“Will you let me go when I need to?” he asked. “When I truly, truly need to?”
“Before you’re grown? We can’t, son. We can’t do that!”
The boy looked up at him, and precisely now, when his flushed face was as childlike as Chert had ever seen it, another look stole across, something strange and sly and somehow alien. “Then I will go anyway without your blessing, Papa Chert.”
“No!” He took hold of the boy’s shoulders. “You must promise me you’ll do nothing of the sort. It will break your mother’s heart—that’s the truth! You must promise me that, until we say you’re old enough, you will stay here with us. Promise!”
Flint tried to squirm out of his grasp, but years of working stone had given Chert strong hands and the boy could not get away. “No!”
“You must promise, boy. You must.” Chert was almost weeping himself. “That’s all I can say. Promise me you won’t go without our… without my permission.” Opal would never allow it, but if he had to—if he felt it was the only way not to lose the boy in other, deeper ways—he knew he would go against her. And that would be a terrible day. “Promise.”
The boy at last stopped struggling. “Only with your permission?”
“Until you reach a man’s age.”
“But how old am I?”
Chert was so upset that it surprised him how suddenly the laugh came. “Well struck, lad. So, let us say… five more years, shall we? By any standard, that should give you time to do some growing.”
“Five years?” He looked dully resigned. “In five years the world might be ended, Father.”
“Then what you and I do won’t be such a worry, will it?” He had won, but Chert did not feel particularly good about it. “Come,” he said. “You like the temple library, don’t you? I have business there. Come and spend the afternoon with me.”
Silent and thoughtful again, his tears all but dried, Flint followed Chert back through the busy temple halls, past priests and soldiers and more than a few women, all silent, all apparently in a hurry. Each and every one of them wore a face as grim as Black Noszh-la, Gatekeeper of the House of Death.
10. Fools Lose the Game
“For a year the poor child labored in the temple, but then the corrupt mantis of that place sold the Orphan and several other slaves to a ship’s captain in need of crew…”
The room was warm and dark and smelled of the heart-shaped roots that one of Tolly’s other minions had set in the fireplace to smolder the night before, a smell that made Matt Tinwright’s head ache even as he peered around the chamber through slitted eyes. He still had no idea whether the roots had been meant for some magic ritual or simply so the smoke could provide a kind of dreamy drunkenness, which it had definitely done. Hendon Tolly’s pursuits, though often disquieting, were still largely mysterious, despite nearly a tennight of Tinwright being kept at the man’s side like a dog on a leash.
He groaned and opened his eyes wider. The groan became a gasp of surprise as he saw that Tolly was sitting on the edge of the bed next to him, staring down like a vulture watching a living thing turn into carrion.
“Wh—wha—what is it, my lord?” Tinwright stammered. “Do you need something?”
They were alone in the chamber: the women had gone. Tinwright hoped they were all still well. He had seen a few frightening moments before he had finally collapsed into welcome oblivion.
“Brother Okros never decided precisely what he wanted,” the lord protector said, as if in continuation of an early conversation. Perhaps it was: Tinwright could remember little of what had happened. He struggled into an upright position.
“I beg your pardon, Lord Tolly?”
“What he wanted. I’m talking of that pinchsniff Okros. Some days he played the man of learning, concerned only to uncover the great secrets of existence.” Tolly smirked. The lord protector looked remarkably well-groomed for a man who lived the way he did: Tinwright could not help wondering if the nobleman had snuck off to bathe while Tinwright himself was still sleeping. “It was quite amusing, really. On those occasions, he would treat me as a fine cook might treat his grossly fat master—as an embarrassment, but a necessary one, because I was the sponsor of his art.” Tolly rose and gestured impatiently. “Get up, poet. This will be a momentous day or I miss my guess.”
“My lord… ?”
“But Okros lost the path, you see. He came to believe that what we sought were the answers to his questions.” Tolly looked at Matt Tinwright with the bright eyes of a hunting hawk.
The lord protector was stranger than usual, Tinwright thought—as though he were drunk, but in some hard, crystalline way. “But he was wrong, Lord… ?”
“What I want had nothing to do with him. He was a fool… and fools lose the game.” Tolly smiled a hard smile. The warning was very clear. “Now come, poet.”
Tinwright followed Hendon Tolly across the crowded residence to the Prince Kayne Library, which had become the lord protector’s throne room and council chamber during the days of the Qar siege. The old library had always been a quiet, neat room despite its large size, with books crowding all the shelves between the floors and the high ceilings, but now it looked as though it had been in the front lines of the siege. Books lay scattered everywhere, both modern bound volumes and parchment scrolls from Hierosol and even ancient Xis, as well as a dozen chairs and stools and even a few tables dragged in haphazardly from other parts of the residence. The disorder was in large part because Tolly and Brother Okros had emptied the Tower of Summer, King Olin’s refuge, and brought almost everything out of his locked room to this library—some of the books, Tinwright had noticed, even seemed to have been written by Olin himself, and he thought about how glorious it would be to be left alone long enough to read some of them. What a boon for a poet—to read the true thoughts of a mindful king! But Hendon Tolly was clearly not going to let him stray from his side long enough to do such a thing.
Tinwright had not spoken to Elan or his mother in days, and had been hard-pressed even to send them a pair of short, secret letters telling them what had happened. He only prayed that his mother would not show up at the palace demanding that her newly elevated son—she must think he was Tolly’s secretary!—find a place for her in the residence.
Nightmare. And not just the idea of having her underfoot—what if she mentioned Elan?
Tinwright forced these thoughts from his head as a group of soldiers led by the lord constable, Berkan Hood, came to the library seeking an audience with Hendon Tolly. They were understandably distressed about the idea of the autarch’s ships landing unhindered in the harbor just opposite the castle.
“Two dozen warships, Lord Protector, and there are still more coming!” Berkan Hood was doing his best to keep his voice even but not entirely succeeding; he was clearly not the kind of man who usually practiced such restraint. “Yet we have not fired so much as a single bombard. Please, my lord, why do we not fight back? We struggled against the fairies for months, threw them back a dozen times. Now that those demons have retreated, why have we gone shy as maidens in front of the Xixies, who are only mortal?”
Hendon Tolly glared. He was barely interested in the trappings of ordinary rule—Tinwright had seen it even in their short time together. “There are plans afoot to protect this castle and this city, Hood,” he growled, “and I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.” With these curt words he dismissed them, although Berkan Hood and the others seemed far from satisfied.