The ambassador sat forward, one finger held high. He wore the silver cuffs that Dawson’s wife Clara assured him were the fashion in Kaltfel that year and the decorative wrist chain that marked a married man in the courts of Asterilhold.
“Now that’s just the kind of rhetoric to be careful of, Baron Osterling.”
“As long as you’re lecturing me on how to speak, you may as well call me Dawson.”
Ashford either missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it.
“All I mean is that Asterilhold didn’t have any ill wishes toward the prince or the Severed Throne.”
Dawson walked three steps and gestured to a pelt that hung on the wall. The years had greyed the deep golden fur, but the sheer size of the tanned skin was still impressive.
“Did you see this?” Dawson asked. “Mountain lion killed ten of my serfs. Ten of them. I left court a month after my first boy was born to hunt it. It took me three weeks to track it down, and four of my huntsmen fell before we brought it to ground. You would have been… five years old, then? Six?”
“Lord Kalliam, I respect that you are my elder, and I see that—”
“Don’t lie to me, boy. We both know there were knives meant for Aster’s throat.”
“There were,” Ashford said. “In both our courts. Asteril-hold’s not a single thing any more than Antea is. A few people corresponded with Lord Maas about his ambitions. To hold the whole court responsible for the secret actions of a few will drag both our kingdoms into chaos.”
Dawson stroked the dead cat’s fur as he weighed what to say next. The kingdoms of Asterilhold and Antea were like brothers. In centuries before, they had answered to the same High King. Several generations back, the noble houses had made a fashion of intermarrying in hopes that it would drive their nations toward peace. Instead it had confused the bloodlines and given dukes in Asterilhold a plausible claim to the Antean throne. If only you killed enough of the people in between.
It was the fate of all reforms that they turned against the reformers. History was rotten with men and women who had sought to remake the world in the image they had created of it. Inevitably, they failed. The world resisted change, and the nobleman’s role was to protect the right order of things. If only that order were always clear. He caressed the dead animal one last time and let his fingers fall from it.
“What do you propose, then?” Dawson asked.
“You are one of King Simeon’s oldest and most trusted friends. You were willing to sacrifice your reputation and accept exile from the court in order to expose the plot against the prince. No one is better placed to speak in favor of negotiation.”
“And in addition, I was the Palliako boy’s patron.”
“Yes,” Ashford said placidly. “And that.”
“I thought you were a skeptic of the romance of Geder Palliako.”
“The sure-sighted viscount who burned the city he’d been set to protect in order that he rush back to Camnipol and save the throne from insurrection. His mysterious self-exile to the east taken at the height of his triumph and his return with secret knowledge of the traitors within the court,” Ashford said. “It sounds like something a man would pay good coin to have said about him. Next, he’ll be waking dragons to play riddles against them.”
“Palliako’s an interesting one,” Dawson said. “I underestimated him. More than once. He lends himself to that.”
“He’s the hero of Antea, savior and protector of the prince, and darling of the court,” Ashford said. “If that’s being underestimated, the truth must be something out of an old epic.”
“Palliako’s… odd,” Dawson said.
“Does he respect you? Does he listen to your advice?”
Dawson didn’t know the answer to that. Once, when the boy had just come back from Vanai, Dawson had been fairly certain that he could exercise whatever influence he liked over the younger Palliako. Now Geder had a barony of his own and Prince Aster as his ward. There was an argument that he outranked Dawson, if not formally then in effect.
And there was the temple. Ever since the boy’s return from the wilds of the Keshet, it was unclear how much the foreign priests he’d brought back were his pets and how much he was theirs. The high priest, Basrahip, had been central to the raid against Feldin Maas, once Baron of Ebbingbaugh and now bones at the bottom of the Division. From what Dawson understood, without the priest, all might have been lost that night. Geder might not have escaped with the letters of evidence, King Simeon might have gone ahead with his plan to foster Prince Aster with Maas, and the world might be a very different place.
And still, there was an answer to the question that he could honestly give.
“Even if Palliako doesn’t bend his neck back to look up at me, he’ll listen to my son. Jorey served with him in Vanai. They were friends of a sort even before it became the popular thing to do.”
“A word from him would go quite a long way toward throwing oil on these waters. All I’m looking for is a private audience with the king. If I knew what assurances he would need, I could take them home with me. Plots of regicide are no more appealing to King Lechan than King Simeon. If nobles in Asterilhold need be called to justice, Lechan will be the one to do it. There’s no need to field armies.”
Dawson made a small sound in the back of his throat, neither assent nor refusal.
“King Lechan would be very grateful,” Ashford said, “for any aid you could be in mending the breach with his much-loved cousin.”
Dawson laughed now. It was a short, barking sound like one of his dogs.
“Do I seem like a merchant to you, Lord Ashford?” Dawson asked. “I have no interest in turning a profit from serving King Simeon. There is no gift your king could offer me that would bring me to act against my conscience.”
“Then I rely upon your conscience,” Ashford said, dropping the offer of bribery as if it had never been made. “What does it say, Baron Osterling?”
“If it were mine to choose, I’d want the testicles of every man who wrote to Maas in a pickling jar,” Dawson said. “But it isn’t mine. Simeon sits on the Severed Throne, so the decision is his. Yes, I’ll speak with him.”
“And Palliako?”
“I’ll have Jorey approach him. Perhaps the two of you can meet when court is called. It’s only a few weeks from now, and I assume you were going to Camnipol anyway.”
“For the opening of court, as it happens,” Ashford said. “But there’s much to be done before then. With your permission, my lord, I will take my leave of your holding in the morning.”
“What? More Antean nobles to dangle Lechan’s generosity before?” Dawson said.
The ambassador’s smile thinned, but it did not vanish.
“As you say, Lord Kalliam,” Ashford said.
The holding at Osterling Fells had been Dawson’s home when he was only a boy, and his memories of it were of snow and cold. The dim patterns he’d divined as a child put autumn’s feasts of pumpkin sweets and brandy- soaked cherries in Camnipol, snow and ice in Osterling Fells. Almost into adulthood, he had thought of the seasons as residing in different cities. Summer lived in the dark-cobbled streets and high walls of Camnipol. The ice and snow of winter belonged to the narrow valley with its thin river. Granted, the conceit had become more poetic in nature. He wasn’t an innocent to think no snow fell on the bridges that spanned the Division or that the summer heat wouldn’t bring hunting dogs to torpor in his father’s kennels. But the idea had the deep resonance—the rightness—of a thing known in youth and never entirely disbelieved.
The holding had stood in its place at the base of a sloping hill, unchanged for centuries. Before Antea rose as a kingdom, the walls of Osterling Fells had been there. Dragon’s jade, eternal and unyielding, wove through the stone and defied wind and weather. The hard granite had eroded in places, and in some even been replaced, but the jade would never fail.
The room he used for his private study was the same that his father had used, and his grandfather, and so on back and back and back. Before this same window, his father had explained that the walls of the holding were like the fabric of the kingdom, that the noble houses were the jade. Without their constancy, even the most glorious structure would eventually fall into ruin.
When his father died, Dawson had taken the holding as his own, raised his own boys within it, and told the same tale over their winter cribs.
