The Seer - eARC (70 page)

But the doctor did not answer, calling for her tools. When she looked back at Innel, she was watching him with an odd intensity.

Why, he wondered, wanting to put voice to this question, along with the other questions he had, but somehow unable to do so. Then he lost consciousness.

When Innel woke again, he was in his bed. His head ached as if it had been in a melon press. His shoulder felt as if it had a spike through it.

Lismar sat on a chair by his side.

“I’m taking over, Innel,” she said when she saw him blink awake. “You are injured beyond your ability to command.”

“What? No. I can—” He tried to sit up, gave a sharp exhale as the pain wrenched through him. He lay back. “The seer,” he croaked. “Where is she?”

“Your pet has escaped again, Lord Commander. Perhaps you should leash her more tightly. Try iron next time.”

He wondered how well that would hold her when an entire set of guards couldn’t.

“She saved my life.”

“Of course she did, ser.”

Lismar didn’t believe him. For a moment he thought to try to explain, then he realized there was no point.

It was subtle, what Amarta had done. If he hadn’t seen the round of bread bouncing away as he turned to look at her, he might never have realized it. It was easy to miss things, even those right in front of you, if you weren’t looking at them. Or looking for them.

“Cahlen,” he said.

“Anyone else, I’d have her executed on the spot, Innel. Calm yourself: she’s fine. Chained, guarded, but alive. I’ll even allow her some food, little as there is left of it.”

“What was the message she brought?”

“When you’re better, Consort. Rest now.”

As Lismar rose, he reached out with his good hand and gripped her wrist as tightly as he could, which didn’t seem very tight. He forced the words out: “What’s the damned message I was nearly killed for, General?”

He met her look. A tiny smile played around her mouth, making her resemblance to the old king quite clear. After a moment she nodded, reached inside her vest, and pulled out a scrap of bloody paper, holding it to him. He released her and took the paper, blinking through blurred vision to make sense of it.

Garaya
.

Everyone dead.

“No,” he breathed.

“Very much yes, it would seem. Apparently this was sent right before they were completely overcome, by some soldier at the back with the birds, setting them free. Signed by him, even. You know this Selamu?”

Selamu. Cahlen’s Selamu. Now he understood.

“I need the seer.”

“No, you need to rest. I’ll handle this.”

“Handle what?”

“Tomorrow we take Ote. Whatever cracks the Teva are hiding in, we will flush them into the open so we can bring this matter to a conclusion. We have held the empire for a thousand years, and I’m going to show the Teva how. Tomorrow night we feast on roast shaota.”

“Wait, no, you can’t, not without me—”

“Oh, no. I will not risk the life of the queen’s consort. You will stay in bed and heal.” She spoke to a guard. “See to it that he stays in his bed and heals.”

“Yes, ser.”

“You can’t—” Innel said.

But the general was gone.

“Wait,” he croaked, struggling to get up. The room swam around him and he fell heavily to the cot.

Sleep took him again.

Amarta looked at Jolon.
I might help you get free.
she signed.
I need two things.

Yes?

Deliver something to your elders for me.

What?

Amarta struggled to remember her signs. She could not remember how to show names.

The man. Behind me. In the bed.

For a moment Jolon looked confused.

You say the Lord Commander?

Yes.

Jolon’s face showed incomprehension.
I do not understand.

The second thing,
signed Amarta,
is to take me to the mine.

When Innel woke again the camp was dark, the pavilion quiet. A lamp burned low on the side table. He looked around.

Amarta sat next to him, watching him.

He was hot, soaked in sweat. For a moment he struggled to sit up, then again gave up. “Tomorrow,” he said hoarsely, then swallowed. “The general is going to attack. Will it succeed?”

“No,” Amarta said. “The few who survive will be ransomed back by the Teva. As you will be.”

Ransomed back. To the queen. A humiliation from which his reputation would never recover.

Far better to have died.

“Why did you save me?”

“You have more work to do.”

“There you are wrong,” he said bitterly. “Lismar has taken my command. And Cern . . .” He trailed off.

Cern might keep him as Consort, though he could not think of why. Certainly he would not advise it. Cut away the mistaken choice as quickly as possible and find someone to replace him. A Cohort brother from one of the Houses, perhaps.

He had risen too far too fast, he realized, and it had not been an accident. The old king had maneuvered Cern into giving him the Lord Commandership not because of his ability but to see to it that when he fell it would be from such a height that he could never rise again. He had been a fool to think otherwise. “What will they say about me in the histories?”

“They will call this the Battle of Hanatha, or Innel’s Folly. They will say it was the beginning of the empire’s fall.”

“No.” With his good hand he rubbed sweat from his face. He could easily imagine that scribed record. How the Arunkel army had failed to take a walled town defended by children. How the next day the army was bested by a smaller force with smaller soldiers and smaller horses.

Innel’s Folly.

And no one would blame Lismar.

He reached across his body, groping for the arrow, thinking to drive it deeper, but of course it was gone, his shoulder and chest heavily bandaged. He looked for the bottle of tincture the doctor had given him to numb the pain of surgery, thinking that enough might kill him. But it, also, was gone.

“You should have let me die.”

“No,” she said with surprising ferocity. “Your empire and queen need you.”

He laughed at this, struck by the absurdity not only of such patriotic words, but that they had come from her.

The motion sent lances of pain through him. When he stopped, he felt exhausted.

Cern should reconsider their Cohort brothers. Sutarnan would have been a good choice for consort, had he survived the disaster at Garaya. Mulack dele Murice, then. Despite how untrustworthy he had always been, such a union would put House Murice solidly behind the crown, and that would go a long way to strengthening Cern’s rule.

Or Tok. Now that he thought of it, Tokerae dele Etallan would make an excellent consort. With no ambition to command the army, he would also be a more manageable one. With Tok by Cern’s side she would have Etallan securely in hand, the most powerful of the Houses. Her rule would be unchallenged.

But Innel remained convinced that his brother would have been the best choice of all. Prudent, sensible, and charming, Pohut would have approached the Teva with more finesse and eloquence. Not been so hasty to attack simply because Lismar wanted it. Arranged a truce that lasted more than mere hours. Charismatic as he was, he might even have persuaded the Teva to give up the gold at the very start, preventing all that had occurred.

Lismar’s strange words drifted back to him, then.

Restarn thought he was playing you against each other, but you saw through it.

They had seen that, the brothers had, again and again. When he and his brother had clearly become candidates in the very long contest for the princess, there had been plenty of attempts to divide them. But the brothers were too smart for that, of course, seeing right through every scheme that—

A sickening feeling came over him.

Seeing right through every scheme that—

No, it could not be. Innel had followed the trails of his brother’s betrayals back to every source. He had studied the letters closely; they had been written in Pohut’s own hand, which he knew perfectly. From the brusque, insulting words to the overheard conversations, he knew beyond doubt that his brother had been plotting against him. He could not have been that wrong.

He blinked, swallowed, reconsidered.

Could Restarn truly have falsified every piece of information on which Innel had based his betrayed fury? Every single letter that had arrived?

Of course he could have.

“He deceived us,” Innel muttered, fighting down nausea. “Set us against each other. Like pieces on a game board.”

“Lord Commander.”

Now he understood the years before Botaros all too clearly: his estranged brother, as betrayed as he was. Reading the same forged letters. Hearing the same seeded rumors.

But why? Because Restarn needed one of them to prevail. He had been tired of waiting, had taken the matter in hand. The king had told Innel that there was not room at the palace for two mutts. He had told Innel what he was doing, but Innel had been too distracted by politics and Cern to hear.

And of course, the old king had not credited the rumors about the seer, or he would have taken her for himself. She was merely a tool to force the brothers to Botaros, to have them engage in one final, engineered conflict.

He’d killed his brother for a betrayal of which he was innocent.

“I should have known,” he whispered. “I should have seen.”

“Lord Commander.”

It took Innel a moment to realize someone was addressing him, and then another to recall who sat by his side. The seer, who, that night in Botaros, had given him the prediction that allowed him to take his brother’s life and save his own.

Who he had worked for years to get in hand, yet whose advice he had ignored when it was inconvenient.

The seer, who now told him the future of his empire depended on him.

He searched her eyes. “Help me,” he whispered. “Help my queen.”

For a long moment she stared back. “Do you trust me, ser?”

Did he?

“No,” he answered.

She nodded. “Will you do what I tell you, anyway?”

He considered these last years, this last day, and tomorrow.

“Yes.”

Maris walked into the Arunkin camp in the wan light before dawn, cloaking herself in the shadowy colors of night.

“Maris.”

“Amarta?” She gave the young woman a quick scan. “Someone beat you hard,” she said, reaching out to take her bandaged hand.

“No,” Amarta said, pulling her hand away.

“Who did this?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

“No, I said. I don’t want your retribution, Maris. I don’t even want my own.”

“How did you know how to find me here? Ah, of course. Amarta, I’ve come to get Dirina and Pas. Innel has taken them, and—”

“I know. It will wait.”

“But—”

Amarta stepped close. “Maris, will you trust me?”

The question took Maris aback. Behind Amarta’s usual earnestness was a sort of vibrancy and intensity that she had not seen before.

How to answer? She took a deep breath.

“You mean well, I know that, but good intention is not enough. You have so few years in you, but you think your ability somehow bestows wisdom upon you, wisdom to make decisions that—” She stopped herself mid-sentence, recognizing words that Keyretura might have used.

Or that she had expected him to use. That he had not actually used, during their recent—what? Conversation? Fight?

Reconciliation?

Go to the Rift in my stead, Maris.

Looking at Amarta again, Maris realized that this was not the same young woman she had left with Tayre to deliver to the Lord Commander. What had happened in the time since then?

“Forget all that,” she said, realizing the absurdity of her own words. “In what way do you ask me to trust you now?”

Amarta reached out and took Maris’s hand in her good hand, twinning her fingers through the mage’s, and silently drew her through the camp.

After the disaster at Hanatha, Tayre decided to stop seeming to be an Arunkel soldier. The writ of safe passage he carried would do nothing to protect him from the Teva. After changing his clothes he climbed to the top of a distant tree in the thick strands to the north, finding a good view of the field.

As the sun’s first light rose above the line of the Rift, Arunkel troops marched from the camp into the valley. All but the wounded, from the looks of it, who were doubtless back at camp guarding what little they had left.

Going in full, the general was.

Teva battle histories, when scribed at all, were couched in descriptions that lacked any useful detail. Now Tayre had a chance to watch one, an opportunity he could not pass up. Indeed, this promised to be the sort of battle that many more would claim to have seen than could possibly have been here.

Depending on who took the day, that was.

Across the fields, columns of Arunkel soldiers formed into blocks, swords and spears gleaming in the dawn’s light. The center vanguard was slightly forward, sleeves of archers flanking spearmen, two thick lines of cavalry on the flanks. A small company fell back from the vanguard to surround the general. She was taking no chances.

Overall, an unsurprising formation, one that had worked for Arunkel many times on many fields. Tayre found it aesthetically pleasing, almost, this geometric precision.

The Teva, on the other hand, for whom Arunkel was thus arrayed, were a bare handful, the striped shaota and riders prancing back and forth between the Arunkel army and the town of Ote, tails swishing, heads tossing. They seemed relaxed, as if out for a pleasure ride, rather than facing thousands of Arunkel soldiers intending to kill them.

If the Teva were anywhere near as formidable as rumor held, this promised to be quite a show.

He wondered what the seer was doing.

Amarta and Maris stood by the Lord Commander’s bed, watching as he slept.

“Will he die?” Amarta asked.

Nalas, eyes a bloodshot red, slumped in a chair nearby, lifted his head, watching the women warily.

“Very likely,” Maris said. “What pierced him was far from clean. His body is now hot with battle. His shoulder is mangled. Even if he manages to live, it will never be right again. But surely you know all this?”