Aliver, walking again a half stride behind Hephron, repeated those words in his mind several times. He knew he should be angry, should curse him for weakness now that they were being threatened. But instead he walked on as if pulled in the other’s wake. He twinned the young man’s words with the chancellor’s cryptic confession. He was still thinking about the gravity of their implications when they reached the head of the stairs. Hephron, who had gained the vista just before him, froze. For a space of seconds, standing at the head of the stairs looking down, the scene before Aliver made absolutely no sense.
The square below, some hundred steps away, was in a state of utter confusion. People swarmed in all directions, shrieking. The first person he could recognize was General Rewlis. But just as he made out who he was, he watched him being cut from behind through his leg. He recognized the person wielding the blade and tried to name him but could not. Rewlis went down to one knee, head thrown back in a scream of pain, silenced a moment later as the same sword that had cut his leg split his neck in a diagonal blow aimed just below the ear. A second later the blade slipped free. The general crumpled, a fount of blood gushing from his neck, his legs smearing the stones as they churned with the last of his life.
“Hellel?” Melio whispered.
Hephron understood his meaning before Aliver. “You bastard. I could have killed you in your sleep so many times.”
The strangeness of this statement added nothing to Aliver’s understanding of the confusion below them. Hellel? He had been one of Hephron’s entourage, a pale shadow beside him always, the type who nearly finished his sentences for him.
Noticing that Aliver still stared, Hephron gestured with his arm, a motion that both pointed at the scene and swiped it away. “They are Meins! Look at them. Hellel, there by the railing. And Havaran. And Melish on the steps. They have betrayed us! We should have expected it.” He was in motion the next instant, careening down the steps at breakneck speed, his feet jolting against the stones in a barely controlled fall. He tried to wrench his sword free as he moved, but it was not until he had paused on the terrace that he managed to unsheath the steel. He was instantly engaged, two men coming at him at once from opposite sides. Melio danced in behind him a second later, his blade spinning with blurring speed.
Aliver would try later to be sure of just what happened next. He would remember that he drew his sword and gritted his teeth and had just begun to rage down the staircase and into battle… That was exactly what he almost did. He wanted to have done so very badly. He would have, except that before he could move a hand clamped down on his forearm and spun him around.
It was Carver, the Marah captain. “Prince,” he said, “sheathe your sword. You must go to safety.” And to the flank of warriors behind, he gave orders for several of them to take Aliver away. The rest swarmed down the staircase behind Carver. That was all there was to it. Aliver, once pulled away, never saw how the skirmish ended. He went “to safety,” while Melio and Hephron became warriors.
CHAPTER
Thaddeus Clegg entered his inner chambers, tired from a long day wrestling with the confusion inside him while functioning for all the world to see as an efficient chancellor. His cat, Mesha, rose from her curled comfort on a chair, stretched one paw and then the other, called to him with a thrumming chirp. She was a breed native to southern Talay, sand colored, short-haired everywhere except along her belly and under her chin. She was larger than normal indoor cats by half, and, as was common to her breed, she had an extra toe on each paw, an advantage she took great pleasure in exploiting when she slapped mice against the tiles. It also helped her hold her own against the golden monkeys, which had long since decided to give her a wide berth.
As Thaddeus shrugged off his cloak and draped it over a chair, Mesha leaped down from the chair and closed the distance between them with nimble steps. He stretched out his hand and received the soft impact of her head against his fingers. Though he certainly never revealed it to others, Thaddeus placed the greater portion of his desire for sensuous interaction with others in the tips of his fingers and reserved his most intimate touch for Mesha. This was all he wanted or needed now of companionship. He was too proud and self-conscious a man to distract himself with attachments to others, and he would not risk any greater love again.
“Mesha, you are my darling girl. You know that, yes? There is madness outside this room, but you have no part in it. How fortunate you are.”
A short time later, Thaddeus sat with Mesha curled in his lap. He sipped a syrupy liqueur redolent of peaches and tried to create a calm inside that would match his outward appearance of peace. He failed completely. The turmoil of a land struck and struck again, and now scurrying to prepare for war would have been more than enough to keep his mind reeling. He had spent the day in council with the generals preparing to meet Hanish Mein’s forces near Alecia, the target they believed he would attack first. They had gone through all the details of mustering the largest army the Known World had seen since Tinhadin’s time. What a daunting task, all done in haste and without a true king to control the tenor of the undertaking. Yes, Aliver sat through the council meetings, adding what he could, holding up bravely in the face of it all. But it was Thaddeus to whom the generals really spoke. And it was the fulcrum at which this side of his life collided with his own desire for revenge that truly baffled him.
He had not overtly agreed to aid Hanish Mein, but when he had read the chieftain’s simple message, part of him wished to obey. Perhaps he had been too long the servant of a king to feel comfortable as his own master. Or perhaps it was a sign of Hanish’s power, his ability to reach out over distances and turn other men’s hearts to his will. What to do about Hanish’s demand? He had ordered him to capture the Akaran children. Simple as that. Do this thing for him, and Thaddeus would be revenged against the Akarans. Do this thing and he would be rewarded for it in other ways as well. Thaddeus wondered if he could remake himself as a servant of the Meins. What might they give him in payment? A governorship maybe. Talay would suit him, that grand expanse, endless miles and miles of grasslands. It was a large enough province for him to get lost in. This seemed an attractive notion.
Or maybe he was not thinking large enough. Had he still contained the ambition Gridulan had sensed in him years ago, he would have found a way to seize the throne. He had effective control of affairs on the island. Considering those already dead, with the confusion on the Mainland and bloody clashes right here in the courtyards of Acacia, nobody else held the reins of power as surely as he did. The royal children trusted him, and he had had access to each of them even in their private chambers. He could have gone from one to the other and poisoned them: a cup of warm milk offered by a beloved uncle, a cake with a special icing, a salve on his thumb that he dabbed around their eyes, as if wiping away tears… He knew so many methods by which to deliver poison. He could have placed a pillow over their sleeping mouths, bled them from a wound in the neck, stopped their hearts with the flat-handed blow he had learned to deliver at just the right angle and force to stun the organ to stillness. He could end them and thereby repay Gridulan for his treachery.
“How pathetic it all is, Mesha,” he said, running his hand down the cat’s back. The feline looked up at him, slant eyed and bored. “I have made a mess of everything! I should think of the surest route and follow it. Nothing can stop the coming change; I see that as clearly as anyone. And these children are not the innocents they seem. Does not the young of a jackal grow into a jackal? Will it not someday bite the hand that feeds it? It can be no other way. It is foolishness to act as if either they or I could be other than we are. See, I can state all clearly. But I love them. That’s the trouble.”