Erwin · Felsberg, Mercer State
1724
The soldier who led Erwin to his seat held herself very straight. For a second he made the mistake of thinking of her as ordinary. Then he asked how long she had served and she answered without a pause. Soldiers who’d only been half a year usually flinched when a foreign commander spoke to them. Their shoulders drew in a little as if to apologize for standing in the same room. She did not.
Before he sat down he made a note of her. It was a habit older than his rank: find the soldier worth remembering before anyone else thought to look. The hall smelled of lamp oil and wet wool. The spring weather had followed every delegate indoors, and the heavy coats steaming along the benches gave off the faint sourness of sheep left out in the rain. Somewhere beyond the tall windows a gull was choking. Marco came up behind Erwin a moment later. He took his place half a pace back and one step to the left, where he had stood for eleven years.
“You’re doing the thing,” Marco said.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you take a liking to a soldier you’ve known four seconds.” It was a big man’s voice kept low from long habit with rough edges the court had never sanded off.
“In your head she’s already wasted on gate duty.”
Erwin did not deny it. “She reminds me of Josephine.”
That took some of the amusement out of Marco. “Josephine is seventeen.”
“Josephine asks me to sign her papers every midwinter when I ride out to see her mother. And every midwinter I tell her not yet.” Erwin watched the soldier walk back toward the arch, straight as a fence post. “She would have answered me the way that one did. Without a pause.”
“You could tell her yes one of these days.”
“I could.” Erwin kept his eyes on the arch after the soldier had gone through it. Her father had been one of his sergeants at the Ashwell Crossing and had not made the last boat. Erwin had paid her mother’s pension ever since.
He sat with the stillness he’d learned at court and kept his back straight. His face stayed pleasant while his eyes moved over the room. Erwin found Corvis first, out of habit. He had quietly respected the man since the winter Corvis kept a Joyce succession quarrel from turning into a war. Patience and three well-timed letters had done what several loud men could not. The two of them had never been close. Ashmore and Joyce circled each other like old dogs who remembered a bite that neither would mention.
Across the hall Corvis was trading pleasantries with the Cortez woman so smoothly that it hardly looked like work. Erwin was not the only one watching. Two places along the Joyce bench sat a widow of the Joyce party dressed in black with dark red at her collar. She watched Corvis the way Erwin did. Aldrin called her tiresome. Every season she asked Ashmore’s envoys to help pay Joyce’s watchposts on Frost Lake, since the posts heard the north before Ashmore did. Erwin had never found the argument tiresome. He wondered what she had seen.
He watched Kurt of House Orgullo longer and liked him less. Kurt was supposed to be enjoying himself, and he worked the room far too carefully for that. He did not know Yusef Fihri’s face. Azhar had sent the man early and quietly, with no prince beside him to give the visit weight.
According to Aldrin, the main Concord flotilla was not even docked. Only a boatload of its people had come ashore. Concord was a federation of merchants. It had sailed into a foreign harbor and kept its captains aboard. It was still deciding what the visit was for. Erwin had seen Concord at its best once, in the year of the truce, when its hired hulls carried the South’s loyal families over the Gulf. He still remembered one of their navigators.
Then there were the hosts. Officers in slate-gray wool sat along the Mercer benches as if the room belonged to them. The anvil crests on the older men’s shoulders were faded at the edges from years of work. Last summer one of these men had sent a party into the Frost Fang passes with pack mules and a long list of presents. Or someone who took orders from one of them had. Karluk had fed them at his fire. On the third morning he sent them home. The six men of Ashmore’s frontier posting had watched the mules come back down through the passes with their packs still tied shut.
A gray-whiskered major laughed at something the man beside him said. So you went first, Erwin thought. And when they turned you down you smiled all winter as if it had never happened. Erwin would have gone first himself if his own council had let him.
“Commander.”
Aldrin arrived beside him without drawing a single glance. He was slight and forgettable by design. There was ink ground into the side of one finger. His voice matched the rest of him. It was soft and even, and he kept his Eldemere vowels low for whoever stood beside him.
“A moment, when you can spare it.”
“I have it now.”
They drifted into a pocket of quiet near a pillar where a wine steward with his tray gave them cover.
“I took the liberty of trying to share our report with the Joyce attaché,” Aldrin said. “He was kind enough to call it good news, and to observe that I had spent nine years counting my way toward it.” Aldrin nearly smiled. “He has the numbers, Commander. What he lacks is the name.”
“You didn’t give it to him?”
“No, Commander. He asked who could possibly tell twenty-three chieftains anything. I believe he thought he was making a joke.”
Erwin did not answer. His mind went back eleven years, to a field called Blackstone. Marco had fought a champion’s duel there in front of both lines. Erwin had watched from a camp chair forty yards back with his hands pressed flat on his knees. He had put them there on purpose. Afterward he found he could not lift them.
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The Uhrs commander had taken honorable terms rather than spend more men than the raid was worth. That was a war chief making a sensible bargain. The man in the Highlands now was making arrangements of a different kind. Erwin knew his name. The number of tribes sworn to him grew every time Aldrin sent his report. Once he had written to a man in this city behind the council’s back. The answer came at midwinter in four courteous lines that told him nothing.
“Keep the trail,” Erwin said. “Quietly. I want to know who else is talking to Karluk. Mercer we know about. Find out which office sent that party and whether it means to send another.”
“And Joyce?”
“Joyce can go on thinking it’s good news.” Erwin watched the attaché across the hall. “It costs us nothing.”
“And should it prove to be nothing, I would’ve spent a season’s courier money on a misunderstanding.”
“Then I’ll apologize to the treasury myself.”
“The treasury would want the money before the apology, Commander. It demanded last season’s courier accounts.”
“Then draw it on my own account. The same as the letter.”
Neither of them needed to say which letter. Erwin had paid its courier from his own purse so that nothing of it reached the council’s books. Now Aldrin’s trail would go the same way.
“As with the letter,” Aldrin said. “That makes twice in a twelvemonth, Commander. I mention it only as a reminder.”
One corner of Erwin’s mouth tightened. “It isn’t nothing, Aldrin. You know that. You only want to hear me say it so you can sleep.”
Aldrin did not answer. He slipped back into the crowd as the noise in the hall began to change its pitch. Head Marshal Rennick stepped onto the stage as if it had been his for thirty years.
When the cloth came away, six hundred people looked at the weapon. Out of habit, Erwin looked at the hands of the soldier who stepped up to take it. The woman’s thumb found the lever and the catch clicked loud in a room where six hundred people were holding their breath. Light began to climb the coil one ring at a time, like a lamplighter working his way up a street. Several seconds before the room understood, Erwin knew he was looking at a machine.
There was no gift in it to inherit and nothing to refine over twenty years of drill. It was a moving part that a person worked with a thumb. The weapon itself did not hold his attention long. It was a mace with a ribbed shaft, perfectly serviceable. From twelve feet it tore a wooden post apart from the inside and the room flinched as one. Men under his command could kill a great many people for less. What mattered was the lever.
Then Rennick told them the woman had no affinity. Erwin closed his eyes for a second. In that brief dark the smell found him where it still hung over the benches. It was sharp and clean. He had no name for it. When he opened his eyes, his hands were flat on his knees. He had not put them there.
Ashmore’s whole military doctrine rested on a fact most of its nobility never needed to examine. Trained affinity was scarce and birth handed it out by accident. The whole Ashmore army held two thousand one hundred and eleven soldiers with trained affinities. Erwin knew the number the way other men knew their own age. He could place nine hundred of them on a map at any moment and could name the dozens whose loss would cost him a war.
Every plan he had ever drawn sat on top of that number. You could not make more gifted people. You could only find them and try very hard not to spend them badly. So he always fought with terrain and patience. He let an opponent’s own choices turn against them. A thing with a lever did not care whose grandmother had the gift.
He sat in a foreign capital with rain on the windows and thought about what that would mean for the next twenty years. He started with ground, as he always did. A crossing that took one gifted officer to hold could be held by any soldier who knew where the lever was. A wall that stood because the other side could not bring enough fire against it would stand only as long as it took a workshop to turn out one more weapon. He had a rough answer by the time the room finished making its noise. Then it occurred to him that he was one of six hundred people having the same thought, and that most of them would reach a different answer from his and act on it.
The sound that was almost applause turned into murmuring.
“Five keep us,” Marco said under his breath. It was the oath Ashmore’s soldiers muttered before a charge, and Erwin doubted Marco heard himself say it. “She’s got no gift. No gift, and she did that to a post.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve stood across from gifted men. You watch his hands and you get in close before he’s ready.” Marco’s big hand opened and closed at his side. “What do you watch on that?”
He was staring at the side door the mace had gone through, the way a man might stare after a horse he could not afford.
“It’s a good weapon, Commander. I’ll say that as a soldier and not as your second.”
“It isn’t the weapon.”
“I know.” Marco’s voice dropped lower still and it sounded older. “It’s how many more of them they could make.”
Erwin had no answer for that.
“He’d have asked the same,” Marco said. “Your northern friend. He’d have sat through the lot with his arms folded, then asked how many they can make in a year and what one costs.”
Erwin turned his head a fraction. Marco had sat at Karluk’s fire last summer. Of all things, he had come home with a request for a teacher. He had also come home with a look Erwin had not seen on him before or since.
“And then?”
“Then he’d refuse to buy one.” Marco’s shoulders lifted, a small movement for so big a man. “And come back the next morning with a better offer.”
Across the hall Erwin caught Corvis’s eye. The older man had the same calm face as Erwin. They looked at each other briefly, and both looked away before either could be accused of meaning anything by it. Two places along the Joyce bench the widow had not looked at the mace once. She was still watching Corvis.
Erwin thought about the Five Founders as he often did in rooms like these. Five people with little more than conviction had walked into mountains no one else wanted. Ashmore preferred to tell it as an accomplishment whose glory rested safely in the past. Erwin had read the actual history. The coronation liturgy spoke of a conquest, but the chronicle recorded nine years of negotiation. He knew what one of the five did to the other four at the end of those years. He had never once mentioned that part in a council chamber. At about thirty he had also noticed that one of the five gold stars on the flag sat a hair out of line with the rest. For five hundred years by the coronation’s count, Ashmore children had grown up under it without anyone asking why.
Nations told themselves stories. He did not think that was a failing. The stories did half the work of holding a kingdom together. But he had just watched a woman tear a post apart from the inside. He had watched the count of raids fall from forty-one to two while a man who came to the Kregg with no tribe behind him gathered thirteen of those twenty-three tribes around his fire. After today Erwin was not nearly as sure as the rest of his kingdom that the interesting part of history lay behind them.
Slowly the hall began to breathe again.
“Send word ahead to Eldemere,” Erwin told Marco. “I want the council’s attention when we’re home. Not its patience.”
“They’ll give you their patience regardless.”
“Then I’ll be interesting enough to keep it.”
He stood and smoothed his coat. He had already considered the outcome along with the argument he might make against the noble lords and suspected it would be wasted on men who had already decided what they wanted to hear.