Emily winced. “Thank you for telling me.” She’d heard there was a country where a prisoner on death row wouldn’t be told the time and place of his execution, ensuring that every time he left the cell he’d wonder if he was going to his death. It struck her as cruel and unusual punishment. “Why…what do you want to talk to me about?”
Sir Roger sat on the stone floor. “There’s an army advancing on the city,” he said, coming from the south. “The Noblest are making their move.”
“The Noblest?”
“It’s what they’re calling themselves,” Sir Roger told her. “All the usual suspects, of course; Baroness Harkness, Barons Gaunt, Gaillard, Silversmith and Thornwood…led, at least on paper, by Duke Traduceus of the Line of Alexis. They sent the king their formal defiance shortly after they liberated his brother from imprisonment.”
“And so they have declared war,” Emily finished. She felt a stab of bitter regret. She’d hoped, just for a second, that Jade and Alassa had already managed to raise an army. “How long until they reach the walls?”
“Hours…a day, at most,” Sir Roger said. “We’re doing what we can to slow them down, of course, but they’re maintaining an impressive pace. They must have been planning the operation for quite some time.”
Emily nodded. The plan was strikingly simple, but bold. Capture Alexis, kill the king and his daughter, have Duke Traduceus crowned in his brother’s place…they’d win the war in one fell swoop. Except, of course, Alassa wasn’t in the Tower of Alexis, waiting to be executed by the victorious Noblest. She was on her way to Swanhaven, where she could raise an army and come back to recover her birthright. The Noblest might be about to discover that their plans had gone awry.
Too late for them to change their plans, she thought, vindictively. If they sent the king a formal defiance, they effectively declared war.
“Brave of them,” she said, careful not to commit herself. “What does this have to do with me?”
Sir Roger wrung his hands. “You do know I was exchanging letters with Imaiqah, don’t you?”
Emily nodded, impatiently. Six months ago, it would have been a good match; Randor had had every reason to encourage it as much as he could. Sir Roger was loyal to the king, which meant that his marriage would tie Imaiqah closer to the king…except, of course, that her father had been a traitor. Sir Roger had dodged a bullet. If he’d married Imaiqah when their courtship had just begun, he would have been beheaded by now. Randor could not have risked him escaping to rally his troops and lead them against the castle.
“I thought she–and you–were loyal,” Sir Roger said. “Why did you betray us?”
“I made the best decision I could, at the time,” Emily said. In hindsight, perhaps she should have told Imaiqah and her family to flee the country. It wouldn’t have been that hard for them to set up somewhere on the other side of the continent. “I just didn’t expect the truth to come out.”
“Few people do,” Sir Roger said. “And yet, it always comes out at the worst possible moment.”
Emily eyed him for a long moment. She didn’t know him that well, but she was fairly certain he was avoiding something. Something he wanted to talk about, yet…a subject he didn’t know how to broach. She knew the feeling all too well. And yet…
“I don’t have much time,” she said. She rattled her chains, meaningfully. It wouldn’t be that long before they started to prepare for the march to her death. “What do you want to ask?”
Sir Roger lowered his voice. “Why are you helping Alassa?”
“She’s my friend,” Emily said. She didn’t think Sir Roger would listen if she called Randor’s sanity into question. “And she was unjustly imprisoned.”
“That’s not the point,” Sir Roger told her. “A three-way civil war is about to break out.”
Perhaps four-way, Emily thought. It would take time for Alassa to draw all the factions together, if they were willing to support her. Tam wasn’t the only one who distrusted the entire Royal Family. The Levellers might constitute a separate faction in their own right.
She met his eyes. “Then what is the point?”
“Whoever wins, Zangaria will be badly weakened,” Sir Roger said. “And that will weaken the defense against the necromancers.”
Emily nodded, slowly. Zangaria was a long way from the Blighted Lands, but the country still sent troops to help secure the border chokepoints. The necromancers were powerful, insane–and, sometimes, ingenious enough to figure out ways to turn their weaknesses into strengths. Dua Kepala had managed to get hundreds of thousands of orcs across an impassable desert and straight into a fertile, lush and unprepared kingdom. And he’d only been stopped by sheer luck.
“So why are you helping her?” Sir Roger stared at her, as if he could force her to talk by sheer willpower. “You’re only making life easier for the enemy. The real enemy.”
“Alassa isn’t the enemy,” Emily said. She felt a flicker of sympathy for the young man in front of her, tied by blood and honor to a king who was steadily going insane. “She’s…”
“Going to fight a civil war,” Sir Roger said. “And leave the country devastated.”
Emily took a breath. “The tensions that are exploding now have been building up for a long time,” she told him. “The king has been trying to consolidate his power, the noblemen have been trying to resist him while grinding the faces of the poor, the merchants have been trying to survive and prosper in a world that regards them as slaves and…and the people on the bottom don’t want to stay there any longer.”
She took another shuddering breath. “Randor has already given the necromancers an advantage,” she added. “He’s ensured a civil war that will, as you said, devastate an entire country. The Allied Lands will be weakened and the necromancers won’t have to lift a finger. Hell, his growing madness will lead to worse problems in the rear. What will the Allied Lands do if Randor attacks his neighbors?”
“He wouldn’t,” Sir Roger said. He sounded as if he didn’t quite believe himself. “The king knows what is at stake!”
Emily met his eyes. “Does he? Because, from what I can see, the king isn’t trying to take steps to make peaceful change possible. And he’s made violent change inevitable.”
“The king ennobled you,” Sir Roger reminded her. “He put you right at the top, a step below himself.”
“And I should be grateful?” Emily shook her head. “I liked him, when I first met him. But that didn’t blind me to his flaws. And now…he’s gone mad. The house is already burning brightly and he thinks he can put it out by spitting on it.”
“We have to deal with the real threat,” Sir Roger said.
“That’s my point,” Emily said. “Sir Roger–Roger–listen to me. The necromancers cannot be defeated the old way. They were slowly, but steadily winning the war until I killed Shadye. The only thing keeping them from winning is the simple fact that they don’t work together very well, if they manage to work together at all. You know this. Put an army of soldiers up against a necromancer and all you’re doing is giving them more victims to sacrifice. They’re just too powerful to be stopped with swords and arrows.”
She looked down at the floor. “The New Learning will change everything. You saw what muskets could do at Farrakhan. What do you think is coming further down the line? I’ve unleashed creative juices that were corked up for far too long. Each change, each innovation, will breed more change and innovation. It won’t be long before everything changes and the necromancers are left behind once and for all.