Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Verna was in the study three days later, going through the week's correspondence when Dara appeared in the doorway to say Lord Carlton was in the courtyard.
She set down her pen and went out to meet him, finding him in his riding coat, dust on his boots, and looking older than he had in the arena box. The lines around his mouth were deeper and his eyes had the flat quality of someone who had been thinking hard about the same thing for days.
He kissed her cheek and they went inside to the study.
"Finn is up," he said, before she could ask. "Walking around and eating again. His ribs are still giving him trouble and he sustained some hearing loss in his left ear that the healer says may be permanent. He keeps telling Marie he's fine but she doesn’t believe him."
"I'm sorry," Verna said softly.
"The Velmart boy is still in bed. Cracked two ribs and something in his knee that's going to take the rest of winter to heal. Hardy's eldest did the best of all of them and even he couldn't ride for a week." He paused. "You heard about young Peron from the Stellan house?"
"The hearing loss," Verna said.
"His left ear is completely gone," Carlton said. "He's nineteen years old. The Stellan family are not people given to strong expressions of feeling but Lord Stellan wrote to me the day after they got home and the letter was—" he stopped. "Let's say it made the situation clear."
"And the others?"
Carlton looked at his hands. "Bruising mostly, for the rest of them. A few cuts. One broken finger." He looked up. "But those are the physical ones. My son is twenty-three years old and he flinched at a door slamming yesterday. In his own house."
The room was quiet.
Verna looked at him steadily. "Why are you here, John?"
"We're done," Carlton said simply. "All of us.
Every house that had a son on that sand.
Borgine has been getting progressively unstable for the last few years.
We try to keep the peace, but what he did in that arena wasn't politics.
It was a man who wanted to see the sons of the great houses beaten in front of ten thousand people because he could.
" He looked at her directly. "That's not an emperor with bad judgment; that's one who has lost his mind.
As for what he did to you…that was unspeakable. "
"How many houses?" she asked.
"All nine," Carlton said. "Including the two who were in his circle. They both had sons on that sand. I've been in contact with all of them. Some are further along than others in terms of what they're willing to do, but nobody is aligning themselves with him anymore."
Verna leaned back in her chair and looked at him thoughtfully. "What are you proposing?"
Carlton reached into his coat and produced a folded document.
He set it on the desk between them. "This is a summary of what Borgine's campaigns have cost each of the nine houses over the last five years in taxes and levies.
" He tapped it with one finger. "He's been taking forty percent of house income to fund the eastern wars.
Those campaigns filled the auction houses with people from the border territories. "
Verna looked at the document. The numbers weren't a surprise. She’d been documenting her contributions for years. Seeing them written down beside the other figures made them seem like robbery.
"We stop the money," she said.
"We stop the money," Carlton agreed. "All nine houses simultaneously.
Not a negotiation or a reduction, but a complete stop.
On the same day, at the same hour if we can manage it.
" He sat forward. "Without our funds the imperial treasury has perhaps four months before it can't pay the army.
The eastern campaigns are already expensive and getting more so.
If the money stops, the wars stop. An emperor without an army is a man who has no authority. "
It was a move she hadn’t expected from Carlton, who was a man loyal to tradition. Borgine had been very foolish to push the houses like that.
"There will be consequences," she said. "He'll come after the estates."
"Let him try," Carlton said angrily. "He ordered twenty soldiers to your gate and you sent them home.
Nine united houses with their own armies and their own walls are a considerably harder problem than one estate.
" He looked at her. "He knows it. That's why he's been picking us off one at a time for twenty years.
Together we are a force to be reckoned with. "
Verna looked at the document on the desk.
She thought about Borgine in his imperial purple in the arena box, leaning forward in his chair to watch the sons bleed on the sand.
All because he wanted her estate. She imagined his panic when the treasury ran dry.
And his fury when the campaigns ground to a halt because he couldn’t pay his soldiers.
She thought about an empire that could be rebuilt differently, by people who had learned the hard way what happened when power was left unchecked for too long.
"Who do you want to coordinate it?" she asked.
Carlton looked at her without expression.
"You want me to do it?" she said.
"You're the one they all trust. After what happened in that arena, after what you said to his face in front of ten thousand people, there isn't a house head in the empire who doesn't know whose side you're on.
" He paused. "There isn't one who doesn't owe you something for saying what they'd been thinking for years and didn't have the nerve to say themselves.
" And then he added, "And because you stared down the fiercest animal in the Empire. How did you do that, Verna?"
She shrugged. "How did you convince nine houses to act together for the first time in living memory? Who knows what a person is capable of when pushed. I quietened a bear."
He studied her for a moment then nodded. "I won't ask you again about it. Whatever you did, you were very brave."
Verna smiled at him gratefully and said, "The bear wanted to get out of that place as much as I did." Then she picked up the document and began to read it.
"I'll need the commitment from all nine in writing before we move," she said. "Not letters of intent. Signed documents with house seals, stating the date and the terms. No one backs out when the moment comes because they got cold feet the night before."
"Agreed," Carlton said.
"And we need the date to be soon. Before he recovers from the arena and starts making moves. He's worried right now and a rattled Borgine is more predictable than a Borgine who has had time to think." She set the document down. "Three weeks. Can you get nine signed documents to me in three weeks?"
Carlton almost smiled. "Two," he said.
Verna looked at him.
"Two weeks," he said. "Some of them have been waiting for someone to ask."
Outside the window the sea moved against the cliff in its steady rhythm and the whispering trees along the upper drive caught the winter wind and murmured their approval, and Verna sat in her study with the document on the desk and felt the ring warm on her finger.
"All right," she said. "I’ll do it."
The documents arrived within ten days, not two weeks. Carlton had been right. Some of them had been waiting for someone to ask.
Nine house seals on nine signed documents, each one stating the same thing in slightly different language depending on the house's preferred legal phrasing.
The funding to the imperial treasury from the house of whatever name would cease on the fifteenth day of the third winter month.
There would be no negotiations or extensions.
Verna spread them across her desk the evening the last one arrived and looked at them for a long moment.
Then she wrote the coordinating letter, the one that went to all nine simultaneously, confirming the date and the hour and the process.
She sent it out with nine separate riders before the morning bell.
What Borgine did next was exactly what she had expected, which was to be loudly and comprehensively furious.
The letters demanding payment began arriving within a week of the cutoff date, each one more emphatic than the last, the language escalating from formal request to imperial command, then to something that began to sound like a thug.
Verna read each one, noted the progression with the detached interest of someone watching a predictable process play out, and filed them without responding.
The other houses did the same.
Then came the dismissals.
Three of Borgine's most senior advisers were removed in a single morning, the ones who had served him longest and who had been, by all accounts, the last people in the palace willing to tell him things he didn't want to hear.
Their replacements were men whose main qualifications were their willingness to agree with the emperor.
Word of this reached Verna through Carlton, who had it from a contact in the palace administrative staff, a woman who had been quietly passing information to the houses for two years and who had developed, since the arena, a noticeably stronger motivation for doing so.
Then Borgine doubled his royal garrison in a fortnight, which, with the treasury already strained, meant the existing soldiers were being paid late, and the new ones were being paid in written promises of future payment.
"He's desperate," Kalen said one evening, when Verna read her the latest report from Carlton's contact. She was sharpening her short sword at the table with long steady strokes on the whetstone. "He’s preparing to take what he wants by force."
"I know," Verna said. "But he’ll find all the Houses have had time to strengthen their defences. The question is what a frightened Borgine does when he runs out of obvious moves."
She found out three weeks later when Bain's carriage appeared on the road below the estate. When the message came that he was at the gate, she was tempted to refuse him entrance but gave the order to escort him to her study.
Bain, dressed in his imperial purple coat, swept in as though he owned the place, which told her immediately how this was going to go. His jaw was set in a way that was very much his father's.
He looked around the room briefly, then at her correspondence and the ledgers on her desk. "Lady Verna."
"Lord Bain," she said pleasantly. "What can I do for you?"
"You can restore the funding," he said "All nine houses. Immediately."
No preamble or courtesy. Even for him it was extremely rude.
"No," she said.
He looked at her with the expression his father wore when people said things he hadn't given them permission to say. "That isn't a request."
"I know it isn't," she said. "It's still no."
Bain leaned forward and put both hands flat on her desk, intruding into her space.
"Let me be very clear about what happens if the houses don't restore the imperial funding immediately.
My father will declare war. Not the kind of war you've been playing at with your letters.
Actual war. Soldiers at your gates and not twenty this time. "
"Sit down," Verna said.
"I'm not finished."
"You're leaning on my desk," she said, with the same pleasant tone she had been using since he walked in. "Sit down."
Something flickered in his face. He straightened but didn't sit. "The estates will be seized. The women you collect here, your guards, your staff. All of it gone. He has the legal authority and he will use it."
"Had he the legal authority to wage war on the outposts? Legal authority and the moral right aren’t the same thing." She looked at him steadily. "The answer is still no."
Bain moved around the desk.
It happened so fast she had no time to react. He came around the side, grasped her by the arm and pulled her to her feet.
"I suggest," he growled out, his face close to hers, "that you reconsider."
The door suddenly opened and Kalen strode through it.
She scanned the room the way she always did, then crossed the study in four strides. Her hand closed around Bain's wrist, twisting it hard. Bain let out a sharp cry, and released his grip on Verna’s arm.
He spun to face Kalen. She stood with her weight balanced, ready for him. Bain was a big man and well trained, but none of that appeared to concern Kalen.
"Touch her again," Kalen snapped, "and I will break your wrist."
Bain looked at his hand then at Kalen. He seemed to be calculating whether he could win and how.
Kalen watched him do it with the patient expression of someone who already knew the answer.
He came at her, not gracefully. He was angry and moved with the brute force of someone who had relied on size for most of his adult life.
He grabbed for her shoulder but she had already moved, and he stumbled past her.
He turned and swung; she ducked under it with an ease and came back up inside his reach.
She hit him twice in the ribs with the short, compact strikes Verna had watched her use in the arena, not enough to break anything but hard enough to make her point.
He retreated two steps then came at her again, swinging, though slower this time. Kalen twisted, using his own momentum and size against him. He hit the wall hard enough to knock a book from the shelf.
He stood, breathing hard and she stepped back and waited.
He pushed off the wall, looking at her and then at Verna, who said flatly, "Get out, Bain."
Bain straightened his coat. His face reverted to a cold expression that was more like his father than anything he had shown her before.
He looked at Kalen. "You've made an enemy today."
She shrugged. "I have several. Join the list."
After a last glare at Verna, he left without another word.
Verna put her hands flat on the desk to steady them, the ring very warm on her finger.
Kalen turned from the door and looked at her. "Are you alright?"
"Yes," Verna replied with a smile. "Thanks to you."
Kalen looked at the door through which Bain had gone, then back at her with a furious expression. "He touched you," she said.
"He did," Verna said. "And you dealt with it."
"I should have broken the wrist."
"Probably," Verna said. "Pour us both some wine."
Kalen looked at her, her face giving way to something that was almost a smile. She went to the shelf where the decanter sat, poured two cups and handed one to Verna.
"Borgine will be furious the negotiation failed," Verna said.
Kalen pursed her lips. "Let the bastard sweat."