Thaddeus stood beside his fireplace for a time. He hoisted the poker and stirred the logs, though they burned well and did not need it. He thought, Let the old man have what he wished for. It was the great gift of the mist. The drug delivered to its user whatever he or she most desired, most needed to carry on living. Leodan had never taken it before Aleera passed away, but in his grief afterward he discovered the drug so many millions of his subjects knew all too well. The slaves of the Kidnaban mines, the parents of Quota children, the teeming masses in the slums of Alecia, the merchants who floated the sea currents unceasingly, soldiers stationed far from home for years at a time, workers in a thousand different trades they had learned as children and carried on throughout their years: they all depended on the balm of the drug for reprieve from the otherwise unceasing torture of their lives. Their king was no different.
Leodan’s time under the mist’s influence, though, was spent in the manner unique to him-with his dead wife. He had confessed as much. She awaited him just beyond that wall of consciousness. Once he passed through it, she greeted him with sympathy and censure in her eyes, with love for him but with no fondness for this vice. After those first moments she took his hand in hers, accepted him completely, and walked him through the beauty of their courtship. They slipped seamlessly from moment to glorious moment in their life together as husband and wife, as young parents with each child the Giver allowed them, through moments large and small and intimate. The small ones, Leodan had said, often surprised him. Tiny moments during which he viewed her from a certain light, when he remembered the details of her features and the idiosyncrasies of her face or voice or demeanor…How could he love her so deeply and yet forget so much of who she had been during his waking hours? It was these details that the king searched for time and again beyond the mist wall. Aleera led him through a tour of everything that had been wonderful about their time together. All in a single evening.
Life, Thaddeus thought, must have been a pale punishment compared to such bliss. But then he thought of the children. At least Leodan had children, which had been denied Thaddeus himself. At least he did not have to live knowing his love died because of treachery. After Dorling’s death he had been asked a thousand times why he did not remarry and father more children. He had always shrugged and answered vaguely and never with the truth-which was that he feared being the cause of more death. Perhaps he had known all along that his loved ones had been killed to squelch his ambitions.
Ah! Thaddeus jabbed the logs in the fire ferociously, angry that he could not control his thoughts. They were like the coils of a snake writhing in his head, a hungry serpent that at times seemed to eat its own tail. He rested the poker back in place and looked again at the king’s note, at the scribbled words, the looping, irregular sentences, the handwriting only faintly familiar as the king’s. Should this document be found by anyone else, none would believe it came from Leodan Akaran. Few would understand the order. Only he and the king had ever spoken of the plan to which it referred. How strange that something they had discussed casually a few years before-Thaddeus sipping wine and the king glazed by the mist-should now become an actual possibility. But it was not meant for others’ eyes anyway. This was for him. The king was entrusting him with his most precious concern. How strange that he had no idea who his greatest betrayer was.
The note, which he glanced at one last time, went thus: If it comes that you must, send them to the four winds. Send them to the four winds, as we spoke of, my friend.
Having read it again, he loosed it from his fingers at such an angle that it slipped into the fire. It landed at the edge of the logs, and for a moment he thought he would have to nudge it with the poker. But then it caught, flared, and curled and blackened. As quickly as that, it was gone. He turned from the fire and rounded his desk, unsure what he was to do next, but thinking he might face it best if he looked the part of a chancellor at his duties. It was then that he saw the envelope.
It was a single white square at the center of the polished wooden expanse of his desk. It should not have been there. It had not been included in his earlier mail delivery, and if it was meant for him personally it would normally have been delivered into his hands. If he had been cold before, he felt himself made of ice now. He did not touch the envelope but lowered himself stiffly into his chair. The leather protested his weight at first, but then yielded to accommodate him, as it had for so many years.
He broke the envelope’s seal with his fingernail and read the message. The king is dead, it began. You had no hand in it. The credit goes only to my brother. If you are wise, you will feel neither guilt nor joy. But now, Thaddeus, you should think of your future. Turn your attention to the children. I want them, and I want them alive. Give them to me alive and you will have riches along with your revenge. This I promise you. He paused on the signature at the end and stared at it as if it were not a name at all but some word he had forgotten the meaning of. It was signed, Hanish, of the Mein.
There was a noise in the hallway. Thaddeus pressed the letter between his palm and his thigh. Two men walked by outside, talking, their forms visible for a split second through the narrow vantage into the passageway. Then they were gone. Thaddeus pinched out the corners of the message and sat with it bridged between his knees.
He sat for some time, his mind drifting to old memories, unhinged for a time from the dueling things being demanded of him. But then he felt the shift in the breath of the air that meant the king’s door had opened. He could delay no longer. He rose, took the second note to the hearth, and let it slide from his fingers into the fire. He turned to go once more to his old friend. He would take him his pipe and bid him farewell, and then he would decide the fate of the Akaran children.
CHAPTER
From Cathgergen several messenger birds of a short-winged northern variety progressed across the Mein in small bites. Each found waypoints that were little more than rock outcroppings amid the sea of ice and snow, low hovels inside which lone men huddled beside wire cages, cooing and stroking the pigeons they tended, long-haired hermits connected to the world of other humans only by the birds themselves. This route was an old one, established long ago and known only to the few living souls that made it function. It worked with surprising dependability. Because of this an avian courier arrived in Tahalian only four days after being dispatched from the mild climes of Acacia, a fraction of what it would have taken a human to travel the same distance.
As the bird landed in one part of Tahalian, folded its wings, curled its trembling feet around its perch, and offered up its burden to yet another handler, the intended recipient of the message rose from a three-legged stool in a sunken arena carved into the fields behind the stronghold, a space called the Calathrock. The structure was the work of hundreds of men over scores of years. Constructed of massive hardwood trunks, the beams of the arena interlocked to arching effect, jointed with iron cuffs, suspended above an area five hundred yards square. It was high and wide enough to host military maneuvers, marching drills, and weapons training. Even full battles were replicated undercover, hidden from prying eyes, protected from the weather. It was a functional monument to a military cause. And also it was a secret pride of a race of people no longer officially permitted either secrets or pride. Grand as it was, on this occasion the Calathrock hosted a contest between just two men.