The Councillor Read online

  Lysande did not pause to consider propriety. She rushed to wrap her hands around Cassia’s body and heaved her upward under her ribs, as she had once seen a huntswoman do to a stable-woman who was choking on a bone. Cassia’s chest convulsed under her hands. The Irriqi gripped the table, pulling at the silver cloth—time seemed to stop as she hacked and spluttered, and Lysande wondered if she might well die in her arms.

  Then Cassia shuddered—gave one final hack—and spat out something into her palm.

  The others rushed to the end of the table, all shouting over each other, clustering around the Pyrrhan ruler. Lysande’s spine felt rigid, her entire body tightening.

  “Goddesses save us,” Dante was saying. “You could have died.”

  “It’d be awful timing, dying in the middle of dessert.” Jale sounded concerned, though not quite as much as Dante.

  People were standing up, staring in the direction of the high table. The Pyrrhans rushed to the Irriqi, surrounding her, and the Axiumite guards moved in as well. Hands flew to sword-hilts and voices thrummed in the hall. Lysande was watching Cassia’s chest rise and fall. She had an urge to grasp Cassia again and embrace her until they were both calm.

  “Someone is baking with money, it seems.” Cassia held out her palm and Lysande squinted at the little piece of metal. It was so small that it had easily fit inside the cake, and she made out an even tinier carving on the surface.

  Behind them, the Axium Guards moved a few paces closer.

  “It’s not a coin,” Lysande said. “There’s no Eliran crest. Only a picture.”

  Her whole body seemed to have tensed. They all bent their heads to look at it, but only Luca spoke. “A silent sword.”

  “A what?” Cassia said.

  “A silent sword. A little piece of metal to be slipped into the food of one’s enemy: just small enough that they will swallow it, but large enough to make them choke. Clever, no? They were named after the group of trained assassins—the Silent Swords of the Steelsong Era—because they kill so swiftly and leave no sign on the body.”

  Lysande sifted through the information in her mind. For some reason, she felt annoyed that Luca had recognized the weapon before she did. Their gazes met, and she suspected that he knew what she was thinking. “Of course. Rhime and Axium used to use them, before the unification of Elira,” she said. She recalled the arms chapter in the History of the Conquest, with its fine-line diagrams of the many weapons devised to be employed against elementals. “I’ve read that they are carved with the symbol of the ruler that made them. Elaborate work, according to the historians. A crown for Axium, and a cobra for Rhime, to show the killer’s loyalty.”

  “Seems rather stupid,” Jale said.

  “Stupid?” Luca shook his head. “Not quite on the mark. A silent sword is left for those clever enough to check for it. It’s a warning. A message of intimidation from the killer.”

  They all leaned down to peer at Cassia’s palm. The picture on the silent sword was just discernible on the metal. It showed a beast with horns, a body topped by a pair of wings, and a tail trailing behind: not a lioness, nor a goat, nor a dragon, but something composed of all three.

  There had been a picture of an animal like that in the History of the Conquest, too, beside the description of the worst massacre in Eliran history. But Lysande had read on the same page that there had been no such beasts for four hundred years. The traditional omen of death . . . “winged horror” . . . “half-beast” . . . “symbolic herald of magic,” and “the most potent creature of the elements” . . . fragments of sentences rose in her mind. A visceral dread, coupled with fascination, worked its way through her as she looked at the disc.

  “Who uses a silent sword with a chimera on it?” Cassia said, taking the piece of metal between her thumb and finger.

  No one answered. The word chimera seemed to hang in the air.

  “I am afraid I know.” They all looked up at Luca. This time, there was no trace of amusement in his mouth. His black eyes were fixed on the silent sword.

  “One such piece was used to kill a captain in Rhime, twenty-three years ago. They dug it out of her body with a knife and took it to my dear father,” Luca said. “He never found the killer, but he kept the silent sword in his private vault. He was convinced that if an enemy kept records and files of evidence, we should too.”

  “No one would willingly take a chimera as their symbol,” Jale said.

  “One would.” Luca looked back at him. “The woman who styled herself as leader of the elementals and wanted Sarelin Brey lying under the soil.”

  They came upon Lysande in a flood: memory after memory, all of them surging along the fibers that wove through her, because in all of them, Sarelin was present. Tales returned from nights when they were drinking into the silver hours. Why had she not analyzed those bloody descriptions earlier? But she knew the answer, even as she asked herself the question.

  “Mea Tacitus,” she said, meeting Luca’s eyes. “The White Queen.”

  A story Sarelin had told her of the White War surged above the rest. Two weeks after declaring war, the White Queen brought her army to a town east of Axium called Sacton, where she stood outside the ramparts and shouted for the lady and lord to surrender. A messenger from Sacton rode out and was given a scroll bearing the White Army’s promise of terms. Mercy and liberty, in exchange for safe passage. Lysande remembered the way Sarelin had spat out those words.

  When she entered the town, Mea Tacitus showed the nobles a certain kind of mercy. They did not live to see soldiers run through their streets, pillaging, slitting the necks of guards who tried to stand in their way. The White Queen roasted them alive with a jet of flame from her palm.

  One little boy was left to decorate the archway of a prayer-house after the soldiers had riddled him with arrows. Reports held that the White Queen took a throwing axe from one of her captains—an old weapon, and small—and placed it between the child’s teeth.

  “An iron gift,” she announced, to the two citizens of Sacton left standing. “Send it to your Iron Queen.”

  The Axium Guards who reached the town later that day had halted, staring at the masterpiece in red, a creature composed of wings, fur, scales and elongated talons, carved into the boy’s chest. No soldier had needed to speak the word chimera.

  Lysande remembered the dark fury on Sarelin’s face when she had repeated the story, and how it had made her shiver, even beside the fire in the queen’s suite. The Pyrrhan historian Lady Tariq had argued that in obliterating Sacton, the White Queen inspired the surrender of many other towns; that after the infamy of Sacton, the outposts began to fall to the White Army with speed.

  A famous slaughter demands resources, Tariq wrote. It is a risk in the short term, though some less scrupulous souls than I would call it a wise expenditure in the long term.

  A vibration carried through her bones, the same rhythm she had felt when the city bells pealed. Something aside from grief was causing it.

  A grudge between two women who made the world tremble would end only when one of them expired, she had always believed. If the White Queen was attacking the Council, Sarelin’s death had not finished the carnage. This was part of a much bigger game. One that had been designed for something more than revenge.

  She had never felt smaller, standing on the platform, beside the high table in the candlelit hall. But she had never known herself so hungry, either; so ready for the silent possibilities that swirled around her; so prepared to risk her ease. While she knew that it was partly because of Sarelin, she also knew that it was not entirely for that reason. Something had moved inside her when she gave an order to Raden, and the same thing moved with a ravening quickness whenever she inked and sealed a decision in her mind.

  She heard a song of steel inside her, and let her breath march to it.

  One of these rulers is helping her play.
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br />   Beside her, Cassia dropped the silent sword on the table. The chimera spun and spun, and landed face-up, gleaming in the light.

  Five

  The carriage stopped, and upon climbing out, she felt them shuffling toward her, dragging their feet over the bare ground: the pairs of duelers with collars of dried blood around their necks; the swordswomen whose biceps resembled knotted rope; the pages who had merely been standing in the wrong place when an arrowhead landed vein-deep; the squires whose livery was now carved in pieces; the splintered archers and broken knights; all of them singing and howling, caterwauling and snickering, crying out in death as they had not in life. Although she could not see them, she made out their incorporeal presence. It was easy to picture the dead when you had heard their stories, and Lysande had listened, in the royal suite, over many years, soaking up tales, until she could see this place groaning with ghosts.

  A footstep: Derset climbed out of the carriage behind her, then Litany. She was waylaid by her attendant fussing over her hair and smoothing down the velvet of her doublet. Lysande let the specters fade from her imagination. She was already staring ahead at the wall curving before them, so tall and wide that it dominated the very sky.

  “I heard Sarelin speak of this place many times.”

  “It has seen more duels than the Plateau in Valderos, my lady,” Derset said. “The Canduccis and Malsantes of Rhime fought each other here, after the calendar was made—”

  “—at the Conquest. In the Pre-Classical Era.”

  “I see there is no need to explain.” Derset smiled.

  Was it her fault that she imagined ghosts, in a place like this? Her eyes followed the circular wall, stark and bone-white against the gray of the clouds. Behind it lay a ring of sand—the oldest fighting ring in Elira. If she recalled the clashes and duels from Sarelin’s stories, she could hear Sarelin’s voice again, and that was what mattered: some warriors fought in the Arena for honor, Sarelin had said, others for duty, but most frequently, prize-fighters came there searching for gold.

  “I did not expect it to look so beautiful,” she said.

  “All theaters of death are beautiful, my lady.” Derset’s smile had turned wry. “That is the tragedy of them.”

  The sound of voices carried, muffled slightly by the stone, a wave of shouts and cries that did not issue from spectral throats this time. With every step they took down the path, the noise grew louder. By the time they reached the base of the Arena, the clamor had built to a roar. Lysande hesitated before the door.

  “The audience arrived some half-hour ago,” Derset said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “They are not accustomed to waiting.”

  Gathering her spirits, she gave the door a push. The sound on the other side hit her so hard that she stood gaping. Twenty tiers of white stone loomed, packed with so many people that it looked as if the railings might burst and spill them out onto the sand—members of the populace, judging by their dilapidated cloaks. They jostled and pointed at the ring. Lysande remembered a phrase from an old poem: baying for blood. The scale she had consumed so hungrily in the weak light of the dawn had calmed her mind a little, but as the sound of the crowd increased threefold, she wished for another dose.

  On the other side of the sand she could see the city-rulers, sitting in a stone box halfway up the tiers, their followers behind them. The bright purple and white of the Pyrrhans shone, embroidered beside the blue and gold of Lyria, then the softer gray and brown of Valderos, and finally, the black and red of Rhime. A patch of silver and emerald told her that a party of Axium Guards waited for her. It was a relief, in some small measure, to see the blaze of their armor. And yet she felt, somehow, that she should be sitting in the crowd, amongst those threadbare cloaks.

  “Did I ever tell you that I am a third child, my lady?” Derset asked, as she stood, gazing across the sandy circle of the ring.

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “No one in my family expected much of me. Honors were bestowed upon my sister and brother—she was the Chief of Arms in our family, he the Protector of Bonds—but I had to work my way up in the service of the crown. There was no one to teach me how to face a room full of nobles. So I taught myself.” He placed a hand upon her shoulder again and gave her another gentle smile. “You can learn to stand before crowds, Lysande. Even to like it.”

  It was the first time he had used her name. She met his gaze, and felt his hand slip down to rest against hers. His palm exerted the slightest pressure and she allowed herself to linger in the sensation for a moment, before pressing back and letting go. There was something soft about his demeanor, almost as if he lacked the edges of the other royal advisors, and Lysande liked the way it felt.

  It was not the distance that daunted her as she stepped onto the sand, nor even the crowd. It was the sight of the figures dotted around the arena—the steel-clad warriors as large as Dante Dalgëreth, in helms that came down to their shoulders, leaving only a slit for the eyes. Some of the helms sported horns, or beaks of solid steel like vultures. Their wearers stood with legs apart, dangling swords and maces at their sides. A weapon was nothing compared to its potentiality, and with each one, she saw the phantom form of a blade slicing through her neck; she imagined the spikes of the mace splitting her skull into fragments from an angle she had never predicted, possibilities layering like topsoil over clay.

  “These must be the prize-fighters,” she said, wrenching her eyes from a mace. “Sarelin once said that it was dishonorable to cover your face in a duel.” How well she remembered that discussion, Sarelin waving her goblet, arguing about the importance of rules and the need for Axium’s code of conduct to apply nationwide, claiming that her anger had nothing to do with the fact that a Rhimese soldier had just won the capital’s biggest tournament while wearing a mask.

  “They are mercenaries, my lady. They serve no princess or prince.” Derset gazed out at the competitors. “Many of these women and men will die in front of us, slain by their opponents. I do not pretend to understand why they risk it. But I know that the winner today will take home a sack of gold.”

  Of course, for a noble, to conceive of putting one’s neck in the path of a spiked mace for something as commonplace as money was a feat of imagination. Lysande had less trouble understanding it.

  The sound of the crowd raged louder around them. It seemed an age before they reached the far end, but at last, Lysande set one foot on the stairs that led up to the box.

  Halfway up, Litany turned aside to join the crowd. “Up here!” Lysande called.

  Litany hesitated, one boot on the next stair. “In the box, Councillor Prior?”

  “Certainly, in the box. If I must have an attendant, I will at least see her enjoy the view. And you may call me Lysande.”

  Litany regarded her for longer than was appropriate, she thought. The girl must have realized it, for she looked hastily away. When Lysande proffered a hand, however, Litany took it. They climbed the rest of the way together, puffing up the stairs. The girl gripped her palm with a singular strength, and it was enough to surprise her; she reminded herself that Litany unscrewed storage jars and carried stacks of linen on a daily basis.

  The city-rulers met her by the railing at the top, arrayed in almost as much finery as last night. Jale was glowing, seemingly wearing half of the Lyrian treasury and sporting a long jacket of gold cloth. Dante leaned forward beside him, draped in gray fur, and Cassia waited in her white doublet and cape, two hooked swords at her hips.

  Yet next to all this display, Luca Fontaine wore the same plain black cloak as last night, with the single ruby nestled at his collar, and he watched her from the far end of the railing. Lysande was relieved to see no scales glinting on his shoulder. A cobra in close confinement was the last thing she needed now.

  As she led Derset and Litany into the box, Derset moved to shield her. A woman was stepping forward, blocking their path. “El
lice Flocke, Councillor. Keeper of the Arena.” She bowed, her doublet sparkling with jeweled pins. “We have been blessed with an even bigger crowd than usual.” The Keeper gestured out at the packed tiers.

  “Nothing like a bit of blood to get a good turnout,” Jale said cheerfully.

  “Indeed, Your Highness. There will be four rounds today, to honor each of the goddesses. And for the subsequent entertainment, we have only the fiercest of wolves.”

  Religion and bloodshed, Lysande thought, looking down at the mercenaries in their helms and the covered cage where the wolves were no doubt chained up, waiting for the attendant to wave an emerald cloth. No wonder Sarelin had liked tournaments so much.

  She could see members of the audience waving paper designs of Fortituda fastened to sticks; the stands teemed with images of the goddess of valor, Sarelin’s favorite, but every so often, she spotted a design of Cognita, Crudelis, or Vindictus, bobbing above the heads.

  Divinity is a draught for the masses, Perfault had written. Would Charice have agreed? More to the point, would they ever discuss philosophical texts in her chamber again? A moment came back to her, brief and glittering as the flap of a butterfly’s wings: she was sitting with legs folded, side by side with Charice, bent over a copy of a rare text from one of the old southern scholars, while they absorbed the theory of the “middle space.” In addition to a realm of certain things and a realm of emptiness, the scholar Severelle claimed, there was a middle space, a place between being and non-being, where anything was possible.

  An ambiguous enough concept, without Charice muddling it further. They had argued over points, definitions, and examples, sometimes reaching an agreement; the idea of a place between absolutes, between certainties, had fascinated Lysande, and she had been unwilling to believe that Charice could see it as purely metaphorical, a dream that defied crystallization.