“There is a foul pleasure in it,” Kylar said quietly.
“There’s pleasure in having a full belly too, but for some it’s dangerous pleasure. When I ordered you to kill Gorkhy, you didn’t feel that.” Logan saw his tattoo was uncovered and covered it. “I did. I gave an order and he died. I killed with a word. And I loved it. And I wanted more.”
“So now what? You going to become a hermit, move to a cottage in the woods?”
“I’m not that selfish.” Logan scrubbed a hand through his hair. “If I asked you, would you kill Terah Graesin?”
“Absolutely.”
Logan closed his eyes. He’d obviously expected it. “If I didn’t ask you, would you do it anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been planning it?”
“Yes.”
“Dammit, Kylar! Now I know.”
“So why’d you ask?” Kylar asked.
“To remove the excuse. Can you rule justly after you take the throne unjustly?”
“Good question to ask the woman who stole yours.”
“How, Kylar?”
“Schedule a meeting with her and drink a lot before-hand.”
“Dammit, man, how were you going to kill her?”
“A botched abortion. I’d poison whatever abortifacient she uses. Many of those potions are dangerous. If it appeared she’d taken double what her apothecary recommended, it would look like a tragic and shameful accident for a single, wanton young queen. If the nobles tried to cover up the details, the rumors would swirl around what a whore Terah was, rather than speculations that she was assassinated. And it would make the virtuous new king look even better.”
“Gods,” Logan breathed. “How long did it take you to come up with that?”
Kylar shrugged. “Couple minutes.”
There was pain in Logan’s eyes, as if he had to struggle to speak. “It’s brilliant, Kylar. It’s brilliant—and I forbid it.”
“You forbid it?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you propose to forbid me anything?” Kylar asked.
Logan looked astonished.
“Despite all my efforts, you’re not my king. You can’t forbid me a damn thing.”
Logan’s face darkened and all his usual conviviality drained away. It made Kylar conscious of just how tall Logan was. His lean seven-foot height made him a looming, merciless skeleton. “Know this,” Logan said. “If I’m crowned because of Terah Graesin’s murder, I’ll have you executed.”
“You’d kill me for Terah Graesin?”
“I’d execute you for treason. An attack on Cenaria’s sovereign is an attack on Cenaria.”
“She shouldn’t be queen.”
“But she is.”
“You had no right to swear fealty.”
“I did what I had to do to save the people, Kylar. Now I must abide by my word. Politics is ethics writ large.”
“Politics is the art of the possible, and you know it,” Kylar said. “On the eve of battle, the tides changed so you couldn’t be king, so you changed course. The tides are changing again.”
Logan folded his arms. His voice was granite. “My word stands.”
“Can you love an idea more than you love a man and not become a monster? How many friends will you sacrifice on the altar of Justice, Logan?”
“If you force my hand, at least one.”
They were standing on a precipice. Socially, Logan had always been Kylar’s superior. Morally, Kylar had always felt inferior, too. But they’d never been placed in a direct hierarchical relation. Now Logan was giving an order. He would not be moved.
Kylar could only accept his order and accept all his orders henceforth, or reject it and them forever. There was part of him that yearned to obey. He was convinced that killing Terah was the right thing, but Logan’s moral compass was a more accurate instrument than Kylar’s. What was it about submission that was so hard? Kylar wasn’t being asked for blind servility. He was being asked to obey a man he knew and loved and respected, who in turn respected him.
The wolfhound is pampered by the fire. The wolf is hunted in the cold.
“Do you know how much I love you, Logan?” Kylar asked. Logan opened his mouth, but before he could say a word, Kylar said, “This much.” And left.
29
Kylar was back in the city on his way to the one safe house he was confident hadn’t been discovered during the Godking’s reign when the ka’kari spoke.
~Would you be excited about Logan being king if he told you politics is the art of the possible and asked you to murder his rivals?~
I’m already damned. My crimes might as well accomplish something.
~So you’ll serve clean water out of a filthy cup? You must have better tricks than I do.~
The safe house was on the east side, far enough from the fashionable areas that it had been on the city’s outskirts. Now the building was gone. The entrance itself, a flagstone set flush with the ground, was only paces from the Godking’s new wall. The neighborhood, once unfashionable, was buzzing with activity. After the Godking’s death, thousands of people had fled the Warrens, either hoping to reclaim their lives or hoping to claim someone else’s better life. The fires that the displaced had started on their way out of the city had left great swathes of it bare and black. Too few buildings remained to shelter everyone, even without the thousands who had left the city with Terah Graesin. Now they all were back, and there were no building materials to be found. With an army besieging the city and cold rains starting, people were desperate.
Kylar sat with his back to the wall to listen to the tones of the city. There was no way he was going to get into the safe house before nightfall. Even invisible, he couldn’t lift a flagstone in the middle of what was now a de facto street without dozens of people noticing. The safe house had another entrance, of course. Unfortunately, a new wall was sitting on it.
The gossip was angry. Terah Graesin had stopped the free flow of traffic across the Vanden Bridge this morning, and it had nearly caused a riot. Kylar listened to a proclamation that promised a return to the way things had been before the invasion. The squatters would be driven back into the Warrens, and those legitimate merchants and petty nobility who had been uprooted would be granted their old homes and lands as soon as they could prove their claims. The herald was greeted with hisses and jeers.
“And how in the nine hells am I supposed to prove that I owned a smithy, when the queen burned it and my deeds to the ground?” one man yelled. Kylar would have been more sympathetic if he didn’t recognize the man as a beggar. Others, however, joined a chorus of agreement.
“I’m not going back!” a young man yelled. “I lived in the Warrens long enough.”
“I killed six palies in the Nocta Hemata,” another shouted. “I deserve better!”
Before the crowd’s fury gained more momentum, the herald beat a hasty retreat.
Within an hour, scribes were openly hawking badly forged deeds. An hour after that, a Sa’kagé representative showed up. His deeds were not only higher quality and much more expensive, he said the Sa’kagé guaranteed that no duplicate deeds would be forged. He could only sell deeds for this neighborhood, and he had an allotment of what kind of shops could be represented. Thus, unless the owner still possessed the original deed, Sa’kagé deeds were as good as gold. Within minutes, the non-Sa’kagé scribes had been chased off or coerced to join.