Chapter 12
Twelve
Itoss the cowhide figure into the heap with the others and swipe the back of my hand across my sweat-damp forehead. The pile of the lumpy but vaguely human-shaped things looks increasingly unsettling the higher I build it in the military division’s storage room.
You might think that nobles would reserve the grotesque thought of having to deal with limp bodies for scenarios that specifically require them.
But no, the powers that be—or, at least, the resident former general—seem to have decided they may as well be multipurpose.
Anytime a training exercise requires obstacles, drag out the leather corpses!
That’s the last of them. I march back out to the field and find Stavros presiding over several lingering students aiming for extra recognition. I guess one good word from the former general could see them launching their military careers several rungs up the ladder.
“—been so long,” one of the women is saying. “Do we really need to worry about the empire after all this time?”
Stavros rubs his hands together, the hooked metal one he wears for lessons in the field glinting against the flesh one in its leather glove. His gaze slides from the questioner across the faces of the others.
I’ve noticed that during class, he rarely rests his eyes anywhere for more than a couple of seconds. He shifts his attention so smoothly I doubt anyone would notice if they weren’t watching for it, but I suspect it’s to cover the faulty vision Julita mentioned to me.
He speaks in a wryly confident tone that’s a little warmer than any he’s directed at me. “Darium still exists, doesn’t it? Last I checked, they continued to hold Cotea in their grip, just across the channel from us?”
A man off to the side raises his shoulders in a shrug. “We’ve always pushed them back, though.”
“Yes, because we’re there and trained in both tactics and combat well enough to do it.
” Stavros tips his head in acknowledgment.
“You all know that Darium’s forces conquered the continent by taking advantage of the wreckage after the Great Retribution.
They recovered quickly and overwhelmed the rest of us before we were in a state to fight back.
It’s a far greater challenge for them now, but only a fool believes they’re impervious.
The late King Melchior won Silana’s freedom several decades ago, and yet Darium has never gone more than a year or two without harassing our borders in an attempt to regain ground. ”
His mention of the Great Retribution chills me. If the scourge sorcerers keep up their sick experiments, they could set us up for full-out war on top of divine punishment.
The students in front of Stavros will serve as officers, with the best mounts and equipment and the ability to make decisions. It’s the common people who’d be summoned to bear the worst of the blows on the front lines.
The man who shrugged makes a slight scoffing sound. “Several decades, and they’ve gotten nowhere.”
“Ah, but you never know when a new advisor or emperor might come along with the right insight to shake things up. And if you get careless with your defenses…”
Stavros lunges forward in an instant, flicking his foot around the guy’s ankle at just the right angle to send him toppling over. Before the student lands on his ass, the former general grabs his hand and helps right him with a light pat of his prosthetic.
The other students laugh, and the guy who became a demonstration does too. Somehow the man who’s such an asshole to me manages to maintain both authority and good will with the younger nobles.
I’d bite my tongue off before I’d admit it out loud, but he’s good at what he’s doing here.
Stavros sends them off with a wave of his hand. As they offer their brisk salutes of respect, I amble over to him.
When he turns to face me, a quiver runs through my nerves despite my best attempt at matching his effortless cool. The memory of his vindictive expression when he spoke of the riven simmers amid my thoughts.
I can’t let him see my anxiety. I force a sardonic smile onto my face and tilt my head toward the storage room. “You know, if all you wanted your assistant to do was cart equipment around, you could have hired a mule.”
A hint of his annoyingly cocky grin curls his mouth. “Maybe I did. Are you itching to get in on more action?”
I fold my arms over my chest. “I’m just puzzled about why you made such a fuss about my fighting ability if the closest I’m going to come to even fake battles is wrestling with stuffed leather.”
Yesterday afternoon, I propped up the cowhide figures on stands so Stavros could lecture the junior students on the best points to hit with their fake swords from which positions.
This morning, I stacked them into piles of three to five, and then Stavros had some of his senior students—the ones I guess he feels have the most promise for higher command—set a bunch of other junior students maneuvering around them all across the field.
I haven’t had a hilt in my hand once since he agreed to bring me on. Possibly I am a little disappointed.
I definitely haven’t learned anything from the students, who are too busy fawning over their professor and looking down their noses at my laboring to consider having a conversation with me.
Stavros shrugs. “We’ve only just gotten started. Who knows what fantastic uses I’ll find for you yet, Thief.”
Julita lets out a long-suffering sigh, as if she’s the one he’s mocking. I’m sorry. He isn’t normally quite this much of an ass.
A smile of my own touches my lips. “Julita thinks you should stop being such a prick.” Which isn’t quite what she said, but the sentiment was implied.
Stavros’s face does strange things when he’s reminded about the woman I’m hosting. He arches his eyebrows, but at the same time his jaw tightens.
He keeps his tone nonchalant. “And how do I know you’re not just making that up?”
Because he’s much better company when he’s crooning Veldunian serenades.
The corner of my mouth quirks higher. “She suggests you should do some serenading instead. Apparently you know some Veldunian songs?”
I get an even more interesting expression in answer to the light jab. Stavros’s dark eyes flare, both amused and dangerous. “It was only the one time, and—”
He cuts himself off just before he prods my shoulder in a gesture that might have been playful. If he hadn’t remembered at the last second that he’s talking to more than just the woman he shares that memory with.
In that glimpse, I can almost imagine a Stavros who isn’t an asshole. Then he glowers at me as if it’s my fault he slipped up.
The chances he’d ever really joke around with me appear to be approximately nil. I think I’ll survive that disappointment.
Instead, his voice turns a bit gruff. “Why don’t you get on with taking down the wretches you were so eager to destroy, hmm?”
Without waiting for my response, he turns on his heel and strides off to do some former-general-y thing I’m clearly not invited to.
As the distance between us grows, I exhale some of my tension. He has no idea about my power, and I can keep it that way.
I’ve managed not to give in to my magic’s call in nearly seven years. I’m the one in charge here.
I glance around the courtyard. A few clusters of students between classes are lounging on the stretch of lawn between the Domi and the Quadring, but none of them look particularly eager to have a stranger crash their conversations.
Maybe I need a better idea of how the investigation started before I can continue it.
I keep my voice low, moving my lips as little as possible. “Could you walk me through what you saw, and where, on the day the sorcerers made their attempt on the prince’s life?”
If you think it could help. They were touring some of the classrooms in the Quadring—the queen and both Princess Klaudia and Prince Jacos. Take that entrance to your right.
I cross the field to one of the less prominent doorways and then walk through the halls at Julita’s direction.
I was here, she says, bringing me to a halt a few doors down from one of the exits to the outer courtyard.
They were saying their last farewells before taking their leave.
A crowd of us from the classes that’d just been let out were watching them go.
And I heard someone muttering—there were these odd words that my brother and Wendos would use.
I’m not sure where they came across them.
The hall is currently empty, everyone shut away in their classrooms. “Words to go with the scourge sorcery rituals?” I whisper.
Exactly. I couldn’t make out the murmur all that well—it was only a couple of words amid a lot of chatter… And the hall was so packed, I couldn’t see who’d spoken. It unnerved me, but I thought I might have misheard it. Except that night, the prince came down ill.
“Could it have been a coincidence?”
I suppose. But after I spoke to Stavros, he reached out to people he knows on the Crown’s Watch who guard the palace. The symptoms were unusual and severe enough that they had the palace searched for possible intruders who might have poisoned the prince. It wasn’t a simple flu.
I drift back toward the stairwell. “And you’ve seen specific signs of rituals—where?”
There’s the dartling eggshell—they get it powdered and burn it.
It has a very distinctive scent. One time when I was on a hunt in the campus woods, I caught a whiff of it and followed it, and found a few traces on some tree roots in a clearing.
There’s no other reason for anyone to be smearing that around.
“Anything else?”
One other time in the woods before that, I came across a tree that’d been marked with the sigil of the All-Giver, inverted. Julita shudders. Borys liked to draw that too, as if it’d encourage more power to flow down into him.
I frown as I tramp down the stairs. “And that wasn’t enough proof?”