“Listen,” Leeka said, “I don’t have time for this. In case you haven’t noticed, your master’s lost his head. You and I, though, we could aid each other. I want to get somewhere fast, which would be hard on this ankle. And you…you look like you need somewhere to go.”
There was something like intelligence in the consideration the beast gave all this, but it was nothing like full understanding either. In answer the animal stamped the ice. Leeka was aware of his weakness, his feeble lightness compared to the creature’s girth and bulk, natural weapons, and the thickness of his defenses. He stared at the beast with all the annoyed exasperation he could muster. Better that it did not remember it could impale Leeka on that horn of his and walk about with a new ornament. Or that it could bowl him over and trample him to mush at will. There could be no violent contest between them. The winner was obvious enough that Leeka prayed the rhino did not consider it. Then he thought of something.
He turned, limped away, and came back a few moments later with his fist clenched in the dead warrior’s hair. He tossed the head out between him and the mount. It rolled in a wobbling, awkward motion that stopped soon enough. The creature studied it, turning side to side as if suspecting trickery. Leeka tested several possible witticisms. None quite fit the moment. He let the silence sink in. The beast had enough to consider with its dull mind anyway. He would give him a little while to think it all through.
CHAPTER
Aliver dressed for the meeting with a military crispness. Though he was alone in his room, he snapped out the folds of his council vest audibly, as if his every move were being watched by elders keen to denounce him for slackness. It was dimly lit, because he had snuffed out most of the lamps, and chilly, because he had opened one of the large bay windows. He was to attend his first meeting of the king’s councillors, an abrupt gathering called because of the assassination attempt. Attempt, he made sure to tell himself. Attempt only. Though he had not been allowed to see his father for two days since the attack, Thaddeus had assured him the king lived and fought for his life with all his strength. For the time being, he had said, only the physicians could aid him. That fact in itself seemed absurd. How could Leodan Akaran’s life and the fate of an empire lie at the mercy of so few men? One with a knife, a few others with potions and tonics…
It was not as if Aliver had never been warned of such possibilities, but previous discussions of the rules of ascension had seemed distant notions, not soon to be relevant to his life. His tutor, Jason, had once said that a prince knows no greater time of danger than the days or weeks leading up to his crowning. Ofttimes, he claimed, princes were slain by their most trusted advisers, friends, even kin hungry for power themselves. Aliver could not remember the words he had responded to this with, but surely he had denied any such treachery would befall the Akarans. But Jason had an answer to this also. “Never in the historical record has a power of any nation, no matter how strong, maintained control indefinitely. Either you Akarans have broken the mold, or else history has dawdled a time before catching up with you.” Jason had bowed as he said this, almost joking, deferential and friendly, as he always was when he challenged the prince. But thinking of it now, Aliver felt a prickle of apprehension.
A sharp knock at the door startled him. A moment later a squire stood before him, displaying on his palms the sword called the King’s Trust. The prince knew the blade well. It was the very weapon that Edifus fought with at Carni. The black stain on the hilt leather, it was said, was blood from the first king’s own hand. At some point in his single combat with a tribal leader Edifus had stumbled, lost grip of his sword, and survived the moment only by catching his foe’s slashing blade pinched between his palm and fingers. Quite a move, one that had, for training purposes, been modified into a blocking motion, pushing on the flat of the opponent’s sword with the fat edge of the hand. Leodan had worn the sword only on the rare occasions that called for it, but Aliver had sought out the altar that displayed it in his father’s dressing chambers on many occasions. He had run his fingers over the ridged, soiled weave of the hilt, cupping his hand around it, hoping to find that his fingers fit perfectly into the worn grip of it.
Once he had lifted it out of its cradle, held it before him with one hand on the hilt and one on the sheath. He broke the seal between the two with a motion of his wrist and slid an inch or two of the blade into the light. He got no further. He had never been sure afterward, but he thought at the moment that the exposed portion of the blade sang out as air and light touched it. And it was not a cry of joy. It was sorrow conveyed through tempered steel. He felt sure the chamber was filled with ghosts about to materialize in wrath around him. He had done something wrong, touched an object he should not have, something not yet for him. The moment also left him with the fear that the martial history known to that blade was horrible in ways he had not yet been schooled in.
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?