Chương 169: Chapter 165. A New Ally

"I love you, daddy." Said the straight-faced lollipop boy after he reached up and caught his smiling father by the tie, tugging him down close to say it properly. Both of them seemed to know, as Adom and everyone around them knew, that they had been absurdly fortunate to be standing here. Because it was historic. The first king in living memory, made by the blade instead of by blood. Everyone present would tell the tale for the rest of their lives.

In fact, half of them had already started, turning to whoever stood nearest. Then someone in the press found the words for what the whole square was feeling.

"LONG LIVE THE KING!" It went up like flame catching dry grass. One voice, then ten, then all of them at once, thousands of throats, fists punching the air, the words rolling round the high walls and coming back doubled.

"LONG LIVE THE KING! LONG LIVE THE KING! LONG LIVE THE KING!" And down in the crush, on his knees, Kazimir came apart.

"No," he was saying, lost under the roar at first, then louder, clawing at the air as if he could shove the sound back down the throats it came from.

"No — don't. Don't say it. Stop saying it. Stop!" But there was no stopping a thing like that, and Adom watched the prince come to know it. Each round of the chant landed on him like a blow, every long live the king another stone laid over the grave of everything he'd schemed and bought and bled for, and he could no sooner hold it back than shout down the tide. His face crumpled. Whatever composure he'd been clinging to fell away for good, and he wept — openly and wretchedly.

He folded the rest of the way to the ground and sat in the dust of the square and sobbed, a prince at the feet of a kingdom too busy celebrating to remember he was there.

"... What's the matter with that one?" A voice came at Adom's elbow. He'd let the invisibility slip off somewhere in the noise — no one in a crowd this size was studying one more masked traveller — and a woman beside him stood frowning down at the weeping prince, half-concerned, half-curious. Adom considered the wreck of Kazimir a moment.

"Couldn't say," he said.

"Overcome, I'd guess. It's a big day. Can't be easy, watching your own brother made king right there in front of you." He shook his head, all sympathy.

"Family's a complicated business."

"Aw." The woman's face went soft, and she looked at Kazimir with a warmth that could not have been more misplaced.

"That's actually quite sweet of him."

"Isn't it," Adom agreed, turning back to watch the king. And he was happy. He let himself have it for a moment, standing there in the roar. Under the gladness, though, ran a colder current he couldn't quite shake. He'd just bent the future badly out of its old shape.

Whatever Oriscael had been going to become, in the life he remembered, it would not be becoming that now; a kingdom that should have fallen to Kazimir had instead crowned a man who, last time, had died in a cage on another continent before any of this so much as began. Adom's maps of what came next had been worth a great deal an hour ago. They were worth rather less now.

The road ahead had gone darker to his eyes, and harder to read, but that was the price of nearly every good thing he kept choosing to do, he supposed. He glanced down at Kazimir, still weeping in the dust, and the cold current sharpened to a point. That one would have to be dealt with. Arrested, at the least, and watched closely after.

If even half of what Adom had heard of the man in his first life held true in this one — and he had no reason yet to bet against it — then a Kazimir left loose and humiliated was a Kazimir who would, sooner or later, turn up on the wrong side of a border with a great deal to tell his kingdom's enemies. Or worse. Defeat had never once made that man harmless. It had only ever made him bitter. Later, though. He filed it away.

Because for now the whole square was simply having the finest day of its life, and his friends were in the thick of it: Sam hoarse and beaming, Karion and Damus shoulder to shoulder with the crowd, every one of them roaring Veyslav on as the new king turned a slow, half-dazed circle with the blade held high to the sun, letting his people see it. It looked, Adom thought, like rather a lot of fun.

And it was history, besides; he could see it being set down permanent already, a row of journalists at the front scribbling as fast as their hands would carry them, racing to get every second of it down before it got away. So Adom lifted his own fist with the rest of them, and joined in.

"LONG LIVE THE KING!" This was fun.

The law, as it turned out, did not waste time. The moment the sword came free of the stone in front of that many witnesses, Veyslav was king in every way that counted, by a rite older than the kingdom's written memory. There would be a coronation, naturally, but that was a matter for later.

Word Adom caught through the day put it the better part of a year off, and for a reason he hadn't anticipated: a king made by the sword was rare and large enough an event that the High King of the Fae himself would be expected to attend, and the High King of the Fae did not come quickly, nor for small things. So the ceremony would wait on him. The crown itself waited on no one. Veyslav was king by midday, and he spent what was left of the day being one. The first thing he did was arrest his brother.

Kazimir went under house arrest before the square had finished cheering; confined, watched, stripped of the year of machinery he'd built around himself, but alive, and kept comfortably enough. That last part caught Adom's attention. For all the poison between these four, there seemed to be a line none of them would quite step over with one another, even now, even with a throne on the table. It was the same restraint, he understood, that had spared Veyslav in the first place.

When Kazimir and Radomir had wanted their brother gone, they hadn't killed him. They'd sold him — handed the problem to slavers and a long voyage and let distance do the thing they couldn't bring themselves to do with their own hands, and in doing so left a door cracked open that Veyslav had, in the end, walked back out through. Some odd elven thing, perhaps. Or a quadruplet thing, Adom couldn't say.

He only knew that human siblings, in his long experience of them, would have skipped the sentiment entirely and gone straight for the throat, and certainly would not have left the outcome to the generosity of chance. They'd have made sure. That Veyslav was standing here at all, crowned, was the whole of the argument. By evening, the other two had bent the knee. Radomir came first, which surprised Adom until he heard the shape of it.

Radomir had been one of the two hands that put Veyslav on that ship; but the day his brother turned up alive in Oriscael, something in him had buckled, and he'd spent the year since quietly sick with what he'd done. When the sword chose Veyslav, he didn't resist it for a heartbeat. He swore to him like a man set down at last from a weight he'd been carrying alone too long. Repentance had reached him well ahead of today. Vesna needed no convincing whatsoever.

She'd been Veyslav's from the start, one of the few in that family without his blood on her hands, and the more Adom gathered, the plainer the reason became. Veyslav had been the old king's favorite, openly and by a wide margin, and losing him had struck the father far harder than anyone outside the family had been let to see. The king had declined from the day his favorite vanished, grief working at him like rot in a beam, until the many years he should have had dwindled to a scarce few.

The old man had died never once knowing his own children had done it to him. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Elves could live a thousand years and more, and yet a grief gone deep enough could take one of them in a couple of years, sometimes in a span of days. It had always struck Adom as a singularly cruel arrangement, that so much time could be undone by so simple a wound. The old king had at least seen Veyslav again before the end.

His son came home years after he was lost, and the father got to lay eyes on him once more — though by then the damage was long done, the years already bled out of him, and no homecoming could put them back. But still. He'd seen his boy return before he went. A messy family, in Adom's considered professional opinion. Quite spectacularly messy. Veyslav did a great deal else before the light went.

The Intendant gave up his charge of the empty throne with something close to relief and became, on the spot, the first of the new king's counsellors. Men and women Kazimir had jailed on invented charges over the past year were walking free by sundown. The officials he'd bought found their arrangements abruptly and quietly worthless. And then, near the end of it, with the city still loud and the day burning down to gold, Veyslav gave the order Adom had crossed an ocean to hear. He freed Oberys.

Later that evening… The room they'd given Adom to wait in was a generous one: high windows, the whole of the cloud-country falling away beyond the glass, more comfort in the chairs alone than some inns Adom had slept in entire. He sat in the middle of it with his hands loose in his lap and waited, until the door opened, and Oberys Baelys came in. He looked slightly younger than Adom expected, silver at the temples, dressed in good silk that made nothing of itself.

He moved without hurry and seemed pleasant, with an edge under it. Adom rose.

"Lord Baelys. It is an honour."

"Please." Oberys crossed the room with a warm smile, a hand lifting as if to wave the title gently off.

"The honour is mine. The famous Ghost of Arkhos, and now our noble Kingmaker besides. I have looked forward to this a great while."

"... Kingmaker?" His smile deepened, as though Adom had said something charming.

"A king was made today, my lord. In an open square, before the better part of ten thousand witnesses, and the hand that made him was not seen by a single one of them." Oberys let it rest there, his eyes settling on Adom's.

"Modesty is a becoming thing, and I'd never ask a man to part with it lightly. But we are alone, and I have spent a great deal of my life learning to recognise exactly what I'm looking at. You needn't waste any of it on me." Adom said nothing, which was an answer of its own, and Oberys received it graciously.

"I am also, as it happens, the chief beneficiary of all your trouble." He opened his hands, taking in himself, the room, the simple fact of his freedom.

"It is not often a man gets to shake the hand that reached clear across a kingdom and opened his cell from the outside. So permit me the unfashionable thing; to say it plainly, once, and never tediously again." He inclined his head.

"Thank you, Adom Sylla. For the whole of it."

"... You're welcome."

"Good." Oberys's expression shifted then, the warmth losing nothing but gaining a point.

"Now. You strike me as a direct man; I'll confess I made something of a study of you, and direct was among the kinder words my people brought back. So I shan't insult you with the long way round. Shall we simply get to it?"

"Couldn't agree more," Adom said. So they sat.

"So," Adom said.

"Morgana."

"Morgana." Oberys settled back.

"Princess Morgana Vi Savarnis. Yes. I'll admit I was not in the least surprised when my people brought me word that the youngest magus in Sundar's history had been quietly turning over stones, looking for her. Intrigued, certainly. But not surprised." He allowed himself a small pause.

"She speaks well of you, you know. Remarkably well, and she is not a woman who spends her good opinion freely." Adom kept his voice level, though it cost him a touch more than it should have.

"So you know her, personally?" And there it was: his heart going quick, just slightly, the thing he'd refused to let happen the whole way across the ocean. Was this it, then? Was this the moment something, for once, went the way he wanted? Oberys laughed quietly, as if plainly delighted to have a suspicion confirmed.

"Oh, my lord. It would seem she is every bit as important to you as you are to her." He let it land with great gentleness.

"How nice." Adom smoothed his face back into something that gave away rather less. He was, it seemed, out of practice.

"But yes," Oberys went on, sparing him.

"I know her quite well. My house has dealt with her court for some years now; I bring her what is hard to come by where she is, and harder still to come by without questions asked. Goods. Coin. The occasional truth she could buy from no one else. I have sat across from her more times than I could easily count, and I number it among the better uses I have made of my life." He inclined his head.

"If you wish to meet her, I can arrange it. Today, this very hour, if you've the stomach for another crossing. I would have you standing in front of her inside the week." The thing Adom had carried so long and so carefully began, at last, to loosen.

"Thank you," he started.

"That's—""But." It was a soft but, yet it stopped him cold all the same. Oberys folded his hands, but the warmth in him did not leave so much as step aside to make room for something graver.

"Before I put you on that ship, I'd have you understand exactly what you would be setting your name beside. You are a Magus of Sundar, my lord — the youngest ever raised, seated within arm's reach of the throne itself. And Morgana is the one living soul with a true blood claim to that same throne. The daughter of the brother that throne saw killed." Adom nearly drew a sharp breath.

Oberys had no proof to offer, but a man whose trade was the truth did not say a thing like that idly, which made it as good as confirmed.

"To stand at her side is not a thing a man in your position does and then quietly steps back from. There is no shape of that road that does not end, sooner or later, in open conflict with the empire you serve. None. Whatever else she comes to be to you, she will be that as well, always. And I'll not put you on the water toward it without your knowing it first." Adom didn't answer right away. He sat with it, slowly turning it over asking himself one question: Did he want this?

Open war with the Emperor; because stripped of the softer words, that was the thing Oberys had just laid on the table. Was there another road that didn't run straight through it? He made himself look for one, a nd while at it, almost despite himself, he took stock of where he actually stood. It was more than he usually let himself notice. Oriscael, now, a kingdom old and storied enough to count the High King of the Fae among its friends, and hardly the only door that had swung open to him of late.

Wangara, the merchant guild he'd grown into something that reached across half a continent, rooted shallow enough in Sundarian soil that he could tear it up and replant it somewhere freer if he had to. A spy network that had stymied even the man sitting across from him. The Order, quiet and growing, its hall tucked away near the edge of the Giant Highlands. Mr. Biggins, Bennu, Bob. Resources he'd half lost the full measure of.

And the plain knowledge — never tested, but certain all the same — that if he asked it of them, the Iron Wolves would ride for him, and a great part of the Magisterium would stand at his shoulder. Somewhere in the last few years, without ever sitting down and deciding to, Adom had stopped being a promising young man with powerful friends and become a power in his own right. Nowhere near done growing, either.

On a different shelf entirely than the one he kept picturing himself on — the same shelf, give or take, as the Archmage, and as the Emperor himself. So. Was it worth it? Sundar was one of the three great powers of the world, and the only one of the three ruled by human hands. That mattered more than it might sound, and for a reason Adom had never much cared for. The world did not love a human at its head.

A human could live almost anywhere: settle in elven lands or dwarven holds, trade, raise a family, grow old in peace. But leading was another matter entirely. However warmly an elf might smile, there was a ceiling on how far elves would ever follow a man not of their own kind, and it sat a good way below a throne. The same held for the rest of them, each in its own fashion. The thing went mostly unspoken, and was no less real for that. Not that humans had any standing to complain.

They came in every shape and shade the world could offer, and Adom was quite sure that, left alone with no other race to look down upon, they'd have found cause to despise one another over the colour of a neighbour's skin, or something smaller still. The other races were much the same once a man scratched past the friendly surface of them. An old, ugly, tacit truth. And pretending otherwise had never once made it less true. Which left a human who wanted real power two roads to walk. He could build his own.

Raise a kingdom up from nothing, throw its gates open to every race and creed, grow it patiently into something the world had to reckon with — and spend the better part of a lifetime, likely several, in the doing, much as Sundar had spent the better part of three thousands years becoming Sundar. Or he could take hold of a power already built.

One that came with the standing, the alliances, the centuries of accumulated weight no fresh banner could conjure overnight — and one ruled, conveniently, by human hands, so that no one need blink at a human guiding it. Skip the millennium, and begin from where Sundar already stood. Gather allies faster and stronger, for having an empire's name behind him when he came to ask. And in the life Adom remembered, that same empire had sat at the heart of half the reasons the world finally tore itself apart.

Not by accident, but by the steady work of the hands that held its throne. Which was the answer, really, once he stopped flinching away from it. He didn't want war with the Emperor. But he wanted, very badly, what waited on the far side of it. Put proof of the man's crime into the right hands, put Morgana where she was born to be, and Sundar stopped being his enemy. Sundar became his: the single greatest piece on the board, held now by someone who'd owe her throne to him and use it well.

With that at his back he could reach for the rest of it: treaties, alliances, the slow hard work of drawing a splintered world into something that could stand on its feet together. Time enough, if he started now, to have it done before the World Dungeon ever opened its mouth — to meet what was coming as one age turning into the next, and not as a scatter of frightened kingdoms waiting their turn to fall. So finally, Adom looked up at Oberys.

"Yes," he said.