The Last Mortal Bond Page 2

  Reflexively, she looked to the river first, the Haag, carving its way south just beneath the high walls of the city. She could make out the stone arches of the single bridge spanning the flow, but night hid from her any sign of the sentries posted there. She took a deep breath, relaxed her hands on the casement. She’d half expected to find the Urghul, she realized, barely a quarter mile distant and storming the bridge, ready to lay siege to the city.

  Because you’re a fool, she told herself grimly. If Balendin and the Urghul had broken through Ran il Tornja’s legions, she would have heard more than a few horses on the cobbles. She shifted her attention to the courtyard below.

  Aergad was an old city, as old as Annur itself, and the castle she had taken for her own had been the ancestral seat of the kings who ruled the southern Romsdals long before the rise of her empire. Both the castle and the city walls looked their age. Though the builders had known their work, there had been no need to defend Aergad in more than a century, and Adare could see gaps in the tops of the ramparts, gaping spaces where ice had eaten away at the mortar, sending huge blocks of stone tumbling into the river below. She had ordered the walls repaired, but masons were scarce, and il Tornja needed them to the east, where he was fighting his months-long holding action against the Urghul.

  Moonlight threw the jagged shapes of the southern wall onto the rough stones of the courtyard. The messenger was dismounting in the shadow; Adare could see his shape, and the shape of his horse, but no face, no uniform. She tried to read something in the posture, in the set of those shoulders, anything that would warn her of the message that he carried.

  A whimper broke the night’s quiet, an infant’s cry from the room behind her. Grimacing, Adare turned away from the courtyard, to where Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian, the second of that name, twisted uneasily in his small wooden crib, disturbed by the hooves on the cobbles or by the cold northern air from the open window. Adare crossed to him quickly, hoping that he hadn’t truly awoken, that she could soothe him with a soft hand and a few words, that he would slide back into his slumber before she had to confront whatever news was coming.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “It’s all right, my little boy. Shh…”

  Sometimes it was easy to soothe him. On the better nights, whispering meaningless comfort to her squirming child, Adare felt as though someone else was speaking, a woman who was older, slower, more certain, some other mother who understood nothing of politics or finance, who would fumble even simple figures, but who knew in her bones the soothing of a colicky child. Most times, however, she felt lost, baffled by her motherhood, desperate with her love for the tiny child and terrified by her inability to calm him. She would hold him close, whisper over and over into his ear, and his body would shudder itself still for a while. Then, when she thought the grief had passed, when she pulled back to study his face, his chest would heave, the sobs would force his small mouth wide, and the tears would well up all over again.

  He had her eyes. Looking into them when he cried was like staring into a mountain pool and finding red-gold embers glowing unquenched beneath the water’s surface. Adare wondered if her own eyes looked the same behind tears. It seemed a long time since she had cried.

  “Shh, my little boy,” she whispered, running the back of her fingers softly over his cheek. “It’s all right.”

  Sanlitun screwed up his small face, strained against the swaddling, cried out once more, then subsided.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered again.

  Only when she returned to the window, when she looked out once more and saw the rider had moved into the moonlight, did she realize she was wrong. It was not all right. Maybe the child had known before she did who had come. Maybe it wasn’t the cold or the wind that had woken him at all, but some infant’s knowledge that his father was near, his father, the Csestriim, the kenarang, general of Adare’s shrinking empire, murderer of her own father, possibly a mortal foe, and one of her only allies. Ran il Tornja was here, striding across the courtyard, leaving a groom to lead away a horse that looked half dead. He glanced up toward her window, met her eyes, and saluted, a casual motion, almost dismissive.

  This sudden arrival would have been odd enough in the daytime, but it was not daytime. It was well past midnight. Adare pulled the window closed, tried to still her sudden shivering, straightened her back, and turned to face the doors to her chamber, arranging her face before he entered.

  * * *

  “You should have the men on the gate flogged,” il Tornja said as soon as he’d closed the door behind him. “Or killed. They checked to make certain it was me, but let my guardsmen pass without a second glance.”

  He dropped into one wooden chair, shoved out another with the heel of a boot, put his feet up on it, and leaned back. The nighttime ride that had half killed his horse didn’t seem to have wearied the kenarang in the least. A little mud speckled his boots. The wind had been at his dark hair, but his green riding cloak and tailored uniform were immaculate. His polished sword belt gleamed. The gems laid into the hilt of his sword glittered with all the brightness of lies. Adare met his eyes.

  “Are we so spoiled for soldiers that we can start knocking them off for minor infractions?”

  Il Tornja raised his brows. “I’d hardly rate a lapse in the Emperor’s security a minor infraction.” He shook his head. “You should have my soldiers at the gate, not the Sons of Flame.”

  “You need your men to fight the Urghul,” Adare pointed out, “unless you plan to prosecute this war all by yourself. The Sons are capable guardians. They let your men pass because they recognized you. They trust you.”

  “Sanlitun trusted me,” he pointed out. “I put a knife in his back.”

  Adare’s breath caught like a hook in her throat. Her skin blazed.

  My father, she reminded herself. He’s talking about my father, not my boy. Il Tornja had murdered the Emperor, but he had no reason to harm the child, his own child. Still, the urge to turn in her chair, to see the infant sleeping safely behind her, settled on Adare as strongly as a pair of clutching hands. She forced it away.

  “Your leash is shorter than it was when you killed my father,” she replied, meeting his eyes.

  He smiled, raised a hand to his collarbone as though testing for the invisible cord of flame that Nira had set around his neck. Adare would have been a good deal more comforted if she could still see the ’Kent-kissing thing, but a writhing noose of fire would draw more than a few eyes, and she had enough problems without admitting her Mizran Councillor was a leach and her kenarang an untrusted murderer and a Csestriim on top of that. Nira insisted that the kenning was still in place, and that would have to be good enough.

  “Such a light collar,” il Tornja said. “Sometimes I forget that it’s even there.”

  “You don’t forget anything. Why are you here?”

  “Aside from the chance to see my Emperor, my son, and the mother of my child?”

  “Yes. Aside from that.”

  “You’re less sentimental than I remember.”

  “When sentiment feeds my troops, I’ll look into it. Why are you here?”

  Behind her, Sanlitun stirred uneasily, whimpering at the sound of her raised voice. Il Tornja glanced over her shoulder, studying the child with something that might have been interest or amusement.

  “He is healthy?”

  Adare nodded. “He had a cough two weeks ago—that ’Shael-spawned wind off the Romsdals—but it’s mostly over now.”

  “And you still keep him with you, even when you work?”

  She nodded again. Prepared to defend herself. Again. Nine months since she first arrived in Aergad, an exile in her own empire. Six months since Sanlitun’s birth. Only six months, and yet it felt she hadn’t slept in a year, in a lifetime. Despite his name, Sanlitun had none of his grandfather’s calm, none of his stillness. Either he was hungry or he was wet, puking or fretful, clutching at her when awake, or kicking her as he slept.

  “A wet
nurse—” il Tornja began.

  “I do not need a wet nurse.”

  “Driving yourself into the dirt does no one any good,” he said slowly. “Not you, not our child, and certainly not our empire.”

  “My empire.”

  He nodded, his smile barbed. “Your empire.”

  “Women raise their own children all the time. Six children. Ten. I think I can manage a single baby boy.”

  “Shepherds raise six children. Fishermen’s wives raise children. Women whose cares don’t extend beyond keeping the hearth lit and the sheep fed. You are the Emperor of Annur, Adare. You are a prophet. We are at war on two fronts, and we are losing. Fishermen’s wives have the luxury of caring for their own children. You do not.” He did a thing with his voice then, a shift in tone or register that, coming from anyone else, might have indicated a softening. “He is my child, too.…”

  “Don’t speak to me,” she growled, sitting back in her chair, putting more air between them, “of your children. I know too well how you have gone about rearing them in the past.”

  If she’d hoped to dent his armor, to knock his mask askew, she would have been disappointed. Il Tornja assembled the planes of his face into a regretful smile and shook his head again.

  “That was a long time ago, Adare. Many thousands of years. It was a mistake, and one I have labored long to correct.” He gestured to Sanlitun, an unfolding of the palm at once paternal and impersonal. “He will not grow stronger or wiser from your coddling. He may not grow at all if you neglect everything else.”

  “I am not neglecting everything else,” she snapped. “Do you see me sleeping? Nattering endless nonsense? I’m at my desk each morning before dawn and, as you can see, I’m still here.” She gestured to the papers. “When I put my seal on these treaties, our men will eat for another season. And when I’m done with these, there’s a stack of petitions from Raalte to address. I live in this room, and when I’m not here, I’m with Lehav reviewing our southern strategy, or reviewing the troops, or drafting letters.”

  “And fortunately for us all,” il Tornja added smoothly, “you have your father’s brain. Even sleep-addled, even clutching a child to your breast, you think better than most Annurian emperors I have known.”

  She ignored the compliment. Il Tornja’s praise seemed as genuine as the rest of him, and like the rest of him, it was false, weighed to the last hair, measured and parsed, distributed only where he thought it was needed, where it would be useful. The point, the heft of the statement, remained: she was doing her job.

  “There you have it. I will raise Sanlitun and—”

  The kenarang cut her off.

  “We don’t need you to be better than most of your ancestors, Adare.” He paused, fixed her with his general’s stare. Not his real stare, thank Intarra, not the fathomless black gaze of Csestriim contemplation she had seen just the once above the battlefield of Andt-Kyl, but the other one, the one he had no doubt studied for generations—a hard look, but human. “We need you to be better than all of them. For that, you require rest. You must give up the child, at least occasionally.”

  “I will do what needs doing,” she growled, doubt’s sick flower blossoming inside her even as she spoke.

  The truth was, the past six months had been the most brutal of her life, days filled with impossible decisions, the nights an unending torment of Sanlitun’s screaming, her own fumbling with the blankets, drawing the child into her bed, murmuring to him, praying to Intarra and Bedisa that he would fall asleep once more. Most times he would take the nipple, suck greedily for a few heartbeats, then shove it away and begin bawling.

  She had servants, of course, a dozen women seated just outside her chamber who would come darting in the moment Adare called, arms piled high with dry swaddling or new bedding. That much help she would accept, but sending the child away, training him to suck at another woman’s breast … that she could not ask of him. Or of herself. Even when she wanted to weep from exhaustion, from the flood of sleep-addled confusion brimming in her blood, she would look down at her child, at his fat cheek pressed against her swollen breast, and she would know as she knew any great truth about the world that she could not give him up.

  She had watched her mother die, coughing her shredded lungs onto the softest silk. Adare had stood beside her father as he was laid into his tomb, imperial robes hiding his wounds. She had killed one brother herself, and was locked in a desperate, vicious war with the other. Her family had been whittled down to this one child. She glanced over to the crib where he slept, watched his small chest rise and fall, then turned back to il Tornja.

  “Why are you here?” she asked for the third time, voice ripe to bursting with weariness. “I doubt you left the front, the fight, to discuss the finer points of my parenting.”

  Il Tornja nodded, steepled his fingers, studied her for a moment, then nodded again.

  “We have an opportunity,” he said finally.

  Adare spread her hands. “If I don’t have time to raise my son, I certainly don’t have time for your fucking riddles.”

  “The republic has offered to treat with you.”

  Adare stared.

  “My men intercepted the messenger—the man is waiting below. I wanted to talk to you before you saw him.”

  Slowly, Adare told herself. Slowly. She studied il Tornja’s face, but could read nothing there.

  “A messenger sent to whom?”

  “To you.”

  “And yet your men intercepted him. Hardly a model of trusting cooperation.”

  Il Tornja waved a dismissive hand. “Intercepted. Tripped over. Escorted. They found him—”

  “And they brought him to you,” Adare said, trying to keep a clamp on her anger, “instead of me. What are your men even doing in the south? The Sons have that front secured.”

  “Staring fixedly in one direction is a good way to get dead, Adare. While I don’t doubt the devotion of the Sons to both their goddess and their prophet,” he inclined his head toward her slightly, “I learned long ago not to rely on units outside of my command. My men found the messenger, they came to me, and when I learned his message, I came directly to you.” He shook his head. “Everything is not a conspiracy, Adare.”

  “You’ll pardon me if that doesn’t ring true.” She leaned back in her chair, ran her hands through her hair, forced herself to focus on the heart of the matter. “Fine. A messenger. From the republic.”

  “An offer to negotiate. To make peace. From the sound of it, they’re starting to understand that their government of the people isn’t working out.”

  “How perspicacious of them. It only took nine months, the loss of two atrepies, the deaths of tens of thousands, and the specter of widespread starvation to bring the failure to their attention.”

  “They want you back. An emperor on the Unhewn Throne again. They want to heal the rift.”

  Adare narrowed her eyes, forced herself to breathe evenly, to think through the situation before speaking. It was tempting, so tempting. It was also impossible.

  “There’s no way,” she said, shaking her head. “No way that forty-five of Annur’s most rich and vicious aristocrats are going to give up their newfound power. Even if the city were burning down around them, even if the palace was on fire, they wouldn’t change course. They hate me too much.”

  “Well…” Il Tornja drew out the word with an apologetic shrug. “They don’t want to give up their power. Not exactly. They want you back as a sort of figurehead, but they want to keep making the laws, deciding the policy. They say bark, you woof obligingly—that sort of thing.…”

  Adare slammed a palm down on the table, more violently than she’d intended.

  Sanlitun squirmed in his crib, and she paused, waiting for his slow, shallow breathing to resume before speaking.

  “Their fucking policies,” she hissed, “are destroying Annur, gutting the empire from the inside out. Their policies are killing people. And now they want me to be complicit in the
ir shit?”

  “As far as I understand it, they want you to be more than complicit. They want you to perch atop the pile and grin.”

  “I won’t do it,” she said, shaking her head.

  He raised an eyebrow. “There was a time, not so many months ago, when you thought there might be room to negotiate with the council, when you were sending the messengers to them.”

  “Messengers that they imprisoned. Good men who might be dead now for all I know. I used to think the rift could be healed. Not anymore. It’s too late.”

  Il Tornja frowned, as though tasting food gone slightly bad. “Too late is not a phrase that should ever pass an emperor’s lips.”

  “I would think an emperor is served by facing the truth rather than running from it.”

  “By all means! Confront the hard truths! Just do it in private. You don’t want to plant fear in the hearts of those who follow you.”

  “I couldn’t plant fear in your heart if I was sowing it with a shovel.”

  “I’m not talking about me.”

  “You’re the only one here.”

  “You have to practice your face, Adare,” he said. “All the time.”

  She opened her mouth to object, but he raised his hands, forestalling her. “I didn’t come here to quarrel. I came here because this is an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity for what? To give up everything we’ve been fighting for the past nine months? To let the idiots destroy what’s left of Annur?”

  “It is Annur that I’m trying to save,” il Tornja said, suddenly grave. “I need you to go back. To heal the rift between the empire and the republic. I would not ask if it were not necessary.”

  Adare frowned. “You’re losing,” she said finally.

  The kenarang nodded, then shrugged. “Even genius has limits. My armies are stretched thin as yesterday’s smoke. The Urghul outnumber us, they fight beside an emotion leach, and are led by a god.”