3 There Is No War
He had never cared for winter.
Kadra drained his third wine bottle of the night and set it atop his overladen desk. Heat burned a path down his throat before the alcohol sank lower to soothe the ruined nerves of his spine. Enough to tide him through the next few hours.
Beyond the window of his office within the Academiae, Praefa and Silun crawled across a cloudless sky, throwing the courtyard below into sharp relief.
In an hour, it would ring with applause as five hundred students graduated.
At present, it hosted a game of fear, extravagance, and pedigree.
A hunt where everyone believed themselves a predator.
Snow gilded the school into resplendence, embellishing the ice sculptures lining the cobblestone paths.
Spheres of lightning illuminated colonnades bedecked with banners and baubles and noble families bedecked with more.
Throngs split and interwove, rife with social-climbers eager to impress each other in a ceaseless circle of envy and hunger.
A replica of his own graduation, nine years ago.
Cassandane had gotten her wish. Nothing had changed.
The peel of an orange parted under his hands, the scent brisk and invigorating. He popped a segment in his mouth with a faint smile. A small pleasure. Oranges had been a rarity in his youth.
Steps vibrated up the staircase before the door to his office crashed open, dislodging a volume of the Distribution Act from a shelf and sending it into the roaring fireplace. No loss.
“Godsdammit, are you eating?”
He spared a glance over his shoulder. Cassandane had abandoned her much-malingered crimson robes for a bronze gown. One of several concessions she had made since becoming Head Tetrarch.
She rounded his desk to plant herself between him and the window. “You’ve a half hour before your speech! Even Sarai is out there, mingling, trying, while you’re watching us from on high!”
“My presence will not aid you.” It would upend the carefully delineated social lines along that courtyard.
Enemy would align with enemy. Middle-class matrons would ingratiate themselves with noble families by cursing him.
The last time he’d shown at a convivium to ensure Sarai’s safety had been equally eventful.
“Nevertheless, we must show everyone that nothing has changed.” She pulled the curtains shut with more force than needed.
“We can’t alienate the upper classes in the name of reform when we need their backing.
Tonight, we prove that the Tetrarchy has no intention of rocking the boat.
This is how we hold on to power, and this is how we move forward.
In increments. Change can come once we’re established. ”
She would be highly displeased with his plans then. He smiled humorlessly. “Apathy in the midst of war, Cassandane?”
“There is no war in Ur Dinyé!” It was more plea than pronouncement. “None that we can acknowledge. We’re on crumbling ground, Kadra. One wrong move, and all will be rubble.”
His lips curved at the familiarity of that excuse.
Many a iudex had warned against interpreting the law too liberally when he had entered the profession at fifteen.
Progress, they had insisted, had to be a slow crawl lest the upper class notice and throw the weight of their power behind stymieing it.
People would die during this incremental justice, grave wrongs would be rewarded, but the land would see a brighter future if lawmakers and judges went quiet and slow with progress.
A philosophy of delayed gratification undoubtedly inspired by the Elsarian Order’s notions of morality. Drivel.
He tilted his head at the pile of parchment on his desk. “The coalition of northern Praetors has answered.”
Frustration leeched from Cassandane’s face, replaced by the same fear he kept seeing in Sarai. Her fingers stilled around the scroll he handed her before she set it down. “I can’t.” She swallowed. “Not tonight.”
“Hmm.” Another concession then.
“Godsdammit, don’t you judge me, Kadra!” Fury splintered her voice into jagged marble.
“For the next three hours, I must smile and wave and project enough strength to prove that I am worthy of being Head Tetrarch, while bowing before every Guild to prove that I’m also a mere woman who knows her place.
Do not ask me to do that while holding whatever dreadful news the north has sent us in the back of my head.
” She sought the fireplace, staring at the still-burning volume of the Distribution Act with grim resignation. “It is dreadful news, yes?”
“Yes.” He was alive to her troubles. “You aren’t without allies. You have my blade, and Sarai—”
“I’m deeply grateful that she threw herself forward to protect us, but I cannot live as you both do.
” Her jaw pulled so tight that she seemed poised to gnaw off her tongue.
“Have you even seen her lately? Don’t you notice the exhaustion and fear in her posture when anyone approaches her?
She’s nineteen. She should be young. Dancing, failing, loving the wrong men, so she can look back and wonder what she was thinking and laugh at the life she led.
Instead, she carries the weight of a country and the fear that she might have broken it.
She can never put a toe wrong because the public will tear her to shreds.
” Cassandane gripped the fireplace mantel like she wanted to break it.
“You’re unrepentant about what you do and what you want, but others pay the price. ”
Three bottles of wine, and they still didn’t numb him as the barb struck. The chasm in his chest tore wider. “Do you think,” he fisted the neck of a bottle, “that I don’t know that?”
Cassandane risked a glance and nearly tripped into the fireplace when his eyes tore into her. “Then hold back. A fearful nation is a dangerous one. Get the Guilds on our side tonight.” She warily glanced at his clenched grip and cursed. “Kadra, are you fucking drunk?”
His damaged spine burned as he rose. Three bottles hadn’t been enough after all. “The Academiae’s previous Headmaster threw people off Sidran Tower. Its reputation will survive me.”
He barely noticed her furious departure, still consumed by what she’d uttered.
The same truth that kept him at his vigile station for days at a time.
That had driven him to ally with Aelius’s enemies and write to Praetors and Tribunes in towns with powerful economic reach.
Because he had planned his death but had nearly taken Sarai with him.
He had forced her into a bitter world, shackled her politically to the very man who had ignored her as she bled to death. And she’d inherited his enemies.
Cassandane was wrong. Dancing, failing, loving the wrong men. Sarai had already done one of those things.
He was outside before the sonorous water clock by the courtyard struck ten.
Wine poured freely from a fountain of ice, spilling onto beige cobblestones.
Students in the Academiae’s dark-gray robes bustled around a banquet table with enough to feed a small village—roasted slabs of beef, herb-stuffed fish, steaming pies, with myriad soups and roasted root vegetables.
Bards sawed and plucked at their instruments.
A cozy sight were it not for the frenzied whispers at his arrival.
Wind wrested a needle from a nearby pine and wove it into a bitter gust that pushed at him, seeking weakness and finding none.
He was too familiar with the cold for it to trouble him, born into ice but destined for lightning, the years in between little more than a cloud of blazeleaf smoke and blood.
The ever-present strain of the ruined nerves in his spine had been his only companion throughout.
There were nights when those memories didn’t resurface.
He’d known many of them after Sarai. Tonight wasn’t one of them.
Throngs splintered at his approach, slinking forward with the same feverish intensity he had witnessed in childhood.
Proximity to power was a drug as strong as wine.
These people had drunk deep. They offered flinty eyes and primal fear, along with false cheer in their voices as they greeted them.
Obsequious grins belied their sly hatred.
Some families wore a jeweler’s entire stock; some snuck a few portions of the roast into beeswax cloth for another day’s meal.
Then, there were the other beings. The whispers at the back of his mind and the spills of crimson bubbling from the courtyard’s tile.
Skeletal figures watching with overlarge eyes from behind the distant conifers.
An oil-slick miasma distorting the air above segments of the crowd.
Invisible to all but him, and proof of a truth that he couldn’t tell Sarai when she was so burdened.
That he hadn’t returned entirely unchanged from the dead.
“My daughter’s a Petitor too.” A noblewoman thrust a graduate in front of him.
“She’ll be one after tonight. Top of her class before she left because of that unfortunate situation with Petitors…
losing their lives. Very generous of you to allow everyone to return to complete their studies. She’s eighteen.”
Why this was significant escaped him. “Congratulations,” he addressed the air above the girl’s head and moved past, but the mother blocked his path.
“I beg your pardon, Magus Supreme, but she’s a Tenth-Tier.
” The woman summoned an ingratiating but determined smile.
“Properly trained. Certo, you must wish for a more powerful Petitor to help with your caseload. We’re all aware that the current one is only a Seventh-Tier and a bit…
broken,” she said with a high laugh that echoed across a suddenly silent courtyard.
Gold winked at the edge of his vision as a figure carefully set down her wineglass.
Fuck.