Chapter Text
The man who is about to die says, Marika has betrayed us.
The words move sinuously through the halls of the tower, flitting under eaves, over crenellations and spilling into the cracks between stones. They float upward, on a column of grey-dusted light, to the great glaring eye of the athenaeum, open to the sky. They move through the ranks, finding the chinks in armour, filling the reservoirs of his soldiers’ minds until they overflow with disbelief.
Whispered, they rattle the ground beneath him like a siege engine.
Though the words do not move him, they taste acrid to his serpents. They are an invasive press behind his eye, that pocket of flesh that still belongs to his mother. When the words touch down, they burn. There are so many things that can catch fire in this secretive, spiral hall. Parchment, specimens. Tempers. Everything in bright, humming red.
Aware of the hazard, the squire who tells him does not use those exact incendiary words. But he must know by some quality in the air, some dire intuition, what is being asked of him.
How will your Grace, my lord regent, punish treason?
It is not the same as killing Hornsent: it is not a matter of duty, but of indulgence. Treason titillates. It is a change of pace. His men will play at guessing. They will place bets and venture suggestions. All have great and extensive vocabularies, a library of cruelty to rival the athenaeum’s specimens. Treason deserves a deliberate hand, and so they ask: who will do it? Who better than the saint’s own son to excise blasphemers from the world? They say he has devised such forms of torture that one is kept alive and conscious long enough to witness the ripe fruit of their own heart pulled out, and time enough to weigh their sins before it stops beating. He thinks, A man with more pomp would use a scale.
Impalement, perhaps. He signals to the squire he will descend. No. Not impalement. Too grand a gesture for a wretch. Wordlessly, he rises.
He has put out eyes, plucked them from a head and watched their jelly surface fizzle and pop in his furnace grip. He has beheaded, and quartered. There was a time he had prisoners buried alive. A little too solemn, as he discovered - as if presiding over a funeral to which all had agreed, except the person in question. He decided then the wet, muffled pleas and dirt-caked cries annoyed him. If a man must beg, or repent, or curse his captors, let him do it in a clear voice above the rising smoke of his stake, or in the aqueous silence before a blade falls. Of late he has favoured the noose, and there are enough scaffolds at the Fort of Reprimand to hang a small battalion. There a man can pay his way to a good death: a coin in the dry hand of the hangman for rope that should end in a clean break; or a token for a blindfold before the executioner’s swift and noiseless strike.
He descends at his own pace, avoiding the wide, solemn halls that wrap around the fortress. Instead he favours the tight, labyrinthine passages that lead straight down to the south-facing ramparts, lined with unused rooms framed by uneven ceilings. The floor here is without rushes or weave, damp and slippery underfoot, and his serpents press close to him. Strange orange lichen spreads its veins through cracks in the stone, seeking the firelight. There are corners and crevices of the Black Keep that refuse to be lit by any natural fire, and so must be perpetually illuminated by his own. His alchemists and lamplighters tend those flames, which feel like parts of himself, little unconscious slivers, scattered throughout the fortress, blinking in and out of existence.
A blade, then. A Black Knight will strike clean and true, crush the prisoner’s skull under the swing of a warhammer or sever it at the neck with a silvered edge. He hears the crunch of bone, the thick spurt of gore. There is skill in beheading a man, if you do not want to watch the gruesome iniquity of tendons sagging under fitful strikes.
He frowns. No. Too fast, too clean a death. Not purposeful enough. The wretch should burn. It will have to be one of his Fire Knights. They are restless. They stand closest to him, the unbroken line of his flame stretching between them. They will understand. As if in sympathy, heat leaks from his palms.
He relished in it, before - hand up, palm open as if in blessing, or wrapped around the red-hot shaft of his spear. The simple gesture that birthed cleansing flame. The absence of thought. Giving over to the abyss, the glorification of violence. Not his violence, as he reasoned, but the rage of a people: of his mother, a thousand spear points narrowed into a single person.
Now, he is tired. Killing has become gaudy, theatrical. Its proliferation has made it less effective, and so by extension it must be more capricious, more shocking. He knows this is what keeps the attention of his men, jerks their heads back and snaps their eyes into focus. Makes them tighten their grip on this world. Escalation is necessary in this land that does not move and does not change. It prevents the gaze from wandering to the dead tree on the horizon, to the promise of the newborn god who pledged a kingdom to her defenders, to the hornless of this land, and then left them to tidy up in her wake.
Theirs is a holy violence. It is something his mother would have wanted, he is sure.
He emerges on the wide stone walkway of the ramparts. The wind is low, barely there. A good day for a controlled burn. Most days the sky looks sooty, clouded over by smoke, an effect of the veiled tree. But today he thinks he can smell it, too. Not the smoke of his own fire but the sulphurous mouthful of a lesser flame, like something burning just out of sight.
Against the horizon, a small gathering of his forces manifests: his Black Knights glossy as polished jet, his Fire Knights liquid in their streaking crimson. His foot soldiers mingle in an anonymous mass of leather and dull iron. Their sallow faces float above the landscape, blurred under the shadows of their caps and helms. They are never rowdy, nor boisterous. Never anything but solemn and stone-faced at an execution. They have seen enough to quiet them. Every last one is hornless, and all have done enough to reach the pinnacle of the world, to have once glimpsed the golden city, only to find themselves stuck here, under a fine layer of soot. They watch, weary; a rawness to them. Ragged and worn thin. He has used them - but that is what they are here for.
He skims over the faces. Among the incandescent figures of his Fire Knights, a beak nose beneath a falcon’s eyes - Salza, in his customary red headscarf. Beside him is Kood, helm tucked under his right arm, with the pleasant, obedient face of a well-mannered war dog. Both are his lieutenants, and both will kill on his behalf for no more than courtesy. Behind the brilliant red of their ranks, it is difficult to describe the colour, the pall of this dead land. To say that it is something, rather than it lacks something. To call it misery or degradation or despond. As shorthand, he thinks of it as grey.
At the centre of their crescent-shaped gathering, the prisoner has been given a wide berth. The sorry figure kneels, hands bound, the space around him suspiciously vacant, as if proximity might lead to contamination. Perhaps his men think treason is contagious.
He comes to a halt before the accused and studies his face. Even without the blindfold, the figure would remain unrecognisable. A member of his forces, but no one he knows. Another anaemic arrangement in boiled leather whose corpse he would step over on the field. Easier to be betrayed by a tool than a person.
He gives a perfunctory nod to Kood, but then the prisoner speaks.
“We are alone.”
There is no movement but the swirl of cloaks. Someone coughs, and leather creaks. Despite himself, he, Messmer, bends down to hear the rattle of words. With a careful movement he unknots the blindfold and lets it slip from his hand. The wretched creature jerks back in surprise before looking up at him.
“The queen has betrayed her own flesh and blood.”
Starved and bruised, the prisoner looks more corpse than man. Reason has deserted him. Time seems to have stopped behind his eyes. Messmer imagines their cloudy jelly, overheated, running down his ruined face.
“The queen is gone. The saint has told me.” A wracking cough. “The saint is come. Long live the saint!”
Saint carries brightly over the black stones. He is conscious that his men regard this as a great blasphemy. There is only one saint: his mother, who birthed their prince and his martyred sister. There are no other saints in this land. Only usurpers.
“The misshapen shadow tree is an edict: spurn all that exists.” Now the prisoner’s voice is bolder, travels farther. “Wound all that exists.”
From his serpents’ eyes he sees Kood step forward, but holds up a hand to stop him. He brings the other hand to the prisoner’s face.
Even in quivering withdrawal, the accursed’s words are clear: “For we have been abandoned.”
In a jumble of disgust and pity he can, for a moment, imagine Melina’s hands wrapped around his own face. How pleasant the cold conciliation of her reassurance. She could cajole just as readily as she could relieve his discomfort. Blooms wilted at her touch; birds ceased their song. But Death, that little black flame at her fingertips, never touched him.
He turns his wrist, long fingers spread, and places the flat of his palm against the blasphemer’s face, encompassing it. His nails dig into skin.
Melina was merciful. Perhaps it was her undoing.
The abyss inside him exhales.
Unlike Melina, when traitors burn, they do not smell like jasmine.
❦
While the realm stagnates, the Black Keep continues to grow, expanding and contracting like the breath of a great beast. Much of it has been rebuilt since the crusade began - its walls thickened and reinforced, its storehouses swollen and overflowing. Its towers multiply; its chantries gain a spire, and then another. The lower bailey is now such a sprawl that it resembles a walled city, not a fortress. When they are not marching or fighting or surging over the lands, they are building, then demolishing, then building again. It keeps the men busy. Those who cannot fight stack stones, or forge steel, or spin cloth, or quarry, or hunt, or plough. Those hornless, once farmers or indentured servants, now have neither land nor Hornsent masters to return to. So they spread their hands across the realm, and under Messmer’s command they sow and reap and pray, and nurse pockets of its still-beating heart. Only poor luck has kept them here: the misfortune of marching under Messmer’s banners and not his mother’s at the moment of ascension. Had they renounced him before, they might have crossed over into paradise with Marika, and remained with her in the golden city. Instead they scrub dark brown blood from black iron, and sweep ash from the gutters.
It is afternoon now, judging by the low pallor of the sky. After the execution his audience had dispersed, but he has chosen to walk the ramparts, to observe the sombre funerary rites underway for his own men. Lining the south-facing battlements, the vessels, packed with the bodies of fallen soldiers, burn with preternatural silence. Smoke stacks above them in great black spires, transient echoes of the keep itself. Prelates presiding over the pyres ring moon-hued bells at regular intervals, guiding the departed to the riverside of the hereafter. Unlike the Hornsent of Belurat, the hornless do not embalm - for they do not believe in the final return to the Crucible, the primordial vessel where all life is subsumed. Without masters to obey they have shaken off that belief, let it slip and fall away like a poorly-knotted tether. Now they revert to their old ways, offering their ashes to the Deathbirds who lead them to the Mariner. Beneath the world, beyond the rim of the Crucible, he tirelessly plies the elysian waters where all hornless can rest, despite their lack of horns.
Placidly, Messmer’s serpents bathe beneath the shower of sparks. He knows he is needed down in the great hall, to receive a report from some herald or another; else in the yards to approve some new incendiary device dreamed up by his alchemists. He would prefer to return to the solar, to his private chambers in his separate tower. He ought to wipe the dead man’s soot and grease from his hand. Had he the time he would blur with the steam rising from the heated cisterns, disappear for a moment from memory. He would, in truth, like to be alone.
From the corner of a serpentine gaze he watches his men go about their duties in a thatched pattern of black and red. Armour grinds against itself like teeth, leather groans when it is stretched. No eyes meet his. It suits him fine. He would rather not look on deep weariness, or be shocked, as he sometimes is, by the flat, vacuous boredom of a solider’s gaze. As though regaining some measure - or perhaps better said the entire measure - of their freedom, overturning Hornsent dominance, is a novelty beginning to wear thin. He thought respite would be met with gratitude: did his men tire of seizing holdfasts and scooping up Hornsent on the tips of their spears like fat pike from a river?
Sometimes, when he asks a fool’s question, Melina’s voice floats down from his memory to answer. Holdfasts can be cultivated. Pike can fill a man’s belly. His mother did not leave him land to tend, nor a table at which to feast. She left him an army to extinguish the Hornsent.
A nondescript voice to his left bids him come. A heavy pair of black shoulders before him, the clang of plate as they descend the spiralling stairs into the heart of the keep. Mind your step, your Grace. As though he has not been walking these smoke-blackened arteries since long before the veil fell. Before a kingdom was taken from him, and then a sister.
Once, he believed grief would grind him to a halt. The loss of Melina, of his mother’s favour, a place at her side, would surely drive him to lie down in the cinders of his life and simply cease. What use in continuing? But for all his rattling fragility everything in him is obstinate: his bones, the flame around his heart, the coiled abyss that urges him on and says where you cannot walk, you will crawl on your belly, for we are not ready to quit this world.
So he crawls.
At the bottom of the stairs he can hear the dart of a squire’s feet, the murmur of brocaded robes over the flagstones. His serpents glide over faces, missing the messenger at his side. “Your Grace.” The tone draws his gaze, drab and monotonous, like everything in this land. “Lieutenant Gaius has returned. He requests an audience.”
An audience. Too formal for one of the few men whom Messmer does not turn away. By audience Gaius means behind closed doors, preferably thick ones. It means news more important than a failed harvest or the movements of Hornsent Inquisitors in the south.
He waves a hand, and the messenger disappears. He is practised in the gestures of a sovereign, now. He is cognisant of the distance it creates. When he crosses the wide halls that ring the athenaeum, he is unimpeded except for the familiar formalities of bows and stiff salutes. Some still shrink before him. Is it the aftermath of the execution, he wonders, that rekindles their fear? Are they picturing the unnatural thing that lives behind his ribs? Or is it simply his countenance? He knows he has become difficult, brooding, seething discontent. Melina, again - cajoling, affectionate: when were you not? Were he a canopy of warmth like his mother, a gold cutting tool, he is sure they would not recoil.
It is an ugly art, Rellana told him, once, after a particularly gruesome execution. Bringing peace. One has to hang people. Not too many. Just the right ones.
The problem, as he understands it, is not victory but permanence. Hornsent still roam in dwindling numbers. Monuments to their reign still stand. Beyond the horizon, where his mother stepped into godhood and closed the door behind her, the golden city is still unreachable. Left behind, he must keep his garrison fighting. Without threat to unite them, they are only frightened farmhands, indentured servants. If they do not strike out at the Hornsent, they will turn inward, to their wounds, full of grief and resentment, bent under heavy plate, their spears clumsy and unwelcome in their hands. Cementing his rule, that singular triumph, faded some time ago. Take up arms, he commands his men, seated in his mother’s shadow. Again? they ask, after another quelling, another pyre of horns, another skirmish with the inhuman brutes of the plains or the bear-skinned hill tribes to the north. To conquer a land is the work of men. To viciously guard it is the work of dogs. As his men tell it, soon as you wrench your sword from the guts of a Hornsent, another appears before you. At each turn on the carousel of duty they ask, how long have we been doing this? And how much longer must we go on? Time sloshes through them, a sirupy miasma, muddled and impossible to navigate. Days pass and they move forward, only to look behind and find they have remained in place. And like a pool of still water, open to the elements, things begin to darken, to thicken. Decay sets in. Gone are the days of his men riding far and hard enough to kill the horses under them. Now is the time of stagnation, of waiting. They have found you can have purgation without catharsis. A spiteful world order, he acknowledges. Because the stars do not turn under the veil of shadow, he has lost track of it - of how long ago it was they wandered in: fresh-faced, golden, swollen with light from another land, leaking the grace needed to pry open the world at any hidden seam and step through.
Even in mercy he would not rob his men of that memory: his mother’s immaculate light, the hush of its warmth under the skin. Forgetting the golden city is impossible. Remembering it too well, as if they have only just left, is their curse. No such sun exists here, no auric canopy, and so they all squint a little, as if they will never adjust, because everything appears dimmed, murky no matter how much he casts about the darkness with the torch of his own flame. He can recall the sound of marble fountains, but here water seems to have a different voice on onyx and basalt. He can plant magnolias for that same white-gold dappled shade, but in the keep’s upper ward they sit like ugly blots on a page. Seasons are only a faint echo of what they were before the shroud fell over his realm, but he hears those left toiling in the field to feed his army, drained and dirty and dreaming of the golden city. The harvest is past and summer is ended, and we are not saved.
When his mind is especially cruel he can smell it, his mother’s victory city: jasmine, leaves veined with light; the smoky scent of his sister’s last words. But he has never been able to bring living jasmine to the Keep. Not before it wilts, small and curled on itself, like the poor stunted child of its predecessor.
❦
He lingers for a time in the athenaeum. Much has changed since he and Melina sulked here as children, creeping through the labyrinthine shelves and touching things they should not. It was barely more than a monastery, albeit one that grew around it the walls of a holdfast in place of a rose hedge. Abandoned for a time, it later became a specimen library, then a repository of Hornsent culture and knowledge, before Marika claimed it and gifted it to Melina, who sought to use it to undo the horror of the jars. Now his own fortress grows around it, and hardens like a shell. When a cleric finds a piece of writing in Melina’s hand it is not archived, nor shelved, nor shuffled away in a drawer to be spared the daylight and disintegrate in a century’s time. Instead it is brought directly to him so that he may read it, and run his hands over it, and imagine her voice over his shoulder; her little flame beside his own.
It’s a small comfort, even as he feels distinctly out of place here. Specimens still hang from the vaulted ceilings in their morbid arrangement: fleshy proof of the Crucible’s reach. Now, under hornless purview, he instructs his clerics to collect evidence of outer gods meddling in his lands - how they manifest in physical attributes, or linger in arcane traces like a patina. He wishes to know whether grace can coexist with the imprint of a rival god. It is for Melina, he would argue - but what comfort is it to her now? It is only to know whether he still bears his mother’s grace, despite the writhing abyss inside him. Or, if he does not, whether he should hang instead alongside those monstrous examples of nature.
At the top of another sinuous staircase, an obsidian mass: his Black Knights, their ranks picked out in gold across their breastplates and tabards. He stops, though he did not intend to, and waits for acknowledgement. It makes him feel a little foolish, standing apart like a spectator and watching, though it is exactly what he is doing: he is waiting for a gaze to slide over and meet his, for attention to shift like evening light. He is watching the figure of his knight captain, centred by his men like a hearth, spry and amiable, who wears his vestments graciously, who stands with a kind of preternatural balance, whom you would expect to catch preening but instead listens intently, easy and overfamiliar in the way it makes you feel rude for not opening yourself like a book and begging him to read.
A lull, a shuffle. Shoulders incline and bare heads dip. Huw peels himself away from the low hum of black velvet and offers a bow, hingeing at the waist, straight-backed and too precise for the rough shapes of the men around them. He wears no armour, only the leather and heavy brocade of his station. There is no weapon at his waist, and Messmer realises he did not attend the execution with the expectation of being called upon to raise a blade.
“Your Grace.”
From Huw’s mouth the words weigh differently, as they did first uttered in the heart of the golden city.
Messmer asks, “Did you know the accused?”
“No. A labourer, I am given to understand, and not a man-at-arms.”
“From the south?”
“Perhaps from Ensis.” Huw raises his chin. “Shall I enquire?”
A pause. When will you look at me as you once did? “No.”
When a man irks him, he, Messmer, keeps him in service to the realm but sends him south, out of sight. At the crossroads, the astrologers still hold Ensis - but their orders are unchanged, and he does not expect disobedience to flourish under Rellana. Traitors are sent to the Fort of Reprimand, which had a name, now long forgotten, back when it served some other purpose.
Huw’s eyes pass over his face, following the arc of his thoughts. “You did not send the accused to Reprimand.”
“I am given to understand the lord commander prefers to marshal forces across the river-valley, rather than hang criminals like a village executioner.”
“I am sure my father has not used those words.” A strained smile. “He thinks it is below his station.”
“He should hide it better.”
“He does not mean to offend.”
“Then you need not defend him.”
“I only mean-” Huw stops, takes a step forward, moving Messmer with him. Assured they are out of earshot of his men, he continues. “An agreeable middle ground can be found between breaking traitors behind closed doors and making a spectacle of them.”
Messmer’s serpents descend, testing the air around Huw. Were they alone, Messmer would let them brush his skin, taste him.
“Are you bothered by this morning? Is that it?”
Huw hides his face in another deep bow. “I only speak for the Black Knights.”
And give me advice I do not ask for, Messmer thinks. Advice he is bound to, even as what he wants more than anything is acquiescence. Relief. From what, exactly - he can name things, in a roundabout way. He is a sovereign, and so does not need a ledger for all his grievances.
“Once,” Huw presses, “you gave traitors a chance to speak.”
He is surprised. “This one spoke enough blasphemy. Why should I hear more?”
“To let them recant. I do not speak of Hornsent. I speak of hornless men, those who served you once but went astray.”
Huw is right. But Messmer need not explain himself, for he is prince tyrant of the world, and if he wishes he can strip Huw of his station, his title, and make him only one more hornless in his army. But he is loathe to do away with a thing of value, loathe to look and not find mild complicity in Huw’s dark gaze. Once a yeoman of the Divine Beast hunt before his father’s fall from grace, Huw is not unfamiliar with marshalling men for battle. But his ability to secure their trust, and make them cleave to his cause - to Messmer’s cause - is not a skill he learned on the field.
When the Fire Knights began to supplant his former battalions, Huw had asked him, bluntly, do you still need a man to swing a sword? Messmer acknowledged he did. So Huw remains a constant presence at his side, a gnawing regret beneath his ribs where he might have kept his flame hidden, if he’d had the sense. Might have chosen to trust his second-in-command, and so eased the truth of his curse between them in a manner gentle instead of abrupt.
But Messmer lies as well as Huw acts, and sometimes even Huw cannot hide his disgust.
He examines his knight captain. Astute, unwavering; irreproachably so. It makes him difficult to blame for his wariness, for the shuffling discomfort since Messmer uncorked the flame in his chest and turned it into a weapon of war. Since Huw saw fire in place of gold leap from his palm; from hands he thought he knew so well. I am, Messmer thinks, being punished. For lying? You overreact. At the revelation of your curse, intimate and unpredictable? Should I have been eager to clamber onto my own funeral pyre?
He does not notice his serpents reaching for Huw until he has to rein them in with great mental exertion. The effort makes him suddenly resentful.
“Are you asking me to be merciful to traitors?”
“No. Only fair.”
“Then I will endeavour to kill the next one slowly, so as to give him enough time to speak up.”
❦
He goes to see Gaius alone. With Rellana at Ensis, Gaius need not answer to anyone else, and because of his allegiance to the Carian Moon Knight, he is not looked upon favourably by some of Messmer’s ranking men. You are skilled enough to lead a battalion, Messmer has told him more than once. Gaius demurs, in his sullen way, as he always does; but he will not believe hornless can accept leadership if it is not from one of their own. If that were true, Messmer himself would not be at the head of an army.
But Gaius is no fool - he sees there is infighting in the ranks, which Messmer does not bother to quell. Jealousy breeds resentment, and the factions rub up against each other until sparks fly. The astrologers resent the martial dominance of the Black Knights, who, under the banner of a golden tree instead of a snake, in turn are leery of the Fire Knights’ reliance on Messmer’s flame. To himself he will admit he is open-handed, generous in the favour he shows his Fire Knights, who relish in sharing the warmth of his curse. Among his Black Knights are his longest-serving soldiers, but he is no longer so selective when he must dispatch them on the field, and they find themselves as likely to deliver a missive as to snuff out pockets of Hornsent rebellion.
Are we no more than heralds? he overhears one day, around a corner and by accident.
If we were we’d warrant faster horses.
Conjurors who set fires for the Prince Regent, astrologers who fight on behalf of the Moon. An indiscreet noise of disgust. How many left, men loyal to the Queen alone?
In his moments of weakness - Melina would call it guilt, or perhaps petulance - he sometimes longs for someone to speak against him. To spit at his orders and throw a glove at his foot, or rip the serpent-embroidered cloak from their shoulders in defiance. Not to hold him accountable for his actions - for Melina, or the ruin which followed - but to shake him from this stupor. Enliven him. Such a challenge might remind him he is his own person, and not just an order unfurled from his mother’s mouth, made to echo over the land in permanence. In his mind he weighs this insubordination, measuring it against himself. Only the powerful are worth betraying, and only the envious betray. His mother need not know how he answers: the claim he stakes, considerate punishment or merciful action. The tenderness he shows a discontent like one reaffirms a wayward son; or the noose he ties instead. The kindling he prepares in a closed fist. Either way the decision is his, and it will assure his authority. His men will return his gaze, and so turn from the horizon that stares indifferently back at them, that dead tree on an unmarked grave.
They have spoken against you, but instead of thanking them for it you tied them to a stake and lit the kindling yourself. Melina’s voice, soft and dry, with its gloam-coloured admonishment. In life I did my best to warn you. You thought you knew better.
Do not answer, he begs his wandering mind. It is like trying to hold back one of his serpents, warring with his own base instincts. I listened. You were not my subordinate.
No, I was your rival. For Mother’s love and approval. Her legacy.
Not true, he knows, even if he thinks: she always favoured you.
Is that why she put me in a little box and shut the lid? When I was consul in Belurat I could have had a voice, if Mother had not taken mine. She took away the words she did not want to hear. How could I stand before her when I was shuttered away and made to answer requests from country abbeys for more lamp oil; or complaints that fountains did not flow as they did last season; or temple Hornsent soliciting posts for their allies and spinning baseless accusations against rivals; sitting, heavy and uncomfortable under all that regalia - you remember how it weighed on me, how it bent my neck - to receive Sculpted Keepers who wished to quibble over a passage in a holy book while others clamoured to prove prophetic signs. All while you roved across the countryside in her name, with a battalion armoured in self-justification.
What can he say? I am not unfair in my rule.
When he reaches the chapel, two halberdiers acknowledge him with crisp nods, and begin the long processes of unbolting the heavy iron-banded doors. He watches, expressionless, even as his sister’s bitter autumnal laugh follows him.
You like things to yield to you. You are just like her. It is not delivered as a compliment, even if he wants it to be. You surround yourself with subordinates whose devotion goes beyond duty. Then you make them scrabble to serve you, for a shred of your love, as if it is limited. As if you have so little to give they must jostle for the privilege of it. You do not want their dissent. You want them to speak up because they are compelled. And when the iron is hot you want it to bend. You shape others to your will, before you fix them in the cold plunge. You want them to cede to you like you always ceded to mother. Because if they do not, you will kill them.
“Enough,” he says out loud. The torches in the hall shudder. He stalks past the mute halberdiers who, startled out of their stiffness, shrink away from him.
He waits for Gaius in one of the chapel’s humble antechambers, where the doors are squat and wide to receive and store supplies. A small hearth is blazing, and the chairs are upholstered - ochre, safe and uninteresting, worn out from an age of sitting impatiently, waiting for the world to right itself. The narrow glazed windows are open, and he can smell the oily blackness of pitch oozing in from outside. He is dismayed to receive a lieutenant in a room not fit for his station.
Two squires open the double doors with some solemnity. “Firmament’s sake,” Gaius says, entering. “I do not need to be announced.”
Messmer rises. “They are only showing due respect.”
“I think we are past heralds, are we not?” Gaius shifts his weight back, takes his staves out from under his arms and lowers himself into the chair nearest the door. Crafted with the same skill as those of Rellana’s mages, the staves fit in a curved crescent beneath each shoulder. When he is close enough, Messmer’s serpents can pick out a whiff of the arcane - magic foreign to him, a weighty, suffocating amethyst, the rumbling drag of a waterfall in a limestone cave. He, Messmer, has never quite understood it: this magic which keeps the other man grounded, and steadier on his feet than he would otherwise be.
It was not so long ago Gaius could follow Messmer up the wide, curving stairs of the keep's main hall. But since remaining in this realm, the atrophy inherent to his people has progressed faster than anticipated. Messmer has been told, with some vagueness, what happens to Albinauric legs - though he has never witnessed the slow withering himself. For a time now Gaius has been wearing the long black and silver mail skirts typical of his people, augmented by plate worn by those who serve the House of the Full Moon. More often than not he is alone in the field rather than behind castle walls. Do not pity me, he says coldly, when attention is drawn to his legs. My people are made to ride. It is true Gaius is perhaps his most skilled rider, even with his unorthodox mount. Even in heavy plate he holsters his staves and swings himself onto a saddle the way a deer leaps lightly over a stream, and is gone before he’s even sat the leather and silver-lined cloth. Messmer has seen more able-bodied men in armour who cannot mount a war horse without a humiliating tussle.
Still, an ugly, perverted part of him would like to see the degeneracy. Had his mother’s gift for healing not deserted him, he might have tried his own hand at it. Melina would have found a way. Their mother’s talents are wasted on him.
“I do not mean to seem ungrateful,” his lieutenant says after a moment. His voice, when moderated, is quite soft despite its coolness. “But we have been riding hard.”
“We? Your mount?”
“Fed and stabled.” His gloves are supple; he eases them off finger by finger. “A few of yours, a few of Lady Rellana’s. Stargazers are terrible riders.”
“She dislikes it when you call her that.”
“Then it is a good thing we are alone.” He pulls down his mail coif and pushes back the dark fabric beneath to reveal a shock of silver-white hair. His face is long, with an angular nose and heavy eyes that blink with a marked lethargy. Messmer thinks it lends him an aspect of equanimity. For someone who has been treated so poorly by fate, he should have none. That, Messmer supposes, is what you get for once being the warden of royalty.
“You asked for an audience.”
Gaius runs a hand through his hair, letting the silence settle. Like his skin, there is a subtle pearlescence to it. It gives the illusion of translucence, as though a bright enough light might pass through him entirely.
“Yes. Rain has ruined the south’s last harvest intended for the Keep. The stores at Moorth should last more than a year, but disease has festered in the cellars. A mould, spread through the air.”
Messmer frowns. “Gaius, I have clerks and clerics for this - for the reading of almanacs and the counting of grain. I trust them to keep the forces fed.” Many are the same hornless who used to work the fields for Hornsent lords. In a land with no true sun the seasons are unpredictable, and the food tasteless. They say in the south by the coast, where the sand is white and the fish are stained blue, things taste better. He is not so sure. In the Keep, the finest cut of meat sits on the tongue same as any boiled onion. Disease, in its random malevolence, occasionally threatens his supply lines. So do Hornsent agitators, setting fire to his storehouses, butchering livestock in the fields or sprinkling poisons into poorly-arranged sacks so it runs through the grain like fingers through sand.
He says, “Unless this is sabotage, you should not need concern yourself with supply lines in the south. What about Temple Town?”
“Temple Town is the exception. That is where the river ran dry.”
Messmer tries not to sound impatient. “I will admit a river running dry is not quotidian. But of what import?”
“If it were not important, I would have waylaid some poor herald to deliver you the summary days from now, and since departed. You know I dislike the Black Keep. You know I would not come unless it were necessary.”
Messmer’s serpents blink, and shift their heads. Gaius’s tone is as austere as his dispatches. His frigid absence is felt all the more in his reports, blunt and to the point, and full of an asperity that Messmer chooses to believe is directed at Gaius’s circumstances, and not at Messmer himself.
“I am grateful for your presence in the north.”
“Lady Rellana has been good to me.”
Gaius has, as most Albinaurics do - or so Messmer has been told - a streak of self-preservation, and so his loyalty is only as ironclad as his master’s generosity. He is a servant of the Full Moon, but there is kinship in persecution, and Gaius has never undermined Messmer’s cause. He himself volunteered to serve as sentinel in the north, to patrol the roads that lead to the dead tree. A perpetual ichor leaks from its scarred trunk, and even standing under it is perilous. Deathbirds feed at it; and where black sunflowers grow they turn their faces from the sky in shame. Despite this, men are drawn to it: Hornsent and hornless alike. They have knelt before it, prayed to it. They have touched its brittle bark; their hands come away darkened by ash. They have demanded answers from it. Some have drunk from the golden sludge that seeps thickly from its joints. Others have raised their swords in anger, or yielded their soft bodies to the field of thorns in a final act of self-effacement. They are all dead.
“There has also been a desecration,” Gaius adds. His voice, with its habitual undercurrent of disgruntlement, is suddenly rueful. “The cave above the river’s mouth. The statue’s head - like the one at Prospect.”
Messmer’s fingers curl. The question seizes him as it always does, noisily taking the crown from his head and rattling it in mockery. Hornsent, or dissidents among my own? Both rely on sabotage. They will not heave themselves, great armoured body of rebellion, openly against him. He has learned as much from his mother’s rise. The hornless took up Marika’s banners because her enemy was their own. All rebellions need an enemy: a thing in a high place to grab at and tear down. But rebellion also needs someone in the aftermath to climb up and occupy the seat left empty. The hornless might turn on him tomorrow - but whose cause will they champion, in this godless wasteland? The only path to his mother lies through him.
“But I am here,” Gaius continues, “because what was true in that report is no longer.”
He frowns. Gaius has never been one to waste his time.
“The desecrated shrine was restored.”
A dutiful mason. “Make it known. Reward the man if you find him, but let word spread of a miraculous restoration of Marika’s image by her grace.”
“And the river runs again.”
“Attribute it to increased offerings.”
“It reversed course.”
Messmer stares. “Not possible. That river begins in Rauh, and flows down into the hills before reaching the reservoir at Temple Town.”
“Yes.” Gaius regards him cautiously. “And I crossed it myself. I know what kind of arcane force can act against nature like that.” He pauses to glance at his staves, leaning against the chair beside him. “But this was wholly unfamiliar to me. I cannot account for what I saw.”
It is a discussion for an age ago, the sort Messmer would have had with Melina, one disabusing the other of absurd notions. “What else?”
“The Lamenters have gone quiet. My men say they stand by the roadside and stare at nothing, as though they have forgotten why they wail and thrash.”
Something cold and long-fingered creeps down his back. For all that he has taken from Hornsent land and made his own, the Lamenters feel beyond his reach, somehow, relics of a different time. Spectres, like the Deathbirds, bound to different rules, who linger to haunt the land and kick stones over graves, and answer to something old and unknowable.
Gaius presses on. “And at Temple Town’s granary, harvest that was unsalvageable a fortnight ago is now fresh as the day it was threshed.” He reaches into a fold of his mantle and offers up a little dun-coloured cloth pouch. “Here.”
Messmer takes it. When he turns it over in his hand, the contents spill out over his palm and run through his fingers: fine golden kernels of wheat, small and hard as amber. They smell faintly of soil and sunlight. He holds one up to his serpentine eyes, not bothering to mask his scepticism. “You are sure?”
Gaius leans forward, quiet but emphatic. “Your Grace, before I was - before I came here, I crossed the Altus Plateau many times. Whatever spoiled crop this was before it was miraculously revived, it is no longer. What you are holding is not native to this land. This is Altus grain. This is what sustains Leyndell.”
The name shudders through Messmer, foreign and ugly. Leyndell. The word itself, the leaden tumble of it from any mouth, should mean nothing to him. It might as well be a place he has never laid eyes on. His mother’s kingdom should have been his to name. Or Melina’s.
“You believe someone has crossed the veil?”
“She does not deny it.”
His serpents dart forward. His heart is in his throat. “She?”
“Your men at the western postern told me you executed a prisoner for treason this morning. For claiming a saint walks your lands.”
“For blaspheming the name of my mother.”
“Well.” Gaius leans back. “I believe I found your saint.”
A hundred questions stumble over each other to reach his lips. Instead he says, “Working miracles in Temple Town?”
“Or some approximation, yes. You should know-” Here he breaks off, and looks somewhat pained again. “Those who have borne witness - there is talk. They say this girl is your mother. Marika reborn, returned to them.”
Messmer gapes at him.
“It is careless speech - there is no truth to it,” Gaius says quickly, and there is enough force behind his words that Messmer relaxes a little. “They see what they desperately want: sign of their saviour. They look for proof she has not forgotten them, believing all this time she has toiled on their behalf. Now she returns at last to fetch them.” He shakes his pale head. “But I was a time in her realm before I came here, and I know her likeness in stone and in pigment. This saint is young and fair and beautiful - but she is only a child.” He hesitates. “I am sorry to bring ill news.”
Messmer nods, slowly. “Where is she?”
“Handed off to your constable on arrival.”
“You may go.”
“I will stay for the interrogation.” It is not a question. “If there is word from the Lands Between…”
Lands Between. He detests that term, too. It places his own realm on the periphery: sunk and forgotten.
“You wish for news. From Liurnia.”
Gaius nods, something helpless in the gesture. “How could I not? The silence is maddening.”
“Has she spoken yet?”
“About herself? No, not a word on her provenance. Not even a name. She claims only to serve those in need, and lift up the downtrodden. She praises and delivers blessings to the smallfolk like a well-trained country cleric. She demonstrates some mastery of the healing arts. When I seized her she came willingly, and without need of chains. I think she would be glad of an audience with you.”
“Blasphemy is one way to get it,” Messmer says drily, still in disbelief.
“Could she be of the shaman people, or the Numen? Your mother’s ancestors?”
Messmer frowns. Harder to justify an execution, then. What should he do, put her in a jar and hope for a miracle? He waves a hand. “You have my leave to stay until I have sat in judgement. But I would like to see this child before. To speak with her.”
Gaius tilts his head. “Your Grace.” He struggles for a moment. Over his pale features, a brief consternation. “Do not harm her. If it please.”
For the first time since Gaius delivered the news, Messmer shifts the entirety of his focus back to Gaius himself. Both sets of serpent eyes turn on him.
“Are you pleading her cause?”
Gaius brings a hand to his mouth. For a moment Messmer sees him younger, as they met: a placid Albinauric trailing behind his charges, overwhelmed by the vast nothing of this realm. Like many of Messmer’s men, he does not look as if an era has passed. He looks as if he has been taken hostage by it.
“No,” he says at last. “I understand her fate. But something is at work in this child. More than we can see. More than I understand from Temple Town. A strange reassurance. A simple sincerity, something that asks to be treated kindly. Perhaps that is why so many see your mother in her.”
Messmer tries to wipe the sneer from his face. His mother did not claw her way to heaven because she wanted to be treated kindly. She wanted what she was owed by the world. So do I.
Sometimes he feels the land jolt beneath him, crack and fissure, but it is not the earth: it is the snag of someone coming to take power from him. Wrenching it away, severing him from the authority of his mother. A metallic snap, and something crumbles.
Tonight, he will dream of a fracture in his crown, the crown he does not wear. He will lift it from his head, and in his hands it will come apart like a knot of lilies, thin as flesh, smearing his skin in bright yellow pollen. He will dream of a brother he never had, seated before him, beautiful as any woman, weeping as he removes his left eye with his right hand.
❦