Chapter 1449: The Dispute of the War Room

The war room filled the way a lung fills before a shout.

They came in the same order they always did, the Marquises first and the Earls behind them, boots scuffing the carved stone, cloaks shedding the cold of the upper rings. Somebody’s scabbard knocked the doorframe on the way through and three heads came round for it. But the sound was wrong.

There was no mumbling this time, none of that bright disordered noise that had filled the chamber after the gate held. The men who spoke did it close to one another’s ears, with a hand half raised to cover it, and the men who didn’t speak looked at the table.

The table had been laid with nothing on it at all. Not even water. Every man who came through the door read that correctly and sat down quieter than he had meant to.

Northern stood at his place and went down the line of them one face at a time, and watched the light in their eyes.

It was still there. Diminished, guttering in a few of them, but there. That awful hopeful light he had never asked for and had never once managed to enjoy. One of the Earls near the foot of the table caught him looking and straightened up, as though he had been waiting all evening for exactly that.

’Take a good look. You won’t be seeing it again after today.’

He had been telling himself for weeks that he would rather have it over with. Now that it was here he found the taste of it disagreeable, which annoyed him, because he had specifically decided in advance not to care. He shifted his weight off one foot and put it back.

King Ruger came in last, and the room stood.

He was dressed for a council and carried himself like a man dressed for a wall. He had not tied his blue hair, and it hung forward past his jaw as he took the chair, and he did not push it back. He sat, and the room sat with him in one long ragged scrape of wood over stone, and after that there was only the draft leaking through the vents near the ceiling.

"General."

Duke Sethran Yuen rose.

"The Empire’s outer wall has fallen. Not a section of it. The wall, end to end. Reports came in from three separate merchant lines before any of them could have spoken to each other, so I am treating it as fact."

He set his hands flat on the table, and they came down with a sound no man’s hands make.

"Ryugan did not do it. Ryugan will be blamed for it."

Somebody down the table breathed out through his nose.

"There is a second matter."

Sethran did not look up.

"Lord Northern has made it known that he has the Sixth Prince of Reimgard in the Tempest Spire."

The word for what happened to the room next was not silence. Silence is empty. This was full.

Lord Eryx laced his fingers together on the table and did not say anything at all, which from Eryx was practically a speech.

"Lord Northern requested this council."

Ruger’s voice came out level.

"He will explain."

Northern did not stand. Standing would have made it a performance and he had decided this was going to be a transaction.

"I’ve been holding him. He’s unharmed, he’s fed, and he spends most of his day insulting me... and the furniture."

He let that sit for exactly as long as it deserved.

"Yesterday his father spoke through him."

Prince Rieran’s head came up.

"Spoke through him?"

"A thread of consciousness. Small enough that I did not notice it, which I would like the record to reflect I am still furious about. He used his son’s mouth, said one sentence to me, and in the same breath he read the entire Spire. Every floor. Every ward."

Northern turned his hand over on the table.

"The Emperor of Reimgard has looked at this mountain personally. That is why you are all awake at this hour."

Down the left side of the table a Marquis put his palm over his mouth and left it there. Two of the Earls looked up at the ceiling, which told Northern exactly how much good their education had done them.

The Queen’s smile stayed exactly where it was. She turned the ring on her middle finger once around, and then again, and went on turning it.

"Then we return the boy," said Marquis Halloran, too fast.

"We return him with apologies and a tribute and we let the Empire understand that the wall was not ours—"

"They will not take the boy," Eryx said.

He said it quietly, the way he said everything, and the room turned to him the way it always did.

"Forgive me. They will take the boy, and they will also take the blood-tithe, and they will take it from Ryugan, because Ryugan is the only party in this affair small enough to punish."

His fingers stayed laced.

"Which raises a question I have been carrying for some weeks now, and I ask it without malice, Your Majesty. Why would a Transcendent spend even a thread of himself on a mountain kingdom and a foreign lord for hire?"

He turned to Northern at last.

"You have never told us where you came from."

’And there it is.’

Northern had rehearsed a dozen versions of this. Every one of them had been cleverer than what he actually said.

"Because he’s my father."

The draft in the vents was suddenly very loud.

"My name is Rian Artemis Reimgard. I am the Emperor’s youngest son. My mother was taken into that house to be bred into a weapon and I was thrown away before I could hold my own head up, and men were sent to make sure I stayed thrown away."

He said it flatly, the way a man reads out a ledger.

"The prince upstairs is my brother. And unless I have read it wrong, he is also the man who put Pyrrhus at your gate. The Sixth Prince recommended the knight who came with him. Pyrrhus was refusing to call for him because calling for him meant admitting he had failed. I did not know any of that when I came to this mountain. But I do know it now."

For a moment nobody in the room could arrange their face.

Halloran’s mouth was open and he had no idea it was open.

Then it broke.