“Begone!” the other priests chorused, which made Lanius laugh.
His mother was not laughing. “They dare,” she said.
“Fools dare all sorts of things,” his father said grimly. He wasn’t red anymore. He was white—with fury, or with pain? “It’s what makes them fools.”
Chain mail clanking, one of his guardsmen strode up to the king. “Your Majesty, we’d need about two companies’ worth of men to storm the gates,” he said. “Half an hour’s work, no more.”
King Mergus shook his head. “No. We’ll go back to the palace. Let Arch-Hallow Bucco think he’s won—for now. This time, though, he will pay.”
Lanius started to cry when his father steered him back toward the carriage. “I want to go in there!” He pointed to the cathedral. “It’s pretty in there!”
“They won’t let us go in there,” his mother told him. That made him cry harder than ever. He was used to getting what he wanted.
“Be quiet, Son,” his father said, and his tone was such that Lanius was quiet. The king went on, “Bucco has had his day. He’s truly a fool if he thinks I won’t have mine.” Lanius didn’t understand that. He didn’t understand anything except that they had to go back to the palace. It didn’t seem fair at all.
Three days later, a palace servant bowed low to King Mergus. “Someone here to see you, Your Majesty.”
“Ah?” Mergus’ shaggy eyebrows rose. “Someone I’m expecting?” The servant nodded. Mergus’ grin showed teeth yellow but still sharp. “Well, send him in, send him in.”
In came Arch-Hallow Bucco, escorted—none too politely— by several palace guards. He did not wear his red silk robes now, only an ordinary shirt and pair of breeches. He looked more like a retired schoolmaster, say, than a man who dared thunder at kings. He also looked frightened, which was nothing less than Mergus had expected.
“Will you speak to me of bastards now, Bucco?” the king demanded.
One of the guards prodded the arch-hallow. Before speaking at all, Bucco bowed very low. “What—what is the meaning of this, Your Majesty?” he quavered.
“I am going to explain something to you, something that has to do with which of us is stronger in the kingdom,” Mergus answered. “When you shut the gates in my face, you thought you were. I am here to tell you, you are wrong.”
Arch-Hallow Bucco gathered himself, looking sternly at Mergus. “I did what I did because I had to do it, Your Majesty, not from hatred of you. I have told you that before, when you tried to flaunt your sin. If I did otherwise, I would not be worthy of the rank I hold.”
“I take a different view,” King Mergus said. “I say that, because you did what you did, you are not worthy of the rank you hold. And, as I am king, what I say in these matters carries weight. As of now, this instant, Bucco, you are no longer Arch-Hallow of Avornis.”
“What will you do with me?” Bucco knew fear again, but did his best not to show it.
“For your insolence, I ought to take your head,” Mergus said, and the newly deposed arch-hallow quailed. “I ought to,” the king repeated, “but I won’t. Instead, I’ll send you to the Maze, where you can pray for wisdom. You’ll have plenty of leisure to do it in, that’s certain, and company, too, for a good—no, a bad—dozen of your followers will go with you.”
Bucco looked hardly more happy than if King Mergus had ordered his immediate beheading. Not far to the west of the city of Avornis, several of the Nine Rivers came together and split apart in a bewildering group of marshes and islands—the Maze. No one knew all the secrets of navigating there, and those secrets changed from year to year, from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. Kings of Avornis had stashed inconvenient people on insignificant islands there for hundreds of years. Few thus disposed of ever came back.
“And who do you think will make a better arch-hallow than I do?” Bucco asked.
“Almost anyone,” Mergus said brutally. “The man I am naming to the post, if that’s what you mean, is Grand Hallow Megadyptes.”
Now Bucco stared. “He would accept it? From you? He is a very holy man.”
“Yes, he is.” King Mergus smiled a nasty smile. “He actually believes in peace among us, which is more than you can say. For the sake of peace, he will become arch-hallow.”
“You may send away those who condemn your sin, Your Majesty, but you cannot send away the sin itself,” Bucco said. “It remains here in the palace. It will not be forgotten. Neither will what you do to me today.”
King Mergus yawned in his face. “That’s what you think. I told you, I take a different view. And when the king takes a different view, the king is right.” He nodded to the guardsmen who’d brought Bucco into his presence. “Be off with him. Let him lie in the bed he’s made.”
Without giving Bucco a chance for the last word, the guards hauled him away.
Captain Grus had a pleasant home in one of the better—although not one of the best—parts of the city of Avornis. His home would have been even more pleasant, in his view, if he saw it more often. His river-galley cruises sometimes kept him away for months at a time.
He happened to be at home, however, when Mergus cast down Bucco and raised Megadyptes in his place. His father brought the news back to the house from the tavern where he spent his afternoons soaking up wine, rolling dice, and telling lies with other retired soldiers. Crex was a big man, stooped and white-bearded, with enormous hands—far and away the largest Grus had ever seen on any man. Grus never knew why his father was called Crex the Unbearable; everyone but Crex who knew was dead, and his father was not the sort to encourage such questions.
“Aye, he sacked him,” Crex said in the peasant accents of the central plains from which he’d come. “Threw him out on his ear, like he was a servant who dropped a soup bowl once too often.”
“There will be trouble,” Grus predicted.
“There’s always trouble,” Estrilda said. His wife was a couple of years younger than he. She had light brown hair and green eyes. At the moment, she looked tired. Their son, Ortalis, was four, and playing with a toy cart in the garden, while their two-year-old daughter, Sosia, slept on Estrilda’s lap. With them to look after, she’d earned the right to be tired. She went on, “There’s been trouble ever since the king married Queen Certhia. That’s hard to stomach.”
“He wants a proper heir,” Crex said. “He wants a better heir than Scolopax, and how can you blame him?”
“Shhh, Father,” Grus said. Crex would speak his mind, and he wouldn’t keep quiet while he did it. Estrilda said the servants were trustworthy, but that wasn’t something you wanted to find out you were wrong about the hard way.
“I can blame him for a seventh wife,” Estrilda said now. “It’s not natural. And plenty of people will say he got rid of Bucco to keep the arch-hallow from telling him the truth about that.”
“Megadyptes is a holy man,” Crex said. “He’s a holier man than Bucco ever dreamt of being, matter of fact.”
“Well, so he is,” Estrilda admitted. She suddenly raised her voice: “Ortalis! Don’t throw rocks at the cat!”
“I didn’t, Mama,” Ortalis said, revising history more than a little.
“You’d better not,” his mother told him, rolling her eyes. She looked back to Crex. “You’re right. Megadyptes is holy. I don’t understand how he can stomach any of this.”
“It’s simple,” Crex said. “He knows Avornis needs a proper king once Mergus is gone, that’s how.”