Rise Of Empire (5 page)

Hadrian paused in his own efforts to switch boots and scowled at his partner. “You realize they’ll probably execute him for treason?”

Royce nodded. “Which will neatly eliminate the only witness.”

“You see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.” Hadrian sighed and shook his head.

Royce could see the familiar melancholy wash over his partner. It appeared too often lately. He could not fathom his friend’s moodiness. These strange bouts of depression usually followed successes and frequently led to a night of heavy drinking.

He wondered if Hadrian even cared about the money anymore. He took only what was needed for drinks and food and stored the rest. Royce could have understood his friend’s reaction if they had been making a living by picking pockets or robbing homes, but they worked for the king now. Their jobs were almost too clean for Royce’s taste. Hadrian had no real concept of filth. Unlike Royce, he had not grown up in the muddy streets of Ratibor.

Royce decided to try to reason with Hadrian. “Would you rather they find out and send a detachment to hunt us down?”

“No, I just hate being the cause of an innocent man’s death.”

“No one is innocent, my friend. And you aren’t the cause … You’re more like”—he searched for words—“the grease beneath the skids.”

“Thanks. I feel
so
much better.”

Royce folded the uniform and placed it, along with the boots, neatly into his saddlebag. Hadrian still struggled to rid himself of his black boots, which were too small. With a mighty tug, he jerked the last one off and threw it down in frustration. He gathered it up and wrestled his uniform into the satchel. Cramming everything as deep as possible, he strapped the flap down and buckled it as tight as he could. He glared at the pack and sighed once more.

“You know, if you organized your pack a little better, it wouldn’t be so hard to fit all your gear,” Royce said.

Hadrian looked at him with a puzzled expression. “What? Oh—no, I’m … It’s not the gear.”

“Then what is it?” Royce pulled on his black cloak and adjusted the collar.

Hadrian stroked his horse’s neck. “I don’t know,” he replied mournfully. “It’s just that … I thought by now I’d have done something more—with my life, I mean.”

“Are you crazy? Most men work themselves to death on a small bit of land that isn’t even theirs. You’re free to do as you choose and go wherever you want.”

“I know, but when I was young, I used to think I was … well … special. I imagined that I would triumph in some great purpose, win the girl, and save the kingdom, but I suppose every boy feels that way.”

“I didn’t.”

Hadrian scowled at him. “I just had this idea of who I would become, and being a worthless spy wasn’t part of that plan.”

“We’re hardly worthless,” Royce said, correcting him. “We’ve been making a good profit, especially lately.”

“That’s not the point. I was successful as a mercenary too. It’s not about money. It’s the fact that I survive like a leech.”

“Why is this suddenly coming up now? For the first time in years, we’re making good money with a steady stream of
respectable
jobs. We’re in the employ of a king, for Maribor’s sake. We can actually sleep in the same bed two nights in a row and not worry about being arrested. Just last week I passed the captain of the city watch and he gave me a nod.”

“It’s not the amount of work. It’s the
kind
of work. It’s the fact that we’re always lying. If that courier dies, it’ll be our fault. Besides, it’s not sudden. I’ve felt this way for years. Why do you think I’m always suggesting we do something else? Do you know why I broke the rules and took that job to steal Pickering’s sword? The one that nearly got us executed?”

“For the unusual sum of money offered,” Royce replied.

“No, that’s why
you
took it. I wanted to go because it seemed like the right thing to do. For once I had the chance to help someone who really deserved to be helped, or so I thought at the time.”

“And becoming an actor is the answer?”

Hadrian untied his horse. “No, but as an actor, I could at least
pretend
to be virtuous. I suppose I should just be happy to be alive, right?”

He did not answer. The nagging sensation was surfacing again. Royce hated keeping secrets from Hadrian, and it weighed heavily on his conscience, which was amazing, because he had never known he had one. Royce defined right and wrong by the moment. Right was what was best for
him—wrong was everything else. He stole, lied, and even killed when necessary. This was his craft and he was good at it. There was no reason to apologize, no need to pause or reflect. The world was at war with him and nothing was sacred.

Telling Hadrian what he had learned ran too great a risk. Royce preferred his world constant, with each variable accounted for. Lines on maps were shifting daily and power slipped from one set of hands to another. Time flowed too fast and events were too unexpected. He felt like he was crossing a frozen lake in late spring. He tried to pick a safe path, but the surface cracked beneath his feet. Even so, there were some changes he could still control. He reminded himself that the secret he kept from Hadrian was for his friend’s own good.

Climbing onto his short gray mare, Mouse, Royce thought a moment. “We’ve been working pretty hard lately. Maybe we should take a break.”

“I don’t see how we can,” Hadrian replied. “With the imperial army preparing to invade Melengar, Alric is going to need us now more than ever.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But you didn’t read the dispatch.”

P
rincess Arista Essendon slouched on the carriage seat, buffeted by every rut and hole in the road. Her neck was stiff from sleeping against the armrest and her head throbbed from the constant jostling. Rising with a yawn, she wiped her eyes and rubbed her face. An attempt to straighten her hair trapped her fingers in a mass of auburn knots.

The ambassadorial coach was showing as much wear as its passenger, having traveled too many miles over the past year. The roof leaked, the springs were worn, and the bench was becoming threadbare in places. The driver had orders to push hard to return to Medford by midday. He was making good time, but at the expense of hitting every rut and rock along the way. As Arista drew back the curtain, the morning sun flashed through gaps in the leafy wall of trees lining the road.

She was almost home.

The flickering light revealed the interior of the coach; dust entering the windows coated everything. A discarded cheesecloth and several apple cores covered a pile of parchments spilling from a stack on the opposite bench. Soiled footprints patterned the floor where a blanket, a corset, and two dresses nested along with three shoes. She had no idea where the
fourth was, and only hoped it was in the carriage and not left in Lanksteer. Over the past six months, she had felt as if she had left bits of herself all over Avryn.

Hilfred would have known where her shoe was.

She picked up her pearl-handled hairbrush and turned it over in her hands. Hilfred must have searched the wreckage for days. This one came from Tur Del Fur. Her father had given her a brush from every city he had traveled to. He had been a private man and saying
I love you
had not come easy, even when speaking to his own daughter. The brushes were his unspoken confessions. Once, she had owned dozens—now this was the last. When her bedroom tower had collapsed, she had lost them and it had felt as if she had lost her father all over again. Three weeks later this single brush appeared. It must have been Hilfred, but he never said a word or admitted a thing.

Hilfred had been her bodyguard for years, and now that he was gone, she realized just how much she had taken him for granted.

She had a new bodyguard now. Alric had personally picked him from his own castle guards. His name began with a T—Tom, Tim, Travis—something like that. He stood on the wrong side of her, talked too much, laughed at his own jokes, and was always eating something. He was likely a brave and skilled soldier, but he was no Hilfred.

The last time she had seen Hilfred had been over a year ago in Dahlgren, when he had nearly died from the Gilarabrywn attack. That had been the second time he had suffered burns trying to save her. The first had been when she was only twelve—the night the castle caught fire. Her mother and several others had died, but a boy of fifteen, the son of a sergeant-at-arms, had braved the inferno to pull her from her bed. At Arista’s insistence, he went back for her mother. He
never reached her, but nearly died trying. He suffered for months afterward, and Arista’s father rewarded the boy by appointing him her bodyguard.

His wounds back then had been nothing like what he had suffered in Dahlgren. Healers had wrapped him from head to toe and he had lain unconscious for days. To her shock he had refused to see her upon awaking and left in the back of a wagon without saying goodbye. At Hilfred’s request, no one would tell her where he had gone. She could have pressed. She could have ordered the healers to talk. For months, she looked over her shoulder expecting to see him, waiting to hear the familiar clap of his sword against his thigh. She often wondered if she had done the right thing in letting him go. She sighed at yet another regret added to a pile that had been building over the past year.

Taking stock of the mess around her increased her melancholy. This is what came from refusing to have a handmaid along, but she could not imagine being cooped up in the carriage with anyone for so long. She picked up her dresses and laid them across the far seat. When she spied a document crushed into a ball and hanging in the folds of the far window curtain, her stomach churned with guilt. With a frown, she plucked the crumpled parchment and smoothed it out by pressing it in her lap.

It contained a list of kingdoms and provinces with a line slashed through each and the notation
IMP
scrawled beside them. That the Earl of Chadwick and King Ethelred were the first in line to kiss the empress’s ring was no surprise. But she shook her head in disbelief at the long list. The shift in power had occurred virtually overnight. One day nothing, the next—
bang!
There was a New Empire and the Avryn kingdoms of Warric, Ghent, Alburn, Maranon, Galeannon, and Rhenydd had all joined. They pressured the small holdouts,
like Glouston, then invaded and swallowed them. She ran her finger over the line indicating Dunmore. His Highness King Roswort had graciously decided it was in his kingdom’s best interest to accept the imperial offer of extended landholdings in return for becoming part of the New Empire. Arista would not be surprised if Roswort had been promised Melengar as part of his payment. Of all the kingdoms of Avryn, only Melengar refused to join.

It all happened so fast.

A year ago, the New Empire was merely an idea. She had spent months as ambassador trying to strike alliances. Without support, without allies, Melengar could not hope to stand against the growing colossus.

How long do we have before the empire marches north, before
—

The carriage came to a sudden halt, throwing her forward, jerking the curtains, and creaking the tired springs. She looked out the window, puzzled. They were still on the old Steward’s Road. The wall of trees had given way to an open field of flowers, which she knew placed them on the high meadow just a few miles outside Medford.

“What’s going on?” she called out.

No response.

Where in Elan is Tim, or Ted, or whatever the blazes his name is?

She pulled the latch and, hiking up her skirt, pushed out the door. Warm sunlight met her, making her squint. Her legs were stiff and her back ached. At only twenty-six, she already felt ancient. She slammed the carriage door and, holding a hand to protect her eyes, glared as best she could up at the silhouettes of the driver and groom. They glanced at her, but only briefly, then looked back down the slope of the road ahead.

“Daniel! Why—” she started, but stopped after seeing what they were looking at.

The high meadowlands just north of Medford provided an extensive view for several miles south. The land sloped gently down, revealing Melengar’s capital city, Medford. She saw the spires of Essendon Castle and Mares Cathedral and, farther out, the Galewyr River, marking the southern border of the kingdom. In the days when her mother and father had been alive, the royal family had come here in the summer to have picnics and enjoy the cool breeze and the view. Only that day the sight was quite different.