Chapter 172: A Game Of Thrones

For a long while, no one said anything at all. The room stood open along one wall to the sea, the waves drawing in and falling back against the rocks below, indifferent to any of it. It was the only sound left. The tea had gone cold in the cups and the light that had been so kind an hour ago lay flat across the cleared plates, with no one seeming able to move inside it.

But someone had to speak. Adom knew that. She had told them the whole of it and then looked to him, of all of them. So he drew breath to begin on one of them.

"I…" Sam beat him to it. "I'm sorry. That this happened to you. I'm really sorry, Morgana."

Morgana looked at him.

"Thank you, Sam," she said.

Damus spoke next. "Your family was wronged, Your Highness. Badly. I'm sorry for it."

Beside him Karion, every trace of the easy charm gone, managed only, "Me as well. Truly," and looked faintly relieved to have got the words out at all.

Bedivere said nothing. But he didn't need to. He had lived the part of it that came after, and his grief was an old and settled thing that had stopped needing words a long time ago.

Then they were all looking at Adom.

"...I'm sorry, Morg."

That was all.

Bedivere was the one who broke the quiet, in his own time.

"I was there that night," he said. "Fought to get back inside the walls once it started, but didn't manage it." He was staring at the horizon. "They put enough steel in me that by rights I shouldn't have lived to be carried off the field at all. Every man of Soren's personal command was inside that castle when it burned."

"My father gave the order to lay down arms," Morgana added. "His own men, ready to die for him, and he had them set their swords on the floor."

She looked round at them. "Do you know why?"

She didn't wait for an answer.

"Because he believed he still knew his brother. That under the crown and all the years, Rayhan was the same boy he'd grown up beside. That no version of that boy could stand across a hall and order his nieces and nephews cut down."

Her jaw set. "He was nearly right. It wasn't Rayhan that had rotted. It was what had got into him. Mephtilem. The Chancellor was a long time in my uncle's ear, and by the end there wasn't enough left of the man my father loved to reach."

"Everyone knows it," Damus said quietly.

They turned to him.

"Forgive me. I mean it's Among the great houses. Never said where it can be overheard, but known."

He seemed to pick his words carefully. "That Soren didn't die the way the record claims, and that the Chancellor holds the Emperor like a tool. But believing a thing and being able to move on it aren't the same animal. There's never once been anything to put on a table. No proof. So the houses keep their heads down and their suspicions behind their mouth, and Mephtilem keeps the realm."

Karion let a long breath out through his nose. "Speaking of proof."

He leaned in. "Here's the shape of it, and stop me where I'm wrong. Morgana stands up before the great houses. Names herself, tells them what she told us. Best case, enough of them are angry enough — and frightened enough of the Chancellor — to throw in behind her. Between them they've the weight to pull the Emperor down."

He turned a hand over. "Worst case, and likelier by far: it's one woman's word against the throne. A dead general's daughter everyone was told burned with her family almost two decades gone, walking in out of the sea with a tale and nothing to—"

He suddenly stopped, probably hearing himself. The bluntness of it had got away from him somewhere in the middle, as it tended to when he was thinking aloud, and he had the grace to look it.

"...Forgive me. That was crudely put. I didn't mean—"

"It's all right, Karion." Morgana said. "Say it plainly. I'd rather you did. It's no kindness to me to dress it up." Then she offered a small smile. "Besides, you're not wrong."

Karion inclined his head, and went on more carefully. "Officially, your father died defending his household from rebels. That's the line in every record in the Empire. Yours against all of it."

He shrugged, though not unkindly. "Houses don't wager their necks on a story. They wager on proof. Without it, they'll not move."

"" Morgana said it like the word sat foul on her tongue. "Yes. That's the lie they landed on. My father, who never once raised a hand to the crown, killed by rebels in the night."

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Her eyes had gone cold, and very clear. "Shall I tell you what he actually did? He found out what his brother had been selling."

The room waited.

"Slavery's a hanging crime in Sundar. It has been since the founding."

Her hands went still on the wood. "And for years my uncle's people had been handing our own subjects over to the Pale Market; taking them off the back roads, out of the border villages. The poor, the friendless, the ones no one would come asking after. Selling them across the water like cattle, into places no Sundar law reaches."

"Why?" Sam asked, before he could stop himself. "Why would an —"

"Because he'd bankrupted himself." Her mouth twisted. "Rayhan spent the first years of his reign at war, wars he started to push the borders out, to be the one who made Sundar greater than it had ever been. And he won for a while. But one does not hold new land by taking it. You hold it with garrisons and roads and coin, year on year, and it bleeds you white. He'd swallowed more than the treasury could keep down, and he was too proud to give a foot of it back."

She had a dry laugh. "So he made up the shortfall the quiet way. He sold his own people to pay for the conquering of others. The Emperor of Sundar, balancing his books with the bodies of the men and women he was sworn to protect."

"And your father found out?" Adom asked.

"Yes. My father found the proof of it by accident. And he wasn't a man who could know a thing like that and hold his peace. So he put it to Rayhan directly, in front of the whole family, the fool, that's how much trust he had left in him."

"And my uncle told him, before all of us, that if he breathed a word of it past that door, he'd have him killed." Her voice didn't rise. "His own brother. Every one of us heard it said."

The atmosphere in the room was heavy, despite the fresh sea breeze coming in.

"He didn't even wait. That same night, Mephtilem came with the Chancellor's own men and put my whole family to the sword. And then they called it rebels."

She put on a humorless smile. "It was clever, I'll grant them that. My father had spent years breaking the rebels and the border-lords who sheltered them, who raided our villages and called it freedom. There was no man in the Empire they hated more, and none with more reason to want him dead. So when he was found butchered in his own hall, who was there to doubt it? Of course it was rebels. Everyone knew the General had enemies in the wastes."

Her hands curled into fists. "They murdered him in the evening and had the story told by morning. The man who'd bled to keep those borders safe, remembered ever after as the one they finally got."

The room went quiet again. It was Sam who put the obvious thing into words.

"Even so," he said slowly, "proving it would be... hard. Wouldn't it? Whatever happened that night, it happened years ago, behind closed doors. And it's not as if the Emperor's going to sit still while you go digging."

He pushed his glasses up. "A man who'd do all that to keep it buried, he'd do a great deal more to keep it from being dug up."

Nobody answered him, because nobody had an answer.

"There might be a way," Adom said.

They all looked at him, Morgana most of all.

"General Soren's castle," Adom said. "The one your family was killed in. Where is it?"

Damus answered before Morgana could. "Castle White?"

He frowned, placing it. "It was rebuilt years ago, and raised again on the old foundations, near enough stone for stone, from what I heard. And then handed to a lord. For services to the crown."

His frown deepened. "Gerros Aldric. House Aldric got it about a decade back. It was a considerable to-do at the time; a great prize, that grant. People talked."

"Aldric..." Adom turned the name over. "I think I have a student from that house. Quiet boy." He shrugged. "His father, most likely."

"Most likely," Damus agreed.

"Anyway." Adom set his cup aside and leaned in. "Here's the thing. If I can get to Castle White — to the exact room it happened in, the exact spot — I think I can pull the night itself back with runes. Make it into something we can carry. Something the great houses can stand in front of and watch with their own eyes."

He looked around the table, and last of all at Morgana. "Not your word against the throne's, but the thing itself. Recorded."

Morgana wasn't moving. Instead, she just kept staring at him.

"Are you..." She stopped, then started again. "Are you Adom?"

"Reasonably." And then, because the question had cracked the lid off it, the rest came out in a rush. "It's a runework thing. I've been at it for a couple of years now, with Professor Kim— you remember Kim, the squinty one whose lab we used to go to all the time back in the day, right?"

Morgana nodded, still staring.

"Well, we cracked it. Or close enough."

He was gesturing now, the cup forgotten.

"You ring the place in runes. All of it: walls, floor, ceiling, every side of the space boxed in, left and right and over and under. The more you set, the cleaner it comes back. Then you feed the array mana, and it gives you the past. Right there in the air, where it happened."

"And… it goes back?" Morgana asked slowly.

"It goes back. That's the whole beauty of it. Keep feeding it, and it keeps reaching — peeling the place back, hour by hour, year by year. The further you want to go, the more runes and the more mana it costs, and the cost climbs "

He waved that off.

"But the principle holds. I think I can push past twenty years, if I lay the array dense enough and have the reserves to drown it. I'd want to refine the sequencing first, and the draw is going to be obscene, but it works. It absolutely works, and if I can stand in that room and ring it properly, the night is All of it. Exactly as it happened—"

Morgana suddenly crossed the room and hit Adom like a wave.

She got both arms around him and lifted, clean off the floor, all of his height and weight going up as though he were a sack of nothing, and held him there.

"Oh—" Adom got out, every thought he'd been mid-sentence on scattering at once.

She didn't let go. He hung there a moment, recalibrating, and the practical part of his brain — the part that never quite switched off — caught the faint hum against his ribs, the thread of metal he could feel running the length of her forearms even through her sleeves.

"...It's the lines on your arms, isn't it," he managed, somewhat compressed. "That's why you're strong enough to do this. That's an enhancer. A one—"

"" Morgana said into his shoulder, though it wasn't an answer to the question. "Thank you. Thank you, you wonderful nerd. "