Emerson · Felsberg, Mercer State
1724
The arrivals went on for three hours in a thin rain that beaded on the honor guard’s shoulders and darkened the flagstones. Hooves and iron-rimmed wheels rang under the archway, and the court smelled of wet horse. Emerson’s post was in the inner court, six paces from the archway where the delegates dismounted and went in. It was close enough to hear their conversations and not close enough to be part of them.
He meant to hold as still as Kira all day. An usher stood at the arch with a list. He announced each arrival in a flat voice that carried across the court. Emerson heard every name and none of them meant anything to him.
About an hour in, the usher called, “Lord Advisor Corvis of the Kingdom of Joyce.”
A silver-haired man in dark blue came up the court without hurrying. The fur at his collar was dark with rain and not a fold of his coat was out of place. He said a few words that made the usher smile. Emerson noticed because until then the usher had done nothing but read.
“The Lady Eleanor Dahl, of Joyce.”
A woman in widow’s black walked a step behind Corvis. Dark red showed at her collar and in the panels of her skirt. Her gloves were black. She was tall, with dark hair pinned up off her neck. She did not look at the court but watched Corvis’s back. Emerson knew that look. His mother wore it when she held up a weld she did not trust.
“The Lady Esrin of House Cortez, of Ardyn.”
She was younger than Emerson expected a lady of anything to be. Fair-haired and slight, she held her back very straight, as if she had never once been allowed to slouch. She greeted Corvis with the easy warmth of someone who had met him at gatherings like this for years, and the two of them went in together.
“Lord Kurt of House Orgullo, of Ardyn.”
Like Esrin, he wore Ardyn’s colors. He was a well-made man with dark blond hair cut by somebody who charged for it. He walked like the officers on the parade square at Stonemarch, who never looked where they put their feet. The embroidery on his coat was denser than hers. Emerson’s mother would have noticed that first and said nothing about it. Kurt was close enough behind the other two that it would have been natural to walk in with them. Instead he stopped to adjust a glove that needed no adjusting and let them go ahead. Emerson decided that was nobles being strange and went back to the spot on the far wall he had picked out at dawn.
“General Balbaros, of the Republic of Scale.”
The court changed. Nobody stopped talking exactly. The sentences got shorter, and two attendants near the arch found reasons to stand somewhere else. The man who passed his post was not the biggest Emerson had ever seen, though he came close. He was bald, with two streaks of gray in his black beard. A heavy brow sat over his broad, blunt face. All of him was solid and none of it was fat. He was the only person that morning who did not slow down for the arch.
Emerson’s weight shifted onto his back foot. He did not decide to move. In two weeks of drill his feet had never once done that, and he hoped Mosley had missed it. Four places down the line, the soldier from Iron Port with the earth affinity had made the same adjustment no one else had.
“Yusef Fihri, of the Azhar Sultanate.”
He came in alone and carried no papers. He was in his fifties, with close-curled black hair going gray at the temples and a forgettable face. Just inside the arch he stepped two paces to his left, out of the direct line of the doors. Then he looked over the court as though he meant to remember it. He was the only arrival that morning who counted the guards. His eyes stopped for a second at each post along the colonnade, and he made no effort to hide it. He might have been checking a cargo list.
That one’s early, Emerson thought. It did not seem important.
At ten Kira was taken off the line for escort duty. She was one of six soldiers picked to guide delegates from the arch to their seats. Within a minute she had her instructions and was waiting at the arch three steps ahead.
“Lord Commander Erwin of the Ashmore Kingdom,” the usher called. “And Deputy Commander Marco.”
The first man did not look like Emerson’s idea of a foreign commander. He was maybe forty and tall enough to be easy to follow through the court. His clothes were better than a soldier’s and plainer than any noble’s. He had a long, narrow face under dark hair, with lines between the brows that a man got from years of listening patiently to people being wrong. His gray eyes moved slowly and missed nothing.
The man behind him was the bigger, broad through the chest and shoulders. His nose had been broken once and set by somebody in a hurry. Marco’s eyes went from the roofline to the doors. Within four steps he was between his commander and the most open side of the court, but he never seemed to change direction. Mosley had taught them to watch the doors and the ground in front of the line. Nobody had mentioned the roof.
Kira stepped forward. “Commander. I’ll take you through, sir.”
“Thank you.” His voice was a quiet baritone with the full, unhurried vowels of the Ashmore court. He paused before the word that mattered, the way Emerson’s mother let the hammer hang before the stroke that counted.
They passed Emerson’s post at speaking distance.
“How long have you been in, soldier?”
Kira answered at once. “Just over six months, sir.”
“Six months.” This time Erwin let the pause come after the words. “You’re standing better than men I’ve had for ten years.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It isn’t a compliment. It’s a complaint about them, not you.” His voice went drier. “Don’t tell them I said so.”
Kira’s mouth twitched. She kept most of it off her face. They went into the hall. Emerson wished he had been picked for escort duty. The commander’s words stayed with him longer. Erwin had said men I’ve had. Not men I command.
By midmorning Emerson knew the other problem with the front rank. People forgot you were a person. The captain had called them furniture with opinions, and the delegates said things in front of the line they would never have said in a room. Around eleven, two men stopped five paces from his post and started talking about the north.
One wore Ashmore green. He was slight and ordinary, with thinning brown hair and the pale skin of a man who spent his days with paper. He had a folder under one arm that he did not seem to know he was holding. The other man wore Joyce blue. He was older and looked as if he no longer enjoyed his work.
“Not raids,” the Ashmore man said. “That’s my point. The number’s been going down for nine years. I counted forty-one when I started and nineteen four winters ago. Last winter there were six. This winter I have two, and one of those turned out to be a border quarrel between cousins.”
“Then I fail to see the concern.”
“The concern is movement. Barak riders were seen sixty miles inside Uhrs territory in the autumn. Nobody reported a fight. They were seen coming back by the same route before the snow.”
“A bad winter pushes everyone about.”
“It wasn’t a bad winter.” The folder had come out from under his arm. He did not open it.
The Joyce man made a sound that was not agreement. “They’ve been killing each other for four hundred years, Aldrin. If they’ve stopped, I’ll take it as an improvement. You’ve spent nine years counting your way to good news.”
“They haven’t stopped moving. Nobody’s losing herds. These movements leave no bodies behind and no burned camps.” The Ashmore man lowered his voice, and that was what made Emerson really listen. “Twenty-three tribes over nine years. When has anything up there held together that long?”
“When there’s nothing worth fighting over.”
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“Or when someone told them to stop.”
“Who,” the Joyce man asked, “is going to tell twenty-three Frost Fang chieftains anything?”
A wine steward walked between them. By the time he had passed, the two men were walking toward the hall and out of Emerson’s hearing.
The north’s quiet, apparently.
Emerson let it go. He started to wonder whether he would be able to feel his feet by the fourth hour.
By noon the court was empty and the hall nearly full. The sixty formed up again along the colonnade inside, where the air smelled of lamp oil and damp wool. Six hundred people talking sent their voices up into the rafters and the voices came back down as one murmur, like surf heard from a street away. Mosley walked the line while it settled. Emerson heard him coming by the small sounds of men straightening as he passed. The footsteps stopped behind him.
“Front rank doesn’t step back for guests.” It came no louder than anything else Mosley said. Behind Emerson a page turned and then came the short dry scratch of writing.
Emerson fixed his eyes on a lamp bracket across the hall and held his breath until the footsteps moved on. They stopped again a few places farther down, where the soldier from Iron Port stood, and Mosley wrote something. Sways,Brice had said. Emerson wondered what one word Mosley had found for him. Whatever it was, the man from Iron Port had gotten it too.
He set his heels and locked his knees. After that he did not let his weight move a hair in any direction. By the time Mosley reached the end of the colonnade both his calves had cramped into hard knots. There was nothing to do but stand on them. Kira came back from escort duty and took the place on Emerson’s right. She was pleased with herself and hid it, all but the left corner of her mouth. Somehow that was more irritating than if she had shown it.
“Well?” he murmured.
“Don’t talk in the line.”
“You’re talking in the line.”
“I’m answering. It’s different.”
After a moment she added, “The Ashmore one’s all right.”
“How can you tell?”
“He looked at me.”
Emerson did not understand at first. Then he went back over the morning. A hundred and fifty of the most important foreign guests had come through the inner court past the honor guard in its ill-fitting over-tunics. The rest of the delegations used the outer doors. He tried to remember how many of the hundred and fifty had looked at any of the sixty.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh,” Kira agreed. She kept her eyes on the far wall. “Quiet now. Something’s happening.”
Past six hundred seated delegates from eight nations and a handful of smaller states, a door opened behind the stage at the head of the hall. The room stood up in uneven waves. Ashmore was on its feet while Ardyn stayed seated. The Nine Isles stood in two groups three seconds apart, and somebody in the second group looked annoyed.
Two men in Mercer colors took their places on either side of the platform. They read the roll of nations in the flat, carrying voice all heralds seemed to share. The Kingdom of Joyce. The Ashmore Kingdom. The Ardyn Kingdom. The Concord Federation. The Nine Isles Union. The Republic of Scale. The Azhar Sultanate.
The Sectar Theocracy was not called.
No one seemed surprised. Three rows back on the left side of the hall, a block of benches with room for eleven people stood empty under a card. The card was too far from his post to read. Nobody had carried the benches away.
Not every delegation in the hall had a place on the roll. Near the colonnade the cards were close enough to read. A short bench marked for Aberdeen stood pushed up against Joyce’s. Handerlin’s envoys sat among the Scale seats. A few paces from Emerson’s post a lone man sat under a card for Cameron. The heralds did not call any of them.
“That’s it?” Brice murmured from four places down the line. “All that standing for a list?”
“There’s still an hour before he’s meant to speak,” Mosley said as he passed behind them. He sounded like he had answered the same complaint a dozen times. “Settle in.”
“You’re new,” someone said at Brice’s shoulder.
Emerson stood near enough to hear it. The man looked like nobody Emerson had been trained to watch for. He wore plain traveling clothes, and the strap of his satchel was worn soft with use. A small Scale sigil was pinned to his coat where anyone would see it. His eyes rested for a moment on a loose thread on Brice’s sleeve, as though it told him something.
“New enough, sir,” Brice said.
“Don’t call me sir. I’m nobody.” He smiled a little. “How long has your unit been holding this line?”
“Since eight.”
“And whose kit did you draw for today? The quartermaster’s own stores, or did anything come in special for the occasion?”
Brice blinked. “Ours, I think. Nothing special.”
“No extra kit, then? No catering brought in?” The man asked it the way a clerk confirmed a total. “So whatever was arranged for today was already sitting in a Mercer storeroom a month ago.”
Brice glanced toward the refreshment tables, where the smell of new bread had been drifting all morning. “There’s extra bread,” he offered. “The kitchens have been cooking for three days straight.”
“Bread’s not what I meant. But thank you.”
He made a small note in something Emerson could not see.
“Enjoy the standing.”
He was gone before Brice could decide whether he had been insulted.
“What was that?” Emerson murmured.
“No idea. I don’t think I gave the right answer.” Brice scowled. “Bread’s not what I meant. I offered him bread! Bread is a perfectly good answer to almost anything.”
A few paces along the colonnade, Lord Advisor Corvis and the Lady Esrin were together again. Whatever they were talking about, it did not sound like diplomacy.
“And how is your mother since Rosehaven?” Corvis had slipped some accents of the North. He asked it without hurry, as if the answer were the only business he had come for.
“Improved enough that she’s already planning my next visit as a punishment.” Esrin laughed easily. Her voice was a light, clear alto. She pitched it low enough to sound private and just loud enough to be overheard. “You’ll have to come and defend me against her again.”
“I’ll bring the wine and let you do the defending.”
One of them touched the other’s forearm and drew back before the touch could mean anything. Emerson could tell it was a performance. He did not know what it was for, only that they were doing it well. Near the doors Yusef Fihri was watching the same exchange. He did not lean toward it, and his eyes never stayed on it long enough to be noticed. At some point Corvis found him across the hall and inclined his head so slightly that it might have been a courtesy between strangers whose eyes happened to meet.
Fihri did not return it. He looked at Corvis for perhaps a second and a half and then looked somewhere else. Emerson did not know what he was seeing but he remembered it anyway. He remembered most things, whether they turned out to matter or not.
Lord Kurt was working the room and seemed to be enjoying himself. He spent a while with the Nine Isles delegation and a while with a bunch of Ardyn merchants who looked like people waiting to hear an offer. He didn’t stay long for any of the conversations. The people he left behind seemed to have been given more attention than they expected.
He did not go near Corvis or Esrin. Twice he passed within twenty feet of them. Each time he found somewhere else to be at the moment a greeting would have become natural. The second time he turned to a serving table that held nothing he wanted.
General Balbaros stayed near the Scale seats for over an hour, and nobody chose to stand close to him. Emerson watched maybe forty people pass through the space around him without stopping. None of them seemed to know they were keeping their distance. From his place behind his commander, Marco watched the general’s hands.
Half an hour before the demonstration, Emerson started to overhear talk of a man he had admired since he was a boy. Two Concord sailors stood by the refreshment tables in clothes that suited the room no better than his over-tunic suited him.
“Should’ve been him leading us in,” one said. He had a deck voice and was working to keep it down. “Man saves half of Ka’al Varan in one afternoon, and they send Moretti to stand around at a party instead.”
A little later the talk reached him again from two older Joyce attendants by the colonnade.
“The Concord captain. The one from the cyclone?”
“Hadrel. Yes.”
“They say the Admiralty doesn’t quite know what to do with him. He’s too famous to discipline and too useful to promote past a captaincy. His own sailors love him for both.”
“That sounds like a difficult man to handle.”
It had never occurred to Emerson that the captain from the cyclone could make grown men uneasy. Then the noise of the hall broke off. Conversations stopped in the middle of sentences, and heads turned toward the front. Brice went quiet. Kira’s posture did not change at all, and that was the clearest sign something was about to happen. Head Marshal Rennick stepped onto the stage with two aides. General Falk came up after them, and Emerson knew him by the single broad band at his cuff, which no other man in the army wore. The barracks said he still watched every exercise from the forward line, and that his staff had given up asking him not to.
The Assembly had given Rennick the office five years ago. In another year it would renew his term or elect a new one. The title was older than the State. In the companies the founders came from, the captain led the fighting and the marshal kept the roll. Long ago Mercer had put the marshal above the captain.
He was not especially big and he was older than Emerson expected. Gray ran through his trimmed beard. He stood like a man with old injuries, not like one on parades. There was no armor on him, only the clothes of a Mercer officer on an ordinary working day. He let the last whisper die.
Then he waited a little longer, and six hundred people waited with him.