Aliver shook his head, perplexed to hear a soldier voice such reluctance. He had always been taught to think in terms of a direct strike, especially as their army outnumbered the forces of any one province. He wanted to ask what had happened to General Alain, but from the way that Carver mentioned him, it was clear everyone else knew something of this already. He said, “The soldiers of the Mein number no more than twenty thousand, and ten of those are in our service throughout the empire. That was the decree. So my question is how quickly can we have a force large enough to defeat the ten thousand fighters in place? That hardly seems an impossible task.”
Carver muttered that the Mein’s population had always been hard to ascertain. At times their numbers seemed to fluctuate in ways that did not correspond to the official census. “If we are to have war with the Mein, it is unlikely we will clash arms before early summer. A punitive force sent sooner…I am not sure it is possible. If Hanish picked his timing so as to leave us unable to strike back immediately, he chose well. There is also the innate nature of Meinish soldiers to consider. Men of the Mein kill as a matter of course. They cull the weak so that each generation makes them stronger. They train in the harshest of conditions. They keep secret customs that we can only guess at. Each Mein life we take will be paid for dearly.”
This was met with murmurs of agreement. One councillor said he had heard tales that Hanish had trained a secret army in some hidden location. Another agreed. Julian shook his head at the speculative direction of the conversation but had nothing to add other than his disapproval.
“Hanish fights the Maseret,” Carver said, “the dueling dance the Mein so enjoy. If the attack on the king is his doing, it is like a dagger thrust in the face. He wishes to have us back on our heels, off balance. We must concede that he has achieved this much already.”
“I fear the next strike is already initiated,” Chales said.
Relos nodded a few times, as he always did to indicate he was about to speak. “They have belief, those people. They speak with their dead; and the dead, I am told, are very convincing orators. Belief is dangerous when turned to a cause.”
Aliver looked about him. What was wrong with these people? What happened to his father cast as a simple tactic in some dance? Talking with the dead? One would have thought from their tones that this was nothing more than a war game, a business meeting…
“Are you here to write out the terms of surrender of my father’s rightful kingdom?” Aliver snapped. “Damn you all if you don’t find one manly thing to tell me!”
“Young prince,” Thaddeus said, his face pained as if he wished they were having this discussion in private, “you need not damn us. Not a man here believes we are in true peril. They would just have you know the matter is grave.”
“I know that,” Aliver said. “Did I not look upon my father’s face? Tell me whatever more you must. But I say again-speak with me on how we will punish Hanish Mein. That is what we will do. We have to decide only how and on what day. Understood?”
The others murmured assent, but through the rest of the long meeting Aliver wondered whether his outburst had been wise. The meeting adjourned, leaving his head cluttered with ideas that floated about bumping into one another, rising and sinking like pieces of debris from a shipwreck. He had no true feel for what was to come. He felt like a cabin boy clinging to a piece of wreckage, at the whim of currents he had no power over.
CHAPTER
Of all the things that pained Thaddeus as he stood beside the sickbed of his old friend the king, it was the loose manner in which the flesh of his face sagged that most shot him through with regret. It showed Leodan for what he was: a man grown ancient, so tired of life that the muscles of his face barely had the power to contract or to quiver or to register emotion. To say his skin was ashen would speak only to the surface of the truth. He was a powdery white, indeed, but the color and life had been bled from far below the skin’s waxy surface. Thaddeus had the momentary thought that Edifus himself may have looked much the same on his deathbed. And this death-like the first king’s generations before-might well mark a shift in the order of the world.
Thaddeus could barely keep from falling to his knees and bawling his sorrow, confessing everything, denying everything. He felt the truth of both impulses. In a way, this was all his doing. He had believed the message Hanish Mein had sent to him. He had known from the moment he heard it that Gridulan was guilty of the crimes Hanish named. And he had hated, hated the son for the sins of his father. He had wanted to punish him, for Akarans to suffer, for the very land to be thrown into chaos. Several times as he watched the king in his mist trance Thaddeus had imagined laying hands on his throat and slowly squeezing the life from him. It would have been physically easy to accomplish, but he had never done more than imagine it. Instead, he had killed that poor messenger. He had not planned that out. He was not sure why he had done it. It was a vague notion that came upon him that night. She had brought news of threats to the Akarans. Thaddeus wanted those threats living and breathing, and so she had to die. Cowardly of him, but in a way he had been asking Hanish Mein to punish the king in ways he could not himself. So why was he so miserable now that Hanish had succeeded?
As he bustled through the myriad tasks the situation required of a faithful chancellor he was struck again and again by the images of Leodan’s stunned face, the stain on his gown, the fingers of one of his hands as they clasped at the shoulder of the gape-mouthed Aushenian prince. Nor could he shake free of the assassin’s bold candor, he who had named himself. Thaddeus heard the Meinish words issuing from the man’s mouth, their meaning quickly taken in. He watched the man cut a dripping crease of blood across his own neck. There had been such certainty in his face, not a moment of doubt or hesitation, no fear of the gaping finality of his own actions. Thasren had stared about the room as if he were the true prophet of an unknown god; all around him were the ignorant, the damned.
A sound issued from the king’s mouth, little more than a moan. He opened his eyes. Thaddeus grasped him by the hand and whispered his name. Leodan turned toward him, but his eyes did not show the surprise he expected. The king seemed to have known he was there all along. He showed his body’s dysfunction only when he opened his mouth to speak. His tongue, Thaddeus could see, was white and dry, swollen and unwieldy. Clearly, he was not able to speak. This was a symptom of the poison, a sign that he had turned to face his last handful of hours in this world.
But the king had not lost complete use of his limbs. He motioned with his hands, unsteadily at first, until Thaddeus realized he asked for parchment, ink, and a quill. Once he had them in hand-after the chancellor had also propped him up with pillows into a seated position-Thaddeus watched as the king, breathless and concentrating, twisted his hand into position. Staring at the page and at his fingers, he willed them to motion. His hand moved in jerky motions, starting and stopping at awkward moments, letters ill formed and jumbled closely together. The sharp point of the pen on the dry parchment was for a moment the only sound in the room. Thaddeus tugged on his earlobe as he waited, his mind whirling with the most improbable notions of what the king might be writing to him. What accusation would he make? What curse? And he asked himself how would he react if this dying man charged him with the crime he was in fact guilty of? Did he still have enough anger in him to lash back? He could not locate any emotion like that.
Though it took a long time, Leodan’s face showed some satisfaction when he raised the parchment for Thaddeus to see. It read, Tell the children their story is only half written. Tell them to write the rest and place it beside the greatest story. Tell them. Their story stands beside the greatest tale ever told.