A Practical Guide to Evil

The morning of Hakram’s arrival, I got a visit from Archer.

Though Indrani enjoyed a good pampering most out of the Woe, she was too restless to actually stay in a palace for long. It’d been the same back in Laure, where she’d spent more in dives by the docks than in her suite. I trusted her not to get into too much trouble, and once in a while she did stumble across an interesting tidbit. Sometimes she even bothered to share those. This morning, by her sunny smile, was to be one of the lucky ones. Indrani only got that manically pleasant when she figured she’d found something of sufficient value to ask something of me in turn.

“Tell me I’m good,” she demanded, sitting on the table just to the left of my eggs.

“You’re sometimes slightly to the north of decent,” I helpfully replied. “Like, once every few years. It has happened. I’m told. In rumours. But not, like, very reliable ones.”

She wagged a finger at me.

“If I don’t get honey, you don’t get your treat,” Archer said.

Leaning forward, I offered her a widely pleasant smile and snatched a little covered porcelain bowl which I then put on her lap. There was a pause.

“There’s honey in that, isn’t there,” Indrani resignedly said.

“I think we should be talking about where my treat is, if anything,” I replied, taking a bite of my eggs.

Good eggs. They tasted like salt and a little bit of victory at someone else’s expense. She sighed, stealing a fork and then a bite of her own. Magnanimously I allowed this raider-like behaviour, even though taking breakfast from her rightful queen could be seen as treason in a certain light.

“Our little hero friends are about to meet for a Good talk,” Archer told me. “Tonight. A buddy told me it’s mandatory for any of their kind that’re in the region.”

I let out a low whistle. That was a lot of heroes. Maybe the most there’d been together in more than a century: even when we’d started the Truce and Terms, most of the people who’d signed it hadn’t actually been in the same place. There had to be at least forty heroes around Salia at the moment, since all those that’d been on other fronts had retreated to the capital with their parent army.

“Hanno called that?” I asked.

“I didn’t get told that outright,” Archer admitted, “but there’s really no one else who could give that order and expect it to work.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong there. If the Grey Pilgrim still lived he would have made a second, but since Tariq had died there’d been no potential rival for leadership on Above’s side of the fence.

“How reliable would you say your friend is?” I asked.

“She wouldn’t lie,” Indrani firmly said. “I trust her.”

Either the Silver Huntress or the Vagrant Spear then, I thought. I wasn’t sure that Alexis would come to her with something like that even after they’d buried the hatchet, though, so most likely the Spear. I took another bite of eggs, swallowed.

“Why’d she tell you?” I asked.

“Because the Blood are worried about this little tiff between Cordy and Shiny Boots going bad so they’ve had a talk with their Bestowed,” Indrani said. “Congrats, Cat, you’re now the adult in the room the rats go tattle to.”

“Ah, everything I ever wanted,” I thinly smiled.

The thought that even the Blood, whose idea of diplomatic subtlety was painting the cudgel black before hitting someone with it, could tell the situation was getting volatile rather soured my appetite. I needed to ask one more thing first, though.

“You find out where they’re meeting?”

I’d set down my fork, so Indrani did not miss a beat before helping herself to my breakfast. Refuge had taught her some very firm ideas about unattended food being up for grabs.

“Some place out in the country,” Archer said. “A village in the middle of nowhere.”

“Let me guess,” I smiled, “is it called Carrouges?”

She shoveled in the last mouthful of breakfast and eyed me balefully.

“How would you even know that?” Indrani complained through her chewing.

“I was just there last night,” I sighed. “Shiny Boots is digging up a dwarven gate there.”

Nd then dragging everyone there. That was telling: he’d get the Bitter Blacksmith to open the lock for him and then, with that open gate in sight, make his case to the heroes that the Kingdom Under should be appealed to directly. Going around Cordelia. I grimaced. Even if he didn’t get to it immediately after, if he let a few day pass, the simple act of having gotten most of the heroes to back his solution would kneecap Cordelia’s claim. Their Name was about handling heroes, and the heroes would be making their preference pretty clear. I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“I might have to do something about this,” I admitted. “If he goes through with it there’s only confrontation left.”

I wouldn’t need to warn the First Prince about it happening, not since the Kingfisher Prince would be part of the gathering and I did not doubt he’d inform her the moment he got the summons, but I wasn’t actually sure Cordelia could do a lot about this. She was a high officer of the Grand Alliance, for all that now the authority was fraying along with all authorities more parchment than steel, so it could be argued that she had a right to attend and make to them her own case. And Hanno would let her, I thought. He’d respect the right, even if it opened the door to a rival claimant.

It wouldn’t be a good battlefield for her, though. Hanno had fought alongside most those people and he was still the Sword of Judgement, two things that’d weigh the balance of opinion in his favour. And should the First Prince’s support come mostly from Proceran heroes, which I suspected it would, then it would be final nail in the coffin of her claim: people could live with a Warden who was Proceran, but no one would want a Proceran Warden. I sighed, lost in thought, and came back to the sound of Indrani slurping down the last of my tea.

“I need to find out what Hasenbach will be up to,” I said. “She’s been looking for her slayer’s arrow, but now she needs to give answer or she’ll get knocked out of the race.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Indrani asked.

I cocked my head at her.

“Did Vivienne talk to you about what we found out?”

“You two think this is a Bard plot,” she said. “That she somehow nudged things a while back so that it’d get ugly when they fought it out.”

“There’s something off, ‘Drani,” I said. “I can feel it. They’re both better than this, but it’s like every action one takes scrapes the other raw.”

Archer chewed her lip.

“I’ve learned not to bet against you when it comes to this stuff,” she said. “So do what you think you have to, Cat. But if you’re worried that time is running out, then you need to be careful about something too.”

I leaned back, giving her my full attention. It was rare enough for her to venture advice that when she did I always felt bound to take it seriously.

“You need to get your own house in order, Cat,” Indrani said. “You’re worried about the two of them fucking it up when someone becomes Warden of the West, but you’re not done either. You need to clean up your loose ends, otherwise it’s you that becomes the weak point.”

My lips thinned.

“You’re talking about Hakram,” I said.

“Not just him,” she replied. “Whatever the Hells you have going with Akua these days, that needs seeing to. And you made a promise to the Pilgrim before he died.”

I had made three, but I knew which one she meant. I’d sworn to Tariq that I would reconcile with Hanno. Which I very much had not, for all that our last conversation had been cordial. That’d been a veneer, a surface thing. Nothing had been aired out or fixed.

“I don’t have a lot of time, Indrani,” I quietly said. “Four days, maybe less.”

“So you best get a move on,” Archer mercilessly replied. “And one last warning, since I know you.”

She met my eye squarely.

“You like to just dip your toe in and retreat,” Indrani said. “Like you’re gauging the temperature of the water. It’s a thing you do when you’re afraid of dealing with a hard conversation, Cat, and you’ve even got the excuse of all that’s going on right now to justify being half-hearted.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Don’t,” Archer said. “You might be pissed, but Hakram’s one of us. Don’t botch this because it stings.”

My fingers tightened around the arm of my chair. She set down my empty cup and hopped off the table, throwing me one last look over her shoulder before walking out of the room.

That I wasn’t sure who it was I was angry at only made the anger burn more harshly.

An hour before Noon Bell I learned that my tentative steps to find out what the First Prince was planning as a response to Hanno’s summons were pointless. I didn’t have to rely on spies because it was at my own damn door that the knock came: Cordelia Hasenbach wanted to meet.

I offered to head to the archives, but she’d taken the lead already. She was out, had gone by her palace and was ready to receive me as soon as I could make the time. I didn’t bother to play coy or string it out. The sooner that talk was had the better. Word had come by scrying ritual that Warlord Hakram and a band of wolf riders were out of the Twilight Ways and making good pace, expected half past Noon Bell. I figured that the other half of the reason Hasenbach had left the archive was that she wanted to have a look at the preparations to formally receive the Warlord of the Clans for the first time in Proceran history.

So I limped my way through beautiful old Merovins halls again, led by servants to another of the pretty little parlours that seemed to grow like mushrooms wherever Cordelia Hasenbach stayed for more than a few days. I was ushered in quietly, my visit not secret but definitely less than official, and I found that the First Prince of Procer looked tired. She was impeccably dressed in grey and green, hair in a Lycaonese braid, but even though she’d tried to hide it under cosmetics I could see the rings around her eyes. Someone had been reading instead of sleeping for too long.

We got through a single round of the usual courtesies before she brought up why she’d asked me to come, which by Hasenbach standards was positively brusque. She, too, was feeling time slipping away through her fingers.

“When we first began discussing the Liesse Accords, one of the central principles was the founding of a city in the Red Flower Vales,” Cordelia said. “A centre of learning and a seat for the Accords.”

Also a way to discourage war between Callow and Procer, since it’d be standing right in the middle and sworn to neutrality. The Stairway was a second land path between our nations, but it was also ridiculously defensible and easy to close off. Geography always had a seat at the table when war was discussed, whether we liked to admit it or not. I intended to have ours strongly arguing for peace.

“As Queen of Callow I have the right to grant lands on the kingdom’s side,” I said. “My successor has sworn to abide by the grant.”

If there’d actually been Counts of Ankou around left this might have gotten messy, but they’d been unseated with the Conquest. Telling a governor I’d appointed myself that the map would get redrawn was much less complicated.

“Indeed,” Cordelia said. “Princess Vivienne was most eloquent in arguing in favour, arguments I passed to the Highest Assembly. Not enough, unfortunately, were swayed.”

If the ceded lands had come from just Orne or Bayeux it might have gone through, Vivienne had written me back then, but with two principalities losing a slice it’d turned into a slog. Ceding territory through anything but a peace treaty needed to be ratified by two thirds of the Highest Assembly and the First Prince just hadn’t had the votes.

“And you’re telling me that’s changed?” I asked.

She smiled and set a scroll down on the table between us. I popped the seal and unfurled it, reading through the dense lines carefully. Most of it was legalistic nonsense, but the gist of it was pretty clear. Since some principalities had formally seceded and some summons to emergency sessions of the Highest Assembly refused, the First Prince was exercising ancient prerogatives to establish a new principality. The Principality of Cardinal. Its borders had been decided this morning by vote in the Assembly, but there I tripped over a phrase.

“What is a ‘vote présentiel’?” I asked.

“Only princes in attendance or their representatives may vote, and there is no quorum to any decision so taken,” the First Prince said. “The decisions are not binding until a second vote has been taken over the matter, but to be fully overturned it would need a two thirds majority or the consent of the First Prince.”

Meaning that this morning, Cordelia Hasenbach had created a principality out of two chunks of land – one in Orne, one in Bayeux – and been made princess of them. She had then, I saw in the following lines, declared independence from the Principate of Procer. In practice the land wasn’t actually in her hands yet, but the legal foundation was there and if Rozala Malanza backed this, which by the roll count of the votes she did, then it was a done deal. So long as she held firm and refused to let the decision be overturned, the land was split from Procer and ready to be added to the city-state of Cardinal.

There had been two things I wanted most out of Cordelia Hasenbach: Cardinal and Procer’s signature on the Accords. She was already halfway to delivering that.

“That is,” I frankly said, “a very good bribe.”

She didn’t take offence, even though her nose wrinkled ever so slightly at the bluntness. We both knew that this was. I closed my eye, thinking it through. The First Prince was giving me this but she’d not asked for anything in return. So what was it that she got? I clenched my fingers and unclenched them. The timing made it clear that this was her answer to what Hanno was up to, but this wouldn’t help her with the heroes. It wouldn’t – no, I was looking at this wrong. Hasenbach was never going to win this by heroic backing, she already knew that. Her angle, her strength, it was on the great scale. The nation game, not the boots on the ground where Hanno thrived.

She hadn’t asked anything of me, I realized, because my signature was what she was after. What she wanted was the two of us working together to make the Age of Order so that she was already pretty much filling the shoes of the Warden of the West. Hanno’s opening stroke was gathering support, Cordelia was going straight for the authority. She wanted the wind in her sails before she ever stepped foot in front of the heroes, providence nudging things her way.

“Someone’s been teaching you namelore,” I finally said, opening my eye.

The blonde princess’ austere face turned anguished, for a moment. It was gone in a flicker, like it’d never been there.

“Owls are terrible gossips,” the First Prince simply said.

The Augur, I thought. Hasenbach wasn’t learning namelore so much as brute forcing through prediction what might and might not work. Gods, that must be rough on her cousin. Especially the parts that had anything to do with me, because I had it on good authority that the Augur had been unable to predict me since I became First Under the Night. Sve Noc had seen to that. So she doesn’t know if I accept this or not, I considered. She just knows that if I agree, she might be able to beat Hanno.

“I see you have concerns,” Cordelia calmly said. “Perhaps I can allay them.”

“I’m not sure you can,” I honestly said.

Her calm did not waver.

“Then perhaps it is a matter of tightening our alliance,” the First Prince of Procer said. “Let us sign the Liesse Accords.”

I paused for a beat.

“You’re serious,” I said.

“I am,” Cordelia said. “I believe the Blood is so inclined as well, and should have the hour free. It has waited long enough, Queen Catherine. Let us sign the papers.”

Fuck, I thought. I wasn’t sure it’d make her win, if I went through with this. If my instincts were right every time, I wouldn’t have murdered my own fucking father. And this, the offer on the table right now, wasn’t it what I’d been after for years? I could get the world I’d been after today. Not tomorrow, not in a year, not on the horizon. Today. Woudn’t it change what this war was, to be fighting for something? It might even help. And it wasn’t like I’d be fucking over Good, one of Above’s own claimants was asking me for this. It wasn’t a plot or a scheme, there was no reason it should…

I breathed in, breathed out. Forced the thoughts back into line. I knew myself just well enough to be aware that, given long enough, I could justify nearly anything to myself if it got me something I wanted badly enough. That’d gotten me through some hard decisions, but it’d let me make some bad ones too. And, setting aside all my worries about one claimant winning against the other, there was still one warning fresh to my ear. Archer had been right, when she’d told me I needed to see to my loose ends. Going into this half-cocked was potentially disastrous. I licked my lips. I’d not noticed them going dry.

“I’ll have to consult with my successor first,” I said, tone even.

Her control slipped just enough that I saw her eyes tighten. Dismay. Fear. She thinks she loses tonight if she doesn’t get this, I realized. That she’ll have abdicated for nothing, thrown her life and her life’s work away pointlessly. And I feared too, knowing that, as much because I was not sure I could stop Hanno as because I was afraid of what Cordelia Hasenbach might yet do, cornered.

“I see,” the First Prince replied, tone just as even.

I rose to my feet, then hesitated.

“What is it about him that you find unacceptable?” I asked.

Her face was a mask, pale and unmoving.

“Hanno of Arwad is the culmination of personal power,” the First Prince said, tone hard as steel. “He derives authority from his personal virtue, his personal strength of arms, his personal ties to a Choir. And for all his flaws, I recognize the man to be exceptional. Which is the very issue: he is an exception.”

The Lycaonese princess rose to her feet.

“He has not method, no system, because he does not use them,” she said. “His judgement, when it is not that of angels, is entirely personal. Circumstantial. And perhaps, for Hanno of Arwad, most of the time the answer will still be correct. But ask yourself this – will the same be true of his successors?”

Her blue eyes burned.

“That is why we partition power, why we share it,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “Why we make rules all have to obey. His flaw is the same was yours, Warden: he believes, deep down, that he is capable of wielding power without misusing it. That others after him will do the same.”

Her jaw clenched.

“I have seen what that mistaken belief did to Procer,” she said. “Even when the power was in my hands. And I would not see that mistake repeated for all of Calernia. There must be rules for Named as there are for men, and I cannot brook anyone who would do otherwise.”

The queen’s judgement, I thought, against the assembly’s law. Of course she didn’t trust heroes, while she was trying to keep Procer from falling apart they kept… getting in the way, from where she sat. The Mirror Knight emboldening a prince to make a scheme that nearly pulled the Firstborn out of the war, another trying to kill a prince of the blood and then the Kingfisher Prince refusing to ask for her death. All of it, that expanding mess dropped in her lap, culminating in that moment where the White Knight looked her in the eye and refused to compromise.

A disaster that the First Prince traced back to the Chosen, and their leader had just refused to consider helping fix it.

It’d not been that that happened, at least not exactly. Not entirely. But I could so easily see how she’d come to see Named as needing to made subject to rules, and how fundamentally she would never believe that Hanno of Arwad would ever do it. If he had it in him, wouldn’t he have done it back then? It was the harshest light possible to look at the past in, but no part of it was entirely wrong. That was the problem here. When I was going to speak to Hanno one last time, and I must, I expected his troubles to be just as grounded in truth. Neither was wrong.

One must still lose, though, and so that damn coin was spinning.

“You’re not out of this yet,” I said, and left it at that.

I wasn’t part of the party that greeted Hakram when he rode into the capital.

Procer was the host, it wouldn’t do to step on their toes. The two of us were rulers now, I no longer had a claim on him beyond what the Warden of the East could stake. Instead of moping in a palace, I went down into the city and found a nice little butcher’s shop. They killed the pig out bad, clean and quick, and I bought a bag of salt from the owner’s brother just down the street. I put the dead pig on my borrowed horse’s back and headed back up to the Lineal. There were plenty of empty parks and palaces, so I found myself a nice little thicket of trees and hung my cloak on a branch.

It’d been a while since I’d dug a fire pit, but I still remembered how. I put my back into it, and it when it was done I went back to the palace to snatch up a spit and firewood. Blackflame would spoil the taste, so I struck Legion pinewood matches and struggled with the feeble breeze that’d shown up to fight me. I should have brought oil to quicken that up, even if it would have been cheating a bit. The pleasant thing about Name strength was that I needed no Night to shove the pig onto the spike and begin to roast it. I rubbed salt on sparingly. Orcs preferred the meat without spices.

It was halfway to Afternoon Bell when I heard the first footsteps. Vivienne had taken longer to tell him where I was than I’d thought she would. I didn’t need to ask who it was, or even turn. I might have temporarily lost the knack I’d had as Warden of the East, but I could still pick out the sound of that gait out of a thousand. There’d been a time where it had been just as familiar as my own, almost an extension of my own body. Those days were over. I still remembered.

The steps stuttered as he entered the thicket.

“Smells good,” Hakram Deadhand said, voice hesitant.

Careful. I glanced at him, turning the spit. He looked, I thought, much the same as he had in Ater. Oh the armour was off, the same plate that’d been burnt by Summer flame and he had never left abandoned, but the clothes didn’t matter much. He was still one of the tallest orcs I’d ever met, broad-shouldered and built. The arm and leg he’d lost in my service were now in steel, the finest prosthetic work Hierophant had ever done, and the hand he’d lost to the Lone Swordsman remained in bone. Deadhand they’d called him, even before they called him Adjutant.

There was still a song about it. Dead the hand and dead the man, I almost hummed. But it was a Legion song, and he was no longer of the Legions. Or one of mine at all. I had not yet said a word, and already that knowledge hung between us like a funerary shroud. I took my hand off the spit, rubbing the bridge of my nose.

“I thought,” I said, “that this would be hard in the way that picking at a wound is hard.”

Hakram stood in a tall oak’s shadow, the sun not reaching any of the limbs that would reflect it.

“But it’s not?” he quietly asked.

I smiled, a tad bitterly.

“I just don’t know what to say,” I admitted.

In a way, that was even worse. Six months ago he’d been the only person in my life I’d ever found it hard to understand. Now it was like there was a pit between who we’d become and who we’d been and anything I said would just be shouting to the shadow across the pit rather than the man in front of me. Pointless. Slowly, Hakram moved out of the shade. Eyes watching me every step of the way, as if waiting for a storm or a refusal, he made his way to the other side of the fire. There he sat, lowering himself to the forest floor.

“Then,” Hakram Deadhand said, “perhaps you should let me start.”