Chapter 1450: And... She Returns

I CAN COPY AND EVOLVE TALENTS

Chapter 1452: And... She Returns

"Four hundred and twelve."

Chancellor Vedge was on his feet, and his voice cracked in the middle of the number.

"Four hundred and twelve of our sons at that gate. And you are telling this council that we buried them inside a family quarrel?"

"That is not what he—"

"We sent five hundred archers into that canyon on his word! We attacked the Reimgard Empire on the word of a man who forgot to mention he was born in it!"

Halloran waited until the shouting had run itself out of air, and then spoke into the gap without lifting his voice at all.

"Was it ever Ryugan you were defending, or were we the wall you chose to stand behind?"

Northern let them have it.

He had earned a fair amount of it, was the trouble. There was a version of this where he stood up and pointed out that the Empire had come for Ryugan before he had ever set foot on this mountain, that Pyrrhus had not consulted anybody’s parentage before razing the border villages, and every word of it would have been true, and none of it would have mattered to a man who had just been told the shape of the thing he had been standing next to.

So he sat there and let the room say it.

’Right on schedule.’

Being right about it helped considerably less than he had assumed it would.

It was Duke Amene who ended it.

He had not moved through any of it. He sat with his sword cradled against his chest the way he always did, his blind eyes shut, and when he finally spoke he did not raise his voice, so the room had to go quiet to hear him.

"On the night of the gate I sat in this mountain and felt every soul that fell. All of them. Ours in red and theirs in obsidian, and the ones in the forest that nobody in this room has been told the truth about."

His head tilted toward the sound of Vedge’s breathing.

"I know exactly what walked onto that field for us. I have known since the first hour."

"Then you knew what he was—"

"You are speaking of what he was. I am speaking of what he is. That is a different question, and a more useful one."

Amene’s chin came around, sightless, and settled unerringly on Northern.

"Some weeks ago, on a forest path, before any man here had thought to ask him, he told Sethran and myself that he was not kind, that he had his own motives, and that his interest would not put the future of this nation in peril. Nobody had accused him of anything. He volunteered it."

He let his hand rest on the pommel.

"Men who are working a mark do not warn the mark. It ruins the work."

Down the table, Sethran set two metal fingertips on the wood and left them there.

"He sold us five hundred Argent swords at a hundred Credis a unit. He could have had ten times that at auction and he knew it by the end of the same conversation. He also refused to bring the offer to His Majesty himself, on the grounds that it would look like leverage."

He looked around the table without hurry.

"I have spent my life among ambitious men. That is not how ambitious men behave."

Ruger stood.

He did it slowly, and the room came up with him out of reflex, and he waved them all back down with one hand like a man swatting flies.

"I am going to say a thing, and then I am going to say a second thing, and I want no one here to confuse them."

He set his knuckles on the war table.

"The first is that I stand with Lord Northern. He came to a kingdom that had already been sentenced and he changed the sentence, and I will not now discover a reason to be finished with him on the day it becomes expensive to keep him. That is my position. It is not negotiable and it is not up for a vote."

His gaze moved down the table.

"The second is that I do not require it of you."

Eryx’s eyebrows moved a fraction.

"Any man at this table may oppose me in this and keep his lands, his seat and my ear. There will be no reprisal and no long memory. What is coming will be paid for by every house in this room, and I will not have a man pay for something he was bullied into."

Ruger straightened.

"So decide. Out loud, where the rest of us can hear it."

Sethran did not sit down. Amene raised two fingers off his pommel without opening his eyes. Prince Rieran said, "With him," before his father had finished breathing.

And the rest of the room did not.

Vedge stayed on his feet with his hands shaking. Halloran found the tabletop and stayed with it. Eryx unlaced his fingers, finally, and folded his hands one over the other.

"Then I will be plain, and Your Majesty will forgive me for it."

He inclined his head to Northern with what looked very much like respect and had never once been respect.

"I do not doubt his strength. I do not doubt what he did at the gate. I doubt that a man with a father like that has anywhere in him a reason to still be standing on this mountain when the reckoning arrives. And I would like him to tell this table, plainly, that he will be."

Northern looked at him.

He thought about the boy upstairs who had spent his whole life searching, and about the voice that had come out of that boy’s mouth, and about the Sword King who was at this moment drifting toward this mountain like weather.

’Say yes. It costs nothing. It’s one word.’

"I don’t make promises about where I’ll be standing."

He did not look away from Eryx, and he did not soften it either.

"I’ve broken too many of them."

Roma, who had spent every meeting since, finding somewhere else to look, fixed on him then and did not stop.

Eryx opened his mouth.

He never used it.

The pressure came down on the mountain all at once, and it was not loud.

That was the terrible part. There was no sound to it at all. The candle flames along the war table leaned together like men agreeing on something and stayed leaning, the draft in the vents stopped dead, and out in the corridor every guard went down onto one knee without deciding to. Somewhere below, a bootheel scraped across stone, caught itself, and went quiet.

And none of it was being done to them. Northern understood that before he understood anything else. Nobody was pushing. Nobody had even looked their way. This was simply the weight a thing of that order displaced by standing still, the way a ship displaces water by being a ship.

Amene’s sword slid out of his arms and rang on the stone.

He did not reach for it.

"Stars. Good stars."

Northern was already up and moving for the balcony. He knew, too, because there were only so many things in the world that could press on a mountain this way, and he had met three of them.

The cold came up off the courtyard to meet him, thin and clean, the way it always did at this height.

Below, the guards had cleared a ring without being asked. Nobody had given that order. Every man in it had simply found himself standing a pace further back than he had been.

A woman stood in the middle of the ring in a travelling cloak the colour of ash, white hair spilling loose past her shoulders, her hands empty and folded in front of her, looking up at the balcony with the patient expression of someone who had been waiting on a doorstep a very long while and had decided not to mention it.

’Oh, good stars.’

"Little brother," said Rehema Nora, First Princess of the Reimgard Empire. "We should talk."