Lord Attaper stood just inside the door. He’d arrived for the meeting dressed as commander of the Blood Eagles in gilded cuirass and helmet, studded leather apron, and heavy boots. Attaper even wore his equipment belt, but his ivory-inlaid sword and dagger scabbards were empty.
“Your highness?” he called. He gestured to the doorway, empty now that the last entrants were sitting down. Each councillor’s aides stood against the wall behind their principal.
“Right, close us up,” Carus said, his raised voice covering the buzz of whispers. Chairs scuffed, but there was dead silence by the time the heavy panel slammed under the pull of Attaper’s arm.
Instead of taking the empty chair midway along the right-hand curve of the table, Attaper stood at parade rest beside the doorway. Carus looked at him and grinned again. The Blood Eagle, his feet spread and his hands crossed behind his back, had chosen a place outside the formal seating order to avoid giving superior status to his rival Lord Waldron.
Carus swept his gaze across the council. His eyes had the hard glint of a sea eagle viewing white foam on the wave tops, judging which flecks were wind and which might be made by the fins of fish just below the surface.
“We’re being attacked by rogues who call themselves the Confederacy of the West,” he said. “They’re using wizardry now, though they’ll be bringing swords out soon I shouldn’t wonder. We’re going to cut them off at the knees by moving on them immediately.”
Carus paused to let what he’d just said sink in. Aides scribbled in waxed notebooks or on sheets of smooth-planed white birch; the seated principals glanced around to check their colleagues’ reaction, but for the most part they kept silent.
Lord Angier, who held a rotating appointment as representative of the united guilds of Valles, was the exception. More puffed up by his presence in the council than daunted by awareness that he was far the most junior person in the room, he said, “What do you mean, ‘We’re being attacked by wizardry,’ your highness?”
Carus pointed his left index finger at Angier. In a voice that was no less terrible for being quiet, he said, “Guildsman, stupid questions wouldn’t amuse me even when time wasn’t as short as it is today. Shut your mouth and listen.”
Angier gaped, first at the king and then at the chancellor, who Sharina knew had acted as his patron. Royhas grimaced and jerked his head in a swift gesture of negation. Angier suddenly understood the enormity of what he’d done; he wilted visibly.
“Right,” said Carus softly.
If Garric had been chairing this meeting, there’d have been a babble of voices—some raised in shouts. With Carus at the head of the table, Sharina had a vision of these same men facing a lion in an enclosed space. A hungry lion.
“The Confederates’re gathering their forces at Donelle on the east coast of Tisamur,” the king said. “Donelle seems to be where the wizards in league with them have their den as well.”
Liane opened the parchment codex on which she’d written her notes on the Confederacy, summarizing information from a score of sources. Garric would have asked her to brief the assembly at this point. Carus didn’t bother—with an explanation or with Liane, either one.
“I’m going to take the fleet and the army to Tisamur,” he continued harshly, “land in the Bight of Donelle, smash the Confederacy’s army, and hang every wizard I can catch. Zettin and Koprathu—I’ll sail in three days. How many ships will you have ready?”
Zettin, the Admiral of the Fleet, was a nobleman in his late thirties—a former Blood Eagle who’d take any risk for success. Master Koprathu was the elderly Clerk of the Fleet Office responsible for outfitting Admiral Zettin’s forces. Both reacted with shock in their different ways.
“Three days?” said Koprathu. He opened a satchel, taking out an abacus and a series of accounts scratched onto potsherds with a stylus. “Oh, that’s much too soon, sir, we’ll need at least—”
“Your highness,” said Zettin, jumping to his feet, “I’m ready to go now with the ten ships of the guard squadron!”
“Koprathu,” King Carus said, “I didn’t ask for an opinion, I want a number: how many ships can you get ready in three days? Zettin—”
His glance shifted, his face grew harder.
“Lord Zettin,” he continued, “I could train an ape to caper and do tricks for me. What I need from you isn’t noble posturing but hard facts and the readiness to do as you’re told. I’ll ask you once more: how many ships can be ready to sail in three days?”
Zettin’s face didn’t change for a measurable instant; the look of noble insouciance remained long after it could possibly have any connection with what was going on in the admiral’s mind. Waldron leaned forward, watchful rather than hopeful—though he’d objected at the time, Garric gave the fleet command to Attaper’s protégé Zettin.
“There are seventy-six trireme hulls that I trust to swim,” Zettin said. “In the arsenal, the builders’ yards, and the squadron on duty downriver at the Pool. I have thirty-seven hundred men. That’s nominally, but I expect that a sweep of the harbor for sailors will about make up for attrition from sickness and desertion. So, eighteen to twenty ships fully manned, with more in proportion as space is used for cargo and passengers instead of oarsmen. Plus the phalanx, who train with us part of the time but aren’t under my command.”
“Good,” said Carus, gesturing Zettin back to his seat. Zettin sat quickly and gratefully. Without the king’s command, he’d have been in a quandary as to whether to sit or stand—and feeling a fool whichever he chose.
Master Koprathu turned over the yellow-glazed shard on which he jotted notes with a fine brush and started working on the back. The shards holding his accounts were spreading in a three-tiered arc before him, encroaching on the space belonging to the councillors to either side. They edged away from the clerk, not least because some of the low-fired pots were crumbling.
Koprathu must have been aware of Carus’ gaze—and that of everyone else in the room, drawn by the king’s eyes. He continued working with desperate animation, never looking up. Sweat beaded his forehead.
Carus nodded brusk approval. He turned. “Lord Waldron,” he said, “what’s the status of the army for deployment in three days?”
Another of Waldron’s aides, this one a grizzled fellow nearly the general’s own age, was trying to offer him a sheaf of paper. It probably held the morning reports of the regiments under his command. Waldron waved the man off impatiently.
“Of the phalanx, cross-trained as oarsmen,” Waldron said, “five thousand, three hundred and seventeen present for duty this morning. Heavy infantry, not cross-trained, two thousand, one hundred and twelve present for duty. Light infantry—”
The archers and javelin men; scouts and skirmishers for the main army and useful as marines in a sea fight.
“—one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-nine present for duty; but I think I can bring that number up by several hundred in three days. They’ll come running from their small-holdings if they hear there’s a chance for loot and a fight.”
Waldron and the king exchanged hard smiles.
“Cavalry,” Waldron continued, “only seven hundred and sixteen in and around Valles. Several thousand more if there were time to raise the household troops of my northern neighbors, but three days isn’t long enough for that.”
“Bring five squadrons south for security in Valles while we’re gone,” Carus said with a nod. “I doubt we’ll have bottoms to transport seven hundred horses anyway, let alone fodder for them.”
He paused, then added without raising his voice, “The horsemen will fight as infantry if I order it?”
“They will,” said Waldron in the tones a glacier would use if it were very angry. “Or they’ll crawl from my camp on their bellies as foresworn cowards.”
“My camp, Lord Waldron,” the king said with a gentle smile, “but I’m fortunate to have a commander who understands that real honor doesn’t depend on sitting in a saddle.”