Conservation of Shadows (25 page)

“I am trying to decide whether you are very thoughtless or very clever,” Vathré said softly. “Who are you and why are you here?”

“I was the sword at the emperor’s side,” he answered, “and that sword was nameless.” The pale-haired man closed his eyes, opened them. “My name is Marten. I came because the emperor has thousands of swords now, to do his bidding; and I no longer found that bidding to my taste.”

Vathré glanced down at the Blade Fidora. Its color remained clear and true. “An interesting time to change your loyalties—if, indeed, they’ve changed. You might have found a better way to leave than by showing up here in full uniform, scaring the guards out of their wits.”

“I left when the demons were . . . subduing a village,” Marten said flatly. “I don’t know the village’s name. I hardly had time to find more suitable attire, my lord, and on campaign one dresses in uniform as a matter of course. To do otherwise would have aroused suspicion.”

“And you weren’t afraid of being caught and killed on the spot?” one of the advisers demanded.

He shrugged. “I was taught three spells in my training. One allowed me to walk unharmed through the palace wards. One calls fire from blood. And the last lets me pass by like the dream of a ghost.”

Biantha glanced at the Blade Fidora and its unwavering light.

Lady Iastre coughed. “Forgive me if I’m less well-informed than I ought to be,” she said, “and slow to react as well—but you mentioned being ‘on campaign.’ Is this a common thing, that ‘the sword at the emperor’s side’ should be out in the field?”

Marten’s eyes moved toward the source of the voice, and so he caught sight of Biantha. He inhaled sharply. Biantha felt her face freeze, though she longed to smile at the stranger her son had become.
Answer,
she wished him.
Say you’ve come to me after so many years—

Marten gathered himself and said, “I came to warn you, if nothing else; death is a price I have taken from many.” His voice shook, but he continued to face Vathré squarely. “The demon emperor has come, and your battles will be the harder for it.” Then the whispers began, and even Iastre cast troubled eyes toward Biantha; the light of the Blade Fidora reflected all the shades of fear, all the colors of despair, that were voiced. “Please,” Marten said, raising his voice but slightly, “let me help. My lord, I may be slow in learning that there is more to war than following orders. That there are people who die for their homes or their families—”

“Families,” Biantha repeated, tasting bitterness. So calm, his face, like polished metal. She felt Iastre’s hand on her arm and forced a smile.

The whispers had died down, and Marten faltered. “I know how the emperor thinks,” he said at last. “Let me help you there, my lord, or have me killed. Either way, you will have taken the emperor’s champion from him.”

So pale, his face, like Fidora’s light. Biantha caught her breath, waiting for Vathré to speak.

Lines of strain etched the lord’s face as he left the throne to stand before Marten. “Will you swear fealty to the Watchlands and their lord, then?”

Marten did not flinch. “Yes.”

Yes,
echoed Biantha, doubt biting her heart. She had not known, when she first came to Evergard, what powers the Blade Fidora possessed. A magician-smith had died in its forging, that there might never again be a traitor like Lord Mière. Vathré had questioned Biantha, as he had just questioned Marten, and the first part of the sword’s virtue had been plain to her, a mirror of spoken minds.

Only later had Vathré told her the second part, that a false oath sworn upon the sword killed the oath-taker. Once an heir to Evergard had sworn guardianship to the Watchlands and their people and fallen dead. Once a weary soldier had woken Evergard’s lady three hours before dawn to confess a betrayal planned, and then committed suicide. Biantha had no desire to find her son the subject of another story, another song. How had Paienne felt, she wondered suddenly, when her father’s treachery became part of the Nightbreak War’s history?

Marten laid his hand upon the glass-clear blade. “I swear it.” Then, swallowing, he looked directly at Biantha.

She could not bring herself to trust him, even after the long years, when he wore a uniform like his father’s. This time, she did turn away.

“There’s something sinful,” said Iastre, fingers running round and round a captured draughts piece, “in sitting here playing a game when our world is falling apart.”

Biantha smiled uncertainly and considered her options. “If I stayed in my room and fretted about it all the time, I should go mad.” She nudged one of her pieces to a new square, musing on how the symmetry of the game—red on black, black on black—had soon been spoiled by their moves.

“I hear it was Marten’s planning that kept the demons from overrunning Silverbridge so far.”

She looked up and saw Iastre’s worried expression. “A good thing, I suppose—especially considering that the emperor now has a personal reason for wanting to humble the Watchlands.”

“Surely you don’t think he should have stayed in the emperor’s service,” Iastre protested.

Oh, but he did once,
Biantha did not say. “It’s your move.”

A snort. “Don’t change the subject on me now. You fled the emperor’s palace too, if you’ll recall.”

“Too well,” she agreed. She had slept poorly the first few years at Evergard, hearing danger in the footfalls that passed by her door and dreaming of the emperor’s serpent-eyed scepter upon her own shoulder. “But I left in a time of peace, and as terrible a crime as I had committed, I was only a human mathemagician. Besides,”—and Biantha drew in a shaky breath—“they knew they had my son: punishment enough.”

Iastre shook her head and finally made her move. “He’s here now, and he may be our only hope.”

“That,” she said, “is what worries me.”

Even here, playing draughts, Biantha found no escape from Marten. She had spotted him once in the courtyard, sparring against Evergard’s best soldiers while a healer and several enchanters looked on, lest the former champion seek a life instead of a touch. At mealtimes in the great hall she took to eating at the far end of the high table; yet over the clinking glasses and silverware, the tense voices and rustling clothes, Biantha heard Marten and Vathré speaking easily with each other. Evergard’s lord trusted Marten—they all trusted Marten now, while she dared not.

Like a pendulum, her thoughts swung between her son and Paienne, her son and Lord Mière. Late at night, when she walked the battlements listening vainly for the footfalls of marching soldiers, feeling betrayal’s cold hand in every tremor of the wind, she remembered tales of the Nightbreak War. Biantha had never put much faith in the minstrels’ embellished ballads, but the poetry preyed upon her fears.

Working with fragments of history and the military reports that came in daily, she attempted to map past onto future, battle onto battle . . . betrayal onto betrayal. And failed, over and over. And cursed the Prophecy, staring at the worn and inscrutable pages, alone in her room. It was during one of those bouts that a familiar knocking startled her from her work.

Marten?
thought Biantha involuntarily. But she had learned the rhythm of Vathré’s tread, and when she opened the door she knew who waited behind it. The twin edges of relief and disappointment cut her heart.

The gray-haired man looked her up and down, and scowled. “I thought you might be overworking yourself again.”

She essayed a smile, stepping aside so he could enter. “Overwork, my lord? Tell that to the soldiers who train, and fight, and die for it, or see their friends die for it. Tell that to the cook or the servants in the keep.”

“There are ways and ways of work, my dear.” He paced around the chamber, casting a curious eye over her bookcase and her cluttered desk, then rested a hand on her shoulder. “Perhaps I should come back later, when you’ve rested—and I do mean rest, not sitting in bed to read your books rather than sitting at your desk.”

Biantha craned her head back to glance at him. “At least tell me why you came.”

“Marten,” he said bluntly, releasing her shoulder.

She flinched.

“You’re hurting the boy,” Vathré said. “He’s been here quite a while and you haven’t said a word to him.”

She arched an eyebrow. “He’s not the boy I left behind, my lord.” Her voice nearly broke.

“I’m old enough to call you a girl, Lady Biantha. Don’t quibble. Even I can’t find cause to mistrust him, and the years have made me paranoid.”

“Oh?” She ran her fingers over her copy of the Prophecy, worn smooth by years of on-and-off study. By all accounts, Marten’s advice was sound—but the demons kept coming.

“I’m sending him to command at Silverbridge.” Vathré shook his head. “We’ve held out as long as we can, but it looks like our efforts have been no more than a delaying action. I haven’t told the council yet, but we’re going to have to withdraw to Aultgard.” He exhaled softly. “Marten will keep the demons occupied while the bulk of the army retreats.”

Biantha stared at him.

“The soldiers are coming to trust him, you know,” he remarked. “He’s perhaps the best tactician Evergard has seen in the past couple generations, and I want to see if that trust is justified.”

She closed her eyes and said, “A gamble, my lord. Wouldn’t you do better to put someone else in charge?”

Vathré ignored her question. “I thought you should know before I announce it.”

“Thank you, my lord.” Biantha paused, then added, “Do you know where Marten might be at the moment?”

He smiled sadly. “Haunting the battlements, hoping you will stop by.”

She bowed her head and, after he had left, went to search for her son. Biantha found him by the southern tower, a sword sheathed at his back. Even now it disconcerted her to see him in the dress of Evergard’s soldiers, as if her mind refused to surrender that first image of Marten standing before the court in red and black and gold.

“Mother,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back.

Slowly, reluctantly, she faced him. “I’m here.”

Moonlight pooled in his eyes and glittered in the tears that streaked his face. “I remember,” he said without accusation. “I was seven years old and you told me to pack. You were arguing with Father.”

Biantha nodded. Marten had nearly reached the age where he would have to begin training as either a magician or a soldier, or forfeit what little protection his parents’ status gave him. Over the years, as their son grew older, she spoke to her husband of leaving the demons’ empire to seek refuge in the Watchlands or the realms further east. He always treated her kindly, without ever turning an eye to the courtesans—demon and human both—who served those the emperor favored.

Yet Biantha had never forgotten her husband’s puzzlement, molting slowly into anger, that she should wish to leave a court that sheltered them, though it did nothing to shelter others. She could not reconcile herself to the demons’ casual cruelty: one of the emperor’s nieces sent, after an ill-advised duel, to redeem her honor by riding a horse to the mines of Sarmont and back, five days and back forcing a terrified beast to carry her. The pale-eyed assassin who had fallen from favor after killing the rebellious lady of Reis Keep, solely because he had left evidence of his work. Children drowned after a plague blinded them and clouded their wits. If anything, the demons were as cruel to each other as to the humans who lived among and below them, but Biantha had found less and less comfort in that knowledge.

“I stood in the doorway,” Marten went on, “trying to understand. Then Father was weeping—”

She had said to her husband,
If you will not come, then I must go without you.

“—and he drew his sword against you.”

“And I killed him,” Biantha said, dry-mouthed. “I tried to get you to come with me, but you wouldn’t leave him. You started to cry. I had little time, and there were ever guards nearby, listening for anything amiss. So I went alone. It would have been my death to stay after murdering one of the emperor’s officers. In the end, the emperor’s trust meant more to him than you or I.”

“Please don’t leave me again,” Marten whispered. He stood straight-backed in the darkness, the hilt of the sword at his back peering over his shoulder like a sleepy eye, but his face was taut. “I am leaving for Silverbridge tomorrow.”

“Will you be at the forefront?”

“It would be unwise.” His mouth tightened for a moment. “I will be giving orders.”

“To kill.”
And, perhaps, be killed,
she wanted to say, but the words fluttered in her throat.

Marten met her gaze calmly. “It is war, Mother.”

“It is now,” she agreed, “but it wasn’t before. I know what it is to be the emperor’s champion. ‘The sword at the emperor’s side,’ you said. The others heard the words only; they have never lain awake and sleepless for memory of bloodstains on a pale rug, or because of the sudden, silenced cries at night. How many fell to your blade, Marten?”

“I came to follow you when I started losing count.” His eyes were dry, now, though Biantha saw the shapes of pain stirring behind them. “When the numbers started slipping out of my grasp.”

Biantha held silence before her like a skein of threads that wanted words to untangle it.

He lifted a hand, hesitated, let it drop. “I wanted to talk to you once, if never again. Before I go to Silverbridge where the demons await.”

She smiled at him, then. But always the suspicion remained that he had some way of breaking his oath to Vathré, that the demon emperor had sent him to ensure the Watchlands’ downfall through some subtle plan—or, more simply, that he had come to betray the mother he had abandoned, who had abandoned him; she no longer knew which.

“Go, then,” said Biantha, neither promise nor peril in her voice, and left him to await dawn alone.

Four days later, Biantha stood before her bookcase, eyes roaming aimlessly over her collection of mathemagical works, some in the tight, angular script of the demon empire, others in the ornate writing common to the Watchlands’ scholars.
There has to be something useful,
she told herself, even after having scoured everything that looked remotely relevant. Now, more than ever, she wished she had talent for another of the magical disciplines, which did not rely on memorized proofs or the vagaries of inspiration, though none of them had ever seemed to get far with the Prophecy.