Chương 68: Book 2: Chapter 4 - Queen's Gambit

To live under tyranny and do nothing is to participate in your own subjugation. We do not fight because we are brave, we fight because we are afraid. Afraid of what we know will happen should we fail to act. Let the histories call us criminals. Let the Duke call us traitors. We know what we are. We are the ones who decided that watching and waiting was no longer enough.

- The Red Sash Manifesto, author unknown ISABELLA I waited for the daily humiliation ritual to begin as I poured my father's dark tea the way he liked it - heavy cream in the base, lightly frothed, no sugar, the pot held high enough to aerate but not high enough to splash. There was a particular quality to his silence when I knew he was weighing how much he thought I should know; even after all I'd done for him, he still didn't trust a daughter he couldn't understand.

He let me wait, reading his daily intelligence brief one theatrical line at a time. It was a tactic I'd seen him use regularly on petitioners and guests, but he had only recently begun using it on me. Since the failure in Kaz-Varr, the dynamic between us had shifted. At least before I had been an ornament, something he could deploy as bait for a certain type of predator if nothing else, but now I was increasingly of the opinion he would rather be rid of me entirely.

He set the document down with a light touch, as if too much movement might disturb its contents.

"The Crown has agreed to restructure the harbor levies." It was information I already knew, a three year deferment on the principal. It had cost my father a substantial estate holding in Verismoor and a decent chunk of his remaining dignity to grovel for the King's consideration, but it had bought him room to breathe. I watched his amber aura flicker, a thread of something green and unstable just beneath the serene surface.

"That's good news," I said neutrally, playing my part in the charade.

"Good news would be reports of Borin and his fanatical clerics choking on their ambitions, but the gods have been stingy of late." He sipped his tea and the thread in his aura flared briefly. Frustration, annoyance, the flaccid indignity of a man who had been forced to accept a smaller portion than he believed he was owed.

"They've consolidated the lower forges, I'm told. The metal is flowing once again and the southern houses are buying." Eighteen months ago, the Thorne name had sat at the center of a web that ran from the Dragon's Tooth mines to the capital's treasury. The disaster of the Stone-Sworn coup and their subsequent betrayal had been compounded by the failure in the dungeon.

The web of influence and favors he'd spent years building had been cut in a single night, the promised prize lost under the mountain along with the dwarven vanguard who'd died fighting over it. Expeditions were sent in, of course, but whatever had been down there had been buried under rubble a thousand feet deep. Probably for the best.

"Where does that leave us?" I asked innocently, taking a demure sip of coffee. He'd never say it out loud, never acknowledge it even to himself, but my father had wagered the Duchy's future on that prize. I'd broken the ciphers on his correspondences over a year ago, the news they contained was consistently bleak and the vultures were circling. His business partners were getting desperate, and desperate men did desperate things.

"You let me worry about that." His aura settled and calmed. He picked up another document, this one written in a flowery script on thick vellum paper I recognized as the announcement that had the whole city buzzing.

"What do you know of this upstart?" News of the Petracca ruins being purchased after so many years had sent ripples through Eastwatch. I'd made inquiries at the time, but the identity of the buyer was under seal in the capital... seals that even my father's highly placed bureaucrats could not pierce. Then a full year had gone by with the property remaining untouched and most had forgotten about it.

That had all changed with the arrival of a letter one week ago from someone representing the mysterious claimant and announcing his impending arrival to take possession of the estate.

"Same as everyone, I suppose. A merchant prince from the far western reaches with no house and an ocean of capital that nobody seems to know the origins of. They say he's been buying up noble debt across five duchies." Yours among them, I thought but didn't say.

"I expect he intends to accumulate favors from his betters in hopes of buying himself a noble title, new money usually does." He examined me for a moment as if seeing a parrot who had just uttered an unlearned phrase.

"Yes, he seeks the sort of power money cannot buy, the power of a bloodline. He believes he can leverage a nobleman's purse, that owning debt gives him control." He turned his cup a half-rotation, smiling silently to himself as if enjoying some great jest.

"It's a misapprehension we will deploy to our advantage, a man with no name will do almost anything to earn one." I could see where this was going, the pressure in the room changing like a sudden shift in the weather.

"You're considering a match." The rumor was that this man was old and deformed, coming to the east to secure a noble bride and produce an heir who would entrench his lineage in the upper nobility. But then rumors about mysterious men always shaded that direction, regardless of the truth.

"I consider many things," he said, a statement of the obvious he was clearly annoyed to have to say aloud.

"Nothing is decided, of course, the man hasn't even arrived, but a daughter of the Thorne line is no small thing to offer." He probably expected me to be flattered.

"Binding a man of his wealth would solve many problems, converting his capital to our capital, his ambition to our shield. And it would cost us..." he spread his hands as if weighing the cost and finding it insignificant, "... very little in the scheme of things." Very little. I let [Royal Bearing] take the rage before it reached my face. I lowered my eyes, refusing to bristle as he likely wanted.

"And if he's not what you expect?"

"As I said, nothing is decided." He returned to his stack of documents, concluding the conversation.

"He arrives within the fortnight, I'll want you present when we receive him. You have a way of seeing people that I find occasionally instructive." It was a naked attempt to manipulate me, but then knowing how he worked the locks didn't stop them from opening.

"As you wish, father." I thought of Tarasynora as I gathered the dishes. Your father was nothing, she'd told me when I'd arrived with Vex's token looking for answers. A secretary, a small and insignificant man who carried other men's secrets, all the while believing himself their better. And then, as if by magic, he was something. The men who made him are not men whose names you'll find on any family tree. She had not given me their names, she claimed not to know them, but she could only mean one thing. Hestians.

Church officials. Men who had the shield of the gods, more powerful than even the nobility. The fire that had made my father the brother of a Duke, the wasting sickness that had made him one in truth... he'd been a piece in someone else's game. But to what end? Ancient power best left alone, she'd said before slamming the door in my face. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Eighteen months I'd carried that now, fitting it against everything I knew, trying to find the threads that would lead me back to the truth. For eighteen months I'd found nothing.

"Isabella." The sudden intrusion caused me to nearly drop the dishes I was holding.

"Leave it. It's unbecoming."

"Of course, Father." I set the dishes down and he gestured to a nearby servant to clear the table. I curtsied and left, focus returning to the matter of today - if I was to be forced into this magnate's arms, perhaps I could turn him myself... there was plenty of good I could do with so much money, and I'd certainly done more for less. +++ The leather and metal found the contours of my face with the ease of frequent practice, the mask settling against my skin with that familiar coolness.

Sounds flattened and my vision sharpened, breathing muffled to silence as [Voice of the Void] tickled at my throat. There had been a time when putting on the mask felt like becoming someone else, but more and more it had come to feel like who I truly was. The detachment I wore at the breakfast table, the feigned interest in Victor's bloodthirsty ranting, the polite attentiveness in council meetings, the casual cruelty amongst the ladies of the court... they were the disguise.

I checked the drop signal on my way through the tannery, attention sliding past me as if I wasn't there. I found the chalk mark on the third post of the footbridge, the position and angle denoting today's meeting location. This latest communication system had been implemented after consultation with a retired military scout recruited in the early days of our Red Sash rebuild.

We'd adapted the protocols for our more urban environment, ensuring the mark was single use, the location constantly changing, and any evidence quickly removed by street toughs on our payroll. Paranoia some would say, but then we'd gotten comfortable the last time and it had ended with a child's blood on my hands and Kalia's arm barely attached to her body. We didn't get comfortable anymore. The meeting location was in the basement of an alchemist's shop on Bergram Street.

The owner was a sympathizer whose nephew served as an outer-ring runner and had proven himself reliable on more than one occasion. I entered through the coal delivery hatch and down into a cellar that smelled of chemical reagents and damp limestone. Kalia was already there, seated on an upturned crate, a map of the harbor spread across the floor. She'd pulled her long white hair into a braid that fell over one shoulder, a knife resting against her thigh.

The dim light of a lamp caught the thin silver scar that ran from her wrist to her elbow, the last reminder of her terrible wound.

"The Greycloaks hit another supply wagon last night," she said without preamble, glancing up from the map where several red markings were visible on the road leading out of the harbor.

"Third one this month."

"Casualties?"

"Cargo was stripped, of course, driver roughed up a little. The guards had been bribed before it started, same as the others." She folded the map, slipping it into her inventory.

"Their fear of your father is all but gone, they're taking payoffs and not even bothering to make it look like they fought back." I glanced around at the mention of my father, earning a frown from Kalia.

"Sorry," she said, shaking her head.

"Duke Thorne." Stealth and subterfuge didn't come easily to her, she'd spent most of her life fighting in pits, but, as we'd learned the hard way, even the smallest slip could get us killed.

"This is the shift we've been waiting for," I said, pacing the room. My father's military expansion had absorbed the criminal guilds and Eastwatch underworld in a flurry of forced conscriptions, but what had once been a brutally efficient strategy was cracking under the strain of stretched resources and a return to old habits.

"Maybe, but these men are not wearing Red Sashes, they're wearing Greycloaks. Morrigan's influence is growing fast enough to be a problem." The old criminal networks were reasserting themselves, growing back into the spaces where all such things eventually dwelled. Krispin Morrigan, the former head of Eastwatch's defunct thieves guild, had returned only three months ago from a banishment that my father could no longer enforce.

In truth, I'd underestimated the man, his reputation as a simple brute had left me backfooted when he'd suddenly reappeared in the city and quickly found a foothold. Already, his influence had grown to encompass a good portion of the docks where many of his Greycloaks were employed and where much of his plunder could be traced. For us, this was both an opportunity and a complication.

The weakening of surveillance made our own operations safer - my father's informants now with less reason to report to handlers who could not guarantee their safety - but the rising criminal tide was hurting the same people we were trying to protect.

"Has Morrigan made any move against us?" I asked, spinning the threads in my mind.

"Not as of yet, our decentralized network is deliberately difficult to attack, but it's only a matter of time." She was probably right, we weren't criminals in the traditional sense, but that wouldn't stop Morrigan from seeing us as direct competition - doubly true once we started up active operations again.

"Carpy's group completed the run of medical supplies to the west harbor slums, and Brook has eyes on the grain reserves as requested. Our sources inside the mills report that three of Iscor's warehouses are running below their stated supply, likely selling to Greycloak black market contacts under the table." I could see she wanted to say more - for all her talents, Kalia's aura had always been very easy to read.

"And?" I asked finally, prompting her to spit it out.

"Ren says there's been a lot of activity around the old Petracca estate... tents going up, artisan carts of all manner and make, supplies shipped in from every corner of the continent."

"Yes, it appears this mysterious westerner is coming at last," I said, the mask modulating any emotion that might have slipped into my voice.

"Based on the letter his representative sent Duke Thorne, he'll be here sometimes in the next two weeks traveling with a modest retinue. Though what the man considers modest I can only guess."

"He's real then."

"Quite real, I'm afraid, though more than that I can only speculate. I'm told that the Duke intends to make him an offering of friendship." I let the implication fall without spelling it out.

"I see," Kalia said, fingers wrapping nervously against the wooden crate.

"This offering, I don't suppose it has a name?"

"That's a problem for another day, what matters right now is what this man's arrival means for us." A chime from above rang through the dusty floorboards, muffled voices barely audible.

"Clearly he's a threat to what we're building," Kalia said, lowering her voice to a whisper.

"If he shores up your fa- Duke Thorne's leaky finances, or worse, decides to align his own against us... we're making slow enough progress as it is." I'd been running those same numbers in my head since breakfast, they were ugly no matter how I arranged them.

"We don't know anything until he arrives. Even Alastair knows next to nothing about the man, not even his name."

"If even half the rumors about this man's wealth are true, he must have more commercial infrastructure than the big five guilds combined. That sort of capital thrown behind Alastair Thorne..."

"Don't borrow trouble, Kalia, you know as well as I that rumors are rarely true - all the more when they're ridiculous enough to be a bedtime story for children. Nobody takes over an entire trade that quickly, it's impossible." Men of wealth left traces: transactions, partnerships, rivalries, enemies and allies. Far as I could divine, this man had appeared fully formed, a fortune appearing from nowhere.

Perhaps he was backed by the Crown, it would explain much, but then the King was never one to let another outshine him even in secret. Private capital then, a western banking house looking to diversify their holdings east? Why do it this way, though? I hated that I couldn't make sense of it, none of it balanced out.

"Then what do you suggest we do about him?" Kalia asked, leaning back on the wooden post behind her.

"We can't sit on our hands, not with so much riding on the next month."

"I'll know once I see him," I said finally, pushing off the decision to a future version of myself I hoped would be better equipped to make it. Kalia didn't reply but I could see she found the likelihood of that to be less than comforting.

"Whatever happens, we'll adapt, what else can we do?" More noises from above suggested the store was once again open for business, heavy footfalls raining dust on us from the ceiling.

"Let me worry about the magnate, you stay focused on preparations for phase two."

"Of course." She slipped out through the window into the alley beyond and I shortly followed. As I turned the corner into the main thoroughfare I took in the city, a city whose color still shone bright though it frayed at the edges. My city, the city I was trying so madly to save even as I moved the pieces that would see it bleed yet again. Portent hung heavy in the air as I pulled up my hood, just another citizen awaiting the arrival of a mysterious man said to carry the wealth of the gods at his back.