The Scepter's Return Read online

  Afterwards, they both dressed quickly. “These to remember the day,” Lanius said, and gave her a pair of gold hoops to wear in her ears.

  “Thank you, Your Majesty,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that, though.”

  “I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to,” Lanius answered. He thought she meant what she’d said. She wasn’t greedy or pushy. He didn’t care for people who were. Nothing would make him break off a liaison faster than someone pushing him for presents.

  He coughed once or twice. No, that wasn’t quite true. Sosia finding out about an affair could make him break it off in nothing flat. He was reasonably, or even more than reasonably, discreet, and he tried to pick partners who wouldn’t blab. It didn’t always work. He didn’t like remembering what happened when it didn’t.

  This dalliance wasn’t going anywhere. Even if his wife didn’t learn of it, Oissa would find someone she wanted to marry, or else Lanius would tire of her. But it was pleasant. He enjoyed the variety. What point to being a king if he couldn’t enjoy himself once in a while?

  After a last kiss, he slipped out of the little room. No servants were walking along the corridor. Lanius nodded to himself. No scandal this time—not even a raised eyebrow.

  Had things been different, Grus might have gotten furious at him for being unfaithful to his daughter. But Grus had been known to enjoy himself every once in a while even before he became a king; Arch-Hallow Anser was living proof of that. And he hadn’t stopped after he wore a crown. He was hardly one to tell Lanius what to do and what not to.

  Lanius hoped everything down in the south was still going well. Grus’ letters were encouraging, but they took longer to come back to the city of Avornis than Lanius would have liked. He knew the Avornans were over the Stura and disenchanting thralls. That they’d done so much was reason enough to celebrate. But Lanius wanted them to push on to Yozgat. Like Grus, he cared more about the Scepter of Mercy than anything else.

  He could have known more, of course, if he’d campaigned with Grus. He shook his head at the mere idea. The one battlefield he’d seen was plenty to persuade him he never wanted to see another. Listening to vultures and ravens and carrion crows quarreling over corpses, watching them peck at dead men’s eyes and tongues and other dainties, smelling the outhouse and butcher’s-shop reek, hearing dying men groan and wounded men shriek … No, once was enough for a lifetime.

  He supposed he ought to be grateful to Grus for going on campaign. The other king had already usurped half—more than half—the throne. He couldn’t want anything else. If Lanius had had to send out generals to do his fighting for him, he would always have been as afraid of great victories as of great defeats. A great victory was liable to make a general think he deserved a higher station. Since only one higher station was available, that wouldn’t have been good for Lanius. He didn’t think many usurpers would have worked out the arrangement Grus had.

  While he mused on bad usurpers and worse ones, his feet, almost by themselves, took him to the archives. He went inside eagerly enough. The smile on his face had only so much to do with the hope of finding that missing traveler’s tale. As he had with other women before her, he’d brought Oissa here once or twice. It was quiet; it was peaceful; they were unlikely to be disturbed—and they hadn’t been, at least not by anyone banging on the door. It was also dusty, here, though, and sneezing at the wrong time had put him off his stride and made Oissa laugh, which put her off hers.

  “Business,” Lanius reminded himself. The smile didn’t want to go away, though. He let it stay. Why not?

  Even smiling, he did want to look for that missing tale. What annoyed him most was that he usually had a good memory for where he’d put things. Not this time, though. Most of his pride revolved around his wits. When they let him down, he felt he’d failed in some fundamental fashion. It rarely happened, and was all the more troubling because of that.

  “It has to be here,” he said. Although true, that didn’t help much. No one knew better than he how vast—and how disorganized—the archives were.

  He pawed through crates and barrels and plucked documents off shelves. He had to look at each parchment or sheet of paper separately, because things got stored all higgledy-piggledy. A paper from his reign could lie next to or on top of a parchment centuries old. Before long, his smile faded. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d be here forever, or half an hour longer.

  That less than delightful thought had hardly crossed his mind before he let out a shout of triumph that came echoing back from the ceiling. There it was! He swore under his breath. That crate looked familiar—now. Not so long before, he’d moved it to get at some other documents, and forgotten he’d done it.

  Lanius started to take the traveler’s tale to a secretary who could make a fair copy. He hadn’t gotten to the doorway before he stopped and shook his head. The fewer people who knew anything about what he had in mind, the better. I’ll make the fair copy myself, he decided. Now he found himself nodding. Yes, that would be better, no doubt about it.

  Before long, he would put carpenters and masons to work. But they wouldn’t know why they were doing what they were doing. And what they didn’t know, nobody could find out from them … not even the Banished One.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Grus never got tired of watching Avornan wizards free thralls from the dark mists that had held them all their lives. Part of that was pride at the magic Pterocles had created that he and and other wizards were using. And part of it was simply that the spell of liberation was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. The rainbows arising from the swinging crystal and then spinning around and into a thrall’s head were wonderful enough by themselves. The expression on each thrall’s face when the mists dissolved, though—that was even better.

  “How does it feel to be a mother?” the king asked Pterocles after another successful sorcery.

  The wizard frowned. “A mother, Your Majesty?”

  “You’re giving birth to people, aren’t you?” Grus said. “I didn’t think a man could. I should be jealous.”

  “Giving birth to people …” Pterocles savored the words. A slow smile spread over his face. “I like that.”

  “Good. You ought to. How well this would work was my biggest worry when we crossed the Stura,” Grus said. “It’s gone better than I dared hope. It’s gone better than anyone dared hope, I think. What do you suppose the Banished One is thinking right now?”

  “I don’t know. Please don’t ask me to try to find out, either.” Pterocles sounded even more earnest than usual. “For me to get inside his mind would be like one of Lanius’ moncats trying to understand my sorcery here. The Banished One … is what he is. Don’t expect a mere mortal to understand him.”

  “All right.” Grus had hoped the wizard might be able to do just that. But he had no trouble seeing Pterocles’ point. “Let me ask it in a different way, then—how happy do you think he is?”

  “How happy would you have been if the Menteshe had started turning peasants into thralls the last time they invaded Avornis?” Pterocles asked in turn.

  That had been one of Grus’ worst fears. One reason he’d counterattacked so hard and so quickly was to make sure the nomads’ wizards didn’t get settled enough to do anything of the sort. He muttered to himself. “How will he try to stop us?” he asked.

  Now Pterocles just looked at him. “I don’t have the faintest idea, Your Majesty. But I expect we’ll find out. Don’t you?”

  Grus didn’t answer. That wasn’t because he felt any doubts—he didn’t. On the contrary; he was so sure Pterocles was right that he didn’t think the question needed answering.

  He had expected the Banished One to bend every bit of his power toward making sure the Menteshe broke off their civil war and turned all their ferocity against the advancing Avornans. That didn’t seem to be happening … or maybe the Banished One’s puppets had escaped the control of their puppet master for the time being. Small raiding
bands struck at Grus’ army—struck and, in classic nomad fashion, galloped away again before Grus’ less mobile forces could hit back. But those were pinpricks, fleabites. Menteshe prisoners affirmed that the nomads were still using most of their energy to hammer away at one another.

  A dispatch rider down from the north let Grus take his mind off the Menteshe for a little while. Among the letters the man brought was a long one from King Lanius. Lanius was conscientious about keeping Grus up to date on what he did in the capital. He probably feared Grus would oust him if he didn’t tell him what he was up to—and he might have been right.

  That afternoon, Grus frowned to see that Lanius hadn’t approved a tax hike. There would probably be a letter—an angry letter—from the treasury minister in this batch, too. I’ll look for it later, Grus thought, and read on. He ended up disappointed. That wasn’t because Lanius didn’t justify his reasons for opposing the increase. He did, in great detail. They even made a good deal of sense. But the bulk of the letter was an even more detailed account of how the other king was training a moncat. If Lanius wanted a hobby, Grus didn’t mind. If he wanted to bore people with it … That was a different story.

  The king went through the leather dispatch case. He was looking for the inevitable letter from Euplectes, but found one from the city of Sestus first. Unlike Lanius’, it was short and to the point. Alauda could scarcely write. She scratched out three or four lines to let him know she and her son, Nivalis, were both well. Grus smiled—he was glad to have the news. Nivalis was his son, too, a bastard he’d sired on Alauda a few years before, while he was driving the Menteshe out of the southern provinces.

  He did find the treasury minister’s letter then. Reading it came as something of a relief. Euplectes was indignant about Lanius’ stubbornness, but he wasn’t furious. Even if he were furious, it would only have been a bureaucratic kind of anger. Compared to the rage of a wife who’d just found out her husband was unfaithful—again—fusses and fumings over tax rates were easy enough to put up with.

  Grus snapped his fingers. Calling the dispatch rider, he asked, “How was the trip down from the Stura?”

  “Not bad, Your Majesty,” the fellow answered. “No, not bad at all, matter of fact. There was one time when I thought a couple of those nomad bastards might take after me, but they spotted a troop of our horsemen and sheered off right smart. Aside from that, I didn’t see a one of ’em all the way down. Didn’t miss ’em, neither.”

  “I believe you,” Grus said. “All right. Thanks. That’s good news.”

  “You think you can keep the line open all the way down to this Yozgat place?” the rider asked.

  “I don’t know,” Grus said—that was the question, all right. “But I aim to try.”

  Sosia looked at Lanius as though he’d lost his mind. “You’re going to build this … this thing off in the country somewhere, and you’re going to spend a lot of your time there? You?” Maybe she thought she was losing her mind instead. She certainly didn’t seem to believe her ears.

  But the King of Avornis only nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Why?” his wife demanded. “Sweet Quelea’s mercy, why? If Anser told me that, I’d understand. He’d want it for a hunting villa. Ortalis, too. But you?” Again, disbelief filled her voice. “You don’t care about hunting. We both know that. You don’t care about anything except the archives and.…” Her gaze sharpened. Sudden suspicion filled her eyes. “If you think you can put some pretty little thing in this place and go have your fun with her whenever you please, you’d better think again.”

  “No, no, no.” Lanius protested louder than he might have, for that had occurred to him. A little reluctantly, he threw the idea in the dustbin. “Come out whenever you please. Don’t tell me you’re on the way ahead of time. If you find me with a woman there, do whatever you want. I’ll deserve it, and I won’t say a word. By the gods, Sosia, I won’t. That’s not why I’m doing this.”

  She studied him. “Maybe,” she said at last. “You don’t usually come right out and lie to me. When you want to hide something, you usually just don’t say anything about it at all.”

  “Well, then,” he said, trying not to show how disconcerted he was. She knew him pretty well, all right. He’d spent the past few months not saying anything at all about Oissa, whom Sosia saw several times a day. Seeing her and noticing her were two different things, though.

  “Maybe,” the queen repeated. “But if you don’t want to put a bedwarmer in it, why do you want to build something out in the country?”

  Lanius didn’t say anything about that at all.

  Sosia glared. “Next thing you know, you’ll tell me it’s got to do with the war against the Banished One, and you’ll expect me to believe that.”

  Of itself, Lanius’ hand twisted in the gesture that was supposed to keep the Banished One from paying any attention to what was going on. He didn’t really believe the gesture did any good, but it couldn’t hurt. “Don’t talk about such things,” he told her. “Just—don’t. I don’t know how much danger it might cause. It might not cause any. On the other hand, it might cause more than you can imagine.” He walked over to her and set his hands on her shoulders. “I mean it.”

  She didn’t shake him off. “You do,” she agreed wonderingly.

  “Yes, I do,” he answered, “and I wish I didn’t have to tell you even that much.” He knew it was his own fault that he did. He’d given her reason to doubt he was faithful. He wasn’t as faithful as he might have been (he thought of Oissa again, and of the smell of cedar). But this didn’t have anything to do with that, and he had to convince her it didn’t.

  “All right.” Sosia still didn’t shake him off. Instead, she stepped forward and gave him a quick hug. Then she said, “I’m still going to come out and check on you every so often, and I won’t tell you when.”

  “Fine,” Lanius said. Keep thinking it might be a love nest. Then you won’t think about what else it might be. He felt ashamed of himself. If he couldn’t tell things to Sosia, to whom could he?

  No sooner had he asked himself the question than he found the answer. It wasn’t no one, either, as he’d thought it would be. He could talk to Grus, to Pterocles, even to Collurio. They all shared one thing—they’d drawn the Banished One’s special notice. Lanius would rather have done without the honor, but the choice didn’t seem to be his.

  Sosia, on the other hand, knew nothing of such nighttime visits. For her, the world was a simpler, safer place. The king wanted to keep it that way for her if he could.

  Three days later, he rode out into the country with Collurio, looking for the right place to build. The trainer said, “You’re taking a chance, you know.”

  “Oh, yes.” Lanius nodded. “If things go wrong, though, we can start over. We have the time to do this, and we have the time to do it properly. Things aren’t moving very fast south of the Stura.”

  “Should they be?” Collurio asked.

  “I can’t tell you that. I’m not a general. I never wanted to be a general. There are some things I’m good at, but that isn’t one of them,” Lanius answered. “But if this whole business were easy, some other King of Avornis would have done it three hundred years ago. You know what we’re up against.”

  The day was fine and bright and sunny. Collurio turned pale all the same. “Yes, Your Majesty. I do know that.” He scratched the tip of his big nose. “Who would have thought that teaching an animal tricks would teach me such things?”

  “You aren’t the only one who has it,” Lanius said. “Remember that. And remember one more thing—you’re the right man for this job because you have it.” Collurio nodded, but every line of his body said he would rather have been the wrong man. Lanius felt the same way, but the choice wasn’t theirs. It lay in the hands of the Banished One—the hands Lanius had seen reaching out for him more than once just before he woke up with pounding heart and staring eyes.

  They rode on, bodyguards flanking them but far enough away
to let them talk without being overheard. Here and there, farmers worked in vegetable plots and berry patches or tended pigs and chickens. This close to the ever-hungry capital, they raised produce to sell rather than feeding themselves with what they grew. They didn’t run away when they saw armored men on horseback, either, the way most peasants did.

  Thrushes hopped about, looking for bugs and worms under trees. A squirrel chittered in a treetop. Somewhere not far away, a woodpecker drummed. A rabbit ran through a meadow. Half a heartbeat later, a fox followed like a flash of flame.

  “How will you know what you want, Your Majesty?” Cullurio asked.

  “When I see it, I’ll know,” Lanius said.

  And he did. Willows grew alongside the bank of a stream, their branches dipping down almost to the water. Metallically yammering kingfishers dove after fish. Near the stream, a meadow stretched out away toward a stand of forest off in the distance. No one’s cattle or sheep grazed the meadow; the tumbledown ruin of what had been a farmer’s hut said nobody had worked the land for a long time. Maybe things weren’t perfect, but they were more than good enough.

  “Here,” Lanius declared. That was the advantage of being a king—when he said here, here it would be.

  Hirundo bowed to King Grus. “Well, Your Majesty, you were right.”

  “You say the sweetest things,” Grus answered, and the general guffawed. Grus went on, “Here he comes now. Look ferocious.”

  “Grr.” Hirundo bared his teeth. Grus glared at him—that was overacting at its worst. But the Menteshe riding in under a flag of truce was still too far away to notice his mugging. By the time the nomad and the Avornan cavalrymen surrounding him drew near, Hirundo was somber as a pyre builder. Given his usual high spirits, that was overacting, too, but the Menteshe wouldn’t recognize it as such.