ago. He grew a downy beard on his cheeks, untrimmed like boys anxious to be men.”
Relos, the commander of the Acacian forces and a man Aliver knew his father trusted, said, “He is a boy no longer. I believe he is now in his twenty-ninth year.”
Julian’s eyes touched on Aliver for a second, and then he asked the general company, “If Hanish Mein did this, for what reason? What does he intend?”
“We cannot know what he intends,” Chales, another older soldier, said. “Julian, your love of peace is well known, but not all persons are as generous minded as you.”
“And boys are often foolish,” Relos said. “Full of pride. Folly.”
Thaddeus cut off Julian’s response. “No one here looks at the night and calls it day,” he said. “We should consider all possibilities, and Julian’s question is valid. Perhaps this is not Hanish Mein’s doing. Perhaps, but I have found the most obvious culprit is usually the actual culprit. The Mein are an ancient people. Ancient people have long memories. Hanish might believe he acts on his forefathers’ behalf. He is in contact with his ancestors, and they crave Acacian blood as much now as they ever did. At least, that is what men of the Mein believe. They delude themselves this way.”
“We are all ancient people, Thaddeus,” Relos said. “Some of us remember this and some don’t. Some can name their father’s father’s father and some cannot. But the blood in each of us began at the beginning and runs still. Age is no excuse for treachery.”
A quiet moment of hesitation prompted Aliver to speak. “We are circling the issue here without looking it in the face,” he said. “The man-the assassin-does anyone doubt he was of the Mein race? And that he spoke their language with ease? Did he not name himself?” The room answered this with silence, all seemingly surprised to hear the young man speak and not sure how to answer him. “Then why look at the night sky and wonder whether it is actually daytime disguised? We know who did this. A Mein stuck a blade in my father! We will do the same to them but with greater force. And I do not care why they did it. An act is an act, no matter the reasoning of the mind that commited it. They must be punished.”
“Just so, Prince,” Thaddeus said. “That is why we are here. We must form some sort of response. The governors will have their own ideas, but they will look to us for guidance and, ultimately, for approval of any course of action.”