The seneschal showed me to a sitting room in the royal residence, a space as grey and black as the city outside. No lamps were lit, despite the gloom. Coran Mourne, new Righ of Ilesia, Ard-righ-apparent, paced along the curve of the room’s outer wall, crushing a visible path in the intricately woven rug and chewing on a thumbnail. He was already dressed all in white, with his usually luxurious fall of blond hair shorn short in mourning and the righ’s torc looking uncomfortably tight around his bull neck. He looked up as I ducked into the doorway, pausing. The tension and grief in his broad face eased.
“Ellion!” Coran said, crossing the room to embrace me. “Great Lord Ilesan, it was good of you to come!”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I clasped Coran tightly. A man’s transition from tanist to righ seems to be even more confusing for the people around him, as if that could be possible. Everyone else would be tentative and withdrawn with Coran for the better part of a twelvenight; I would not be a part of that sudden emptiness. “What happened?”
“Cuill—wine. The Ard-harpist and I will have wine,” Coran said to the seneschal. The man bowed and withdrew.
Coran stepped away and resumed his course around the edge of the room, periodically glancing through the slits at the crows wheeling outside.
“The kharr,” he said. “Naturally, the kharr. How could we not have seen this coming? Athramail thinks it was the Bard’s Wizard who span the breach.”
I nodded. The man called the Bard of Arcadia, the leader of the rebel kharr, had recruited a renegade wizard to his cause. No one knew who the renegade was: the appellation Bard’s Wizard had been inevitable.
“It wasn’t—the breach wasn’t in the outer wall,” Coran said, still pacing.
“Where, then?”
“Here. The residence.”
“Fouzh,” I said. The arcane part of the job had been very subtle, unless the Bard’s Wizard had been here himself. To work inside another man’s arcane defenses without disrupting them is next to impossible.
“Was he captured?”
“The assassin? The spy?” Coran shook his head. “The gods granted me no such pleasure. For all I know, the man still walks within these walls.”
Coran turned and retraced his steps to the far end of the chamber, his face a map of the methods he would have used to extract every possible scrap of information from his father’s murderer. Suddenly he stopped, looking at me.
“Damn it all, where is my head? Ellion, will you sit?”
“It’s not necessary—”
“And where is that wine? Cuill!”
A boy of nine or ten hurried into the room, a decanter and glasses chattering on a tray. I nearly rescued the tray from the boy’s white-knuckled grasp, sure the decanter would fall to the floor and splash all present with blood-colored wine. That ill omen on top of crows might be the grace stroke for Coran’s usually unshakable composure. But pages must learn to conduct themselves with dignity under the most adverse of circumstances; I watched as boy and tray made their precarious way to the safe harbor of a table, and the child executed a point-on perfect bow and scurried away.
“Well, then,” Coran said. “Let’s sit.”
The righ settled, with exquisite gentleness born of countless broken articles of furniture, into a chair that would have swallowed most men whole. His immense muscular frame made the chair look in perfect proportion to the room. I took up the seat opposite, tension easing. One of the pleasures of our friendship was time spent in the company of a man with whom it was easy to feel the world was too small, rather than my own size that was amiss. I offered the righ a little salute with the glass.
“Abu al-righ,” I said, Hail forever.
Pain twisted Coran’s face. He drained his glass quickly, refilled it, rose and sat down again.
“I’m sorry,” Coran said, voice gravelly. “The day came far too fast. Let’s not—How about a game of chess?”
“Chess?” I echoed. I was tempted to break my long-standing moratorium against looking into other people’s minds. I knew Coran as well as any man; what horrors could I possibly find in there that would outweigh what I carried inside myself? But I’d learned the hard way that knowing too much about what goes on inside other men’s heads makes it difficult to like them. And Coran was the only real friend I’d had in ten years.
“If you like,” I said finally.
We set up the board in silence. Once we began to play, Coran stopped glancing outside at the crows, and the conversation turned to calmer topics: the arrivals of Coran’s tiarna and other vassals for tonight’s pyre; the expected improvement in the weather in time for the ceremony; the feast being prepared for afterward. Coran was an excellent chess player, but I had seen all his strategies before; and the one he was developing could only be characterized as tired. In five moves, he would land his king’s admiral to the queen’s side, and that would be the beginning of my checkmate.
“Of all enemies, a bard,” Coran said. “How does a man defeat a bard? He shouldn’t be able to do what he’s doing at all.”
I made a sympathetic noise and moved my king’s knight into position.
“Who musters for him?” Coran continued. “Who commands the companies in the field?” He sighed. “Of course it’s not like that.” Out came his queen’s wizard, right on schedule.
“Not from what I hear.” The kharr didn’t have a proper army: just spies, and pirates, and farmers and tradesmen who suddenly took up makeshift arms. I saw no honor in any of it, just madness in the name of a false god. I sidestepped the trap awaiting my queen three moves hence and moved a pawn instead.
Coran sat back in his chair, surveying the board with a look of disgust, then turned that same look on me. “You already know. Damn you.”
He sighed and looked down at the board again, plotting a new strategy.
“I shall be grateful to have your sharp eye beside mine, when the time comes to order the strategy at Teamair,” Coran said without looking up.
I flinched. Coran was right to be thinking beyond the election of the next ard-righ to the battles the ard-righ must lead, and to expect that he would be the one the righthe chose. But the high throne of the ard-righ should have been mine, and it would bypass me through no one’s fault but my own.
Finally, realization hit me, with all the force of a charging destrier. I knew what would happen this spring: a grand moot. I had known since the ard-righ died. But now I really grasped what a grand moot would mean. It would take place on Bealtan Day; my old teacher Amien would summon all the righthe, and probably a number of tiarna, to the moot grounds outside Teamair. They would all be there, every man I had spent the last ten years avoiding: Amien and Uncle Pariccan; Sanglin and Dandem and every other wizard I knew. I would be summoned, too; and to refuse the summons of the Prince of the Aballo Order means absolute exile.
Everyone of consequence would know all the details of my disgrace, and those who didn’t would soon hear the tale: the untimely death of my parents, the way Uncle Pariccan raised the Tellan tiarna against me and wrested the righ’s torc from my neck. As long as Pariccan failed to produce a male heir, I was, arguably, once again next in line for the throne; but that would never happen. Tellan memory is longer than that. It would be as if ten years of self-imposed exile had never been.
I slumped back and leaned my head against the top of the chair, staring at the shadows on the arched ceiling.
“I need you beside me now, Ellion,” Coran said. “You’re the only man in Ilnemedon who can keep me honest.”
I laughed. It sounded empty in my own ears. Coran was looking at me again: I sat up and met the righ’s gaze.
“Listen, I know—Look, there’s no point in discussing ancient history,” Coran continued. “But you and I both know you’re absolutely wasted as a harpist.”
“Ah, Coran,” I began, pushing the chair back from the table.
“No, really, listen. You are one of the great military minds of our time. You should be ordering the field, not singing about it afterward.”
There was no arguing with this truth. I could have ordered both the military and the arcane aspects of the war creeping eastward across the human lands, from the ard-righ’s throne. It was what I had been born to do.
“I have decided to grant you the Tiarnate of Louth and the title of Ard-tiarn,” Coran said, grey hawk-eyes steady on mine. “And I’d like you to stay on here in Ilnemedon as War-Lord.”
Not merely tiarn, but ard-tiarn: Lord Most High. Coran’s affection for me had always been unqualified; he was the one man to whom my undefined status didn’t seem to matter. But the new righ was a proud man. If I didn’t accept the title, the insult might be more than our friendship could bear. And there was no way I could accept.
“Hell, you could marry that woman none of us ever meet—What’s her name?”
“Laverna,” I said, before I could control the impulse. Shock flashed in Coran’s face: Laverna is a goddess of the old religion, the patroness of whores.
I shook my head, rising. “There’s no woman, Coran. It’s kind of you to offer, but you of all men should understand I can’t—”
“Can’t what?” Coran’s fair face flushed. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to lay aside a title! That ship has long since sailed!”
With a gale-force wind in the tail. But to accept Coran’s offer would remove me irrevocably from the rank of royalty, however dark and ill-explored a corner of that rank I might now occupy.
I bowed, throat tight. “I thank you, my lord. Your offer is beyond generous. But what I need you cannot give me, and my presence among your peerage would be nothing but a source of strife.”
“Hardly more than your presence among my vassals’ wives!”
I bowed again. “My military mind remains ever at your disposal—”
“If you truly think a deposed righ of an upstart backwater commands more honor than the Ard-tiarn of Ilesia, you’re a greater fool than anyone imagined!”
An upstart backwater. Only the righ of Ilesia could hold such a view of Tellan, the nation chartered by the goddess Tella Herself. But Coran was angry, and with good reason: I inclined my head.
“I’m sorry. I will miss your father—but I have absolute faith in you. I’ll see you this evening.”
“Get the hell out.”
