Many asked for news of the queen. Aliver had nothing new to offer them. “She has flown to destroy the Santoth. She will. She is your queen, and she swore to defeat them in your name.” The words sounded grandiose to his ears. Too simple a way to put a complex thing. Too buoyed by optimism he could not be entirely swayed by. He still projected the words with the grinning confidence he needed to, and each time he was amazed at the effect. People believed him, or they seemed to, at least. Both were gifts he-and they-needed.
“Barad,” Aliver said once they had pulled away a bit and could talk, “I love these people.”
“I know. They know it as well, which is what’s truly important. It almost softens me on the whole question of the monarchy.” He smiled. “Almost. If all monarchs were like you… if it were written into the laws that all monarchs must be just like Aliver Akaran in all important matters… But they’re not all like you, and such a law would not stand longer than it takes to wean a young tyrant from the breast. After you win this war-and after Corinn defeats the Santoth-you two will have to find a way to guide the nation into a different future. I don’t say it will be easy, or that you must change everything overnight, but you must put in place a system that lets people decide their own fates. You will do that, won’t you?”
Oh, Corinn and I won’t do that, Aliver thought. We’ll be dead. The people’s fate, for better and worse, will be in their own hands. He resisted the urge to confess to Barad, to unburden himself, and ask him to conceive of the fight going on without him and of the world after without him. He pressed it down beneath a clearing of his throat. It would not help anything. Telling anyone would be an indulgence that might do more harm than good. Though he could not have said whom he was beseeching, he thought, Just let me live long enough to finish this. Please.
Out loud, he said, “I wish we had more time to speak of such things, to plan. When the wars are over, will you help our young monarchs into that future?”
Barad did not seem to notice the peculiar wording. “In any way I can, I will.”
“Good,” Aliver said. “Then there is hope. Does this mean you’ve forgiven us?”
“I never needed to forgive you. Queen Corinn enslaved us both. For her, forgiveness is a long road. I’m yet only standing on the edge of it.”
The prince nodded his acceptance of this.
“I will admit that I do care about your family more than I imagined I could,” Barad said. “I still believe that no one family should rule the world, and I will not forget the things Corinn did to me and to the nation. But I cannot feel the anger I wish to.”
He paused as a child rushed up to Aliver, offering him a wristband woven from dyed leather. Aliver kneeled and let the girl slip it on.
Watching, Barad said, “I can’t imagine the people fighting a war without you. Before, I would have said that these adoring people are deluded by the vintage your sister gave them. That’s only part of it, though. Beneath that they see something in you. They need you right now. Without you I don’t know what would unite us enough to fight the Auldek. We could be scattered and running, hiding and thinking only of ourselves. Instead, all the people of the world seem content to put aside their differences until this war is over.”
They walked for a time, surrounded by well-wishers. Once through them, Aliver asked the first of his two questions. “So, Barad, visionary that you are-how do I defeat this enemy?”
“I’m not a warrior. You know better than I what your family has done in the past.” Barad made a fist and smashed it, with force but humor also, into his other palm. “You crush them. Don’t you? You kill enough of them so that they have no heart to fight on. You destroy their wealth, their happiness, their capacity to threaten you. You control where they live, how they live, and you take their resources so that they have to come to you for the very things necessary for their survival. You make a myth that explains the rightness of your victory and the wrongness that made the defeated into the defeated.” He inhaled a few breaths as if the catalog he had just spoken winded him. “All these things your Acacia has done, and yet none of it made you safe. The Meins came out of defeat a stronger enemy than before you conquered them. The Santoth roar back upon us all now, when we were not even thinking of them. The Auldek come against us because of what? Are they an old or new enemy? They have been devouring our children for generations. Now they want more.”
“I know the way things have been,” Aliver said. “I ask you to speak of a way things could be.”
Barad looked up as they passed through the gate into the lower town, watching the gentle sway of flags above it. Aliver did the same. “Tell me this: Is the world too small for the people that live in it?”
“No,” Aliver said.
“Is there too little water and air, wood and food and animals, stones to build with and ore to make tools with? Is there not enough? In the whole of the Known World I mean-not just as measured in any one place.”
“Of course there is enough.”
“Will any of us live forever?”
“No.”
“Need any of us fear death?”
Aliver let his eyes drift over the faces of the people they passed. Young and old, men and women, a child clinging to his mother’s leg, a crone with one eye closed as if she were winking at him. “No,” he said, “none of us need fear death.”
“If all that is as you say, war makes no sense.”
“I never said it did.”
“Then don’t make war.”
“I must.”
“No, make something different from war. Don’t allow your enemies to be enemies. Make them something else, because otherwise they have a power over you that they should not have. If you think in the same ways as the past, you will only get new versions of the past. Think differently. That’s what I’m saying.”
Exactly, Aliver thought. It was what he had already decided he needed to do. It helped to hear Barad’s deep voice expressing the same conclusion. Think differently. That’s what I’m learning to do again. Now that he was free inside himself, his visions of what the world could and should be spoke to him with growing urgency. He had been thinking differently when he and Corinn spoke of the souls trapped in the Auldek bodies and when they composed the documents he had in a sealed box already safe in Kohl’s saddlebag. He had been thinking differently earlier that day when he met with Delivegu. Aliver sent him on the task unlike any that Corinn had assigned him. The first and last mission Aliver would ever set him on.
A little later they stood on the dock at which the transport was moored. Kelis and Naamen were waiting on the boat. Kelis waved from the deck but did not descend to intrude upon them. Despite the bustling crowds and the din of patriotic songs and the incredible sight of the three dragons perched each on their own cleared section of pier they-and others-knew that the two men were conversing privately.
Aliver stood with a hand resting on a pylon. He and Barad watched the rippling green water below them, the barnacle-encrusted pier fading into the depths below their feet. Crabs worked at the their precise harvest, one large claw and one small, coordinated.
“What will you do now?” Aliver asked.
“Is that for me to say?”
Instead of answering, Aliver found a new question. “Barad, do you remember that I spoke to you when you were still in the mines of Kidnaban?”
The man’s stone eyes managed to convey surprise. “Of course. Hearing your voice changed my life, Aliver. You gave me purpose. Before I had the words to speak against tyranny, I borrowed yours and learned to speak by juggling them on my tongue. The queen almost took that away from me. Under her spell, I came to doubt that I had ever heard your voice. I came to doubt many things.”
“And I had forgotten it myself,” Aliver said, “but I have it all back now. I reached out to you because I knew you were the people’s conscience. I needed you then. It was good to know that you were there in the mines, among the people, saying all the brilliant, rebellious things you’ve always said. I still need you, but after what’s been done to you I have no right to ask anything of you. Go, if you have a mind to. Do and say what you will all across the world.”