Chapter Book 7 23: Sung; Singer

I’d not been to Spite Valley since the war games.

Its real name was Koso Valley, but no one who’d been through the War College actually called it that. The old fort that companies were assigned to hold or take during war games stood empty, Malicia’s generals past trying to actually hold the approaches to the capital, but it wasn’t there I was headed. I led Zombie downslope, past the lone watchtower and the woods until the slope began to rise again. Hills and a mess of rocky outcroppings awaited, small footpaths leading up until I found long abandoned fire pits. Rat Company had camped here, I remembered, on that first night I’d met people not yet become some of the most important in my life. Hakram. Robber. Nauk. Pickler. Ratface. Killian, once upon a time.

Nilin, too, who’d died before I found out he was a traitor.

In a way it was a little like coming home, a different one from the narrow streets of Laure but no less dear. In a lot of ways, I’d taken the first steps towards the woman I now was in this quiet valley. The shadows lengthened and night neared, and I left my escorts in the fort. I could make my own fire and Vivienne had brought cuts of meat to roast. We got to it with the practice efficiency of people who’d travelled together for sometimes months at a time, splitting up the tasks. Before long we had roasted pork and freshly picked berries for supper by an open fire as darkness crept over the horizon. In the distance I saw the campfires of my knights, but aside from that we were alone.

“Why here?” Vivienne asked. “You used the Mavian prayers near our camp before the Graveyard. Why travel hours away this time?”

“Worried?” I teased.

“I am,” the Princess baldly admitted. “Half the Dread Empire wants you dead and assassins only need to get lucky once. I don’t like that you’re so far from our wards, much less alone.”

“People would distract,” I shrugged. “And we never actually told anyone where I was headed, so there’s no secret for her spies to dig up.”

“But why here?” Vivienne pressed.

I looked away, dragged my gaze across the jutting rocks around us. They looked like teeth, in the right light, as if we were sitting in some great beast’s maw.

“It began here, my time with the Legions,” I finally said. “And it will end in Ater.”

“Symmetry-”

“Has its uses,” I cut in. “Learn that. Creation likes patterns, Vivienne. Rules of three, seven and one, a hundred little ironic echoes. You either use that or fall victim to it.”

“I’ll not argue namelore with you, Cat,” she replied, raising her palms in surrender. “It just seems out of the way, which is unlike you. You like being at the heart of the hive.”

I sighed.

“I do, sometimes,” I said. “For this the quiet will suit better.”

The Princess frowned.

“You’re worried about the Bard,” she said.

“I’ll be worried about the Bard even when I’m sure I’ve killed her for good,” I said. “The Arsenal is the only time I’ve ever come close to pulling one on her, and I’m still not sure she didn’t get what she wanted out of that mess.”

It’d come close to costing me Hakram, and the more I heard about what was happening out west the more I wondered if I’d really been the focus of what she was after. Tensions between the First Prince and the White Knight were continuing to rise, to my worry, and I’d not forgotten it was the events at the Arsenal that’d started the enmity between those two.

“She’s not a god,” Vivienne said.

“She’s the patron goddess of stories, or close enough,” I snorted. “I actually think it’s like a domain for her, you know? The Augur insisted she could ‘see all stories’ and there’s not a lot of things for Named that give you that much power over a concept s broad.”

“Kairos Theodosian beat her,” the Princess said. “So can we.”

Ah, I thought, but did he? She’d definitely not anticipated Anaxares the Hierarch being such trouble for her, I thought, but Kairos’ scheme against Judgement? That, I was not so sure. It seemed too much of a coincidence, Cordelia fishing out an ealamal that was once a Seraphim just after the Tyrant plotted a way to shut the door on Judgement’s fingers. The Dead King had put us on the path of finding out a terrifying truth about the Intercessor, that she could influence angels and so that using the ealamal was as good as giving her power of life and death over most of Calernia, but we’d found it out after Kairos had ‘saved’ us from that peril.

And in the depths of Liesse thrice-ruined, Kairos Theodosian had been spared execution at my hand because the Intercessor had given him a way out.

I’d never learned why. He’d traded for that, I knew, but what did he have to offer? I did not think that the Intercessor was behind any of these… movements, but that wasn’t the nature of her power. She could see it all and stand where she wanted, when she wanted to be there. The Intercessor threaded the needle, that was her terrible trick, and all she ever needed to do was to follow the… objects in motion. I’d been fighting her for years, often bitterly, and to this day the only thing I was pretty sure of was that she’d tried to make me replace her at the Arsenal. Trap me into taking up her mantle as either a rival or a successor. I found it pretty telling she’d since decided to go about killing me seriously.

Almost like I was of no further use.

“Ater is the first place where it’s decided whether or not we lose the war against the Dead King,” I finally said. “If it goes badly, Vivienne, it could fuck up everything. There’s no room for mistakes.”

She hummed.

“And so you disappear into the night,” she said. “So you can scheme in peace.”

“I’m preparing,” I piously corrected. “And speaking of, did you get the sheets done?”

“I did,” Vivienne agreed, reaching for her saddlebag.

She handed me a neat sheath of scrolls. I wiggled one out, unrolling it, and found a rather good depiction of Dread Empress Malicia looking back at me from the top of the parchment sheet.

“They all this good?” I asked.

“They are,” she said. “Got an officer from the Thirteenth with some talent to draw them.”

I paused.

“Thanks,” I said.

She eyed me skeptically.

“You hate it,” Vivienne stated.

“I didn’t say that,” I protested.

“Oh Gods,” the Princess said, sounding appalled, “you actually think they’re too good, don’t you?”

It just wasn’t the same if the drawings weren’t unspeakably shitty. Last time it was Robber who’d drawn them, and I still had those parchments tucked away in a chest somewhere along with other mementos. Tolerantly amused, Vivienne took out a writing set from her knapsack and stole the scrolls away from me to half-hearted protests. She took out Malicia’s scroll first, slapped it against a stone, and whet the quill. A stick figure with a crown atop it and three strands of hair was made to represent Dread Empress Malicia, First of Her Name. I cocked an eyebrow.

“Aren’t nobles supposed to get drawing lessons?” I jeered. “She’s supposed to be the most beautiful woman alive.”

“Right you are,” Vivienne amiably agreed.

She wet the quill again and drew two circles over the stick figure’s chest.

“There we are,” the Princess said. “Like looking at a painting of her.”

I snorted.

“All right, hit me with the other ones,” I said.

Amadeus of the Green Stretch got to have a sword and a beard, the Wandering Bard got to hold an attempt in the direction of a lute. Akua Sahelian was drawn on fire, which I suspected to more of a wish on the artist’s part than an accurate representation. They each got their stone, though unlike the Mavii raised stones the outcroppings here were low. I could see the horizon over them, the deep night sky beyond.

“I still think you should have a sheet for the nobles,” Vivienne said. “Sepulchral’s out of the running now that she’s undead, but soon every remaining High Lord and Lady will be in Ater. At least some of them will be plotting to climb the Tower.”

“I’m not planning to control who climbs the Tower,” I said.

She glanced at me skeptically and I grimaced.

“I am,” I conceded, “but only because it’s accessory to what I’m actually after.”

“Which is?”

“Who’s going to dictate what Praes is, going forward,” I said. “I’m not blind, Vivi. I know that my father might not actually want to take the throne. But that doesn’t mean his philosophies can’t rule.”

She drew back, standing by the fire and taking a look at the parchments.

“Malicia has to die,” the Princess said. “She’s done too much to be left alive.”

“I won’t pursue if she crosses the Tyrian Sea,” I agreed. “Anything else gets her a shallow grave.”

“And Akua is not acceptable as Dread Empress,” Vivienne said, a hint of warning in her voice.

I shrugged.

“Which is irrelevant, because she will not accept,” I said.

I wasn’t sure how deep the temptation would run, even now. I had my suspicions – she’d always seemed to think more in terms of legacy than titles, which was telling – but I couldn’t know. Maybe the lure of power would make her blood sing, the idea that she might rule from the Tower at last. But I believed, bone deep, that when the moment came she would turn away. Recognize it as a cage made of everything she had grown to despise. And I was not wrong in this. But if I’m wrong? My fingers clenched. Assassin could not get to Malicia, protected by the Tower as she was, but Akua did not share in that safety. But I’m not wrong.

“Meanwhile the Carrion Lord is nowhere to be found and the Wandering Bard unlikely to be taken as a candidate for ruling the Tower,” Vivienne said. “Why those four, then?”

“Malicia, Akua, Amadeus,” I said. “They’re the stories that Praes can embrace going forward.”

Stasis, reclamation, reform. And each of them had enough sentiment behind them that they were genuine possibilities – Malicia’s cause was plunging downwards at the moment, but that was not because her philosophies were disliked. It was because of chaos and mismanagement. Should she win in Ater and restore order, her reign might well continue for decades yet.

“I don’t care if Sargon Sahelian himself becomes Dread Emperor,” I said, “so long as he’s following a mould I’m comfortable with. Hells, I’d take Marshal Nim if she made a move.”

“You’d prefer the Carrion Lord, though,” Vivienne said.

“Sure, I’d prefer the one man I can trust not to start a stupid war and to butcher anyone threatening the new peace,” I drily said. “But he’s playing his own game, so I’ll not count on it.”

Vivienne grimaced.

“It’s too abstract a cause for soldiers to get behind,” she said.

“Which is why I’ve been taking about deposing Malicia a lot and a little about helping up my father,” I replied. “Easier to grasp.”

She glanced at the last of the four sheets.

“And the Bard?”

“Didn’t have that one, back in Iserre,” I said. “She’s the enemy, Vivienne. There’s not a part of anything I plan that can go without an answer to ‘what if the Intercessor intervenes?’”

“But what is it that she’s after?” Vivienne asked.

“My corpse, for one,” I said. “She’s stated as much and I believe her.”

My heiress looked startled.

“She outright said so?”

“I got a proper declaration of war from her,” I said. “We’re in this to the knife.”

The dark-haired princess stepped away from the light, knelt before the sheet and wrote: kill Catherine Foundling.

“Beyond that I’m less certain,” I said. “But I think she’s here in Praes because she doesn’t want me to get the east in order. She wants Hasenbach desperate, Hanno forced to the forefront.”

“What would she gain from that?” Vivienne asked.

“Right now everyone’s a closed door for her,” I said. “She burned too many bridges, she’s an enemy under the Truce and Terms and no one has an interest in letting her back in. If it everything goes to shit, though?”

“People are forced to consider whether she should not be bargained with again, should the alternative be death by Keter,” the Princess mused. “Yet that won’t work with everyone.”

“Procer’s collapsing,” I said. “A lot of people are going to be willing to do some very stupid things when the defence lines finally break and it sinks in we’re looking at the massacre of half the continent. She’ll get enough tools to make it worth her while. Besides, compared to how she’s a pariah now what does she have to lose?”

Vivienne conceded the point with a nod. Under ‘kill Catherine Foundling’ went ‘prevent alliance’.

“And that’s all?” she asked. “It does not seem so much.”

“Which is why there’s a third line,” I said. “We’re going to call it the hidden knife.”

It went up, neatly written, and she glanced at me in a way that invited elaboration.

“She’s after something else,” I said. “It’s too small a game for her otherwise. Killing me, screwing the Grand Alliance, it’s big but not big enough. She doesn’t work with plots that don’t echo, she’s never only about the immediate win.”

“So the hidden knife,” Vivienne said.

I nodded. She moved to the closest sheet, the one where a terrible drawing of Akua stood aflame.

“And what does she want?” the Princess asked.

I leaned back, going through my saddlebags to bring out a bottle of aragh. I ripped out the cork with my teeth, then spat it to the side.

“Try it,” I invited, then took a drink.

The dark-haired princess stood with her back lit by the flames, milkmaid’s braid crowned with a small circlet of silver. I watched her watch the parchment, glare at it as if it would surrender answers.

“She wants to take it back,” Vivienne finally said. “Or close enough. I figure she’d settle for people just forgetting about it, if it were on the table.”

“Redemption,” I said. “That’s the word you’re looking for.”

Vivienne turned a hard look to me.

“Cat, I know you’re… whatever the Hells you two have been doing, but don’t kid yourself,” the Princess said. “You can’t teach her to be a good person.”

I couldn’t even teach myself that, most the time, so that was hardly unexpected.

“You’re thinking in House terms,” I said instead. “Good and Evil, good people and bad people.”

“If you’re about to tell me there’s no such thing as good and evil, you’re going to need to get me drunker first,” Vivienne said. “I still won’t buy it, but at least I’ll be drunk.”

I snorted.

“Look, we’re not really better than Praesi,” I said. “When it comes down to it, Callowans are not less selfish or wiser or inherently better. That’s probably the most important thing my father ever taught me: most people do shitty things because they’re in shitty situations.”

“In an absolute sense you’re probably right,” Vivienne said. “And I think a lot of what’s wrong with the Dread Empire can be traced back to hunger just as much as the nobility, but that’s not really an excuse. Not for Akua Sahelian.”

“You’re still falling in the trap,” I said, “of thinking about it as opposing ideologies. That’s the thing, though: there’s not really a philosophy of Evil the way the House of Light says there is. Jino-waza’s probably the closest thing in Praes and it’s not inherently bad. It just becomes that when it’s paired with, you know, desperation and a taught disregard for others.”

“Except Akua has been philosophically Evil,” Vivienne objected. “The word is something Wasteland highborn embrace and the damage she did was under that banner. Crushing her rivals, taking the Tower, conquering the world.”

“The Queen of Blades went conquering in all directions and we didn’t call her Evil,” I said. “And when Hasenbach made her rivals drink poison after the Great War, did the House condemn her? Let’s not even talk about the amount of people I killed to become Queen of Callow. We shouldn’t be hypocrites about this. It’s the means that make it something different, Vivienne.”

“And she used those means,” the Princess bluntly replied.

“She did,” I agreed. “There’s no excusing or forgiving that. What I’m saying is that she’s done evil and Evil things, but I don’t believe she’s fundamentally either because there’s no such thing as someone who is.”

Even the Dead King had made choices, known crossroads.

“And what would that change?”

“That she can be taught to understand that people are… people,” I said. “Not just in the abstract but close-up. That’s what it taught her, our campfires and the Army of Callow. That the sum of people existing in the world weren’t Named and those with golden eyes.”

“That’s supposed to make a difference?” Vivienne scorned.

“Imagine you’ve been breaking statuettes of clay all your life,” I said. “Going through them like a spendthrift to get your way. Imagine, one day, waking up to see they were made of flesh and blood.”

Vivienne’s face blanked. It was probably the cruellest thing I’d ever done to anyone, setting Akua on that path. She had begun with a ledger so filled she might drown in the ink.

“Redemption,” I repeated. “That is the word.”

This time Vivienne put it down without argument. She glanced back, silently asking for the rest.

“Reclamation,” I said. “That is where her path led her. She hasn’t renounced nobility, that’s not who she is. She’s grown disgusted with the worst parts of it, the scrapped iron she threw in Kairos’ face. She wants to take the talents of the highborn and put them to better purposes, not to undo their rule.”

It was a difference in the way we’d been raised, I thought. Akua had been brought up to see the aristocracy as the best of Praes, its foundation and virtue. I’d grown up thinking of them as parasites best gotten rid of. Unlike me, she did not consider a world stripped clean of nobles as having been improved.

“And the last?” Vivienne asked.

I smiled.

“Why do you ask?” I said. “It could be only these two.”

She frowned.

“Is it?”

“No,” I agreeably said. “But why are you so sure of that?”

She hesitated.

“It just… felt like there should be three,” she admitted.

“Good,” I said. “Your instincts are sharpening.”

If she was to found a dynasty fated to end up Named as often as the Fairfaxes had, I’d be professionally offended should it not be better than most at namelore. She seemed as irritated as she was pleased by the compliment.

“So, the last?”

“Freedom,” I said.

Vivienne looked at me in surprise, blue-grey eyes blinking.

“She just got loose after years with us,” she said.

“Did she really?” I asked. “First she was bound, and when she was freed she found herself bound still.”

I smiled harshly.

“Now she finds herself poised to take the Tower, and she realizes that the throne would be just another set of chains,” I said. “And these most contemptible of all she has worn.”

She’d be putting those on by herself, after all.

“Akua will be wanting a way out,” I said. “Craving it.”

And how fortunate for her that I already had one to offer. Freedom went up on the parchment, Vivienne applying herself so the letters would come out neat even though the stone beneath was uneven. She rose to her feet afterwards with an expectant look. Instead of answering it, though, I pointed a finger upwards. Vivienne looked up and went still in surprise. The moon was fully out, meaning we’d been at this for a while.

“You need to get moving soon if you want to be back to camp at a decent hour,” I said.

She hesitated.

“This is important,” Vivienne said.

“It is,” I acknowledged. “But is it important to you?”

She looked a little offended at that.

“Of course it is,” she replied. “I wouldn’t let you-”

“That can’t be the way you do things anymore, Viv,” I quietly interrupted. “You know that. There are other things you have to put first.”

Silence.

“I’m the Princess, you know,” Vivienne Dartwick said. “Not the Queen. It doesn’t need to change.”

“You are the Princess,” I replied, smiling, “until you are the Queen. So it’s already changed.”

She had duties now in a way she’d not had them before. Not even when she’d been my regent. A Name was a responsibility that could not be denied, not unless you wanted it to hurt you: Vivienne must act the princess now, else it would turn on her. And that meant not blowing off her duties so she could help with my own, much as the both of us would have liked her to. It was a lonely feeling, but I pushed it down. How long was I going to keep all my friends on a string, never more than a tug away? I might not like the feeling in my stomach, but I liked even less how accustomed I’d become to the people I loved taking everything on my terms. Vivienne sighed.

“We’re getting old, aren’t we?” she asked.

“I guess we are,” I admitted. “We can’t be nineteen and on the road forever. We wanted to change the world, Vivienne. It’s why we fought so had to climb.”

“Only it’s different when you’re on top,” she said.

A pause.

“I wonder if it was like them for them too.”

I followed her gaze, the way it came to rest on the two sheets left untouched. Alaya of Satus and Amadeus of the Green Stretch. The two people who’d reformed Praes into what it now was, led it to its greatest heights since the days of Maleficent the Second before it fell into the pit where it was now stuck. I shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the coolness of the night. Neither of us had an answer, and so after sharing a drink with me Vivienne picked up her bags and saddled her horse. She rode away into the dark, leaving me with a mostly full bottle and more ghosts than I cared to entertain.

It would have been easier if Hakram were here, he would have stayed by my side. There wasn’t really anyone else left, was there? Indrani cared little for this sort of thing, and I’d sent her out on a mission besides. Masego was allergic to scheming or near enough, and neither Juniper nor Pickler were really… fit for this sort of thing. Aisha might have done decently enough, but I wasn’t going to abduct my own marshals’ right hand because I didn’t want to feel as lonely. I wasn’t that pathetic. Even Ivah would have been appreciated if it weren’t up north trying to keep Serolen from further collapsing.

Gods, I realized with startlement, but I even missed John Farrier. How long had it been since I’d thought about the man who had commanded the Gallowborne? The real one, not the one I’d cut up into small companies and spent across a dozen foreign fields. I drank of the bottle again, sitting by the fire, and idly reached for my staff. Without even turning to look I slapped it down, landing on the back of the creature that’d been creeping towards me. It was… a scorpion? No, not just that. It had black fur over the shell and a catlike head. It tried to wriggle away until I flared Night, at which point it dropped ‘dead’.

“How very believable,” I said, amused, and then turned. “Were you going to warn me?”

I glimpsed a blade being tucked back into Scribe’s sleeve as she kept silent. I snorted. Was she pissy because I’d not let her make an entrance by nailing the critter with a knife? I glanced at the cat-scorpion, which had been looking at me warily. It dropped ‘dead’ again the moment it saw me looking.

“I take it there’s news,” I said.

“Sargon Sahelian has arrived,” Scribe said.

I cocked my head to the side and waited. That wouldn’t have been enough for her to come.

“There was a riot in the streets of Ater,” she said. “Citizens clamouring for Malicia to be deposed. It was put down by the Sentinels.”

I let out a low whistle. That was a euphemism if I’d ever heard one.

“My people in the city don’t believe it was a natural occurrence,” Scribe continued. “Someone incited it.”

And there were only so many people with agents in the right place for that. Unfortunately most of them had an interest in seeing Malicia thrown out of the Tower, so that didn’t exactly narrow down the list. I made myself look past the implied massacre to what it would mean.

“It weakens her position,” I said. “In front of all the nobles she’s brought to her gates.”

Scribe nodded, adding nothing. She stayed there as my eyes drifted back to the parchments. I felt Eudokia hesitate, then carefully speak up.

“Survival,” Scribe said.

I glanced at her.

“For Malicia’s list,” she elaborated. “More than anything else, Alaya of Satus wants to survive.”

I hummed.

“So why is she still here instead of on a boat to Tyre?” I asked. “She could take enough priceless things and run that the fortune would last her for five lifetimes and I’d be near impossible to stop her.”

“Because she still believes she can win,” Scribe said. “And it’s personal to her now, a matter of pride.”

I studied her.

“Amadeus?”

“Not only him,” Eudokia said. “All of us. The Calamities helped put her on the throne, so she never entirely felt like it was truly hers. Now she stands with all of them dead or turned against her. If she does not win here, she proves her every doubt right: she never was meant to rule, and it was only the kindness of strangers that saw her climb the Tower.”

I stayed silent for a long moment, considering.

“Write it down,” I finally said.

She did not immediately move, asking a question with her eyes.

“Survival and Pride,” I said. “And you better have brought a cup, Vivienne left with them.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Scribe drily said.

Her handwriting was beautiful, I thought, and impossibly perfect given the angle of her hand and the rough stone the parchment was hung on. A side effect of her aspect?

“The first?” she asked, having left the space empty.

“Stasis,” I said.

Scribe cocked her head thoughtfully.

“That is an interesting interpretation of her reign,” she said.

“You don’t agree?”

“Regardless of our personal enmities, Malicia has been an able ruler and an effective reformist,” Eudokia said. “Not all of her changes were of the Reforms – most weren’t, in fact. The reason you have been able to trample over the High Seats with an army of fewer than twenty thousand is that she has spent decades bleeding them out. There was a time where Kahtan alone would have been able to field a host twice that size.”

“I don’t mean that she’s trying to stop reforms,” I said. “I’m sure she’d be constantly tinkering with the Empire, on the contrary. It’s what at the core of her philosophy that’s in stasis: her.”

“Arguably, her philosophy as a ruler has been centralizing in Praes while using diplomatic means abroad,” Scribe noted. “It was only when Hasenbach edged her out in Ashur even after decades of work that she began resorting to… traditional imperial foreign policy.”

Doomsday fortresses and assassinations, she meant.

“You still misunderstand me,” I said. “Sure she has strategies and policies and ideas. That’s not the point. The point is that Malicia does not have a vision of Praes where she’s not in charge of it.”

I drank of the bottle, let the aragh burn down my throat.

“And I don’t mean for a few decades,” I said. “I mean forever. Malicia’s not making an empire where the power rests with the Tower, she’s making an empire where the power rests with her. She doesn’t ever intend to give up that throne.”

Scribe considered that.

“It would not be so unpopular a vision with most of Praes,” she said. “The empire’s peaks, the moments where it was wealthiest and most powerful, have generally come when an able tyrant held the Tower and concentrated power in their hands.”

“If it were unpopular, it wouldn’t be dangerous,” I said. “And it’s not like the vision is only hers now. High Seats noticed what she was doing, the way she was shaping the empire to make it easier for the Tower to stay in control. Gods Below, Scribe, she had an open rebellion in her heartlands for two years right on the heels of pretty much losing a war and she was still able to collect taxes from most of Praes. Everyone who’s noticed is licking their chops and wondering what they might be able to achieve if they take over her machinery.”

Stasis went up on the sheet. As if gathering courage, Eudokia abandoned the rocks long enough to pour herself a large shot of aragh in what I was pretty sure was an empty inkwell. She drank it down in a single breath, then squared her shoulders.

“Amadeus, then,” she said.

“First one’s easy,” I said.

“Reclamation and stasis,” Scribe mused. “For him, then, reformation?”

I smiled, nodding. We were both familiar with what my father’s story for Praes would be. The High Seats humbled or destroyed, Ater unchallenged and the Legions of Terror the backbone of the empire. The only schools for mages under the Tower’s aegis, local nobility broken and replaced by appointed governors, peace with Callow and assimilation of the forces on the fringes: the Clans and the Tribes. He’d cut out every part of Praesi culture he disliked and replace it with something he preferred. It was a stable and prosperous Praes he promised, but at the price of what was likely a decade of civil war after large swaths of the empire rebelled against his policies.

“Only that’s the story, the ideology,” I said. “In the here and now, he’s up to something as well.”

“Destruction,” Scribe said.

The confidence in her voice caught my attention. I raised the bottle, inviting her to elaborate.

“He’s never been particularly eager to rule,” Eudokia said. “So long as he has free hand to push his reforms, in truth he prefers not to. It’s why Malicia was able to trust him for so long. Even now he does not position himself for the Tower. Which means he is trying to achieve the same ends through different means.”

I grimaced.

“You think he’s going to swing an executioner’s axe at everything he can’t tolerate about Praes,” I said. “Sweep the board clean.”

“He will seek to destroy everything he believes a hindrance to a function Dread Empire,” Scribe said. “That is my belief.”

And she’d sold me on it. It made sense, with the only part tripping me up being that I still had a hard time believing he’d be willing to let the Tower fall into the hands of the people most likely to end up climbing it. Yet he’d made no claim of his own, gathered no armies to his banner. He was no closer to ruling Praes than when I’d last seen him, drunk and maudlin in Salia.

“There’s more,” I said. “Has to be. The methods he’s been using are too odd otherwise. He’s been back in the Wasteland for years while we fought out west, Scribe, he has to have been doing something all that time.”

“He has been unusual in his approach,” Eudokia admitted.

“And that means there’s something else,” I said. “An objective we haven’t figured out yet, the reason he’s been so strange.”

Scribe looked at the parchments in the firelight, falling silent. I looked at her. I still had to fight it, Fade, but it was getting easier. And the more it fought me the more I could feel it. Her Name itself, but also the three candles within it. They felt close enough I could almost reach out. Not, not exactly that. It would be… harsher if I did it. Like an order. A scream, followed by silence. I only shook myself out of the daze when Scribe went still. She was looking at Malicia’s sheet.

“Figured something out?” I asked.

She turned to me without missing a beat, tanned face pleasantly smiling.

“No,” the Scribe lied.

Ah, I thought. And there we are. The first conflict between old loyalties and where you now stand. The victor was not unexpected.

“We leave it empty then,” I said. “For now.”

She rose to her feet, writing ‘destruction’ before withdrawing.

“What follows?” she asked.

“We figure out,” I said, “where we give and where we fight.”

“The Intercessor gives no grounds for compromise,” Scribe noted.

“Which is why we’re fighting her through the other three just as much as we’re fighting them,” I said. “Frankly speaking, my father’s way forward is what I’d prefer but it’d be hard for most of Praes to swallow and he’s still keeping cards close to his chest. We can aim for him, but we can’t start there.”

She eyed me strangely, holding back on a comment, then nodded.

“Akua Sahelian, then,” she said. “Malicia is not acceptable to you.”

“We’re going to have to use Akua to topple Malicia,” I agreed. “Which means getting her noble backing, since the Legions are unlikely to back her.”

Scribe considered that.

“Assassinating some of the High Seats could create such an opportunity for her,” she said.

“It’s also risky,” I said. “So we leave that aside from now. We know we want to use Akua against Malicia, but that doesn’t mean Amadeus is going to stand aside and look. He’s going after something, someone. We need to figure out what’s that before we move.”

“Given that nearly every prominent noble in Praes and most the middling ones are either in Ater or journeying to it, they seem the most likely target,” Scribe said. “It would destroy much of what he disliked of the empire in a single stroke.”

It might. It wasn’t like killing the nobles would end their families, there’d be replacements, but the sheer number of dead nobles would throw their influence into chaos. With the High Seats dead and unable to keep their vassals in line, all the violence held back would flow and in that mess someone with a solid profession army – like, say, the Legions – would be able to decisively break the aristocracy’s power if they moved quickly enough the nobles weren’t able to get their affairs in order. Without gold and land and fortresses, Praesi highborn lost much of their danger.

“So we figure out how he’ll do it,” I said. “He doesn’t have soldiers, just him and Ranger, so it limits the opportunities he can make use of. We find out what those are and we’ll finally catch his tail.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Scribe said.

“We’ll need people in the city when it comes to that,” I noted. “Otherwise we can’t act on the information. When Indrani comes back tomorrow we’ll see about our options.”

Callowans would stand out like sore thumbs trying to enter Ater discreetly, but I had Praesi officers in my ranks. Maybe not enough to make a strike force of killers, but there was another option to consider. How many people would be able to tell apart a Taghreb and a Levantine if the Levantine kept their mouth shut?

“That is a start,” Scribe said. “But it does not explain how we are to ensure Akua Sahelian has overwhelming support among the nobility.”

I cocked my head to the side. Sometimes it wasn’t about winning, I thought.

“I know how,” I said.

Eudokia turned a questioning gaze to me and I grinned.

“I’m going to lose a battle,” I cheerfully told her, “and get betrayed.”