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.”
A group of soldiers strode by. They bowed their heads to Aliver as they passed. Barad watched them until they began to climb the gangplank to the transport. “I don’t know where I would go or what I would say. I have my tongue back, but I am tired, Aliver. I don’t have it in me to harangue the masses anymore, not after the speeches I made for your sister. If I were younger, I would go with you. I’d listen to you speak.”
“I have a different idea,” Aliver said, nervous now as he approached the second question he wanted to ask Barad. “If you want to serve the nation without having to shout above masses or wield a sword… how about having a smaller group of pupils? You could stay here with Aaden and Shen.”
Barad pulled his head back, studying Aliver as if he needed to adjust his angle to see him clearly. “Aliver…”
“Educate them. Speak your mind and tell them every wise thing you know. Explain to them the world as you understand it, so that they can be rulers with their eyes open-and with their hearts and their consciences at the centers of their beings always. Or help them learn to be something other than rulers, if it comes to that.”
“Do you mean this?” Barad said after a moment.
“Teach them to think differently. Help them make a better future for themselves and Acacia.”
“Shouldn’t you do this yourself?”
With all my heart I want that, but I am dead and cannot do it. “If I had the time, I would love to, but I may not have that time. If I don’t, will you do it? I have already written a testament giving you complete power over their education.”
“And what of the mothers of these children? What would they think of their children being educated by a commoner, a mine worker, a rabble-rousing rebel, a man of-”
“They both approved. Corinn did before she left. Benabe you can ask yourself. Mena, I will tell with my own lips. And Dariel, he may not be of this world anymore. He would approve of this, though. You see? Nobody will stop what you begin.”
The man’s gaze drifted from Aliver. It seemed to lose itself somewhere in the middle distance of the green depths at their feet. “Corinn approved?” he asked, but Aliver knew it was not so much a question as a statement, one he needed to test out loud to believe. His eyes ground back to the prince’s. “I would not lie to them. Not about anything. If I teach, I will teach them that there is a better way than that of monarch and subject. I never believed in that system, Aliver. I still don’t.”
“I know,” Aliver said. “I know what you think about such things. Much of it we are of one mind about.”
Barad shook his head. He spoke with an almost angry edge to his voice, almost as if he had not heard Aliver. “You cannot ask this of me and then tie my tongue. I would swallow it first. If I am their tutor, I will dive with them into the royal records. I will show them what your line has done and how. There will be no secrets. If we find horrors, I will hold their hands and face those horrors with them, but I will not lie to them.”