The Seer: Chapter Two

    Bound in word and blood.

    The monarchy’s motto, and a part of Innel’s long oath to the king. He looked at his brother’s body in front of him, wrapped in burlap, laid across the shoulders of his mare, and wondered if he had now broken that oath.

    He turned his horse from the road following along the thundering Sennant River to one that steeply ascended into the mountains. The horse snorted her incredulity at leaving the well-maintained, flat road but went where Innel directed. She was a splendidly well-trained creature with a glossy coal-black coat that he had taken in the middle of the night for the hard ride south to Botaros. Without permission. From the king’s own travel set.

    One more thing to answer for.

    Her ears flattened again. She did not like the bundle she carried, wrapped in what Innel could find that dark, cold night. Did not like it at all.

    Nor did he.

    A confrontation, yes. Sharp words, even, given the circumstances. That he might have expected.

    But this?

    His mare slowed on the steep incline, stepping delicately over a fallen log. He pushed aside the desire to rush her. He wanted to be done with this, but there was no room for mistakes; she was not only carrying him and provisions, but a body.

    Not a small body, either. Pohut had been a large man, powerful and fast. Had the fight been fair, Innel would have been a fool to bet on himself.

    Yet he had won, the body before him testimony to that. His brother and he, resolved at last.

    A cold autumn wind gusted across his face.

    No, nothing like resolved.

    Hours later the road leveled somewhat, weaving among the pines and patches of ice like a skein of silvered yarn, sometimes following along the roaring river far below, sometimes cutting inland, sometimes so overgrown it was scarcely more than a game trail. Once he and the horse disagreed on where the road was, and only after they had to backtrack from a dead end at an overhang that dropped to the white frothing water below did he defer to her when he wasn’t sure.

    The long way back to the capital, this detour from the main road, and that only to avoid the small risk of being stopped and asked what he was carrying. Growing up in the Cohort had taught him that sometimes there was a hair’s width between triumph and disaster. As always, a balance of risks.

    Like arriving at Botaros minutes before his brother did, finding there a child who could truly see into the future, and taking her advice.

    A ten-day ago, he would have dismissed the rumor of a seer as a children’s fable, a ruse to some end. To find that his brother, supposedly aboard ship far south in the Mundaran Sea, had returned and was now en route to Botaros on a fast horse, had quickly decided him.

    Deceit and treachery from anyone else, even Cohort siblings, he had come to expect. But Pohut?

    So Innel had followed his brother. Hard riding, lack of sleep, and blinding fury at Pohut’s most recent betrayal had put Innel there first. By a hair’s width.

    He went over the conversation in his mind, every word, how the girl had held herself. No deception that he could read, and she had known things she simply could not know. Now that he had time to reflect, he realized he should have gotten more answers, starting with what would have happened if his brother had arrived first.

    No. He knew that answer.

    He looked at the body in front of him again.

    First he must return to the capital and find out how much trouble he was in. Then he would come back for the girl.

 

---

 

    Innel stopped in the middle of a circle of alders and dismounted, tugging out the knots that kept the long bundle on his mount, easing his brother’s body down onto frozen mud.

    The mare’s large brown eye met his in what might have been gratitude but was more likely a rebuke for putting her through this.

    They had left the distant roar of the Sennant far behind. Other than muted birdsong and wind through high trees, the silence of the woods was thick and heavy. Such a contrast to Yarpin Palace, where every word, spoken or not, was loud with implication. Where the length of a shirt sleeve could spark backroom discussions and questions about one’s loyalty.

    Where he would need to arrive with a very compelling story about what he had done.

    They were a royal investment, the girls and boys of the Cohort, the result of decades of tutelage and housing. Innel was going to need to explain why he was bringing one of them back dead.

    Ironically, he wanted his brother’s advice more than ever. What would Pohut have said now?

    “You are the aggrieved party,” he might have said. “With no opposing voice, the king will believe you. If you believe you.”

    “But what do I say?” Innel mouthed to the cold quiet around him.

    “Sleep on it. You’ll think more clearly tomorrow. You always do.”

    But tomorrow his brother would still be dead.

    He stumbled away into the brush, hand against a tree, and leaned over to put onto the ground what little remained in his stomach. He heaved again and again.

    His brother. He had killed his brother.

    After a time he stood, wiped his mouth, and looked around at this too-quiet forest, dim and gray-green under frigid, flat white skies.

    The past was done. Writ in blood and carved in stone. Unchangeable. No sense in dwelling on it.

    He drank water and opened a bag of grain to hand-feed his mare, focusing on this simple act and nothing else; the feel of her lips on his palm, the sound of her grinding molars.

    Just a package to deliver, he told himself, struggling the heavy thing off the ground and up and onto his shoulders and then across the horse, tying it securely. She snorted resentment, breath white like smoke in the chill air. As he swung up into the saddle, he resolved to have the stablehands overfeed her on their return.

    A very, very compelling story.

    The mutts, they had been called, from their first day in the Cohort. Together they had studied fiercely, the unspoken rules of palace life, the patterns of war, the moods of the princess. Together they had outthought, outfought, and outcourted the rest of the Cohort.

    Together. Always together.

    Perhaps it would be simpler for him to return to Yarpin without the body. Say he had not seen Pohut at all.

    Or perhaps that his brother had cursed him and the king as well and headed for lands south, now both a traitor and a deserter.

    “On a ship, Sire,” Innel mouthed, to see how the words would sound. “Ashamed to face you after drawing his knife on me.”

    But no — uncertainty about Pohut’s fate led to doubt about Innel’s story, and there would be enough of that. The body had to come back with him, along with Pohut’s knife. The knife he had indeed drawn on Innel but had never had a chance to use.

    Because of the girl’s prediction.

    Or he, Innel, could go elsewhere. Leave the empire entirely. Find some remote place to call home. A self-exile.

    He could not stomach that either. They had worked too hard, too long. Year by year, spending what little influence they had being so close to the throne, grooming contacts, building loyalties. The two of them had been generous with favors but miserly in trust; raised in the Cohort among royals and scions of the Greater and Lesser Houses, he and Pohut had long ago realized they had only one true ally.

    Since he could remember, the trust between them had seemed unshakable. But it was not; these last few years, it had eroded.

    The king had told him, in words he could not mistake for anything else, that there was no longer room at the palace for the both of them.

    And then his brother had betrayed him.

    Now there was plenty of room.

    “Damn you,” he said to his brother.

    There was a saying in the palace that blood speaks with one voice. It meant that what the aristo families shared was stronger than what divided them. This was why the king bred dogs and horses. It was why, when Innel’s father had died a general and hero of the king’s northern expansion, their mother and her three children were taken to the palace and inducted into the Cohort.

    Breeding mattered. In dogs, in horses. In children.

    As he stared at the bundle that was his brother’s body, he could Pohut’s his face and hear his voice.

    Blood spoke, all right. He just didn’t much like what it was saying.

 

---

 

    Innel arrived in Yarpin at the first hint of dawn’s light, gray stone streets and tall brick buildings engulfed in pools of shadow under fast-fading stars. The mare picked up her pace, eager to get home.

    Or perhaps she was trying to escape the stink. Even autumn-chilled, the stench of trash against the wall and the sewers were a foe no arms could subdue, a pungent insult to the nose that overshadowed even the nagging scent of his brother’s body.

 

---

 

    It didn’t matter how many sewer pipes were installed down-city if the Houses on the hill consumed every drop for their baths and flower gardens. The palace was no better, with glassed-in gardens and soaking tubs.

    The stench did not distinguish between common and noble noses; everyone gagged on entrance. Wealthy merchants, foreign dignitaries. The Houses and the king should have been embarrassed, but they simply ignored it. As soon as he and his brother gained some measure of authority, they would do something about it.

    His brother.

    He could still reverse direction, find a country far away, his actions this last ten-day left unknown.

    Along with everything else he had labored to accomplish. A ragged mutt with nothing. Common in the truest sense.

    No. He was not ready to give up.

    Around him, tradesmen and clerks were rushing out into the dim light of the streets to start their day, stumbling out of his way, then staring. He had thought to attract less attention by seeming to be a trader going up-city to deliver a rolled tapestry, his soldier’s uniform hidden under loose clothing and cloak, but it was now obvious to him that a body didn’t hang over a horse’s shoulders the way a tapestry would. A lesson that, oddly, none of his tutors had provided.

    In doorways, rags moved, becoming scrawny children who scrambled to their feet and called out to him, promising everything from the impossible to the unlikely. One small boy pulled off his shirt, shivering in the morning chill, rubbing his tiny chest, describing in detail what he was offering. All, he assured in his high-pitched child’s voice, for only three nals. Less, the boy cried out, as Innel passed him by.

    A girl stood on the street reciting the names of tinctures at prices far too inexpensive to be sanctioned. There was something not quite right about her expression and distant stare that put him in mind of his sister, Cahlen. Would his sister and mother survive this day, if he did not? It seemed to Innel that he should care, one way or the other, but he was not sure he did.

    The king’s laws were supposed to prevent children from shielding blackmarket outlaws by setting the same penalties for the young as for those who hired them, yet it was still children calling from doorways, filling the prisons, and being sold to slavers when it was clear that no one was coming to pay their fine.

    There was an upside, of sorts, he supposed; Innel had studied the empire’s books and knew how much of the crown’s income could be attributed to the sale of those barely old enough to count on their fingers let alone make binding contracts. The king’s accountants were fond of joking that children were one of Yarpin’s most lucrative exports.

    Except that it was true. Those backing these urchins could afford to bribe whomever they needed to. The city was soaked in such dealings, from the slums to the Great Houses. So many palms to which coin could stick.

    And that was where the money went, on its way to clean the city, or to repair streets and water pipes. Another thing he and his brother would remedy when they —

    Again he looked at the body in front of him.

    A crow flew across the horse’s path, squawking loudly, and Innel tensed, momentarily gripping the reins. The mare stopped, and he pressed her forward again.

    The scent of baking bread caught his attention, making him realize how hungry he was. Absurdly he imagined stopping for rolls and herbed butter while the challenge before him simply waited until he felt like it.

    Maybe someone would steal the body from his horse while he lingered, enjoying the bustle of the morning around him.

    But it was just imagination, and he did not stop.

    As his horse climbed the steep hill, the foul air cleared, replaced by briny ocean breezes. The Lesser Houses rose high and wide on either side of the street. Finch and Chandler, Glass and Bell, their familial sigils worked into patterns of trim, mosaic, groundstone, the dual-color flags of their patron houses flying high and bright in the rising sun.

    In this prestigious neighborhood, House patrols kept beggars and other lurkers away. One patrol watched now, not recognizing Innel as one of the Cohort. The man looked him over; the fine black horse, anonymous cloak, body across the saddle. He appeared to weigh the evidence, then nodded a little and turned away.

    From the palace, deep bells chimed the hour of dawn. Perhaps he should have arrived at midnight instead of at the start of the day, which he now realized would mean far more eyes on him.

    No, there was no good time to arrive with this package.

    At the summit, the street opened into a huge square at the center of which was a sizable fountain. Water poured from the mouths of a hundred carved marble flowers into the open beaks of a hundred carved birds standing on rocks in the pool below.

    An apt model of the convoluted House Charters, he had always thought, the many streams of water — some parallel in effort, some at cross-purposes — that assigned contracts and Lesser Houses to the Great Houses. Few could make sense of all the relationships involved, even among the Cohort, even though most of them hailed from the Houses. He and his brother, though, they —

    He veered from the thought.

    The side streets were lavish with rows of trees and gardens fronting the gated compounds of the Eight Great Houses, each painted and jeweled in its two-tone colors, the roof lines sparking brilliant in the sun’s first rays.

    And then the palace walls, beyond which was the Jewel of the Empire, dwarfing even the Great Houses with its size, stonework, and high towers, pink and alabaster stones sun-touched and glinting. The Cohort had sometimes been tutored in those towers, using the view of the ocean and surrounding forests to discuss the crown’s history and economics, but most tower rooms were reserved as lodging for inconvenient royals, like the king’s mother, whom no one ever saw. Housing for those the king didn’t want to see but whose missteps weren’t egregious enough for execution.

    Not the worst outcome, he supposed.

    No, he thought. He wasn’t important enough. A mutt did not rot in the towers.

    At the gate, his mare strained forward toward the promise of food, trotting to the front of the long line waiting for entrance, staring at him intently, as were the guards and bowmen two levels overhead on the parapet wall. He was recognized and waved through. One guard nodded sharply at another, who took off at speed.

    Well, at least his welcome would not be overly delayed.

    At the stables he dismounted. Stablehands took the reins, reached for the body.

    “No,” he said sharply. “Leave it.”

    With stiff fingers from the long ride and cold morning, untying the knots took frustratingly longer, but he would accept no help. He pulled the long bundle off the horse and onto his own shoulders, holding the legs and arms of the now-rigid body out to either side.

    His mare was led away. Tired and hungry, but no worse for the journey.

    Unlike his brother.

    He met the widening eyes of stablehands. That he and his brother had left within hours of each other, very much without permission, was no secret from them. In their looks he saw them draw conclusions, step back.

    Afraid. Of him. Of what he carried. Of what it meant.

    A young woman rushed to the doors ahead of him. At a glance he took in the balance of her loyalty to the crown versus her allegiance to her House; dressed in the monarchy’s red and black, only the yellow trim on her boots and cuffs marked her as a child of House Elupene. She yanked open both doors, dropped back and away.

    Belatedly it occurred to him that it would have been prudent to have taken off his cloak to reveal his own red and black. To do so now would mean putting his brother down. He would not.

    As he walked the path from stables to the palace’s back entrance, he passed faces he knew. A green-and-cream-liveried servant. A pair of red-uniformed soldiers. A cook. A triad of scribes. All backed away, gazes flickering from his face to what he carried.

    Srel, out of breath, dashed to his side.

    “Ser, what. Ah –”

    The smaller man fell suddenly quiet, his gaze solidly on Innel’s burden.

    Innel and his brother had rescued Srel from the streets many years ago, when he’d been a scrawny, starving teen, and Srel had given them his stubborn loyalty since.

    “What –” Srel began again.

    “Talk later,” Innel managed. He wondered if Srel’s loyalty would survive the day.

    Irrelevant, though, if he himself did not.

    The door of the palace side entrance opened inward. He climbed the steps. Scullery and laundry servants stared, gape-mouthed, hastily retreating back into doorways to make room.

    Innel considered the various routes through the many-floored structure that would get him to the royal wing where the king might see him.

    Or might not. Might have him arrested and thrown in the dungeon to await judgment. Might have him tossed into commoners’ jail down-city.

 

---

 

    Might have him questioned to find out what had really happened. Innel had witnessed a number of the king’s interrogations over the years and had finally come to realize what should have been obvious all along: the king didn’t torture people to get answers, but to make sure that those watching knew how willing he was to do so.

    Palace life was all about who saw what, and certainly the fewer who saw him and his burden today, the better. With that thought, he took the servant’s staircase up to the next floor. A tight fit in places, so he turned sideways.

    As he walked another corridor, he realized it wasn’t just his brother’s body that stank, and wondered at the wisdom of seeing the king before cleaning up.

    No. Worse to delay.

    Again, his mind raced over what the king might do, the legalities involved. Innel had just killed a man directly sworn to the monarch, making Innel’s actions closer to treason than mere murder. That he was similarly sworn might prove irrelevant.

    Innel could end up at the northern end of the Dalgo Rift, counting the king’s distant flocks of sheep and goats, lucky to still be in possession of all his limbs.

    He shuffled forward over smooth marble floors, adjusting the balance of the heavy weight on his shoulders. This time of day, the palace ought to be bustling with servants and retainers, children of Houses and tutors rushing to make appointments. He might have a nod or a smile from a guard or aide. A moment’s conversation about matters of the day. A Cohort sibling might have words for him, plans for a game of two-head later. Whispered politics. Favors offered, demanded, bargained for.

    None of that now. Everyone was clearing the way before him, watching as if he were being paraded to Execution Square, another not-inconceivable consequence. With no House to back him, carrying a dead man on his shoulders whose identity anyone could make a reasonable guess about, despite — or possibly because of — his membership in the Cohort, he could think of no precedent.

    He was contagious with implication, and no one would come near him until someone told them what they should think. That someone could only be the king.

    Passing the eating hall by the kitchens where the Cohort had often taken informal meals with the king, he wondered if he would see the inside of it again. If he had eaten his last meal.

    Once he and his brother, not much older than thirteen and fifteen, had arrived in just this spot, late for the meal, which would earn them a reprimand from the headmaster. They had needed the time to clean up. Even so, their faces were thick with purpled bruises from the beating that five of the Cohort had given them after luring them into a deserted basement hallway.

    Pohut had taken Innel’s already bruised arm in a hard grip, holding him back a moment from entering the room.

    “You look like a whipped dog,” he hissed.

    “A good description of us both,” Innel whispered back.

    Pohut pulled him closer, speaking into his ear. “Act like it and you become it.”

    “Brother, we have nothing. No House, no bloodline, no patron –”

    Another shake for his attention. Innel gritted his teeth at the pain, but Pohut’s charming smile somehow gentled it, melting his anger. It was a trick that had opened many doors for his older brother.

    “No House means we are freer, Innel. Lighter. A fast freighter. A pointed dirk. Beholden only to the king. We do what others cannot, say what aristos dare not. We’ll win this.”

    This. Meaning Cern. The reason for the Cohort.

    Innel had snorted in reply. “Your eye is purple and yellow, your toe broken. I think my forearm bone is cracked. We should tell the king.”

    “Say nothing.

    “But –”

    “Five on two. What does that tell you, about how they fear us? Think, brother. Think.”

    Innel tilted his head and considered. “That they do.”

    “How many of the Cohort has the king sent home, to the dishonor of their Houses, while we two remain? One of us will be consort; believe it. We will survive.”

    Survive they had, and more than that. Pohut was right: they could move and act more quickly than those with somewhere to retreat to if they failed.

    Innel had never asked his brother which of the two of them he believed Cern would choose. Until last year it had been enough that it would be one of them.

    The next time that those five Cohort brothers had found Innel and Pohut in that same deserted cellar hall, the brothers had been ready. They had put their attackers on the ground, leaving them there with broken bones, bloodied and bruised. One had a piercing headache that did not go away. A month later he was returned to his House.

    No one tried it again.

    Every year someone left or fell out of the Cohort. In one case, literally: a rooftop duel led to one boy tumbling to his death on the stone courtyard three stories below. The survivor of that duel had been sent back to his House, not because of the death, but because otherwise the two Houses would be at each other’s throats, threatening to snuff lamp oil deliveries to the entire city. Home the boy went.

    By Innel’s eighteenth spring, the Cohort had dwindled to eight boys and three girls. Then Innel and Pohut were separated, sent on campaign, assigned to serve various province governors, or kept close to serve in the palace.

    But not together.

    Innel sent Pohut letters by messenger bird, but his brother’s replies were terse, demanding, critical. They saw less and less of each other, then not at all. Until Botaros.

    A child’s screaming laughter brought him back to the moment. A naked toddler had run in front of him and frozen, forcing him to a heavy stop to avoid plowing the boy over. The boy gaped up at him, then grinned widely, drooling with pleasure, as if nothing could delight him more than this large, grimy man, a dead body slung across his shoulders.

    Out into the hall dashed a head-wrapped green-liveried servant who snatched the child up into her arms and stammered apologies, darting back into a doorway. The child’s howl was muffled by a slammed door.

    Innel struggled forward, keeping his expression as composed as he knew how. A colorful array of servants, clerks, and aristos in their House dual-tones stepped quickly out of doorways to line the walls to watch him go. Though it was usually a loud time of day, all he heard were his own footsteps.

    Meat and bread and cheese, he thought, with sudden craving. A drink of something to clear the nasty taste from his mouth. A carafe of wine to clear the unpleasantness of his thoughts.

    His brother’s counsel.

    A large, stocky figure stepped solidly in front of him, one foot and then the other, the high collar of the man’s pressed red and black sharp against his doughy neck, gold trim on his neckline and down his arms catching the morning light from high windows.

    “By the Eyes of the All, what have you done, boy?”

    Innel felt a rush of anger at having to stop suddenly again. His shoulders ached.

    More were gathering against the paneled walls to watch, quietly whispering to each other.

    “Lord Commander,” Innel said, choosing his next words with care. How to keep this conversation short? “I am on my way to see the king.”

    At that, surely the man would move aside. Anyone with sense would. But he did not. Lason, the king’s brother, commander of the Host of Arunkel, did not much like Innel. Had not liked either of the mutts.

    “What in the seven hells is that on your back?”

    “The king, ser,” Innel repeated.

    Lason looked him up and down with a disgusted look.

    “You’ve gone far past the line this time, boy.”

    Innel bit back all the words that came to him and buried his all-too familiar desire to pummel the other man into senselessness. He could probably take him now — sixty-something, gone soft and slow since the days he had taught weapons in the Cohort by hitting them full force when they didn’t get out of the way — but it would be the last thing he did. While Innel’s friends in the military might hesitate, or even feel remorse, they would cut him down if Lason ordered them to.

    Restraint, he reminded himself.

    More importantly, the king.

    “We will see.” he said. Then with some effort he stepped to the side and around the Lord Commander, who turned in place to watch him go.

    Lason spat and loudly. “You insolent, stupid, mongrel pup.”

    That would garnish the best dish of the day’s news — possibly the year’s, depending on how the rest of this day went for Innel — spreading as fast as feet could dash and tongues could twirl, from west gate to east wall. A half hour at most, he would wager, for the tale to reach everyone inside the palace walls, from royals to servants, aristocrats to soldiers, bathhouse to scullery. How Innel brought a body home and the Lord Commander had spat on him and insulted him.

    Innel suspected that not much work would get done today.

    For a bizarre moment, he imagined dropping the body and walking out the huge front doors of the palace and leaving. He wondered how far he’d get.

    Probably not even to the doors. Far too late to change his mind.

 

---

 

    Now his spectators were past pretending to be on some other task, but simply stood and watched. From the Cohort he saw the curly haired Mulack, entirely in the purple and white of his House. He stood by a smirking Sutarnan, who was claimed by two Houses and yet dressed entirely in palace colors. They were whispering to each other and would, Innel was sure, be more than happy to see his body laid out by his brother’s by day’s end.

    A servant held a covered dish smelling like duck that made Innel’s mouth water and stomach grumble. Just past him stood Tokerae, another cohort sibling, slouching against the wall, his heavy chain of copper and charcoal iron his only nod to his House. The same age as Innel, Tok was finally thickening after years of being painfully thin and overly tall.

    As Innel met his look, Tok gave him the smallest of nods.

    Well, so, there was at least one person in the palace who even now supported Innel. He would not forget that.

    Three years ago Tok had quietly told the two brothers he would no longer court Cern and would back the two of them instead. Still, Tok had said, it would be best if that didn’t get back to his mother, Eparch of House Etallan, who was still harboring fond hopes of having a son married into the royal Anandynar line.

    Ascending another long flight of stairs, shoulders burning, Innel walked another corridor. Word had preceded him, and this hallway too was lined with onlookers. He let his gaze slowly rake across their faces, seeing who looked back, who shifted away, who smiled in support, who grimaced with uncertainty. If he survived today, he would remember them all.

    He headed toward the king’s audience chamber. A likely wait of hours, given the monarch’s usual schedule, but at least he could rest a moment, maybe even put his brother down.

    To his surprise, one of the king’s retainers waved him over, holding him with a gesture, then exchanged a few quick, urgent whispers with the king’s seneschal, a gaunt man with graying hair who never smiled, who glared at Innel furiously over his papers. The Seneschal then waved him through the just-opening doors of a lesser audience chamber.

    He did as he was told and walked inside. Behind him the doors closed.

    At the end of the room sat the king, white-haired, white-bearded, sitting in a heavy ebony and bronze chair atop a dais. He leaned on one arm, the other hand slowly straightening the collar of his morning robe, which was the color of red amaranth.

    Restarn esse Arunkel. Restarn who is Arunkel. A thinning face betrayed his age, but the old man was still strong enough to give the impression the empire ran exactly as he wanted it to.

    By him stood Cern, arms crossed, hands vanished inside the loose sleeves of her similarly colored robe, her face a mask of indifference, a mirror of her father’s. That they both wore morning robes told Innel they had come from their rooms, recently woken. Possibly by reports of Innel coming back from his wandering, carrying a body.

    Well, that was a kind of reassurance, that Restarn was willing to leave his bed to find out what Innel had brought home.

    He could read nothing from them. The only emotion before him was at the king’s feet, where a pair of his favorite royal dichu dogs sat on their haunches, faces brindled in black and tan, eyes bright, black-tipped ears up and forward, noses twitching eagerly.

    One of the dangerous jokes that one never repeated came to him, the one about how the king’s fondness for his bitches explained both the proliferation of dichu puppies and his single heir. Innel had heard it once, a long time ago, from a drunken scullery boy whom he had never seen again.

    The king snapped his fingers and gestured. Both dogs dropped to their bellies, noses still quivering. Scenting his brother’s body, Innel guessed, even from this distance.

    Prudence would say follow them down, so he did. Innel let Pohut’s body slide off his shoulders onto to the polished stone floor and went to his knees. He touched his head to the floor three times in the direction of his monarch and once to Cern.

    Full formality. If ever there was a time for it, this was it.

    “Your Most Excellent Majesty,” he said, wondering what to say next.

    “Show us,” said the king.

    Innel sat back on his heels, gestured to the knife on his belt. “With permission, Sire.”

    Restarn waved him on impatiently.

    Innel cut the knots and rent the fabric covering the head. He pulled back the burlap to reveal his brother’s face. Now no doubt remained.

    In the silence that followed, Innel thought of many things. Of growing up in the Cohort, his brother at his side. Of their last, violent encounter. Of all his plans. With a small surprise, he realized he did care if his sister Cahlen lived beyond today.

    He looked up. Cern’s mouth was open, her expression stricken, no longer anything like impassive. It was one thing to suspect and another to know.

    She had cared for Pohut. The devotion with which the brothers had courted the princess their entire lives had paid off a few years ago when Cern had finally allowed that she held some small affection for them both. Then her father had pressed her to choose one, so of course she would not, carefully apportioning her attention to them equally.

    His brother would have been quite pleased at the grief on her face now.

    “Well,” the king said.

    Innel got to his feet. What he said next could determine his prospects at the palace, his chances with Cern, and whether he would live to see sunset.

    “He tried to kill me, Sire. Came at me with a knife. I had no choice.”

    Short. Direct. Perhaps it would carry the force of veracity.

    And it was true, mostly, though Pohut hadn’t actually used the knife, because Innel hadn’t given him the chance.

    Don’t hesitate. Because he will.

    Restarn’s silence hung. Heavy with implication, weighted with consequence. The king looked him over, then his eyes flickered to the body.

    Long silences were one of the king’s tactics for getting people to talk. Innel had seen it many times in the monarch’s adjudications. A terrified petitioner facing the king’s expectant but wordless expression would babble. The mouth would open and damning words would pour forth.

    Innel knew this, but even having watched innocent men talk their way to the hanging walls, he now felt an almost irresistible need to explain and defend. Clamping his jaw tight, he forced himself to think through what might be going on in the king’s mind.

    It was no secret that Restarn was impatient to have Cern produce issue, to continue the Anandynar line and the unbroken rule of centuries. But surely he must realize that if he took Innel out of the picture, Cern could become mule-stubborn, refusing anyone else. Tempted though he must be, the king could hardly shove her in a cage and wait for her to go into heat as he did with his dogs. She must say yes.

    It was a stand off as old as Cern.

    Innel and Pohut had become, he suspected, the only candidates that she and her father could agree on. Innel was betting that the king could see that his life was worth more than his death.

    But the king did not like having his choices curtailed, either, and might resent Innel removing one of the other possibilities as much as Cern did.

    The next moment was too easy to imagine: the king would call an order, the doors would open, swords would be drawn.

    A few years ago, an overly witty ambassador was beheaded exactly where Innel was now standing. By the time Innel and the rest of the Cohort had come to gawk, servants were mopping up the last of the blood and bits. The head had been mounted on Execution Square’s hanging wall for a good ten-day, a strangely thoughtful expression on the ambassador’s face.

    At least it had been fast. Innel hoped he wasn’t important enough for the full treatment in Execution Square. Those tended to take a very long time.

    He swallowed, throat dry, wishing for water, and looked down at his brother’s face.

    Always the calm one, Pohut, even now.

    When at last Innel looked up, Restarn was watching him, a terrifyingly thoughtful expression on his face. Then the king made a clicking sound behind closed lips, a sound Innel had come to know well: the monarch had decided.

    “He is to be despised,” Restarn said flatly. “A criminal’s burial.”

    Relief flooded Innel, and he sucked in air. He would keep his life today.

    Cern stiffened, drew herself up, turned angrily, stormed out. Innel might be her best remaining choice, but that was not the same thing as winning her.

    But he had survived; he could manage Cern. A problem for later.

    “I’ll expect you at the meal,” the king said, ignoring Cern’s departure. “Get cleaned up.”

    “I should see my mother, Sire. Tell her. She should know.”

    “She already knows. The entire palace knows. Half the city knows.”

    Half the city?

    Restarn said more with tone than he did with words, and woe to those who didn’t hear. Like the witty ambassador. What did this mean?

 

---

 

    It meant that Restarn thought Innel and his brother significant enough for the news to carry. And that meant Innel could push.

    He met the king’s look, forced himself to appear composed.

    “I must see to my mother. To make funeral arrangements.”

    “No funeral. No gift ceremony. A criminal, Innel.”

    If Pohut had won, it would be Innel’s body lying on this cold marble floor and Innel’s dead spirit that would wander aimlessly, only the memory gift ceremony to help him find his way to the great Beyond. Without which, he would be ostracized by family and friends, lost forever, wandering the twilight of death.

    Or so the story went.

    More importantly, the most dangerous place to stand with the king was between compliance and challenge, where he would notice you but not respect you.

    “Mother could not bear that, Sire,” Innel said. “And so I cannot not bear it.” Not even close to true, and they both knew it, but the best he could do on short notice. “The gift ceremony. A full funeral. Please, Your Majesty.”

    The annoyed look Restarn gave him now made him wonder if he’d gone too far. But then the king shrugged, the shoulders of his robe barely moving.

    “Be quick about it, then.”

    As Innel began to reach for his brother’s body, the king said, “No. Leave it.”

    Leave his brother? For a moment he didn’t know what to do. Days on end, aching to put him down, to have him gone, but now he did not want to walk away.

    No. Pohut had betrayed him. He was rotting meat. Nothing more.

    And it was the king’s command.

    With one last look at his brother’s body, Innel bowed and backed out of the room. Around him the Seneschal and various aides rushed in.

    In the hallway the waiting crowd opened a path for him. He had walked out of his audience with the king. He met their eyes, looking for reactions. Many began to leave, perhaps coming to the conclusion that a free Innel was not wise entertainment. The crowd melted back.

    He walked toward the residences, where his mother’s room was. Srel fell into step with him. By now the smaller man would know.

    “What would you have me do?” Srel asked.

    So Srel was still loyal. He felt a flash of relief.

    “Plan a funeral for tomorrow. Tell the Cohort to be there. Make sure they know I’m not asking.”

    Srel nodded and peeled off.

    At the stairs up to the residences, Innel paused, alone for the first moment since he had entered the city. Really, since the night he had left the girl’s shack.

    Without his brother’s body. Without a watching crowd.

    He put a hand on the wall, his head hanging, breathing deeply for long minutes.

    He had done it. He had said the right things. He had survived. This, the hardest trial of his life. His brother would have been proud.

    His brother the traitor.

    It didn’t matter. Tomorrow Innel would lay his brother’s body next to their father’s in the tombs outside the city, paying close attention to who came to the funeral and who did not, whose eyes were correctly blacked and smeared in the nine directions to show their grief, and those whose were not.

    Now that he stood on Cern’s path to the throne, anyone who did not attend the funeral was foolish beyond reckoning, and foolish beyond that if they did not seem to be glad that it was Innel who had returned intact.

    He thought of his competition across these many years, Tok and Mulack and Sutarnan and others, of how they had stumbled in ways large and small, losing the king’s backing or slipping in Cern’s esteem. How finally only he and his brother had remained.

    As he arrived at his mother’s door, it came to him that he truly was Cern’s last, best choice. All he had to do now was win her back.

 

---

 

    The king had been right: his mother knew. He could tell the moment he saw her.

    She sat in a plush red chair, head turned away, face buried in a small handkerchief.

    “The funeral is tomorrow,” he said, pausing for a response. She snuffled quietly. “You and Cahlen will be there.” A sound and a small movement with her head. Was it a nod or another sob? “Mother? Do you understand me?”

    Both, it seemed. She curled forward, head down, shaking.

    His mother had long seemed to him a fragile flower meant for other soil. Palace life had not suited her, not from the first.

    “I had no choice,” he said evenly, walking the small room, feeling the need to be moving. “He plotted against me. Had been arranging my downfall for three years. He came at me, Mother. He meant to kill me. Do you hear me?”

    Again, the shaking, wordless sound.

    He sighed his frustration, wondering why she was still here. The king did not make a habit of keeping in the residences those were not useful to him. Like the women he’d bedded who produced to children. Cern’s mother, the only woman to provide him a living heir, but unable to conceive a second one, had finally been sent to a small town in Epatel. Ostensibly for her health, though ironically she had died there of some high desert illness.

    No, he knew why his mother was here. It was to remind him and his brother of where they had come from and might be sent back to, if they did not perform. The simple power the king had over them. As if they might forget.

    The door opened and in came his sister, Cahlen. She slammed the door shut behind her, eyes casting about, faced blotched with red.

    Cahlen and his mother were both small, slender women, but there the similarity ended. His mother had survived palace life by being unnoticed. If she bore any ill-will toward the king for conscripting their father into the military for an expansion war that he quietly disapproved of, that had then killed him, and then giving her family business away, she never showed it. Silent, fragile, and well-behaved — she simply survived.

    Cahlen was something else entirely. He remembered having to explain to his sister why she couldn’t wear the green and cream of the servants, why she must wear the palace retainer red and black regalia instead.

    “I like the green better,” she had said stubbornly.

    “That’s not important,” he’d said, already losing his patience with her but desperate to make her understand. He tried another approach. “Servants don’t work with the birds.”

    That had been sufficient. The subject never came up again.

    Today she wore appropriate colors, though her trousers were too long, her shirt overlarge, her shoulders spotted with bird droppings, and her hair uneven, as if someone had cut it in dim light using a dirty stew bowl as a guide.

    Her gaze speared him and she charged, faster than he would have thought her capable. Once close, she began to batter him with tight, hard fists. He pushed back, trying to hold her at arm’s length. With his greater reach it should have been easy, but his exhaustion and her wild thrashing made her nearly impossible to control.

    While he was busy trying to keep her from hitting him she kicked him in the knee, quite a bit harder than he expected. He swore and stepped back.

    Again she rushed him, lips pulled back, snapping her teeth. Instinctively he raised an arm, the way he would have with one of the fighting dogs, and cocked it back as if to hit her in the snout. He doubted it would even slow her down, though, not when she was like this.

    Across the room his mother stood, holding her hands over her ears, and gave a piercing scream.

    At this the door opened. In burst three palace guards, all of whom Innel knew. As he tried to make sense of this unlikely intrusion, Cahlen came at him again, and the three guards sprinted toward her.

    This had gone far enough. He let Cahlen step in close and put his weight behind a full-force push to the middle of her chest, propelling her backward while the guards stumbled to the side to avoid her. Cahlen sprawled, ass-first onto an open space on the carpeted floor. Now on her back, she stayed there, breathing hard, glaring up at him.

    He turned his attention to the guards.

    “What are you doing?”

    He had never before seen palace guards break into a private residential room. Not for screaming, not for crashes of ceramic broken against walls. Not even for cries for help. Gossip would follow all that, certainly.

    But guards? Never.

    “Get out,” he told them. They hesitated, the two looking to the one clearly in command. Nalas, a man he knew. Then, with more force, he repeated: “Out. Now.” Nalas tilted his head toward the door, taking the other two outside.

    Innel looked at his sister on the floor, still breathing hard, and wondered what was going on in her head. Cahlen could go from dead calm to bruising fury in an instant, then be over it in the next. A drenching rainstorm turned abruptly to blue skies. Once it had fully passed, the storm would be over. But had it?

 

---

 

    Her expression shifted, mouth went slack, eyes unfocused. There it went, the storm. He waited a moment to be certain, then with a nod at his mother, who stood as if frozen, he left.

    Outside the three guards waited.

    “What in the seven hells was that about?” He stepped up close to Nalas, pushed him sharply with both hands, harder than he intended. Nalas stumbled back, tensed, and Innel found himself unreasonably hoping for a fight.

    Nalas raised his hands in appeasement.

    “His Majesty’s orders.”

    At this Innel forced himself to calm. He wanted to hit something, but a fight here and now over this would be foolish.

    “All right,” he said, breathing deeply. “Why?”

    “Protecting you?” Nalas replied, a tinge of wry apology in his tone.

    “From Cahlen?” Innel said, incredulous. “But she’s harmless.”

    Nalas gave a shrug that said he didn’t disagree.

    The king was guarding him? From what?

    While he was formulating what he might sensibly ask Nalas, knowing that every word would get back to Restarn, Cahlen emerged. Behind her his mother’s face flashed a moment in the doorway and then vanished, the door slamming shut. She wanted nothing to do with this.

    Well, neither did he.

    As two guards stepped to intercept Cahlen, Nalas stepped back, a hand on the hilt of his sword.

    Innel could see this playing out very badly indeed. He stepped into the middle of this, a hand to stop Nalas from drawing his blade.

    Oblivious, Cahlen walked directly to Innel. To the other two guards, he held up a closed fist in an abrupt motion. Everyone stopped but his sister.

    “Cahlen,” he said sharply, to get her attention.

    Innel could imagine the stories that would follow this: not only had Innel slain his brother, but the very day the king let him walk away from that, he had tried to kill his own sister in the hallway outside his mother’s apartment.

    It wouldn’t matter that the king had ordered these guards, or that Innel had not drawn a blade; rumor had a way of following blood.

    Untrained, unarmed, and half his weight, Cahlen was scarcely more dangerous to him than one of her messenger birds. But the guards were plenty dangerous; if she were seized by another tantrum now and came at him, they would take her down and hurt her, regardless of what Innel said or did.

    He searched her face as she came close. Was she still angry?

    Close enough to hit. Close enough to kiss. She did neither, standing scant inches from him, looking up at him, blinking rapidly.

    “Cahlen?” he asked gently.

    “Brother.” She gulped for air. She seemed upset, almost about to weep. He had not seen her cry since she was a baby. But this was not a typical day.

    “What is it?” he asked.

    “I need to fix the East tower dovecote,” she said, voice low. “The birds are too crowded. They don’t fly well. Will you ask for me? The king, the ministers, whoever it is that you must ask.”

    When Innel and Pohut, five and seven, had been taken into the Cohort, the group had numbered nearly forty children, ten of them girls. Cahlen had been brought in two years later, but in weeks was sent back to live with their mother. Between the strange moods, insensible responses, and a tendency to become overly violent when confused, she was deemed unsuited.

    Over the years Cahlen showed a strong talent with animals. Now she was an assistant bird-keeper, living in the tower-shaped dovecote, breeding doves, training them to carry messages back to the palace.

    In this moment, her fury at their brother’s death mysteriously dissipated, all she demanded from him was a favor.

    “I will,” he told her earnestly.

    With that she turned wordlessly away, walking down the hall, only a small limp in her step to indicate anything had transpired besides conversation. As she went, she brushed her hand through her thick, short mass of hair. A bit of birdseed dropped onto the wooden flooring.

 

---

 

    And now to Cern.

    He waited a few days to let her fury ease, then visited her suites. Sachare came into the hallway to meet him.

    Most of the girls of the Cohort had left early, somewhat less motivated by the often brutal competitions that so often comprised so much of Cohort life. Of those who had finished, Taba was now a navy ship’s captain and Larmna had been put in charge of House Nital’s amardide forests in the Kathorn province. Sachare had become Cern’s chamberlain.

    His cohort sister was a tall woman, her hands tucked into the pockets of her red robes trimmed in dark pinks and gold, marking her as one of the princess’s staff. A magenta sapphire glinted in her right ear. Cern’s color.

    “No,” Sachare said, simply and clearly.

    He hadn’t expected Cern to let him in easily, and it was no surprise to have Sachare sent to stand in his way, but he had thought to get into the antechamber, at least. Not to have the conversation in the hallway, in front of a tencount of royal guards who had no reason to keep it to themselves.

    “Her words or yours?” he asked.

    “Mine are less polite.”

    “Oh?” He stepped toward her, too close, just short of what might have been considered threatening, a line his cohort brothers and sisters knew well. “What would yours be?”

    From her changing expression, he could see that she was weighing various answers. She shook her head.

    “Again: no.”

    “He was a traitor, Sachare.”

    “So we’ve heard.” A small, bitter smile. “In any case, it’s not me you have to convince.”

    “Then let me in.”

    “She hasn’t given a new answer since I told you a moment ago.”

    “I can change her mind. You know that.”

    “You may not enter, Innel.”

    That was clear enough. Cern would need more time.

    Still he hesitated, wondering if he should give Sachare the gift he’d brought for Cern, a small book he’d been holding in reserve for such a need. Full-color drawings of birds of prey, their silhouettes, descriptions of their calls and hunting habits. The sort of thing that would appeal to the princess. Expensive.

    “He was a good man,” Sachare said softly.

    This caught Innel off guard. He looked away, the words echoing in his head. When he had his feelings again in hand, he looked back, meeting her stare. “So am I.”

    “As you say.” A hard tone.

    He held out the book to Sachare. “Give her this for me.”

    Wordlessly she took it from him and returned to the princess’s rooms, the sound of the door shutting behind her echoing in the corridor. Her guards watched him silently.

    A gentle touch, his brother would have said of Cern now, so furious. Close but not too close.

    Like the rope game they’d all played in the Cohort, each holding an end to try to pull each other off-stance with sudden yanks and misdirection.

    Hold solid to the rope. Keep the line alive, not too slack, not too tight.

    And never look away.

 

---

 

    Weeks went by. Cern kept a stony silence. When he approached she looked away, rebuffing him openly, and he knew better than to come close enough that she might signal her guards to intercept.

    Appearances mattered. When rejected, he made sure to seem pained and conflicted, like a hurt lover pretending not to care. He set his gaze to linger on her when she was carefully not looking in his direction. He passed by her suites daily, slowing as he did.

    When he and his brother used to fish together, they would find the underwater creature’s location from the eddies and ripples it caused across the surface. The palace was like a lake; even if Cern did not see his longing looks directly, the ripples would get back to her. He had to be patient.

    But he did not feel patient. He lay awake past the midnight bells, mind circling around what he had done that day to draw her back to him, wondering if it was too much or too little.

    Somehow he had to convince her that what he had done in Botaros made sense. The king would only wait so long before looking again at his second-best choices in the Cohort. He had given Innel an opening. He wanted Innel to win.

    Innel needed to get Cern to choose him. Nothing could be more important.

    Almost nothing. One afternoon, a casual comment from Restarn made it clear that Innel was expected to attend the next day’s trade council. Innel studied the trade ledgers deep into the night to arrive well-prepared, because the king did not make casual comments.

    A few days later, he was woken at dawn by the unsmiling seneschal who explained that Innel would oversee the rebuild of the burnt stable auxiliary. Yes, starting now. In his spare time, the Seneschal added, Innel would provide the king an analysis of the ministerial council’s resolution on a stack of tangled and conflicting House petitions.

    Without delay.

    Still being tested, then. He thought he’d proved himself worthy already to the king, again and again, but apparently not.

    So be it; he applied himself to every task, working as hard as ever. Before he quite realized it, he was spending hours a day with the king. At meals, answering challenges like Cohort drills, then pulled in for fast minutes between appointments to suggest courses of action. Even attending the king at his bath, where he couldn’t help but notice that the man was hale and healthy for near eighty.

 

---

 

    And yet, near eighty he was. As the king aged, with only the one heir, who stubbornly refused to be wed — let alone impregnated — good wishes for the king’s health took on new tension. Everyone wanted to know who followed Cern on the succession list. Restarn would not say.

    Traditionally, this list lived in a strongbox under the monarch’s bed and was thrice-sealed. A key, a press-trap, and one final means, unspecified, but quietly said to be mage-lock. If the monarch should die before Cern was queen and no mage came forward to liberate the succession list, there would be chaos among the king’s siblings and their offspring, and pushback from the Great Houses and the Cohort children.

    The other Cohort children. Not the mutts.

    How well Innel was now passing the king’s tests was not at all clear to him. The king showed neither approval nor disapproval, quite unlike the trials of Cohort childhood, when Innel’s mistakes were made clear with beatings and missed meals.

    Now that he considered that from the vantage of an adult perspective, he was not at all sure he liked this better. There was a lot to be said for clarity.

 

---

 

    One day, without warning, Restarn tossed him a captaincy. That seemed an answer of sorts.

    Best of all, it came with an increase in pay. Since the trip to Botaros, he had been chronically short of funds.

    Botaros. The girl who had set him on this course. A frayed, dangling thread, one he needed to cut before it unraveled the entire garment.

    At least the king hadn’t charged him rent on the horse.

    Again he went to see Cern. This time he was let into the antechamber.

    “She liked the book,” Sachare told him.

    “Excellent. Let me see her.”

    “She still says no.”

    With a bit of a flourish, he held out his hand and opened his fingers, revealing a dark square. Sachare took it, sniffed it.

    “She can get candy any time she likes, Innel.”

    “Not from me, she can’t.”

    At that Sachare chuckled a little, put the piece in her pocket, and dismissed him.

    Gentle persistence, he told himself as he walked away, knowing that his repeated rejection here was the subject of palace gossip.

    So be it.

    As winter froze the world outside the palace, Mulack, Dil, and, to his surprise, even Sutarnan came to see him, offering pleasantries that implied support, should things go well. As if the bloody, brutal Cohort fights across the years were merely playful roughhousing.

    But Innel knew better than to reveal his grudges. If he succeeded with Cern, there would be time later to address those who had supported his cause only when the winds were in his favor. And if he failed, it wouldn’t matter. He could be tossed onto the street with nothing.

    Or worse yet, with his mother and sister.

    One morning, these dark possibilities churning in the back of his mind while he struggled with an accounting error he’d been set to resolve, there was a pounding on the door to his small room. A set of servants streamed in, directed by the Seneschal’s second. Over Innel’s objections, they picked up everything of his that they could carry. While he watched in wordless astonishment, they marched his belongings down the hallway.

    He followed them, up a floor and toward the royal wing, to a double-room apartment. Stunned, he stood in the hallway, watching them array his belongings, the accounting book still under his arm.

    Sutarnan stepped to his side. “Congratulations, Captain. Let’s celebrate your new quarters tonight.”

    How did Sutarnan know about Innel’s new rooms before he did?

    He had been too busy; he had neglected his various contacts. Sutarnan knew because he had neglected no one.

    The double room, it turned out, was not entirely for Innel; the second section had six cots laid out, and, as he watched, a set of guards were making themselves at home.

    “What is this?” he demanded, struggling to regain some semblance of control.

    “King’s orders, sir,” said Nalas, putting his things by the cot nearest the door.

    Innel puzzled over this. Guards to protect him? From what? Jealous cohort brothers? In case he might want to leave the palace again on some wild midnight ride?

    That evening, Sutarnan came with a vintner’s matrass of sweet red wine. Innel barked a loud laugh at the offering, watching as the grin fled the other man’s face in rare uncertainty.

    He clasped Sutarnan’s shoulders enthusiastically.

    “Friends, always,” he told him with just enough mockery to keep Sutarnan on edge for the entirety of the two hours they spent drinking together. He pressed Sutarnan to talk about old times, specifically to recount various events in which Sutarnan had been the agent of Innel and his brother’s difficulties. Sutarnan had left uneasy, a result Innel found both petty and satisfying.

    The wine, also, had been very good.

    The next day he went to the king’s Seneschal and named Srel as his captain’s clerk.

    “I will have to confirm this with the king,” the Seneschal said.

    “No, you won’t. And Srel will need a raise in pay appropriate to his new position.”

    At this the Seneschal’s mouth worked tightly, as if he were sucking on a dirty rock. After a moment he nodded slowly and turned away. This told Innel more than all the rumors put together.

    So what was he now? Consort-apparent? He’d never heard of such a thing in his studies of monarchical history, but it seemed so.

    Except that Cern still wouldn’t speak to him.

    He continued his diligent attention to her, sitting near her at meals, coming to her suite daily, where he instead spoke with Sachare.

    Cern would come around, he told himself. In time. Patience.

    Innel ran the garrison every day, his guards following in his wake. It was important to make sure that those who carried weapons regularly in the palace grounds didn’t forget he was still one of them.

    Today at the fields, a game of two-head was just beginning, the teams marked by colored bands tied around foreheads. A small audience of off-duties had gathered to watch. The two teams tossed their respective balls to each other to warm up, one black, one red.

    “Who do you favor, ser?” Nalas asked him.

    At this, Innel considered what he knew about the players on the field. Overhearing, they paused, looked back at him, as did the off-duty soldiers gathered around. Those who had been talking stopped to look his way.

    As some thirty people suddenly fell silent and waited on his next words, Innel felt odd. He did not know what to make of this.

    And then he did. The guard suddenly made sense.

    Not protection. Not to keep him at the palace. It was the king’s way of setting him apart. Cern might not yet have chosen him, but the king had.

    Other things now made sense as well. The apartment. The many new tasks.

    The king was not testing him. Or at least not only testing. Rather he was putting Innel in the position of consort. If not by title and not by Cern’s decision, by practical measure.

    A tactical error where Cern was concerned, Innel knew. He wondered how Restarn could know his own daughter so poorly. No surprise that Cern’s demeanor had chilled further. She now looked past him as if he didn’t exist at all.

    During meals he approached as near to her as Sachare would allow, letting himself look pained and frustrated as Cern turned away. He must seem just the right amount of concerned.

    It was never far from his mind that Cern could still say no. The king could hardly keep him in this exalted yet nebulous position if she did. Innel would be no more than a mutt wandering the palace halls. Out of place, out of support. A frog in the open sea, amidst sharks.

    He must get back into her good graces.

    Deep winter hit the capital all at once in a heavy snow storm with freezing rains that coated the entire hill in slick ice, delaying delivery of the massive amount of food the palace consumed daily, ending up ripping to shreds a delicately crafted deal between Helata, Nital, and Murice to build a new fleet. The three Great Houses refused to clasp hands over the deal, and hard looks followed between their scions in the palace.

    Had they been able to predict this sudden storm, the contract could have been formalized earlier, rather than as it was now, taking months more to soothe the three sides and get them back to the table. Even a day’s warning could have saved the contract, not to mention preserved the kitchens’ larders and hence meals for thousands.

    But who could have known?

    His thoughts returned to a candle lit hovel in a snow-clad village where there was a girl who could indeed predict the future.

    He must act to bring the girl close by, where he could get his own answers and keep a watch on her and what she said to who. Bring the sister and baby as well to ensure her cooperation.

    He could not leave and collect her himself, keenly watched as he was now. He would need someone else to do it for him. Someone competent and exceedingly discreet. That would take resources he did not yet have.

    But would, when Cern came around.