He moved past the Gypsy Scouts that guarded the manor without speaking, and slipped into his office, locking the door.
“I know why Sethbert destroyed Windwir.”
Petronus looked up to see Vlad Li Tam sitting at his small desk. He had expected him, knowing there would be words between them as soon as he saw him sitting in the crowded tent.
Petronus felt the anger rise in him. “I’m not so sure that Sethbert did destroy Windwir. At least not without prompting.” He pointed to the golden bird. “We know your bird was in Windwir. Did it bring word back to you?”
Vlad Li Tam’s eyes narrowed. “You suspect me. But I had nothing to do with Sethbert. Rudolfo was my work. Just as you were my father’s.”
Petronus felt the words hit him like a fist. “What do you mean?”
Vlad Li Tam shrugged. “You were made for this day, Petronus. Just as Rudolfo was made to guard the light.”
“You’re lying.” But Petronus wasn’t sure.
Vlad Li Tam smiled. “Regardless, I have something for you.”
He drew out a leather pouch and handed it to Petronus. “You’ll find evidence here that there was a secret program in the Order to restore the spell.”
Petronus took the pouch and placed it on his desk. “I don’t doubt that. But that is hardly damning.”
“There is more,” he said. “The bird did tell me that Windwir had fallen. But I did not send the bird to Windwir. It had been missing from its cage for nearly a year before that.”
Petronus looked up, surprised. “Where had it gone?”
Vlad Li Tam stood. “I intend to find out. I am leaving the Named Lands. I will not see you again.” When he said it, Petronus heard finality in his former friend’s voice.
They did not embrace or shake hands. Petronus simply nodded, and Tam left.
Petronus looked at the pouch. Finally, he picked it up, sat at his desk and unclasped the buckles. He drew two bundles of paper out and started scanning one. The first several pages were bank receipts in Whymer script acknowledging Petronus’s closure of Androfrancine accounts. These were followed by Documents of Transfer, moving all remaining holdings to the Ninefold Forest Houses. But the last page stopped his eye. It was a Letter of Contribution addressed to the Order and dated three days before the transfer of holdings occurred.
Vlad Li Tam had found a way to pass his vast wealth on to his daughter through the Androfrancine Order and the Ninefold Forest Houses.
Petronus retied the strings and placed the bank letters on the stack of correspondence that waited for Rudolfo, Isaak and Neb to sort through after he was gone.
He opened the second bundle-meticulous reproductions of Order correspondence and reports. He went through page after page, looking at the drawings and seeing it written plainly in some places, veiled in others. He watched it unfold in front of him, and he couldn’t take his eyes away from it. Beyond just the restoration of the spell, they’d made calculations and ciphers on the population impact of the Seven Cacophonic Deaths if used in a limited fashion. They had even developed a delivery system for the spell. A walking, talking and thinking machine brought back from the days of the Younger Gods, resistant to the magicks of such as Xhum Y’Zir.
Petronus felt his heart break for Isaak and the other metal men. These documents had to be forgeries. They simply had to be, because what he read stood in the face of everything he knew about the Order. True, he’d grown to hate it as much as he ever loved it, but he could not believe this. Sethbert’s decision to strike first suddenly made sense, and Petronus felt a pang of hot, sharp grief twist in his stomach as what he’d done settled in.
Then he saw Vlad Li Tam’s note at the bottom. The ink on it was still wet and smudged.
They meant to protect us.
It made sense now. The Androfrancines had ever considered themselves the shepherds of yesterday, guarding the New World from itself and from a past they feared might be repeated.
They meant to protect us.
He felt the tears now, pushing at his eyes, and his thoughts turned suddenly as that greater strategy took form before his very eyes. Someone out there had penetrated Vlad Li Tam’s network of sons and daughters or his closely shielded staff. They had somehow maneuvered the rescripting of the golden bird to implicate Vlad Li Tam in the Desolation of Windwir. A savvy player of queen’s war, when the consort was threatened, would have moved him to a point on the board as far removed from that threat as possible. Vlad Li Tam, dismantling his vast network, had done so.
But who was the other player, that Vlad Li Tam would remove himself utterly from the New World, transferring his wealth to the Androfrancine Order and donating his holdings to the new library, leaving nothing behind but his daughter?
Someone beyond the Named Lands.
Petronus felt his knees go weak.
The Androfrancines had known this, at least some part of them. And they had feared it even to the point of seeking out the terrible song of Xhum Y’Zir to protect the Named Lands from this invisible threat.
In the end, their best intentions for the light had nearly extinguished it.
Perhaps his actions had been justice. Perhaps they had been mercy. Either way, Petronus had done what he had done. Sethbert lay dead and the Order lay dead alongside him. He thought of Grymlis and the Marsher village so long ago.
He put papers in the pouch and put the pouch with the small pile of things he intended to take back with him to Caldus Bay.
By the time he’d finished packing, the tears had already begun.
Jin Li Tam
In the pandemonium that followed Sethbert’s execution, Jin Li Tam slipped from the pavilion. She’d seen something unexpected there-one of the younger Androfrancines looked surprisingly like one of her many siblings, and when their eyes met, he had looked away, and then vanished through one of the three wide entrances.
She followed.
She felt no anger over Sethbert’s death. He would’ve died regardless, she realized. A?€he realind despite the years she spent with him, at no time had she forged any kind of bond with the man. She had no more doubt that he had brought down Windwir than that her father’s hand was intricately tied to all of these events, right down to the execution that for all practical purposes ended the Androfrancine Order’s legitimacy. Certainly, those few who remained-the Remnant-could try to come back from this, but it would never be successful. And what could they come back to? She had no doubt that Petronus had wrapped the Order’s loose strings before disqualifying himself from the Papacy by wetting his hands with Sethbert’s blood.
She wondered if that were her father’s work as well.
The thought of her father brought her back to the moment, and she pressed her way through the gathering crowd. She caught sight of the young Androfrancine moving quickly ahead of her and she quickened her pace. But when she caught up to him, it wasn’t her brother after all.
“I’m sorry,” she said, slipping back into the crowd and looking around.
You want to see someone from House Li Tam, she realized. She thought about this. Why? Over the past few months, her anger had ebbed and flowed like the tidewaters of Tam Bay in her home city. When the anger rolled out from her, the sand in her heart filled in with grief to the point that she longed for the anger’s return. Inevitably, the wave crashed back to enrage her all over again.
But suddenly, now, at the end of it all, it was as if both her anger and her grief toward her father had vanished beneath the tip of Petronus’s knife. Rudolfo had told her once that people spent their lives living with a thousand insignificant injustices, and that sometimes seeing justice served on one great evil could move them forward from the path where they’d been stuck. That sudden death, both of Sethbert and the Androfrancine Order, left her hollow and spent, thinking only of the better world she hoped to give her baby.