sweat from his brow with the edge of his sleeve. “Thank you. I’ve witnessed the bounty. You can put it away now.”
Nico grabbed the head and shoved it back into the bag. On the other side of the office, Eli slumped in his chair. Of course they would bring a severed head to the Merchant Prince of Zarin. It made perfect sense in Josef logic. Powers, he had to get back to them before Josef decided that sending Nico to terrify the daylights out of the opposition was a valid political strategy.
Now that the head was gone, Whitefall’s color was returning. “Den the Warlord, dead at last,” he said. “No small feat. Who defeated him?”
“She did,” Josef said, tilting his head toward Nico.
Whitefall gave him a deeply skeptical look. Eli could see the old man examining the angles, trying to figure how Josef could benefit from such a lie. He must have come up blank, though, because he sighed and leaned on his desk, careful to keep his elbows well away from the blood smears.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” he said, glancing at Nico. “You’re giving the bounty over to this man, then?”
Nico nodded.
“May I ask how you intend to use the reward?” Whitefall said, eyes going back to Josef. “Five hundred thousand gold standards is a great deal of money, more than enough to destabilize the Council. You can see why we have to be careful, especially after the panic we’ve had this last week.”
“I’m not building an army, if that’s what you’re asking,” Josef said. “The Empress destroyed my country. Osera is a smoking ruin, and after paying for the war, we have no money to fix it. That’s where he comes in.” Josef pointed to the bag where Den’s head rested. “I mean to use Den’s bounty to rebuild my island. Anything left over will be put in the treasury to guard against future disaster.”
“How extremely reasonable,” Whitefall said, lips tilting up like the words were some kind of private joke. “Maybe we should appoint more swordsman kings?”
Josef shrugged. “Seemed fitting to me that the man who helped wreck Osera twice should be the one whose head pays to fix it. How long until the Council can pay up? We need the money as soon as possible.”
“And that’s where we find our problem,” Whitefall said slowly. “Yours is not the only country that’s had to pay for a war, King Josef.”
“We’re the only country that had to fight one,” Josef said, crossing his arms.
“I’m not arguing with you there,” Whitefall said. “But armies have to be fed, clothed, and paid whether they meet the enemy or not, and it all adds—”
“Stop,” Josef said, putting up his hand. “You’re telling me that the Council is broke, too?” When Whitefall didn’t answer at once, he threw his head back. “Powers! Does anyone actually have money in this little club of yours?”
The gag reduced Eli’s cackle to a safely muted grunt. Whitefall, however, did not look amused.
“Not being able to produce five hundred thousand gold standards on command hardly counts as broke, King Josef,” he said crisply. “The Council of Thrones would be hard-pressed to do that at any time. Now, however, it is particularly difficult. So difficult, in fact, that were it not for a certain windfall, we’d be unable to offer you any meaningful assistance at all.”
He tilted his head toward Eli as he spoke, making it painfully clear what windfall he was talking about. Josef didn’t answer, but his eyes also flicked to Eli, and Whitefall’s face lit up.
“Let me put this as simply as I can,” the Merchant Prince said. “If the Council does not claim the Monpress bounty, there’s little chance of Osera getting a red cent. Of course, this would mean Mr. Monpress would have to stand for his crimes. Though since there’s little question of his guilt, any trial would be a mere formality on his way to the gallows.”
Eli swallowed against the pressure of the gag.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Whitefall said, his voice softening. “You’ll find I’m a very understanding soul. I know you and Mr. Monpress are old friends. Who could expect you to condemn your dear companion to death in order to placate a country that’s never made a question of how much it disliked you?”
Josef’s face darkened, and Whitefall moved in for the kill.
“Come, King Josef,” he said kindly. “We are grown men. Let’s not bicker. Compromise is the foundation of good governance. Here’s my offer. I’ll give you Eli Monpress, no strings attached. I will let him walk out of this office as your guest and never ask after him again. And to honor the great debt we owe Osera for her bravery, the Council will keep its fleet at Osera to help with the rebuilding as long as necessary. You will get back your friend and your country, and all I ask in exchange is that you leave that head here and never speak of it again. Let Den remain what he’s always been, a black specter from the past. Such things have no place in our modern world. Forget him, forget the bounty, and take friendship instead: Eli’s, mine, and the Council’s. What do you say, King Josef? Is that not fair?”
Eli glanced at Josef, but the swordsman didn’t look at him. His glare never left his target, the old man smiling behind his large desk.
“I give you what you want, or you send my friend to the gallows,” he said, scratching his chin. “That sounds very much like a threat, Whitefall. I didn’t know the Merchant Prince of Zarin made threats.”
“Then you must not have been in politics very long,” Whitefall said drily. “Which is good, actually, because it gives me the chance to do something truly unheard of for a man in my position.”
Josef arched an eyebrow. “Which is?”
“Be honest with you,” Whitefall answered. He sat up straight, and for the first time his voice grew deadly serious.
“When I set Den’s Bounty, I made a gamble. The Council was a fledgling mess then, a dozen countries united in terror against a common enemy. When the Empress’s first fleet was defeated, we immediately began to fall back into the endless infighting and petty quarrels that have divided this continent since the first man called himself king. Even the promise of the Relay wasn’t enough to make the kingdoms forget their old enmity. As someone who’s sought to unite this land all his life, I could not let my hard-won consensus fracture, so I found another common cause—our mutual condemnation of Den’s betrayal.”
Whitefall glanced at the sticky bloodstain on his desk, and his voice began to tremble with old anger. “The night Den turned traitor, he killed men from every kingdom. He betrayed us all for no reason other than his own bloodlust. Den’s treason was an act everyone could condemn without reservation, and setting his bounty was the first unified action of what became the Council of Thrones. That debt bound us together, and from that first binding, I forged another, and then another. I built this Council on Den’s blood, piling each pebble of common ground one on top of the other until there was enough for all of us to stand on.”
“With you at the top,” Josef said.
“But of course,” Whitefall said, lips curving in a thin smile. “I built the Council, after all. I found Sara, I funded the research that became the Relay, I was the first to unite with Osera against the Empress the first and the second time she came, and I was the one who held everything together at the end.”
Josef tilted his head. “And did it never occur to you that you might have to pay if your gamble fell through?”
Whitefall shrugged. “It did. But you have to understand, when he betrayed us, Den was in his late fifties. At the time, we assumed he would either return with the Empress herself in the next year to finish us off, in which case the bounty would be the least of our problems, or he would die across the sea and we’d be rid of him forever. Either way, it seemed a safe bet.”
Josef snorted. “Any gambler knows that even the safest bets can come back around, Whitefall.”
“You’re right,” Whitefall said. “But gamblers also know that you can’t get blood from a stone. The simple, honest truth, King Josef, is that the Council can’t pay what you’re asking. Even after we handed over the Monpress bounty, we’d still be nearly a hundred thousand short on Den’s. But even if we could clear the total amount, the Council still might not pay. You see, the damage of collecting Monpress’s bounty may well be far worse than defaulting on our debt to you.”
“How do you figure that?” Josef said. “Eli’s bounty isn’t some giant, made-up number like Den’s. It’s backed by pledges from dozens of countries. Just call them in.”
“That’s precisely the problem,” Whitefall said. “There’s not a country in the Council at this point that hasn’t involved itself in some way with the Monpress bounty, and several, including Gaol and Mellinor, are in far deeper
