The big man showed me his teeth. ‘They not fight. Cowards.’
‘I told you, the Avareans respect courage and daring,’ Morn explained. ‘They treat their prisoners commensurate with the degree to which they are willing to face fear. Put up a brave fight? Show them rokhan? They’ll still wipe out your army, but they’ll treat your people almost as equals. Retreat, or surrender? Then you die, and all your kin become slaves and sometimes worse.’
Reyek poked me with a finger. ‘Cowards. Spies.’
‘And here I thought we were all going to be such good friends,’ Brasti whispered to Kest, not very quietly.
‘Oh, we are, Brasti, I promise you.’ Morn led us out of the infirmary and along the wall of the compound to another building, its construction almost identical but its contents very different. Racks of weapons awaited us: swords, spears, shields, and a variety of pole-arms, including an entire rack just like Morn’s.
‘You really do love those fucking glaives, don’t you, Morn?’ Brasti asked.
Morn ignored the jibe, saying to me, ‘This is just one camp. One armoury.’
‘How many do you have in all?’ Kest asked.
‘Six.’
Hells. Six might not sound impressive, unless you considered just how poorly armed Tristia was right now. When the Knights had abandoned their Dukes and Lords, they’d taken their weapons with them. What few soldiers we did have left were neither well trained nor well armed.
‘What are those?’ Kest asked, pointing to a row of canvas-covered carts in the centre of the building.
Morn signalled to one of his men, who wheeled one of the carts over to us. Morn removed the tarp to reveal that what was underneath was not, in fact, a cart at all.
‘Oh,’ Kest said.
The machine before us was a long wide iron tube set on top of a set of small wheels. A little wooden box shaped like a small trench was attached to the side. Inside was a set of six black iron balls around six inches in diameter. ‘A cannon,’ I mumbled, my eyes going back to the others all in a row, trying to count how many they had here, and how many in their other five encampments. ‘Morn . . . what are you doing with all these cannon?’
My reaction was clearly exactly what Morn had been waiting for – what he’d been building up to all along.
‘I’m going to save Tristia once and for all.’
Things went downhill after that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The New Country
I had to run to keep up with Morn as he walked out the building and towards the front gates of the encampment, my boots crunching over the densely packed snow, making me feel like a child chasing after his father. ‘Tell me how this works,’ I demanded. ‘Tell me how this can end in something other than violence and bloodshed!’
‘Stop being so melodramatic, Falcio. It’s not nearly so terrifying as you make it out to be.’
Then why are you doing your best to terrify me, you arsehole?
Morn didn’t speak again until we were past the gates and on our way up a small hill nearby. My lungs were pumping hard in the cold, thin air of the mountains. Should’ve joined the damned Rangieri instead of the Greatcoats, I thought.
Morn finally came to a stop and pointed east. ‘Those mountains? Those are the ones we crossed together. On the other side are Orison and Hervor: two Duchies whose rulers have never brought the rest of the country anything but oppression and villainy. Both Duchies are without Dukes right now, and their people are suffering. Those people’ – he accentuated the last words – ‘have as much Avarean blood in them as Tristian.’
‘So you plan to annex Orison and Hervor as part of Avares?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’ Morn spread his arms wide. ‘Strike me down here and now, Falcio, for I am a traitor to our country, to our King, to our cause.’ He dropped his arms and shook his head, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘You think I’d go through all this just to take from one country to give to another?’
‘Then what—?’
‘To create something new!’ He gripped me by the shoulders. ‘Don’t you see, Falcio? This is our chance – our one chance. We’re going to create a new country, one founded on unshakeable principles of justice. Every man and every woman will be judged on the way they live their lives, not on how much wealth or power they’ve accumulated. It will be a nation without Dukes or Kings.’
‘Or Warlords?’ Kest asked.
‘The Avareans don’t seek territory, only glory. I will give them the glory they seek, the chance to prove their rokhan and do something their parents and their grandparents never did: to help liberate a people and change the shape of a continent.’
The excitement in his voice, the ardour with which he spoke, was seductive almost beyond imagining. Orison and Hervor: two Duchies I’ve hated as much or more than Rijou; two ruling families who had brought Tristia nothing but strife and warfare.
‘Imagine, Falcio,’ Morn said, sensing my weakness, ‘the Law as the very foundation of a country, not some gilding painted on too thinly to stretch across its surface, but the very rock upon which it’s built.’
The depth of passion gleaming in his eyes was hypnotic, blinding. I could barely hold his gaze.
‘Oh, do fuck off.’
Brasti was staring at us, his arms folded across his chest. ‘There’s no such thing as a country without rulers. Eventually some arsehole comes along and—’
‘Morn doesn’t intend this new nation of his to lack for rulers,’ Kest said. ‘Do you, Morn?’ He turned to me. ‘He means the Greatcoats to have dominion over an entire country.’
Far from being insulted or trying to deny Kest and Brasti’s -accusations, Morn was so sure of the incontestable rightness of his plans that I don’t think he even recognised the scepticism on their faces. I doubt it would have mattered anyway, because it was me he was seeking to convince.
‘It’s what we always talked about, Falcio,’ he said seductively.
His final words hit me like a mallet to the stomach. Those days leading up to the Dukes’ war against the King, to the imminent destruction of everything we’d fought for . . . we had said it then: why not a country with magistrates in charge? Who better to rule for the good of the people than those very judges who administered the laws?
Was this what the King had wanted? Was this why he’d sent all of us on these strange missions, to set the stage so that Morn, always one of the King’s favourites, could do the one thing that Paelis himself could never hope to accomplish in his own lifetime?
A petty thought occurred to me then: why not me?
If this was your great plan, your Majesty, why not entrust it to me?
‘It can’t be done,’ Kest said, the dispassion in his voice drawing me out of my own small-minded thoughts.