The weight of her words came crashing down on me. Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears, if you’re dead, how is it you manage to keep torturing me? ‘What’s the price?’ I asked. ‘What will it take to make the other Dukes vote our way?’
‘That is precisely what my fellow Dukes are negotiating amongst themselves even now, Falcio. But whatever their list of demands, I can assure you of two things: first, they will be offensive to you, and second, you’ll have no choice but to agree.’ She rang a small silver bell and a moment later her chamberlain appeared at the entrance to the tent and held the flaps open for us to leave.
The Duchess sighed. ‘We enter an age of politics now, Falcio, not of outraged idealism, nor daring deeds in search of perfect justice. The time for preposterous heroics has passed.’
‘Well, if that’s true, then we’re in for a spot of trouble,’ Brasti muttered once we were outside.
‘Why is that?’ Kest asked.
‘Preposterous heroics are the only things we’ve ever been good at.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Fallen Castle
Politics and sailing have a great deal in common. They both require complex navigation skills, they both feel slow yet actually move quickly, and they both make me nauseous.
‘We could have accepted Duchess Ossia’s invitation and travelled with her,’ Kest reminded me.
Moonlight shimmered on the surface of the river, reflecting the stars as they began to appear overhead, the beauty of the image marred only by the food currently departing my stomach at speed. He stood next to me as my latest meal become part of the waters below. It had become a familiar sight. It was probably a metaphor for something.
‘M’fine,’ I mumbled.
Taking the river route saved us a day or two, but that would hardly justify arriving back at the castle to present myself to the heir to the throne in substantially worse condition than when I’d left. Ossia’s caravan would have been the wiser choice – or at least the more comfortable choice – but I couldn’t bring myself to suffer ten days of the Duchess pointing out every weed-filled field or broken-down barn as further proof that nothing the Greatcoats had done since the King’s death had made the slightest difference to the country’s wellbeing. Puking up my guts every two hours was a pleasant occupation by comparison.
I was more concerned with how little I was sleeping. The ever--present queasiness left me in a constant state of hazy confusion. Days and nights flowed into each other without my notice: light bled into darkness, clear skies dissolved in rain and then faded into fog, and over it all came the incessant bellowing of sailors unfurling this or belaying that . . . it all blended together into a thick soup, punctuated by my periodic vomiting.
‘You don’t have to babysit me all day and night, you know,’ I told Kest as I wiped spittle from my lips. Whenever I looked up from the railing, he was there, standing next to me with a book in hand. He’d lift his eyes from the page and raise an eyebrow to see if I needed anything, then go back to his reading. By now I was fairly sure he’d memorised the barge’s entire collection of navigational manuals.
‘Really?’ He did me the service of pretending this was some new idea and not something I’d repeated daily. ‘I suppose it’s just a habit I’ve picked up over the last fifteen years.’
It was a plain statement of fact; it would have stung, had it come from anyone else. But Kest said it like a kind of promise: he’d kept me alive this long – despite my many poor choices – and would continue to do so for as long as he could. I found the thought both poignant and somehow heart-breaking.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ I said, by way of reply, and went back to staring at the river passing beneath us.
More troublesome than seasickness was the echo of Ossia’s words in my head. ‘We enter an age of politics now. The time for preposterous heroics has passed.’
Preposterous heroics. Was that all we’d managed, all these years since the King’s assassination? Had I really been doing nothing more than racing from one crisis to another, facing off against each new threat and pretending that somehow this fight, this duel, this battle would be the last, the one that solved all the complex problems of my troubled country with a brilliant coup de grace?
Most days I could convince myself that it did matter, that if Trin had succeeded in taking the throne, she would have held all of Tristia in her iron grip, just like her mother Patriana had ruled the Duchy of Hervor. She would have been a tyrant unlike any the country had ever seen.
Only . . .
When I thought back now to my travels to Hervor, that harsh northern Duchy rich in mining but poor in everything else . . . the people there had appeared to be no worse off than in many other parts of the country. Patriana might have treated them more as indentured serfs than free men, but for all that, they never went hungry.
Nehra’s exhortation came back to me: Get labour to where it’s needed, bring seed and move crops, keep the roads clear and trade flowing.
Might as well ask me to duel the ocean.
Aline could do it, though. She was quick and clever, and with Valiana’s help, she could navigate the dark arts of economics and politics to put in place policies that would set the country on a path of recovery. Someone just needed to put her on the throne first.
I could do that – I would do that. Even if it meant giving the Dukes whatever it was they wanted from me first.
‘Not long now,’ Kest said, pulling me from my reverie.
‘Really?’ I looked up from the railing to a dark sky full of stars. How many hours had I been standing there? Along the riverbanks, cottages began to appear in the pale light cast by the moon overhead.
‘Look over to starboard,’ Kest said, gesturing to the right, and in the distance, past the next winding turn in the river up ahead, I could just begin to make out lights from the city itself. My eyes followed the path up the hillside to where Castle Aramor had once stood.
Until a few months ago, nine great towers, one for each of the Duchies of Tristia, had topped that hill, connected to each other by a massive curtain wall built to withstand a siege . . . then the Blacksmith’s God had raised his fist and just like that, the castle had come tumbling down, leaving only a single tower and part of the original keep standing. Even in darkness and from this distance I’d swear I could make out the grey haze that permanently smothered the ruins.
‘It’s a trick of the wind,’ Kest said, following my gaze. ‘All the dust and debris from the shattered stones and mortar swirls around the hilltop, then it falls to the ground, only to be picked up by the next breeze – one of the stonemasons working on the repairs told me it might be years before the cloud dissipates for good.’
I guess that too was a metaphor for something.
‘Well, well,’ Brasti said, the heels of his boots clacking against the deck as he approached. ‘Home again, boys.’
‘You look rested,’ I said, hating him for it.