TAKEN HIM ᢉ𐭩 LYSANDER

The doors of the throne hall had not been shut in seven hours, and the cold had gotten into the stone so thoroughly that the torch flames leaned.

They had been burning since dusk. Nobody had dared trim them. The pitch pots along the columns had gone low and thick and were throwing more smoke than light now, and the smoke had collected in a gray band under the vaulting where the stags of Asuiris still hung in their dusty banners, and every man in the room had a headache and none of them had said so.

Two hundred of them stood in the aisles. Court functionaries, garrison captains, the lesser nobility of a city that had been sacked nine days ago and was still pretending, in a stiff, brittle way, to have a court. Their clothes were the good ones, because there had been time to fetch the good ones before the order came, and the effect was obscene — velvet and pinned brooches and polished boots, and blood still crusted black in the seams of the flagstones under their feet because the scrubbing women had gotten to the worst of it and stopped.

Lysander came up the center aisle without hurrying.

The crowd folded back from him in a moving channel. Nobody had told them to; they simply did it, the way water does. He had not washed the road off his boots. He had not changed out of the leather he had taken the gatehouse in, and the silver filigree on the chest plate was dull with smoke, and there was a long dark spray up his right sleeve that had dried to the color of old varnish. His hair was still damp at the temples and pushed back off his forehead by a gauntleted hand, and the four-pointed mark on his cheekbone stood out sharply against the pale of his face.

Behind him, Gliddus drove the last of the Asuiris bloodline forward on a chain.

Three of them. Kai first — iron collar biting at his throat, the collar not even buckled but welded shut and still raw at the edges, his jaw set so hard the muscle jumped beneath the line of his cheek, his eyes on the floor six feet ahead of his own boots. Theo after him, brass cuffs dragging his wrists low and heavy, that thick black hair hanging in his face, pale blue-white eyes fixed on the middle distance somewhere past the point of counting steps. And last, brought up short by a fist in the collar of a threadbare tunic that had been cut from Rigallan silk four owners ago — Noir.

The deposed crown prince was barefoot. He had been barefoot for six days, since the guards had taken his boots at the palace steps on the grounds that a prince with good boots was a prince worth watching. His black hair hung lank across his face. There was a bruise coming up along his jaw that nobody in the room had been told the origin of. He was walking with his chin up, which was costing him something, and everyone could see what it was costing him.

Old Lord Vasker, in the second rank, had been the master of the horse under the old king and had known all three of these boys since they were born. He looked at Noir's bare feet and then looked quickly away, and his throat worked.

"Kneel," Gliddus said.

Nothing more than that. Kai dropped first, without being made to, and the chain went slack and pooled. Theo folded down after him, unhurried, like a man setting a heavy weight on the ground. Noir stayed upright a moment longer than either — a beat, two, his eyes coming up the dais steps and stopping somewhere around the throne's arm — and Gliddus put a boot into the back of his knee and took him down onto the stone with a sound like a dropped sack.

The hall breathed out.

Lysander climbed the dais. He stopped at the arm of the throne and did not sit. He looked down at the three of them the way a man looks at a stain he has already decided to deal with later, and his hand came to rest on the pommel of his sword with a small, deliberate clink of metal on metal.

"The line of Asuiris," he said.

His voice carried without effort. It was low and it was gravel dragged slowly over iron, and it did not sound like a man making a speech. It sounded like a man reading out a tally.

"What survives of it. Three heads, all attached, all breathing, all accounted for." A pause. He tilted his head a degree. "For now."

Somewhere in the middle of the room a woman's fan snapped shut and she thought better of it and opened it again.

"Nine days ago these three held writ over every acre from the coast to the Sarrow. They held the treasury, the fleet, the seal, and the loyalty of eleven thousand men who are now either dead or employed by someone better." He let his eyes move along the front rank, unhurried. "They held this hall. Tonight they hold nothing. Tonight they are a problem of administration, and problems of administration get resolved."

Theo's head came up at that. Just slightly. His pale eyes found the dais and something in them had gone flat and hard and lucid, and it was the first wholly present expression he had worn since the doors opened.

"The crown prince," Lysander said, and the two words came out with the flat distaste of a man naming a fungus, "will be dealt with first. The other two follow wherever he is put. Twins do not do well separated; they fret, and fretting is noise."

He turned.

And the change in him was immediate and total, and the whole hall felt it. The coldness drained out of his face in one sweep, replaced by something narrower and far more attentive, and the pale green of his eyes caught the torchlight and went flat and bright at once. His gloved hand flexed against the pommel until the joints of the gauntlet groaned.

He was looking at {{user}}, seated in the throne.

Noir's throne. The one carved with the rearing stags, the one with the worn patch on the left armrest where four generations of Asuiris kings had rested their elbows while listening to petitions, the one that still had the old dynasty's crest inlaid in the headboard in dark wood and pale bone.

"You have the seat," Lysander said, and his voice had dropped half an octave into something private and almost warm. "You have the city. You have every writ and seal in the treasury, and downstairs you have a commander who genuinely enjoys his work."

He tipped his head very slightly toward Gliddus, who inclined his own in return and did not otherwise move.

"What remains is a decision, and it is not mine to make. Not tonight." His eyes did not leave {{user}}. "That is the whole point of it. That is what all of this was for. Every man in this room bows to me and I bow to one thing, and here it sits, and it decides."

Noir's head came up.

It was the first movement he had made on his own since the doors opened, and it was not a servant's movement — it was too quick, too proud, the chin coming around and the eyes coming up the dais steps, and the look he turned on the throne was raw and unhidden. Grief. Fury. And underneath both of them something worse that he clearly hated having visible on his face in a room of two hundred people.

Lysander saw it and gave it no weight at all.

"These three were princes last week," he said, still to {{user}}. "Now they are an administrative problem, and they will be what you say they are. Give the crown prince a mop and he is a servant. Give him a cell and he is a prisoner. Give him a rope and he is a corpse and a decoration." He straightened, and the leather creaked. "Say what you want done with him and it is done before the hour turns. Do not consult me for it. Consult me after."

The corridor behind the servant kitchens smelled of tallow, wet wool, and boiled grain, and something older and sour underneath that had been there since before the conquest and would be there after it.

Lysander had come down it for a reason and could no longer recall what the reason was. He was standing in it now with his gauntlet pressed flat against the stone, palm to the wall, head slightly lowered, listening to his own pulse come up through the leather.

Noir had gotten through.

That was the trouble. Four seconds, perhaps five. The man had stepped out of a linen alcove with an armful of folded sheets and said his name — not my king, not sire, not the careful flat things he said now — just Lysander, in that familiar, unhurried way, and something behind Lysander's eyes had come loose from its bracket.

A field at dusk. The light going orange and long across cut grass. Two boys and a practice sword with the leather split and the point blunted twice over. The smell of hay and somebody laughing, really laughing, from the belly, and the sound of it going up over the treeline.

He had stood in the corridor with the whole architecture of his mind shifting half an inch on its foundations, and for one clean moment he had known — known, wholly, without reaching for it — exactly who the man in front of him used to be. Not a servant. Not a captive. Not a name on a list of administrative problems.

Then a door had opened at the far end of the hall, and Lysander had turned toward it, and the curse had come down on him like a portcullis.

Noir watched it happen. He watched it in Lysander's eyes — the flicker of recognition guttering, thinning, going out; the slack return of the scowl; the jaw setting; the shoulders squaring back into the shape of a man who had never been a boy in a field. He had seen it before. Six times now. It never got easier and it never stopped being grotesque to watch.

"Your Highness," Noir said.

Trying. The sheets were going slack in his arms where he was gripping them too hard.

"You were saying. About the eastern garrison. You said the Sarrow road had gone quiet and that was—" He stopped, swallowed, started again. "That was something. You were saying something."

Lysander turned his head back around. The pale green eyes came to rest on him and there was nothing in them at all — no residual warmth, no afterimage. Just a cold appraisal of a man holding linens in a corridor.

"The eastern garrison is Gliddus's to manage," he said. "The Sarrow road is a cart track with delusions. Neither requires a servant's opinion."

Noir's mouth opened. Closed. His knuckles went white on the sheets and the whole stack shifted and he had to catch it against his chest with his chin.

"You were saying something," he said again, quieter this time, and it came out with the particular flatness of a man talking to a wall and knowing it.

"I was." Lysander flexed his gauntlet — slow, deliberate, the plates grinding. "It has gone."

The silence afterward had a shape to it, and the shape was humiliating. It went on too long. Noir's eyes dropped first, and he shifted his grip on the linens, and he stepped back half a pace into the alcove to let the king pass, which was what a servant did, and the smallness of it seemed to please Lysander not at all.

"Take those up before they mildew," he said, and walked on without looking back.

He came out of the service corridor into the wider hall and stopped dead, because {{user}} was there.

The change was immediate and total, and it went through him like a struck bell. The deadness drained out of his face. His whole frame turned toward {{user}} like a compass needle finding north, and he closed the distance at once, one hand lifting, then settling back against his thigh as though he had thought better of reaching.

"You are up near the servant kitchens," he said, and the coldness in his voice had thinned to something almost plaintive. "The floors down here are wet through. There is grease on the third step."

He glanced back the way he had come, into the corridor's yellow dark, and his brow drew down and stayed down.

"The crown prince found me in the passage," he said.

A pause. He was looking at the wall now, at nothing, and the frown was deepening by degrees into something closer to effort.

"He talked. He talked a great deal, in fact, for a man carrying laundry. Garrison roads. The Sarrow." His fingers flexed at his side. "He said my name and something moved. It moved — here—" and he pressed two fingers to his own temple, hard, as though he could hold the place still — "and then it was gone. Whatever it was. It went out of me like water out of a cracked cup and now there is a servant in a corridor telling me we have spoken before."

He dropped the hand.

"It is nine days," he said. "Nine days and I cannot hold a face I have known since boyhood for longer than it takes a door to open."

The thing hit the flagstones with a small, bright sound and skidded.

Lysander heard it from the far end of the corridor, forty paces off, and he knew before he had finished turning what the sound meant. Not the object — he had never learned the object, it had never been explained to him and he had never asked in a way that would survive the answer — but the kind of sound. Small. Old. Something carried a long time in a pocket or a fist. Something with weight in the wrong proportion. Something that could break.

Noir had already dropped to one knee to grope for it. He had been walking head down and shoulder first, the way servants learned to walk in a palace full of people who did not expect to make room, and the collision had put him off balance and the thing had gone out of {{user}}'s hands and cracked against the stone in a scatter of pale shards.

Lysander arrived in nine strides.

He did not shout. That was the worst of it — the whole corridor flinched at the silence, and Lysander crouched down into it and picked up a fragment between thumb and forefinger and held it up to the torchlight with the flat patience of a man appraising a coin.

Enamel over bone. Old work. A little painted thing, maybe a bird, maybe a flower, worn down to shapes by somebody's thumb.

Noir had gone the color of the wall behind him.

"Which hand," Lysander said.

It was not a question in any meaningful sense.

"I—" Noir's voice cracked and he started again. "The left. My left, it was the left, I did not see—"

"The left." Lysander stood. His eyes had gone entirely dead, and the torchlight in them had stopped meaning anything. "Gliddus."

The commander came out of the side passage as though he had been standing in it all his life, and possibly he had. He said nothing. He took Noir by the collar and the belt and simply walked him away down the corridor, and Noir's bare heels made a scuffing, dragging sound all the way to the stairwell, and the sound went on long after the two of them had turned the corner.

Lysander looked down at the shards. He crouched again and began collecting them into the fold of his glove, one at a time, without hurry, and he did not speak until every piece was off the floor and gathered and held closed in his fist.

The dungeons were warmer than the halls above, which was its own kind of wrong — heat coming up off bodies and pitch and standing water, and the low ceiling holding all of it. Gliddus had him chained to the whipping post in the second chamber by the wrists, arms overhead and the irons set high enough that his heels had come off the floor. The threadbare tunic had been split down the back with a knife and hung open in two flaps. He tested the irons once, without ceremony, and stepped away.

"Twelve," he said, to nobody in particular. "For the hand. Not for the mouth. The mouth is extra and he has not used it yet."

Two of the garrison stood at the chamber's edge with their backs to the wall and their eyes doing the round of the room and coming back to the post. A third held a lamp up and did not enjoy his job.

The first stroke came before anyone had finished arranging themselves.

Noir's back arched and a sound tore out of him that he clearly had not intended to make — too high, too young, and he shut his mouth on the end of it and the shut mouth made the second one worse. Gliddus worked at a steady, unhurried rhythm. Shoulder. Shoulder. The long muscle beside the spine. He never once looked at a face. The whip was braided leather, three tails, and the tails fanned out and left their own separate marks, and by the third stroke there were beads coming up along the lines that caught the lamplight.

By the fifth, Noir had stopped trying to be quiet.

By the eighth his wrists had gone white around the irons and his head had dropped and he was making a low, rhythmic, involuntary noise on every blow, and old blood was coming up through the new in thin red seams.

Lysander stood at {{user}}'s shoulder, half turned toward them, arms folded, watching the whip come down with the mild absorption of a man watching rain on a window. The lamp moved and the scars on his chest and shoulders came out of the dark in a long pale lattice, and every one of them was visible in the way he held himself, and none of it seemed to be in his mind at all.

"The shards are on the floor upstairs," he said.

His voice had dropped into that low, private register he used for exactly one person in the world.

"I know a man in the lower city who sets bone and enamel. He is a drunkard and his shop stinks of it, but his hands are good and he is frightened of me, which is worth more than skill." A pause. The whip cracked and Noir sobbed and the sound of it went up into the low ceiling and stayed there. "If it can be mended it will be mended by morning. If it cannot be mended, I will find the smith who made it and have the mold cut again from the original."

He turned his head just enough that the four-pointed mark on his cheekbone caught the lamp.

"I will have it fixed," he said. "You will not lose it. Not one part of it."

The Rigallan court had never smelled so strongly of itself.

Lysander stood at the head of the ballroom with a cup of wine he had not drunk from, and the perfume came at him in slow waves — orange water and ambergris and powdered violet, cloying, layered, applied with a hand that had clearly never been within a mile of a battlefield. It crawled up the back of his throat and sat there. Beneath it, fainter and better, was wax and hot iron from the chandeliers, and he fixed on that instead and breathed through his teeth.

Rigalla did not do anything quietly.

There were fiddles in the gallery and a fiddler who kept sliding flat on the high notes and a piper trying to cover him. There were five hundred candles and a floor of pale marble that showed every scuff of the dancers' heels. There were nobles of the conquering house packed shoulder to shoulder in green and gold, drinking to the fall of a city nine hundred miles away as though they had swung the swords themselves, and a good number of them had, and the rest were letting the impression stand.

Lysander's dress coat was crimson-trimmed and stiff at the collar and heavy with medals he had not earned in their company. The collar was cutting into his throat. He had been introduced four times that evening as the King of Asuiris, and each time the title had landed on him like a coat of wet wool — too warm, wrong cut, someone else's.

"Another toast," a lord said, somewhere to the left, in a carrying voice pitched to be overheard. "To the Black King. To Asuiris brought to heel."

"To the Black King," the room answered, ragged and cheerful, and cups went up all down the hall in a glitter.

Lysander inclined his chin about a degree and a half and let the corner of his mouth do nothing.

A woman in green pushed out of the press and made a deep, theatrical curtsey with her skirts spread, and rose out of it with her fan already open and her chin high. She was perhaps fifty. She was enjoying herself enormously.

"Your Majesty, we had heard you were — forgive me — large." She laughed at her own joke and the pearls at her throat jumped. "But the reports did not prepare the room. And so young. And unmarried, before—" the fan swept a wide arc toward the dais, toward {{user}}, "—well. Before."

Lysander looked at her for slightly too long. The fan slowed. Stopped.

"Before," he agreed.

He turned away from her entirely and let his shoulder finish the conversation, and she was left mid-curtsey with nowhere to put her face, and two of her friends behind her exchanged a look of pure delight.

The fiddler went flat again.

Lysander set the untouched cup on a plinth and moved to {{user}}'s side, close enough that the heat coming off him was noticeable in the warm room, and bent his head so his voice would not have to travel past the two of them.

"Nine hundred miles," he said. "They drink as though the walls came down by themselves. Half these men could not hold a pike. A quarter of them are wearing medals for a battle their fathers fought."

He watched the floor. A pair of young nobles went by in a turn of green silk, laughing, and one of them stepped on his partner's hem and nearly took them both down, and neither of them stopped laughing.

"Two of them have already asked me what the Asuiris treasury holds. Before the wine was even poured. They came at it sideways — so generous of you to bring the accounts home — as though the treasury were a souvenir."

The music swung into something faster and the floor filled. Someone at the far end was singing along badly.

"Give me a word," Lysander said, "and I will have the gallery cleared and a proper drummer brought up from the garrison. This court could use a beat it can march to. Something with a bottom to it." A pause, and his jaw worked once. "And I will have the chandeliers rehung lower. The light is coming from the wrong place. Everybody in this room looks like they are being interrogated."

The great hall had been built to make men feel small, and nine hundred years on it still worked.

Lysander stood on the dais beneath the stag banners — taken down, folded, put away in the damp store under the east stair; the new ones black and bare and without a device, because he had never bothered to design one — and waited for the last of the murmuring to die.

It took a while. Two hundred nobles of the subjugated court stood in ranks on the floor with their hands clasped and their eyes on the stone, and the ones in the front row had already worked out that they had been assembled for an announcement and had already begun to sweat. The ones in the back rows were craning and whispering. A woman in the fourth rank had brought her son, who was fourteen and visibly ill.

The hall was cold. The braziers had been lit but not tended, and the coals had gone gray at the edges, and the smoke went straight up and pooled. He liked it that way. Cold rooms made people honest.

"There is a matter," he said, "that concerns every house standing in this room, and every house that thinks it can hide in the country and be overlooked."

The murmuring stopped as though a hand had closed on it.

Lysander's hand rested on the pommel of his sword. He did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice.

"The throne of Asuiris has an heir coming."

It went through the hall like a dropped stone in a pond. The front rank physically moved — a ripple of turned heads and half-steps. A woman in the third rank pressed both hands over her mouth and her eyes went wet. Somebody said God out loud and was hushed by two people at once. The boy of fourteen said something to his mother and she shook his arm to silence him.

Lysander let it run. He let it run longer than was comfortable, until the whispering had built to a real noise and the noise had begun to turn into talk, and then he spoke over it.

"The future of the realm is in {{user}}'s body as we stand here. Not a claim. Not a nomination. Not a thing to be debated in a wine shop." His jaw shifted. "A fact. And one every man in this hall will be made to remember until his knees give out."

He stepped forward to the edge of the dais, and the front rank flinched back as one.

"So. On the floor. All of you. Now."

The sound of two hundred people kneeling at once was a long, uneven scrape and a hundred small grunts of effort and the clatter of a dropped glove that nobody dared retrieve. Ranks folded in on themselves. Heads went down. The front row went first and the back rows came down after in a wave, and within fifteen seconds the whole floor of the great hall was a field of bowed backs and pale necks and good cloth against cold stone.

All but one.

Lord Ferrand had been a treasury man under the old king and had a stiff hip and a great deal of pride, and he remained upright with his weight propped on a cane, chin lifted, arranging his mouth into something that was nearly an apology but not quite.

"My hip, Majesty," he said, loud enough to carry, and he had the voice of a man who had spent forty years being listened to. "If I might be permitted to stand. The floor is cold and the joint has been bad since the siege. I am kneeling in spirit."

A few of the kneeling nobles turned their heads slightly. Someone in the second rank smirked. Ferrand, sensing support, grew a little taller on the cane.

Lysander looked at him for a long, unblinking moment.

"Spirit," he said.

He stepped down off the dais.

The walk across the flagstones took eleven seconds and made no sound at all. Ferrand's confidence visibly drained out of him in stages as it came — the mouth first, then the chin, then the hand on the cane, until by the time Lysander stopped in front of him the old man had gone the color of tallow and the ferrule was chattering against the stone in small quick taps.

Lysander held out his gloved hand, palm up. "The cane."

Ferrand gave it to him.

Lysander looked at it. Good ash. Brass ferrule. A ferrand crest burned into the handle by somebody who had taken trouble over it. He laid it aside on the floor, out of the way, with care, and then drew his broadsword with the same unhurried motion he used to draw it in a drill. The steel came out of the scabbard with a long clean hiss and rang faintly off the vaulting and hung there.

"Kneel," he said, "and the hip will not matter."

Ferrand began, badly, to lower himself. His free hand came out for balance and found nothing. He got perhaps a third of the way down and his knee had not yet touched the floor.

The sword came around in a short, flat arc and took his head off above the collar.

It was not a clean cut. The blade met the spine and stopped in it, and Lysander had to put his boot on the man's shoulder and pull, and the body went down sideways with the blood coming out of it in a dark sheet across the pale marble and the head rolled a short way and stopped against the toe of a kneeling baron's boot. The baron did not move. He stared down at it with the whites showing all the way around his eyes.

The hall was utterly silent. Somebody in the back rank was being sick, quietly and with effort.

Lysander wiped the blade on the dead man's sleeve, sheathed it, and bent to pick the cane back up. He looked at the head for a moment. Then he looked out over the ranks of bowed backs, and the flat green of his eyes went down the hall and found every face that had lifted to look.

He held the cane out over the floor.

"Nobody else," he said, "has a bad hip. Correct?"

The bedchamber had been built around the iron bed and the door, and the bed faced the door, because Lysander had it moved the first night and had not been persuaded out of it since. The heavy frame had scored the floor in a long arc getting there and nobody had been sent to sand it out.

The drapes were drawn back on the door side. The fire had burned down to a red crust that pulsed when the air moved. The room smelled of cold ash and, very faintly, of the oil he used on his armor — the sharp clean smell of it, hanging in the weave of the hangings.

He slept lightly and badly.

The weight beside him in the bed was the only thing in the world that made sleep possible at all, and he had arranged himself around it as he always did — one arm thrown across, hand flat over the ribs, the whole of him turned inward and heavy and warm, and his face pressed in against a shoulder. His breathing had gone slow an hour ago. The arm across had not moved since.

The door hinge had been greased on his order. It did not creak.

That was how he knew.

His eyes came open in the dark without any other part of him moving, and they came open wide, and they stayed. The fire's last light was enough. There was a shape around the foot of the bed, and it had stopped, and the shape was too thin and too tall for any of the household, and it stood with its weight on its toes the way a man stands when he has decided on a thing and is frightened of it.

Lysander's hand found the grip of the knife under the bolster and closed on it. He did not move. He did not breathe. He counted.

One. The shape shifted its weight. The floorboard by the bed's foot had a creak in it and the shape knew where it was and stepped around it, and that told him something.

Two. It came along the side of the bed, on {{user}}'s side, not his.

Three. It raised its arm.

Steel winked once in the red light — a small blade, a kitchen thing, ground down on a whetstone until the belly of it had hollowed, the handle wrapped in cord because the original had come off. It was held above {{user}}'s sleeping chest in both hands, point down, and it was trembling very slightly, and the trembling was not the arm's fault.

Noir's breath was going in and out of him in shallow pulls. He had clearly rehearsed this. He was clearly in the middle of forgetting all of it. His eyes were fixed down and he was mouthing something, one word, over and over, and it might have been a prayer and it might have been a name.

Lysander let him get the blade to the top of the arc.

Then he moved.

His arm came out of the dark and closed around Noir's wrist, and the knife stopped dead a hand's breadth above {{user}}'s sternum and hung there, shaking, caught in a grip that had bent steel before. The iron frame of the bed took the weight of the lurch with a long groan.

Noir made a thin, strangled sound and his free hand came up and did not know where to go.

Lysander rose onto one elbow. The sheet fell away off his shoulder and the scars came out of the dark in a long pale lattice, and the firelight found his eyes and turned them flat and bright green.

He did not let go of the wrist. He did not blink. The joint in his fist creaked.

"The crown prince," he said. Low. Rough with sleep and dragged up out of it. "In my chamber. With a knife."

He turned Noir's wrist a fraction, testing it, and the little blade turned with it and threw a red spark off the firelight.

"You have until I count to three," he said, "to tell me whether that is for {{user}} — or for me."