Kai-Qubad shrugged. He wasn’t a very big man, but his movements held a liquid grace. “Do I know the minds of princes?” he asked. A moment later, he let out a sharp yelp of pain.
“I told you not to evade,” Alca said. “Now answer.”
“No one told me anything,” he said, and then yelped again.
“These games get you nowhere,” the witch warned. “The more you play them, the sorrier you will be. Tell me what you know. Tell me everything you know, and stop wasting time.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Kai-Qubad set his jaw, plainly expecting more pain. He hissed like a snake when it came. This time, it didn’t seem to go away at once, but hung on and on.
“That is your own lie tormenting you,” Alca said. “If you tell the truth, all will be well once more.”
“Ha!” the Menteshe said. But he stood there, huddled in his own misery, for no more than a few minutes before groaning, “Make it stop! I will speak.”
“If you speak the truth, it will stop,” the witch told him.
“Yes, then. Yes! Our lord and master started Evren against you.” Kai-Qubad sighed with relief. Evidently Alca had meant what she said.
“How do you know this?” Grus asked the nomad.
“How?” The fellow hesitated. By now, even that pause was plenty to cause him pain. He said, “Make it stop! I’ll tell.” He hurried on. “I know because my captain’s sister is wed to one of Prince Evren’s guards. That fellow said the prince had an envoy from the Fallen Star come to court not long before we went over the river against you. When an envoy from him you call the Banished One comes, what can a prince do but obey?”
“We don’t,” Grus said. “We never have. We never will.”
Kai-Qubad looked at him with an emotion he’d never dreamt he would see on any Menteshe’s face—pity. “One day, you will bow before the Fallen Star, as we have done. One day, you will know peace, as we do.” He meant it. He meant every word of it. That alarmed Grus more than anything.
It didn’t alarm Alca. It angered her. “How do you dare talk of peace when you were taken in war?”
“We have peace,” the Menteshe insisted. “We have perfect peace. We have yielded to the Fallen Star. He is our master. We accept this. We accept him. We need nothing else. We want nothing else. You are the ones who still struggle. When you accept him, you will have perfect peace, too. We bring him to you.”
“You bring plunder and rape and murder,” Grus said.
“And you fight among yourselves,” Alca added. “What do you have to say about that, if you have perfect peace?”
Kai-Qubad shrugged. “Fighting is our sport.” There, for once, Grus believed him completely. He went on, “And some of our enmities go back to ancient days, and do not die at once.” Grus believed that, too.
“Our old ways go back even further than yours,” Grus said. “Why shouldn’t we keep them, if they suit us?”
“Oh, that is very simple,” Kai-Qubad answered. “Your ways are wrong, but ours are right.” He spoke with complete conviction. He showed no sign of sudden pain, either. As far as he was concerned, he was telling the truth. The spell that would have punished him for lying stayed quiet.
“Do you want to hear anything more from him, Your Majesty?” Alca asked. Grus shook his head. The witch gestured to the guards. They took the Menteshe away. Alca sighed wearily. “What can we do with such people?” she said.
“Beat them,” Grus said. “That’s the only thing I can see. If we don’t beat them, one of these days they’ll beat us. And that would be very bad.”
He laughed at the understatement. He’d spent these past months either fighting the Menteshe or trying to understand the thralls who’d swarmed over the Stura into Avornis. He imagined the riders carrying destruction and murder all through the kingdom. He also imagined the wizards—or would they be priests, of a particular dark sort?—following in the nomads’ wake. He imagined farmers and townsfolk made into thralls. And he imagined the Banished One thriving on their adoration and looking out through their eyes and seeing a world full of slaves to him and thinking it was good. He imagined all that, and the laughter curdled in his throat.
“What are we going to do?” he whispered. “Oh, by the gods, what are we going to do?” He looked at Alca, hoping the witch would have an answer. But she spread her hands, as though to say she didn’t know, either. He felt worse than if he hadn’t looked her way at all.
Sosia eyed Lanius. “Something is wrong,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered, knowing what a liar he was.
His wife knew what a liar he was, too. “I don’t believe you, not even for a minute,” she said. “Something is wrong. When I first realized it, I thought you were having an affair.”
“I’m not,” Lanius said, which was the truth. There were plenty of pretty serving women in the palace. He enjoyed looking at them. He’d kept his hands to himself, though, ever since he’d married Sosia. He’d thought about taking this one or that one to bed, and he knew some of them had thought about the advantages of bedding him, but nothing of that sort had happened.
“I know you’re not,” Sosia said now. “I almost wish you were. Almost. Then I’d know what was wrong. This way…” She shook her head. “This way, I’m guessing, and that’s even worse.”
“I’m sorry,” Lanius said. “You couldn’t do anything about it anyway.” And that, he knew, was also nothing but the truth.
Sosia, who didn’t know what he knew, wasn’t convinced. “Queen Quelea’s tears, how can I believe that when I don’t even know what the trouble is?” she demanded.
The oath didn’t make things better. The oath, if anything, made them worse. “I’m sorry,” Lanius said, and then said no more.
“You shouldn’t be sorry. You should tell me whatever it is. If it’s not a woman—”
“It’s not.”
“I know it’s not. I already told you that.” Sosia sounded impatient. “But since it’s not, what’s the point to keeping it a secret, whatever it is?”
What’s the point to keeping it a secret? Lanius wondered. But he knew the answer to that. He hadn’t shown even Ixoreus what he’d found. Maybe the green-robed priest hadn’t seen that particular piece of parchment. If he had, he hadn’t seen what it meant.
Or maybe he had seen it and had understood it, but didn’t know Lanius had and didn’t want to discuss it with him. Maybe Ixoreus had endured for years the sinking feeling Lanius had known these past few weeks.
Fortunately, Lanius didn’t have long to brood over what he’d found. A servant came in and said, “Your Majesty, the envoys from the Chernagor city-states are here. We’ll have them in the throne room in a quarter of an hour.”
“Oh, very good!” Lanius said. The delay gave him long enough to put on his crown and a pearl-encrusted robe and take his place on the throne before the merchants who doubled as ambassadors entered the chamber.
The Chernagors were big, blocky men with proud noses, dark beards, and hair tied at their napes in neat buns. They wore embroidered shirts and kilts that stopped just above their knees. Lanius had read that the embroidery and the pattern of the kilt varied from one city-state to another. He was willing to believe it, but hadn’t seen enough Chernagors to tell one town’s distinguishing marks from another’s. They’re probably in the archives, he thought, and wondered where they might lurk.
“Greetings, Your Majesty,” a man, evidently their leader, said. His beard showed more gray than black; he wore a massy golden ring on his right finger and even massier gold hoops in his ears. Some Therving men wore earrings, too; Lanius didn’t know who’d gotten the custom from whom.