CHAPTER
Aliver began to dream nightly of dueling with nameless, faceless foes. Unlike the whimsical imaginings of times past, when swordplay was a fanciful clash with mythic foes, these visions were of a dark nature, each moment humming with fear. They always began innocuously enough: with him walking the alleys of the lower town, talking with his companions over breakfast, searching in his room for a book he knew he had placed somewhere. But at some point events always pivoted to sudden violence. A soldier would appear at the end of a passageway with sword unsheathed, calling him by name; the dining table would overturn and when the bulk of it cleared his view, the scene behind became one of enemy warriors swarming into the room like a thousand spiders-in through the windows, clinging to the ceiling with swords clasped between their teeth in enormous, metallic grins. Often he simply sensed that behind him was a formless, seething malice he would have to confront.
In these dreams he fought well enough up until the moment he had to sink his weapon home. Then, with the realization that he was about to slice into a living creature just like him, the flow of time snagged. Motion slowed. His muscles lost their strength and became useless ribbons of tar beneath his skin. He never watched his blade cut into the flesh of these dream enemies. Instead he awoke, panting, body tensed and trembling as if the fight had just taken place in the real world. Only then did the slow stink of reality creep over him. He had not woken from an ill dream to a welcoming world; he had opened his eyes once more to a waking nightmare that daily shrugged off his efforts to deny it.
His father was dead. This meant a thousand things to Aliver, all of them confusing. Not even his ascendance to the throne was straightforward. The Akarans were strict monarchists, but the larger situation was so confused as to delay Aliver’s rise to fill his father’s place. The same reverence for ritual that allowed the people to accept a monarchy also demanded a rigid adherence to tradition. New kings were crowned only in autumn, at the same time as the deceased king’s ashes were released. It was on that day that Tinhadin had first ascended, and it was deemed necessary that all others follow his venerable example. On almost every occasion in the years thereafter there had been a pause between the ruling monarch’s death and the new one’s crowning. A wait of several months was not at all without precedent. The unprecedented action would have been to crown a king on a date other than the summer solstice and to do so without a full, sitting contingent of governors. The priestesses of Vada found the time inauspicious for a crowning and refused to bless any ceremony. And the machinery of government seemed to have no interest in thrusting an inexperienced adolescent into a role so fraught with import. Perhaps some other prince would have grasped power anyway. But not Aliver. Despite himself, he felt something like relief that a crown had not been set atop his head immediately, though he would not admit this. Thaddeus was better suited to serve as the royal voice for the time being.
Bad news flew at him. He could barely register one tragedy before another shouldered past it. Cathgergen was lost to some barbarian horde, the garrison there destroyed, the governor and his entourage thrown out into the cold, bearing a message of coming doom for the world. None of this was easily conceived of. For Cathgergen to fall it meant the defeat of-of how many? Two thousand soldiers? At least that many. And there was no word that any of these had escaped to tell their story or even that some were being held prisoner. And what of the many others who had lived in the fortress-craftsmen and traders, courtesans and laborers and their children, the varied people who made an isolated outpost like Cathgergen livable? They were all simply gone, and Aliver had yet to hear anyone explain how this was possible.
Several key Alecian officials had been slain in their beds. Many of them died along with their wives, husbands, children, servants, and slaves, their bodies hacked far beyond what was necessary to take their lives, as if each of them had been the victim of a crazed killer frenzied beyond reason. Two days later there was another attack on members of the royal family as they tried to leave Manil, the rocky cliffside town on which the most luxurious of the familial palaces perched. Leodan’s half sister, Katrina, along with fourteen others who bore the name Akaran by birth, and more beyond that by marriage, were caught at the docks on a bright morning. Men disguised as dockworkers sprang upon them once they boarded their ship and chopped them down with short swords they had concealed in their garments.
Nobody knew how such extensive plots could have been kept secret and launched with such deadly efficiency. The collective hum and murmur of rumor gave birth to the belief that many of the assassins in both attacks had been house servants, gardeners, and laborers employed by the aristocracy, many of them in service for years without betraying a single sign of deceit. Another tale asserted that a fleet of warships was sliding south out of the frozen Mein. They had been seen by fur trappers near the icy fingers of the River Ask, but how these simple people in so remote a place could have dispatched such a message was never explained, nor could much sense be made of the very idea they proposed. Some claimed that Rialus Neptos-who disappeared after the massacre of the Alecian officials-had a role in the uprising. And still others claimed that the entire entourage of league representatives had sailed away without a word.
Aliver wanted desperately to make sense of what was happening and to piece it together in a way that grappled the chaos back into manageable bounds, but moments of quiet thought were few and troublingly brief. The days of Marah training were behind him now. His officers spoke to those who had only days before been students as if they had suddenly risen in stature in their eyes. They had all, it seemed, been promoted in one mass movement. They spoke of the trials they now faced with an honesty Aliver had not expected and did not welcome. Men who had seemed so confident in their roles just a few days ago now seemed uneasy, tentative and jumpy when giving orders. The future before them, they explained, was fraught not simply with the physical pain of training or with humiliation of being defeated at exhibition matches or even with social disgrace, once the gravest possibility of a failure of character. These were all hazards they had navigated before. Now they were to fight with their actual lives at stake. He would soon be expected to kill. The very thought of it turned the way he viewed all of his training on its head. Did he have it in him to kill? It scarcely seemed possible. Could it be, he thought, that he would fail his nation at the first test? Never had he dreaded a thing as much as he did this possibility.
What made it worse was that he did not know what would really be expected of him. His position alongside his peers was more awkward than ever. On the one hand, he feared that he would be spared battle responsibility just as he had always been set apart from the others in training. On the other hand, the truth remained that the officers pointed again and again to the Forms for examples of battle valor, and in most of these it had been a royal personage wielding the sword or spear or ax. Was he expected to step into those legendary shoes and lead them to victory? He did not know, and nobody-not even Thaddeus-stepped in to inform him.
With only days left before the young soldiers learned of their deployments and set off to fill them, Thaddeus Clegg joined the officers to appraise the troops at assembly. The chosen site was the stadium named after the seventh king’s wife, the Carmelia. It sat on a flat wedge of land that pushed out into the ocean like a half-submerged foot, below the palace but slightly above the lower town. A great bowl carved into the stone, the Carmelia could seat thousands on benches hollowed to hold each spectator. The arena was a vast space, open to the air, with the packed soil of the floor nearly as hard as stone, mopped often in circular patterns that, when stared at, played tricks on the watcher’s eyes.