For the first time in her life, she saw the Kettral-the birds and the soldiers that rode them-not as warriors, but as agents of an unstoppable, almost unspeakable horror. For all his competence and pride, Rouan could do nothing against explosives shot from a soaring bird. It wasn’t a fight, sinking a boat from the air like that; it was a slaughter.
Gwenna watched the ship burn a moment more, then turned away, waves cool against her burning face.
“Annick’s right. We can’t help. Let’s do what we came here to do.”
She started swimming east, faster than was really wise, cutting through the waves, not bothering to look back to see if Talal and Annick were keeping pace.
9
Blood still wept from the gashes to her face and scalp as Adare slammed open the doors to the council chamber. At least, she had intended to slam them open. The great bloodwood slabs-each one twice her height and thick as her arm-proved heavy as oxen, and though she threw her whole weight against them, grunting with the effort, they swung only grudgingly on their huge oiled hinges, gliding silently through their arcs, coming so gently to rest that most of the men and women assembled in the chamber failed to notice their opening.
For a moment, Adare just stared. She had heard about the council’s famous map chamber, of course. While their republic disintegrated at every border, while the citizens of Annur fought and starved and died, the newly appointed rulers of Annur had embarked on their construction project, diverting funds that could have fed tens of thousands into their glittering hall. Adare had heard more than her fill of the fucking map, but hearing was not the same as seeing. Standing inside the huge doors, perched on the edge of this wooden walkway suspended above the world, watching the oceans slosh in their basins, the rivers tumble through their carefully crafted courses, she found herself hesitating.
It wasn’t the council, not the aristocrats seated around the circular catwalk at the hall’s center, that gave her pause. She’d been handling aristocrats since she was a child, and judging from the idiocy of the past months, this lot was even less capable than most. No, it was the sight of Annur itself that brought her up short. She had her own maps, of course, dozens of maps, scores of them. Maps of Vash and Eridroa, of every city on the two continents, of strategic passes and likely battlegrounds. Her maps were the best available, meticulously inked records of coastlines and tax zones, watersheds and disputed boundaries. She had thought that those maps captured all that needed knowing about her crumbling empire. In this, as in so many things, she erred.
It was the scope of the empire that had escaped her. She stared at it. Some recent violence had marred the work, but it hardly mattered. The cities were miniature marvels of glass, and stone, and jewel, every palace, every house, the work of a hundred hours for a master craftsman. Forests of dwarf pine skirted the base of the Romsdals while tangled vines snaked across the choked terrain of the Waist. She looked north, to Aergad. There was the ancient castle that had served as her imperial seat these past nine months, standing proudly on the stone promontory overlooking the Haag. Her son was there in that squat, northeastern tower, probably crying for his dinner, crying for her. She forced the thought from her mind.
It was too much. The whole thing was too much.
She had thought she knew the magnitude of her task when she returned to Annur the first time, when she decided to take on the imperial mantle of her father. She had thought she’d seen the scope of the land after her forced march from Olon to Andt-Kyl. She’d thought she understood the responsibility after watching the battered men and women fleeing south, refugees from the Urghul assault. She’d thought she had plumbed the depths of the sacrifices required after witnessing the battle at the northern end of Scar Lake, after seeing Fulton cut down, after burying the knife in her own brother’s ribs.
A map, after all that, even a huge map, should not have come as a shock. And yet there was something about seeing the land spread out before her, the whole huge ambit of her rule in a single room, the unbroken extent of the territory she had taken it upon herself to guard and protect, that made her stop, hands balled in fists at her sides, blood hot and wet on her face, dumb heart pumping more and quickly, horrified at how much depended on her, at how fully she could fail.
“… if she is harmed, the treaty is lost…”
She had stumbled, still unseen, into some ongoing argument at the center of the room.
“Some of us did not want this treaty in the first place.”
“Then you were a fool. We need unity.”
“And if the mob kills her, we have it. Let us not forget that it was Adare who decided to enter the city unannounced, unescorted, without warning the council or asking our permission. Her death can hardly be laid at our feet.”
“We don’t know she is dead.” A quieter voice, this one. Vaguely familiar. “We ordered the soldiers out as soon as we had word of her arrival. They could have reached her in time. We don’t know anything.”
Adare gritted her teeth, tore her gaze from the great map spread out beneath her, and advanced down the catwalk, a graceful curve of cedar and steel suspended by thick cables from the ceiling far above. She passed over the crescent of the Manjari Empire, over the Vena, then the gold-red sand of the Darvi Desert, passed beneath the lamps, glass blown into great globes meant, evidently, to echo the moon and stars. Most were unlit, wide cloth wicks floating silently in the clear oil. The council continued to bicker.
“The patrol said she was alone.”
“Precisely, which means the idiotic woman is probably dead. Which means-”
Adare cut through the words with her own.
“She is not. Idiotic, I’ll grant you, but not dead.”
She ignored the exclamations of confusion and surprise, the scraping of chairs hastily shoved back, the arms and hands thrown about in postures of shock and alarm. A dozen more steps took her over the peaks of the Ancaz, bloodred sandstone thrusting up as high as the catwalk. Her face burned. That, too, she ignored.
“I’m sure my survival is a disappointment,” she went on, pausing just to the west of the earthen walls and low domes of Mo’ir, “but life is filled with disappointments. I would imagine, given the miserable state of your so-called republic, that you’ve grown accustomed to them by now. I certainly have. The relevant question is what we intend to do about them.”
She raised an eyebrow, studying the men and women of the council for the first time. She had learned all forty-five names, of course, had studied their families and histories, tried to ferret out, wherever possible, their reasons for joining Kaden’s doomed cause. Most just wanted power; they would have leapt at any chance to see the Malkeenians brought low. Bouraa Bouree was one of these-she picked him out easily, all sweat and silk and sullen anger-as were Ziav Moss and Onu An. There were a handful of idealists in the mix, most notably Gabril the Red. He sat almost directly across from her, his dark eyes hawklike, sharp and predatory. In the past, the kenneled intensity of his gaze had made her look away. Not anymore. She met his eyes, nodded once, then turned her attention to the Annurian delegation.
If Sweet Kegellen was surprised at Adare’s sudden entrance, she didn’t show it. Annur’s most dangerous criminal raised a fat hand, waggling her fingers in an incongruously girlish greeting, then smiled from behind her paper fan. Adare nodded, the same nod she had given Gabril. Kegellen hadn’t earned her various names-The Queen of the Streets, That Unkillable Bitch-by sitting demurely behind her fan. The woman was at least as deadly as anyone else in the room, fans and waggling fingers or no.