The King of Forever (Scarlet and the White Wolf, #4) (8 page)

Liall crossed his arms. “In Byzantur,” he said aside to Alexyin, “no commoner is allowed to look on the face of the Flower Prince. And in Morturii, they revere their king so deeply that no man, common or noble, is permitted to raise their voice to him.”

“We could use a bit of that today,” Alexyin grumbled at the noisy crowd. “They’re like a brood of clucking hens spying a fox.”

“If they don’t stop, fetch a bucket of water.”

Alexyin grunted. “A few spears would serve better.”

“None of that,” Liall warned. “We have foxes aplenty among us, but the nobles are more useful alive than dead. Any man—indeed every man—can be forced to agree, but we want to win minds here, not just swords. If I wanted the barons dead, that’s done easily enough. I need the full support of the nobles, in spirit as well as word, and my kingdom needs to be free of this endless dissent and fear. I was raised with royal plotting and treachery, but I do not intend to live the rest of my life that way.”

“Dead foxes can still be put to use. My neck is better warmed by a collar of fur.”

Astute and ruthless again, and he’s not entirely wrong.
“I wonder if it is not the color that entices you.”

Alexyin lifted a snow-white eyebrow and his mouth curved. “A red fox?” He chuckled with real humor.

Ressanda had declined to attend the council. Instead, the baron had sent the ill-bred Jarad Hallin as emissary, an insult if Liall ever saw one.

Liall promised himself that he would fully attend to the matter of Ressanda soon, so that many other worries could be laid to rest. Ressanda wanted a royal husband for his daughter, but Cestimir’s body was long cold. The baron looked now to more promising prospects.

I fear he will not take no for an answer. But how can I break Scarlet’s heart to honor a promise only half made?

“My lord! My lord king!” A courtier waved his arms from the crowd, vying with many others in the sea of voices.

“I will not speak to a mob, ser,” Liall answered, pitching his voice to be heard.

Theor’s beard quivered as he clenched his lantern jaw. “Silence! Can’t you see the king is waiting? Stop your wailing!
Shut it, ya squeaking bastards!”
His booming voice crashed over the heads of the petty nobles like a thunderclap. He leaned easily on his axe and nodded at Liall. “The king wants to talk.”

“We will not tolerate this blasphemy,” Liall said. “I have sent Khatai Jarek to Sul, there to conscript new recruits and to forage and supply for a campaign.”

A rousing shout went up, but there were still many voices of dissent mingled with questions:

“What of the Ancients? Ged Fanorl belongs to them! Let the Ancients deal with them!”

“What about my lord’s holdings to the north, his lands and fields?”

“My baron had farms and flocks in Magur! What of them?”

“To hell with your fields! What about the coin we sent to lure workers back to that blasted place? Where did that go?”

Liall nodded to Theor, who bellowed again for quiet. When he had their attention, he went to the table and opened the lacquered chest. He took an object from it, holding it high for all to see, wondering how many would recognize it.

A deep hush fell over the chamber.

He turned the dagger in his fingers. It was small, no larger than his hand, with a thin blade and a rounded pommel. The blade itself was a mixture of vivid crimson and muddy black, like a fresh wound.

“Blood steel,” he said loudly, letting the power of his voice, trained from childhood to tones of command, roll over the watchers. “There is no other metal like this in all of Nemerl. Long ago, we lost the alchemy to forge it. This weapon was taken from the body of a dead Ava Thule in Magur. It comes from
inside
the temple mountain, from holy Ged Fanorl itself. The Ava Thule have defiled it and stolen from the Shining Ones, who are the makers of us all.” He slammed the dagger point-down into the table. The metal flared bright for an instant and sang with a metallic whine as it sheared through the hard wood, buried to the hilt.

Theor raised his axe.
“DEATH!”
he roared.
“Death to Ava Thule!”

The call was taken up until the hall rang with a hundred voices, a sea of raised fists and open mouths shouting
Death!

Alexyin flipped his long braid away from his shoulder. His eyes were hooded. “Well, you’ve got your war.”

***

T
esk was to bring the new man to Liall’s private solar. Liall sat with the table between himself and the door, a flagon of cold wine and two cups waiting.

Ged Fanorl
, he thought, and wondered what the hall made of his performance. He wasn’t good at acting, or at pretending shock or outrage.

No, your lies take a different talent
.

The sacred mountain had been violated long ago, even before his exile. Only a few knew that secret, and those few had high stakes in protecting the knowledge. Captain Qixa would surely be put to death, and the others...

His mouth twisted and he was busy damning himself to three different hells when the door opened and Tesk entered. A lean man shadowed him.

Liall’s first impression of Margun Rook was that the man was like the ragged remnants of a once-fine garment. He could discern the nobility in Margun’s high brows and his straight, narrow nose, and a sober intelligence in his deep-set eyes, but his muscular arms bore many scars of battle. The marks were smooth and thin, obviously made by sharp steel. Another razor-thin scar circled his left eye socket like a crescent moon, the end trailing down his cheek
. A knife,
Liall thought.
Not by chance, either. That was done with care.

Margun’s white hair was crowned with a widow’s peak that framed his face in two streaks of smoky gray, long enough to brush his shoulders. He wore a brown, sleeveless virca with the serpent badge of a Setna on his breast.

“Thank you, Tesk,” Liall said.

“My lord.” Tesk put his hand over his heart and performed one of his elegant bows. The look he shot Margun was anything but graceful. “Remember my words,” he warned, and left them.

Unlike solariums—which were rooms constructed solely to gather and channel light—solars were rather small palace rooms with a single wall of glass. This one was a wide, airy gable with walls unrelieved by tapestries or banners. A curving wall of thick, milky glass faced the east. It was a room for seeing, and Liall liked to conduct his interviews here, where shadows could not hide.

He studied Margun for several moments as the man waited at attention, his gaze fixed straight ahead. Liall noted that his eyes were the color of blue slate, but the next moment they seemed to be darker, the color of flint. 

Changeable eyes,
he thought. A chameleon of a man.

“Margun Rook,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “What words did Tesk have for you?”

“Words.” Margun’s voice was low and deep, with a hint of northern lilt. “They were not precisely... words.”

Threats, then. Well done, Tesk.
“You hail from noble stock. I’ve heard the tale of Margun Siran, Ramung’s chief assassin in the days of my great-grandfather.”

Margun clasped his hands behind his back. “We are who we are, my lord.”

“True enough. I don’t remember your face from the campaigns, but I remember hearing your name.”

Margun did not react, and Liall was not pleased.
He can’t think I’ll trust him, can he?

But Tesk had found Margun and Alexyin vouched for him. That had to mean something. Liall tried a new tack. “Tell me why you decided to betray your commander.”

Margun’s eyes flickered. “I do not believe I betrayed my oath, sire. I only held myself truer to it.”

“By refusing to follow orders, inciting your brother-soldiers to defect and lay down their arms? I spent my youth being schooled in the language of nuance, but it will take more than a clever turn of phrase to convince me that direct defiance of a superior is
not
insubordination.”

“It was a bad war,” Margun answered straightly. “The Tribelands were your first campaign, my lord, but not mine. What happened there was... it was not right. Conquerors should be better rulers than what was done to the north. I will do what I must to defend my family, my country, and my king, but some orders should never be given.”

“If every common soldier felt free to question the orders of their commanders, there would be no wars fought at all.”

A ghost of a smile touched the wide, hard line of Margun’s mouth. “Yes, sire. That’s quite true.”

Liall gave a short hum of thought. “You were in command of a cohort of men under Khatai Jarek. You refused a direct order to put a village to the sword, and the next month the village you so benevolently spared joined with the Ava Thule and put a third of the smallholder farms in Uzna Minor to the torch, along with the farmers. Do I have that correct? Your life was spared and you were sent to the Setna to learn better sense. Well? Have you learned anything?”

“Sixty-three years is a long time, my lord. I learned many things, among them the fact that a man must answer ultimately to himself alone. I may not have been wise in my decision to spare the village, but I was true to my conscience and their blood is not on my hands. I could not have done it and stayed myself. And yet, I failed my people and my queen when I refused to obey.” Margun shrugged. “Just as many died from my refusal as would have died from my compliance. I was not a good soldier. I was lucky to be sent to the Setna.”

“You were lucky to keep your head. I’d have taken it. If you’re a man who courts his doubts, please don’t doubt that one. I’d have executed you quickly, so you wouldn’t have had time to interrogate that sensitive conscience of yours.”

Margun bent his head. “I didn’t mean to offend you, sire.”

“When you offend me, you’ll know it.”

“Yes, sire.”

I keep trying to put him off-balance and it isn’t working,
Liall thought. Perhaps that was a good sign. “I don’t need a mindless brute to keep my t’aishka safe. I want a man who thinks for himself, but not one who thinks so much that he ponders disobedience in favor of his own mind. I don’t know you, but Tesk does. Alexyin says you’re up to the task, and I trust his judgment.”

Margun nodded his head slowly. “But,” he said.

Liall waited. When it became apparent that Margun would speak no more, the king smiled thinly. “But trusting Alexyin is not the same as trusting you. While he believes you’d make a fine guard for Scarlet, Alexyin’s notion of what Scarlet needs and my own differ greatly. Have you ever known a Hilurin?”

Margun’s eyebrows went up. “No. None. Should I have?”

“I’ve been informed that you’ve never traveled outside of Rshan, so no. Definitely not. And there lies the problem.”

Margun frowned and shifted on his feet, his boots scuffling on the floor. “Because they are so different from us?”

“I did not say that. They are actually very like us, but how you might expect a Hilurin to act and how one might truly behave are two different things. When I first traveled south as young man, I landed in Volkovoi. I saw a few faces in the city that reminded me of home, so I stayed.” He paused. “It was one of the worst choices I ever made. Volkovoi is full of the worst sort of cutthroats, as well as thieves, pirates, smugglers, whores, and Minh. But because of those men, the ones who look like us and reminded me of home, I stayed. I learned that the city employed men of Northern blood as guards, and for good pay, too. Bravos, they’re called. I thought they might be like our own people, so I joined them.” Liall paused to sip his wine, offering Margun none. “I was wrong. Bravos are mindless thugs: brutal and filthy and unimaginably cruel. They particularly delight in causing pain, usually on the scrats.”

“Scrats, sire?”

“Whores of the alleyways with no protectors or owners. Scrats are the lowest of prostitutes. They have no masters, belong to no brothels, and no one cares what happens to them. They’re fair game to the bravos, for robbery and for rape.”

Margun shrugged.

“You do not care for whores?”

Margun smiled suddenly and Liall saw that his teeth were a bit crooked, with sharp canines. “Whores are fine, in their place. I’m a man after all, so I’ve paid my share of them.”

“Poor treatment of them would not distress you?”

“I merely think that any whore’s accusations would be difficult to prove.”

“Just so. And?”

The grin persisted. “So perhaps the bravos are not so mindless, after all.”

Liall grunted and poured a cup of wine for Margun. “Sit.” He slid the cup toward him. “Tell me what punishment you would have handed out for a bravo who
was
somehow prosecuted.”

Margun sat and reached carefully for the wine. He looked down into the cup for a moment before drinking. “What is the punishment for rape in Volkovoi?”

“Castration and death by fire, if committed on a noble, whether man or woman.”

“What about the common men and women? They at least have some rights, I assume?”

“A few. Noble blood is not as rare in the south as here, but they’re even more proud of it. A flogging and a heavy fine would be the punishment for rape of a commoner. Perhaps even death, if the victim were young or a virgin. There are few prisons in the ports, so incarceration would not be an option.”

“And for a scrat?”

Liall tapped his cup with his ring-finger. He did not approve of this man yet, but neither did he dislike him. It was clear that Margun was used to thinking and knowing the facts before he answered. “For a scrat, nothing. Of course, nothing.”

“This is assuming I would be the man in charge of maintaining the peace in this loathsome port? Very well.” Margun drained the rest of his wine in one gulp and placed the cup back on the table. “Then I would find the woman or boy the bravo had raped, and I would bring the man to them. I would let them watch as I cut off the bravo’s privates and stuffed them in his mouth.” He slid a fingertip down the side of the sweating cup and raised his eyes to meet Liall’s.