them?’
‘No one on the earth is hunting them,’ Cynthaen replied, and to the boy the deception seemed glaring. Perhaps it was to Panhandle as well, but if so his face hid it well. He squinted at the two warriors first. ‘You’ll stand guard, I’d guess,’ he decided. ‘Guard a shipment, a warehouse? Warriors, in short.’
Santiren nodded shortly. ‘We can, once our charge here is safe. We shall not need charity.’
Penhold’s eyebrows had risen as he heard her speak, her accent as strange to him as his own was to her. ‘And no questions asked, I’m sure,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Well, then. I am Ordly Penhold, merchant of Collegium. What shall I know you as?’
‘Santiren,’ the Dart-kinden woman replied. ‘And this is Marcantor.’
‘And a boy,’ Ordly Penhold observed. ‘Your servant, is he?’
‘I am no servant,’ the boy snapped. It had been a long march over a foreign land, passed hand to hand, losing his beloved Paladrya. ‘I am Aradocles. I am the…’ He stopped at Santiren’s warning hiss. A whirl of faint colour danced on his skin: shame. I am hunted, that is what I am.
There was nothing on Penhold’s face to suggest he had understood their exchange but, when he spoke, he said, ‘Well now… Arad Oakleaves, is it? Perhaps we’ll call you Master Oakleaves. Almost a Collegium name that, and a lad like you’s better without something too grand.’
Aradocles looked him in the eyes, and saw a man old enough, and wise enough, and outright foreign enough, as not to be easily read.
‘Ordly Penhold…’ He corrected himself, copying the man’s own term of address. ‘Master Penhold. Thank you for taking me into your household. I shall do what I can to requite you.’
Only a few scant years later, General Tynan and the Imperial Second Army defeated the Mantids of the Felyal, burned out their holds, drove them from the forest ahead of his swiftly advancing army, and put to the torch every village and trading post they came across. Nor was Arvandine spared.
Two
To an outsider it would have seemed that the politics of Collegium were of least interest to the politicians themselves. There had been some few moments of silence known to fall during the Collegiate Assembly – they had mostly occurred during the war when to speak into that sudden chasm would have been to volunteer. Business as usual was the constant mutter and murmur of deal-making, deal-breaking, jokes and snickering, and a hundred separate commentaries about current affairs. All too often the only person paying attention to the matter being spoken on was the speaker himself. Sometimes not even that was the case.
‘Your big moment soon enough,’ Jodry Drillen observed. An experienced Assembler knew how to utter a few low words, amid that babble, which would carry clearly to someone close by, or even to someone halfway around the great bank of stone seats. Drillen, with a voice honed in the lecture theatres of the College, was such a man. Stenwold, sitting two tiers further down and three to the left, heard him precisely and glanced up to see the paunchy, richly dressed man smiling down at him.
And I am in his party, am I not? Stenwold knew it. Just sitting here was enough to tell people that he had at last cast his lot. He had never actually taken such a step, it seemed, and yet the men above and below and to either side of him were all supporters of Drillen’s faction. The Assemblers were men and women with enough time on their hands to find significance in anything. In the Assembly, just sitting down was a political act.
It went deeper than that, of course, for Stenwold and Drillen had made deals together behind closed doors. Despite the secrecy it was, paradoxically, well known. There had been an expedition dispatched in Stenwold’s name that people had recently started calling ‘the Drillen expedition’. It had, rumour suggested, been a great success. Rumour also preceded the expedition’s return to Collegium by several days.
Stenwold sat there, surrounded by Drillen’s creatures, with an aching void inside him because he had not yet had a chance to confirm some of those rumours. There were a few matters manifestly known about the returning expedition: one College scholar had died, and the Empire had somehow been involved. But Stenwold’s interest, for once, shrugged off the political on behalf of the personal.
What has happened to my niece?
He had been given no chance yet to speak to the returning scholars. Drillen had grabbed them yesterday at dusk, the moment they arrived. Stenwold had been forced to put his official position ahead of all his personal demands and speak instead to the Vekken ambassadors. What he had heard so far had confirmed his worst fears: Che had not returned with them.
Drillen had promised him access to the two surviving scholars tonight. That was all Stenwold could think about, yet here he was in the Assembly with his name listed to speak.
The Assembly had not seemed itself since Lineo Thadspar died, everyone agreed. Still, while Collegium had been under siege or busy negotiating the Treaty of Gold, that had not seemed to matter. All hands were on the tiller, and pulling the same way. Only with the return of peace had the chaos come crawling in. Without an appointed Speaker the Assembly was deteriorating into name-calling, special interests and personal feuds.
Most of the personal feuds revolved around the identity of the new Speaker. The casting of Lots, the formal process whereby the citizens of Collegium voted in the leaders they deserved, was open all this tenday and Stenwold had already made his choice. Nine Assemblers had put themselves forward as candidates, and Jodry Drillen was one of the front-runners. He was a man with plenty of manifest flaws, to Stenwold’s eyes. He was not reliable, trustworthy or honourable. His scholarship had been surrendered to his political ambitions. His patriotism was as fluid as his waist, dependent on his own station within the state. He was nevertheless, Stenwold was forced to admit, the best of a bad field.
We should select someone at random, plucked out of all the citizens of Collegium, he thought, and not for the first time. In the absence of a Speaker the role had devolved to the Administrar of the College, as tradition dictated. This meant the task fell on a beaky middle-aged man by the name of Master Partreyn, whose main ambition had hitherto extended to ensuring that the College had sufficient supplies of paper and ink. Used to conducting his life in a quiet monotone, he was usually hoarse through shouting by mid-afternoon, and today it seemed as though the Assembly had a never-ending stream of business. Assemblers would soon start skulking off into the early evening, their patience with democracy exhausted.
Partreyn looked over his scroll where, Stenwold knew, the various Assemblers who wished to take up their fellows’ time would be listed, in Partreyn’s own neat script. Stenwold’s name was amongst them today, to report on the current position with Vek.
To report success, or some grain of it – and won’t that be far less well received than failure. Not so long since the Ant-kinden of Vek had brought an army up to Collegium’s gates. Wounds from the Vekken siege were still open. People had lost relatives and businesses and property, and gained nothing but scars. News of a glimmer of hope for peace with that violent city would sit badly with many.
But it is essential, because of the Empire: the Wasp Empire, which had not been standing still since the inconclusive end to the war. Latest news from Stenwold’s agents said that all of the renegade Imperial governors had been pacified and that, of the lands in Imperial hands before the war, only the Three-City Alliance and the Border Principalities remained unbowed. And when they come for us, we must not risk having an enemy to our west.
‘I have Stenwold Maker,’ Partreyn got out, forcing his voice over the hubub. There were some cheers, some groans, for Stenwold had never been shy of forcing his company on these men and women. Stenwold pushed himself to his feet, ready to descend and take the floor. Someone else was shouting, though, voice rising high over the general din.
‘No! No! This is quite intolerable!’ It was a bony Beetle-kinden man who looked slightly Stenwold’s senior, sitting near the front row of seats. Several of the men and women beside him began adding their voices to his. He clearly seemed to be the spokesman for some small faction of his own, but Stenwold could not place him.
Partreyn’s reply was entirely unheard by anyone further back, but the bony man caught it.
‘Three days!’ he shouted. ‘On the list, three days running, and no time to hear me speak! Do you think my business is not already so injured that I can spare time from it? Hammer and tongs, but you’ll hear me speak!’
