Tamas floated in a light powder trance, allowing him to examine faces at a distance with ease. He knew General Westeven, a tall, bald man with bloodspots on his scalp. Age had reduced the general to little more than skin stretched over bones, his whole body moving slowly from advanced rheumatism. Still, that was no reason to underestimate him. His mind was sharp as a fine dagger.
Tamas didn’t recognize a single one of the men with the general. They were nobles, judging by their bedraggled finery. Men who’d slipped through his soldiers’ nets the night of the coup, or were too minor to warrant attention.
He did recognize the woman with them. It was the Privileged who’d killed Lajos and the rest. She looked none the worse for the wear despite the wounds Taniel had supposedly given her. Perhaps Taniel was wrong. Maybe he’d missed. Tamas locked eyes with her for a moment. She returned his gaze unflinchingly.
Taniel wasn’t known to miss.
There was a pause among the royalist group and a brief argument before they finished their trek down the street and formed up opposite Tamas and his mercenaries. There were twenty of them, and Westeven was the only soldier of the whole lot. This wasn’t opposition, Tamas realized with disgust. This was a committee.
“Field Marshal Tamas,” said a fat noble with a stained cummerbund. “Order your men to stand down! We’ve come beneath a flag of truce.”
Tamas glanced at the soldiers behind him. They were at attention, their rifles shouldered. “Westie,” he said. “Good to see you.”
Westeven returned his nod. “Would it were under different circumstances, my friend.”
“There’d be no hard feelings if you stepped away from this lot right now. You’d be a formidable ally in rebuilding the country.”
“The way I see it,” Westeven said, “is that you are the one destroying it.”
“Surely you can see the corruption?” Tamas said. “Nothing short of the destruction of the nobility would have saved Adro.”
Westeven’s eyes were tired, his face strained. He seemed as if he desperately wanted to say yes. “There is more at stake here than you know. And you killed my king, Tamas. I can’t forgive you for that.”
“Your king was about to give the whole country to the Kez!” Tamas’s voice rose sharply. Westeven was a smart man. No, a brilliant man. How could he not see what Tamas was trying to do? How could he stand in the way? “I could not allow the Accords to be signed and this country sold into servitude. What more important is at stake than the people?”
The general glanced at the members of Tamas’s guard. “I won’t speak of it here.” His eyes hardened. “We’re here to negotiate,” he said.
“From what grounds,” Tamas asked. “You’re completely surrounded. I have more men–”
“I have twenty thousand behind those barricades.”
“–including women and children, maybe,” Tamas snapped. “You might have a few dangerous Knacked at best, and this.” He gestured to the Privileged. “Yet I have a dozen powder mages and enough field guns to destroy half the city.”
“You mean the half that wasn’t destroyed by the quake?” Westeven’s calm was infuriating. Tamas gritted his teeth.
“I have time,” Westeven continued. “I hold the main city granaries and armory – food and weapons you need, because the Kez ambassadors will arrive any day now, and if they see that we are at war among ourselves, then they will smell blood, and a Kez army will be knocking on our door within weeks. Even if they don’t, the people will begin to tire of this civil war. They will see your soldiers and mercenaries as a burden. They will turn on you when you can’t feed them, when you can’t rebuild their city.”
The bastard could read his problems like a book. Tamas sized up the collection of noblemen. “What do you propose?”
The man with the soiled cummerbund stepped forward. “I am Viscount Maxil,” he said. He lifted a length of paper and looked it over. “We have a list of demands.”
Tamas snatched the paper before Maxil could object. He ran his eyes down the list.
“You expect me to step down? To arrest myself?” He gave the nobles a look of disbelief.
“You committed high treason!” one of them said. “You killed our king!”
Tamas stared them down until another man said quietly, “We’re willing to negotiate on that point.”
Tamas went back to reading. Before he’d gone another paragraph, he was shaking his head. “You want all the king’s land and that of the executed nobility divided up among yourselves? What do you take me for, a fool?”
“These are points of negotiation,” Maxil said.
“A moment ago you said they were demands.”
“More like negotiation,” Maxil said, looking away.
Tamas gave the list back. “Westie, surely you can talk some sense into them?”
Westeven shrugged. “Negotiate, Tamas. I beg of you.”
“Give me a moment.”
Tamas stepped back behind the cannons and beckoned over the brigadiers. He was joined by Olem, Vlora, Sabon, Brigadier Ryze, and Brigadier Sabastenien. Julene still stood off to the side, staring at the other Privileged with the intensity of a cat.
Brigadier Sabastenien spoke first. “They have no grounds to negotiate from.” The man was young, barely older than Taniel, and Tamas had a hard time taking him seriously. Yet one did not become a brigadier of the Wings of Adom at that age for nothing.
“I’m afraid they do,” Sabon said. “Westeven is right. We don’t have time. If the Kez ambassadors arrive and see us in this state…”
“Not to mention the granaries,” Tamas said. “We’ve reduced rations by a third for the army just to have a bare minimum for the city breadwagons. The people are starving. They won’t put up with this for long.”
“Your council will be angry if you make any decisions without them,” Vlora pointed out. “Sir,” she added.
“This is a matter of war, Captain,” Tamas said, “and in that they have given me full power. I’ll negotiate as I see fit.” He turned to Ryze. “Can we take those barricades without losing a few thousand men?”
Ryze considered a moment. “Only if we give them a good shelling first. Even then… it will be costly.”
Tamas rolled his eyes. Ryze had been an artillery commander before joining the Wings of Adom. He saw shelling as a solution to everything.
“If we don’t shell them?”
“It will be a bloodbath,” Ryze said. “On both sides.”
“Shit.”
Tamas returned to the royalists. “Give me an offer,” Tamas said. He motioned to the paper in Maxil’s hand. “A serious offer. Not that list of pig shit. And it will include her” – he pointed at the Privileged – “giving herself up to await execution for the murder of my men.”
The Privileged gazed back at Tamas with the severity only old women are capable of. To her, they were all children playing at children’s games.
“That won’t happen,” General Westeven said. “Be realistic, Tamas. This is war. Casualties are a fact of that war.”
Tamas gritted his teeth. “Give me an offer.”
Maxil launched into it immediately, and Tamas realized it was what he’d expected all along.
“We have a cousin of the king’s within our barricades,” Maxil said.
“His name?” Tamas interrupted.
“Jakob the Just.”
Tamas blinked, trying to remember the royal line. “More like Jakob the Child, he’s a fourth cousin, at best, and he’s barely five.”
“He’s the closest living relative to Manhouch.” Maxil went on. “We propose that we put him on the throne as Manhouch the Thirteenth. You and General Westeven will remain in control of the army, and we along with your council will combine to form the core of the king’s new advisory board. Your powder mages will be the new royal cabal.”
“And the king?” Tamas asked.
“We will advise him until he comes of age.”
Tamas looked to Westeven. There was a levelheadedness to this proposal that spoke of his influence. The nobility would leave most of the control in his hands. Yet it could not stand.