From without, the King’s Hunt had always struck Geder as merely a vehicle for court intrigue. King Simeon would travel the realm, gracing his friends and allies with his presence, killing a few animals, and having a lot of feasts. It had looked like one of the sort of parties Geder was bad at, only stretched out over the course of weeks and punctuated by feats of manly athletics, half-drunken poetry contests, and extemporaneous speeches. Only when he’d become Lord Regent and the empire was his to command did he begin to see how the hunt was also a tool of convenience.
Not all men of court came to Camnipol. Not all facts of a landscape could be captured on a map. The hunt might seem to wander through the lands and holdings of the empire, but the path he followed was as set and certain as the dragon’s roads themselves. It was not chance that had brought him here, but necessity.
He rose from the water, dried himself, and put on his undergarments before signaling to the body servants that they could enter to finish dressing him. He would have been as happy staying the rest of the day in the warmth and solitude, but the feast was coming, and now that he’d spent some time in the forests near Flor, it was time to attend to the matter that had actually brought him there.
He found Basrahip and Aster sitting together in a withdrawing room. The walls were papered in red velvet and the lamps burned with the rich scent of whale oil. The priest’s voice rolled and thundered like thunder from a distant storm. The young prince in his silk and cloth-of-gold sat looking up into the face of the massive brown-clad priest like an allegory of youth at the feet of wisdom. Geder stopped in the doorway to listen.
“Seeing that the world had fallen from his hands, Morade, in his death, was possessed by the sick pride of his kind. He released a terrible weapon. For three years, the world burned. Every forest fell to ash. Every city crumbled. The thirteen races of humanity took refuge where they could, preserving the animals in pens and the fish in clay pots against the day when they might be freed to fill the world again.”
“Three years?” Aster said, awe in his voice.
“Yes, young prince. For three years, all was laid waste. And so the freedom of humanity was born in ashes and in starvation. Only the Timzinae, favored of the dragons, kept the old ways alive, sacrificing children of the other races to the memory of the Dragon Empire. All others remade themselves, replanting the forests and rebuilding the cities. And without the guidance of the goddess, all lost their way, as the goddess had known they would. She kept aside the temple in the mountains in the lands of the Sinir that are holy to her, that we could prepare for the day when a great man would come and we would know it was time to reenter the world.”
“That was Geder, wasn’t it?” Aster said.
“It was,” Basrahip said, with a broad, gentle smile.
“Speaking of which,” Geder said, stepping into the room. Aster turned to him. He looked stronger, healthier since they’d taken to the hunt. Geder would still see moments of sorrow in the boy, but they were growing fewer and fewer. Whenever Geder worried about it, he reminded himself that Aster had lost his father not a full year ago, and that even the most resilient child would mourn a parent for much longer than that.
“Prince Geder,” Basrahip said, levering himself to his feet.
“Lord Regent,” Geder said. “Aster’s a prince. I’m Lord Regent.”
“Of course,” Basrahip said, as he always did. The correction would never take.
“Is everything all right?” Aster said.
“Yes, fine,” Geder said. “But I need to borrow Basrahip for a time. Before the feast starts.”
“Of course, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said with a bow. When Geder rolled his eyes, Aster chuckled.
Geder and Basrahip walked together down the long hallways. Here, in the heart of the holdfast, the ceilings rose up higher than four men one atop the other, and a clever series of holes admitted the falling sunlight without letting the warmth of the braziers escape. The color of the light was enough to tell Geder that the winter night would be on them soon. Servants and guards went before and came behind, creating a mobile privacy for him and Basrahip.
“That can’t be right, can it?” Geder said.
Basrahip raised querying eyebrows.
“The three-year fire,” Geder explained. “A fire that went on that long would have left a layer of ash all over the world. And there are cities that stood where they are now since before the dragons fell.”
“If it must be, it must be,” Basrahip said. “But the fire years are truth.”
“But there are forests in Northcoast that have trees older than that. Not many, maybe, but I read an essay about how you can tell the age of a tree by the number of rings, and it said the largest of the redwoods in Northcoast—”
Basrahip shook his bull-wide head.
“You put too much faith in empty words. No forests live that were not planted after the fire years. All animals that live were sheltered by humanity in the fire years. If you say that the world must be built upon ash, then look for it, and you will find it. Or if you do not, you must find for yourself what became of it. But the fire is true.”
“It’s just in all the histories I’ve read—even the ones written within a generation or two of the fall—no one’s ever mentioned a catastrophe like that. You’d think they would have. I mean, the utter destruction of everything’s not the sort of thing I’d leave out if I were writing a history.”
Basrahip waved the words away with a massive palm.
“Words on paper are not even lies. They are empty. The voice that speaks them is your own, and you mean nothing when you say them except that here on this page are these words. It the least important thing that there is. From the time before the dragons, my priesthood have been the keepers of truth. All truth. You know that no one can lie to the goddess.”
“Well, yes,” Geder said, feeling abashed. “Of course I know that. I mean, you’ve proved it over and over, haven’t you?”
“And you know that her truth cannot be long denied.”
“I’ve seen that too,” Geder agreed.
“With every generation, the priests of the goddess have passed on the true tale of the world in voices that cannot be denied to acolytes who would hear any falsehood. What are your books and scroll to this? The living voice has carried what I say across the ages. Your library was all created by a hand, not a voice. Tell me this. Will you say all books are true?”
“Well, no. Of course not. There are some essays I’ve read that were clearly—”
“And would you say that you can know perfectly which are true and which not?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless. I mean, most of them, you can assume are—”
Basrahip stopped, took Geder by the shoulders, and looked deeply into his eyes.
“I ask you this, Prince Geder. If I gave you a meal that you knew was poisoned in part, and also you knew that you could not know where the poison lay, would it be wisdom to eat?”
“Of course not,” Geder said.
“So it is with books,” Basrahip said. “Listen to my voice, my friend. The goddess is there, and she will not lead you astray.”
Namen Flor looked like a reed. His thin body rose up from his feet to a tall, broad face and hair the color of wheat that he wore close-cropped. He stood as Geder entered the candle-bright private chamber. If he was nervous, his voice did not betray it.