"The Master of the Tests approaches."
"Shut up, Ariel."
A shadowy figure came down the garden path, his feet almost silent on the gravel, and sat down on the bench alongside Will. "You understand things better now, I imagine, than when first we met." It was Florian L'Inconnu. He didn't exactly smile, but his expression was nowhere near so unfriendly as Will would have expected it to be.
"I understand that I'm trapped here."
"You shouldn't feel that way. Not when the tests have gone so well." So they had. The blood work had proven Will to be part mortal, which had not surprised him, and the ring that Nat had given him had been declared sufficiently old and plausibly similar enough to the recorded aspects of the kings signet to pass muster, which, given Nat's attention to detail, was only to be expected. But he had also passed tests — the spontaneous cure of a scrofulous imp after Will touched him, the wizards' approval of a humble wooden spoon plucked at random from a trove of hundreds of gaudy trinkets—that he had expected to fail. That very afternoon, the sibyls had thrown seventeen coins minted of virgin silver and they had all come up heads. Which convinced Will as nothing else would have—for he could work that same trick in a dozen different ways—that the tests had been rigged in his favor.
"So what? There's only one way this can end."
"I know that you believe you are not the true heir," Florian said. "I ask only that you consider the possibility that you might be wrong. Enough survivors from your former village have been interviewed to establish that your parentage is... clouded."
"I'm a bastard, you mean."
"Which is no shameful thing when the biological father is the king! The monarch is numinous. His touch ennobles. His sperm breeds true."
"It'll make a great pickup line, anyway." Will was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "How is she?"
Florian did not pretend not to understand. "Well enough. She has her work, and that's something. You may have noticed how well prepared everybody was when you showed up at Ararat with the rabble at your back—the entire Council present and accounted for, with no laggards. That was Alcyone's doing. She got a plaque for it." "I'm glad."
"She always asks after you. Guardedly, of course. Are you being cared for properly?"
Will snorted "I asked for a sword so I could keep in practice with my fencing. I was thinking of an epee, though I could've made do with a toil, but I didn't actually specify that." He raised his voice. "Light!" A line of garden torches burst into flame making the silk party canopy behind them flutter. "Take a look at what they gave me."
He held out both hands flat and a sword appeared in them. Drawing the blade free of the scabbard, he gave it to Florian.
"A Masamune!" Florian held it up so that the torchlight glittered from the martensite crystals m the habuchi. "Look at the nie! Like stars! It is a privilege just to hold it."
"Yet they gave it to me."
"Who better?"
"My skill is mediocre at best and I've only ever practiced with a European blade. Before they gave me this, I'd never even held a katana. Surely it belongs with somebody who can appreciate it."
"You're in quite a mood tonight." Florian put a hand on Will's knee.
Will looked at him in astonishment. "Is that what you want?" "What? No," Florian said. "Oh, I'm perfectly willing, of course. But what I really want is a king. An absolute monarch is a weapon finer than anything Masamune ever crafted, and I want to wield one with my own hand." He gestured with the sword. "One stroke to cut through the bureaucracy and red tape that keeps Babel from ever accomplishing anything. A second to behead the lawyers. A third to strike down the traitors who return from the War and spread tales that it is bogged down and unwinnable. Another for subversives and activists fueled by class envy, labor unions, intellectuals, defeatists..."
"There are good reasons for laws and lawyers and truth-tellers." Will stood. "Nor do I value action for its own sake." He walked in among the trees and Florian followed.
Twelve trees grew in the garden of the Palace of Leaves. These were the Birch, the Ash, the Alder, the Willow, the Hawthorn, the Oak, the Holly, the Hazel, the Vine, the Ivy, the Water-Elder, and the Elder. The Vine was a tree only by courtesy, of course. But taken together, the garden formed a grimoire written in the runes in the Alphabet of Trees, and thus to one who could read them (and there was no shortage of such in His Putative Majesty's service), all auguries were implicit therein. Further, in accord with the quantum-astrological law, "As Above. So Below" and the principle of reverse causation, its foretellings must inevitably bring whatever they predicted into existence.
"Behold." Will plucked an elder leaf from a limb hanging over the edge of the garden and dropped it over the railing. It twisted and looped in the night wind and then was lost to sight. "I have raised a storm half a world away," he said. "Or perhaps I have quelled an earthquake. A child will be born with two extra fingers. One who was meant to be lame will be whole. There's no way of knowing, is there?"
"No."
"So is it wise to meddle blindly?"
"Not blindly, lord, but boldly." Florian fluidly moved into a fighting stance. With a stroke of the katana too swift for the eye to track, he lopped a limb from a birch. The blade struck a glancing blow off the trunk of an oak. Bark flew. "A ship sinks! A city declares bankruptcy! Revolutionaries launch rocket attacks across a previously quiet border!" Twigs showered down upon his head and he laughed. "Glory falls from the sky!"
"For the love of the Seven, stop—you don't know what you're doing!"
"Why should I care?" Electrical fires crawled about Florian's face and hair. "For me, anything—even if it entailed my own death— would be preferable to peace and stagnation."
Will felt the dragon-anger rising up in him and choked it down. "Put the katana away," he said, and the sword disappeared from Florian's hand and its scabbard from the bench. And to Florian: "Your scheme, then, is to replace a functioning democracy with the rule of force. "This brute anarchy and nothing more."
"Why should you defend the old regime? A democracy is a bovine thing that wants nothing more than to be left alone to endlessly chew its cud and fertilize the fields. It has no taste for blood. It lacks the capacity to endure hardship, nor does it welcome pain. Only in extremis, and at the urging of the elite, will it rise to greatness, and when the crisis is over it inevitably sinks back down into the muck of inaction and petty corruption."
"You had best pray that I am not the king. For I would never trust one such as you."
"No, Majesty. I am the only one you can trust, for I have revealed myself completely to you. Think you the others are saner or less ruthless than I? Pfaugh! They will smile and flatter and lie, all from the same mouth, and you will know they are misleading you but not to what purpose. But I am a tiger—you understand me. So when need comes, you will turn to one whose biases you know."
"Then I suppose that there's a bright side to the fact that the situation will never come about." Will leaned heavily on the garden rail, feeling the exhausted breath of the city warm on his face. A thousand windows gleamed on the skyscrapers below. Almost whimsically, he said, "I could leap over the edge here and now and fly away."
"If you had wings, you mean." "Even without them. I'd be free. For a time," Will said darkly. He turned back to face Florian. "I am weary and I am going in to sleep now. You may retire from my presence."