Authors: Sonia Lyris
She doubted she could bear another minute.
Much as she hated to admit it, her father was right: there was nothing grand about being queen. It seemed to be largely about reassuring everyone around her, most particularly the Houses by whose lands, holdings, and efforts Arunkel produced food and iron and ships. She was to make sure they were secure in the monarchy’s attention so that they might continue to do what they did best.
Her real job, she was coming to understand, was to seem certain. In the Houses. In the monarchy. To infuse all meetings and conclaves and negotiations and adjudications with an appropriate sense of gravity, history, and credibility.
How had her father always made that part seem so easy? He had about him a sort of size and weight that no one would even think to argue with.
Restarn esse Arunkel
. Who was Arunkel.
For a moment she found herself wishing she could ask his advice on how to be more like him.
She stood. The arguments and clicks trailed into silence.
“Eparchs and representatives,” she said as politely as she could manage, “you will have to excuse me.”
Guards preceded and followed, encircling her instantly, mixing with the seneschal, courtiers, aides, secretaries, and the ever-present Sachare.
So many people. Always so many people.
As she strode down the corridor, her seneschal walked backwards to face her as he spoke.
“Your Majesty,” he began.
She flicked her hands, a gesture both of rejection and acceptance of the carefully worded point he was about to make. “No one will be served if I lose my temper.”
Cern was beginning to understand why her father sometimes interrupted meetings to veer off into irrelevant stories about his travels and campaigns. Or fell into sudden, scowling silences. Beginning to understand it all too well.
“Without you there, Your Majesty—”
“I know,” she said with more force than she’d intended. He was retreating before her as smoothly if he had been walking backwards his entire life. Well, maybe he had; she could not remember another seneschal. “Send wine and whatever happens to be good from the kitchen. They will wait.”
The seneschal gestured at an aide, who ducked his head and slipped away between the moving rings of people around her.
It wouldn’t be so intolerable if this weren’t a discussion about something that should have been settled already, at the last Charter Court. What was the point of having the Court’s chaos every fifteen years if the Houses then refused to honor those damned charters, seeking every possible means to undercut the contracts and demand new terms?
As tempting as it was to throw them all out and force them to come to terms without her, these were Elupene’s Lesser Houses, and Elupene had fingers on every side of mutton, basket of vegetables, and bag of grain. The empire had many mouths, and of all the things the monarchy could be said to be responsible for, keeping people fed was high on the list.
Elupene, like the other great Houses, could not be ignored. It followed that even their Lesser Houses must be attended to.
“May I at least suggest to them how long it might be until your gracious return, Your Majesty?”
“Give me a bell.” Not quite an hour to walk off her foul mood.
The seneschal bowed and peeled off, worming his way through the orbits surrounding her as the entire constellation moved down the hallway.
She had intended to stop at the garden and simply sit at whatever bench was most in need of her attention, inhaling the scent of lilac and honey flute, thinking of nothing for a short while, but her feet took her past that exit and out the doors. Sachare gave the smallest of amused exhales, and Cern glanced sidelong at her, but by then her chamberlain had set her face back to neutral.
Ah well; Sachare could think what she wished. The dogs would help replenish the cistern of Cern’s temper, and that was good for everyone.
As she arrived at the kennels, she found herself comparing the dogs and the eparchs and finding the eparchs wanting. Once you had established an understanding with the dogs, they didn’t change their minds and try to renegotiate. Yes, they tested you, but they tested in the open, without subterfuge and endless posturing, and when they were sure of you, they stopped challenging.
It had taken her time to understand all this, weeks of talking to the handlers, watching her father’s dogs in an attempt to make some sense of what he’d seen in the beasts.
Then, to her astonishment, she had begun to. It was as if, as she sat outside the cages watching Chula and Tashu observe her, she had begun to take their measure in return. To understand their scent as they understood hers.
At the kennels’ door everything slowed as some urgent discussion ensued about who in her retinue would go, and in what order, and who would remain outside. They all did something important, she was sure, though it was sometimes hard to keep track of what. They sorted it out fairly quickly, leaving half her guards and most of the rest arrayed outside, allowing her to take a lesser crowd inside with her. Sachare and the inner circle of guards joined her.
Not alone, never alone.
Kennelmaster and assistants dropped whatever they had been doing and bowed, standing ready. From their cage, Chula and Tashu huffed, a sort of throaty sound that they’d been bred to make in lieu of a full bark, which they could also produce, but did rather less often. Something about being able to stay silent in battle, she’d been told.
She was, she realized, smiling. The kennelmaster opened the cage door, and Chula and Tashu came bounding out. Cern dropped to her knees and hugged them as they snuffled at her head and ears and neck and beat her lightly with their tails.
It was worth it, taking this time. If the Houses only knew how much it improved her mood, they’d be beyond grateful to these large beasts.
“Your Majesty,” Sachare said meaningfully, relaying a look from a guard who had no doubt had it relayed to him across a line of people to reach her.
Time. She was out of it again.
“Yes,” she sighed. “All right.”
She petted Chula and Tashu one last time, leading them back to their cage. They balked, but only a little, and she laughed but insisted, so in they went. She dropped the bolt as they watched her through the bars, tails still twitching hopefully.
“I want to see the pups, Sacha.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” Sachare said, lips pursed in an expression of mild reprimand, which Cern ignored.
The kennels stretched the length of the long, converted stables, dogs in stalls on either side, and the new litter in the back, at the end of the walkway and around a corner. An assistant held out for her inspection her favorite of the new pups.
The runt of the litter, a tiny thing with black-tipped ears. When she’d taken the throne, she’d halted the practice of killing the smallest and weakest. Give them a chance, she’d said. Who knew what they might become? She held him in her arms now, grabbed his snout when he tried to nibble her, let him lick her hand in apology.
After a few minutes she met Sachare’s look.
“Time to go,” she agreed reluctantly. She sighed, handing the pup to the kennelmaster, who returned it to a large cage beyond the stall in which they stood.
Cern stepped into the walkway, her gaze sweeping the area. Ever so slightly, three of her six guards stiffened. There was something odd about the motion. She frowned, trying to figure out what she was seeing.
Her innermost set, these six. Capable, strong. Loyal beyond question. The best of her already impressive best.
A sound from the far end of the building, out of place. A crash. A cry. A shout.
Beyond the stall, one of the pups began to growl softly.
“Sacha,” Cern said.
Now distant and urgent calls. Around the corner, a shriek, cut short.
As one, her guards turned away from her toward the sounds, reaching for weapons. Half of them dropped a step back, facing the trouble, whatever it was, drawing large knives.
Tight quarters, so of course they’d draw knives. They could hardly swing swords in this narrow walkway.
But this was not quite how they were supposed to array themselves. Two lines, one close to her, one farther away—yes—but not so close to each other.
She hissed at Sachare, tugging her backwards from her guards, putting the wall at their backs. Sachare quickly drew a knife from her boot.
In a blink, two of the forward row of guards cried out, one clutching his neck as he crumpled, bloody and dripping, another folded in half, a knife pulled out of his ribs by the guard behind him. The third forward guard turned to face the second row, a look of astonishment and shock on his face that mirrored Cern’s own. In the moment in which he opened his mouth—to object, to ask, Cern never found out—the traitor guard sank his knife deep into the other’s belly.
Betrayal.
Loud shouts bled in distantly from outside of the building. A deep pounding, as if someone was trying to crash through doors barricaded shut. Barking from everywhere.
“Stay back, Your—” Sachare began, then fell silent. The three traitor guards turned to face the two of them.
Cern knew them by name. Had known them for years. Trusted them. Did they really think they would survive this treason?
Only then did it occur to her to wonder if
she
would.
Where were the rest of her guards? The loyal ones?
More pounding in the distance. The guards were locked out. Some ingenious and fast treasonous work, this was.
Sachare stepped between Cern and the armed men, slashing the air in warning.
Three new guards appeared behind the three traitors, and relief flooded Cern, but no, no—she didn’t recognize these at all. They weren’t hers.
“Quickly,” one of the newcomers hissed at the others, glancing back down the walkway. The two farthest men raised short lances, each movement fast and spare, eyes on her. Aiming for her. In quick succession the lancers snapped their weapons forward.
Sachare darted to stand in the path and howled in fury as one of the lances stuck into her chest, the other missing Cern by a hair’s breadth, sinking into the wood behind, breaking Cern’s momentary freeze.
Grabbing Sachare’s arm, she yanked her back through the stall door out of which they had just come. She and Sachare set their backs to the door to hold it shut. It bucked against them as those outside slammed into it.
Sachare had turned white and pasty, swallowing repeatedly, hand wrapped tightly around the hilt of the lance in her chest. Cern did not think Sachare would be on her feet much longer.
Six. There were six assassins outside this stall door. She knew how many capable, armed men she could hope to break through herself, and this was too many.
As a child in the Cohort, when all the others were taken to combat practice, Cern had been taken aside to a windowless room. It had started simply enough: her father had held up an hourglass.
“You have until this empties,” he said. “If you can get to the door, you can join the Cohort for the next meal. Otherwise you go hungry.”
Then a large man had picked her up and began carrying her around the room. Sometimes he would set her down and let her run a few steps before catching her up again, lifting her over his shoulders or spinning her while she screamed and cried. It didn’t matter how hard she ran, hit, bit, or begged, she could not get loose from him, or past him, to the door.
The men and women her father had chosen were clever and careful; they never hurt her in any way that couldn’t be easily covered with clothing. Beneath her clothes were the cuts and bruises that, old and new, she was rarely without.
As the years passed, her training came to include objects of all sorts, from weapons to chairs and tables. Metal pitchers. Scarves and tapestries. Whatever was handy.
All the while her father watched.
She didn’t have to defeat them, it was made clear, only to get through. To safety and help. She learned. She found ways to make it to the door.
But not always. Sometimes there were too many of them and no matter what she did, or how fast she was, she went hungry.
Too many. Like now.
One more slam and they would be inside the stall. Could she hold them off a few moments more, long enough for the rest of her guards to arrive? Surely her entire queen’s guard could not have been turned.
No, it had not; distant pounding told her that outside the kennels people were trying to get in. She only had to keep these ones away a bit longer.
Some quick calculation told her that of the twenty guards who had come into the kennels with her, all were turned or slain. She put aside sorrow until later. If there was a later.
Anger could stay.
Pounding and slamming from everywhere, all around, the building shaking.
The door at their backs bucked again, hard and sudden, slamming the two of them forward into the middle of the straw-strewn stall. Sachare yanked the spear out of her chest and held it out to Cern, who took it as Sachare crumpled to the ground, blood gushing from her wound and bubbling from her mouth.
The stall door burst open, the set of assassins looming in the doorway a moment, then surging toward her.
She did not have to get through them. Just stay alive until help could arrive.
Her back against the wall, she made the first attacker gape by saying his name urgently, making him hesitate long enough for her to throw her weight into a thrust that went into his belly and through him, surprising her almost as much as him.
She tried to yank the spear back, but it was stuck somewhere inside him. She cursed as they swarmed her. She twisted with fast elbows, and someone swore in response. A quick drop to headbutt another, who backed away but not far enough. Something sharp bit into her side and she twisted again, but her ribs burned with pain.
A grab for her hair, and she shook her head. The hand slipped off her head. Suddenly understood her own haircut.
So many things to learn. Perhaps a little late for some lessons. In moments this would be over, and not in her favor.
So fast: a hand on her arm, another on her neck, an armored body pressing in close, and she was trapped. Only a lifetime of habit kept her fighting now, as futile as it was.