The entire Hirshwald, where she had once hunted with her cousins, was now painted grey. Teurshen and its lively muddy streets, Kleinach with its pretty green houses, Senken River where every spring people from miles away had come to fish. It was all grey.
Cordelia Hasenbach, First Prince of Procer, watched day by day as her realm died on beautifully painted map.
Word trickled in from every front, following the scrying lines she had laid down through the Order of the Red Lion, and with every dawn the court painter drew a few more leagues of the Principate grey on the map at the heart of the Vogue Archive. Hannoven was now bare of life, likely beyond recovery in this lifetime. Her own Rhenia was entirely in the hands of the dead save for the besieged city-fortress that was its capital. Only its first two layers of defence had been lost, last she heard from her commander there, but scrying had since been cut. Twilight’s Pass still held – the Morgentor had been lost twice, but the Kingfisher Prince and Otto Redcrown had led daring offensives to take it back both times – yet that was meaningless when the last fortresses of the Hocheben Heights had fallen and the dead were pushing deep in Bremen.
Ashen grey, death’s breath grey, spread through towns and villages that Cordelia had ridden through as a girl.
“The north fell the moment the Heights did,” the Forgetful Librarian told her the day the news came, bluntly but not cruelly. “There won’t be a living soul north of Brus come next winter.”
Cordelia thought of striking her but held back. It was not untrue, and these days she had come to rely on the Librarian’s propensity for brutal truthfulness. Most people would have held back when warning her of the effective end of her people as more than refugees and soldiers of fortune, but Cordelia no longer had time to spare for being handled. Clarity was a priceless luxury when every hour, every decision had lives on the line.
Saale, a small fortress first raised under the Iron Kings. The seven adjoining villages called the Shwestern, which Cordelia had once developed with coin in the hopes that they might grow into a small city. The valley of Kaninchenbau. Grey spread on the map, like a maw opening to devour the world whole.
“The refugees cannot stay in Brus,” Cordelia said, watching the end times take shape.
Her eyes had misted, when she’d heard that Frederic Goethal had opened his gates wide to all Lycaonese. Brus was not rich, its lands hardly any better than those of its northern neighbours’, so the Prince of Brus had effectively bankrupted himself when he’d welcomed four principalities’ worth of teenagers and children. More than that, too. Every piece of bread shared with her people could not fill the belly of his own, and these days no one had granaries to fall back on. He had sacrificed a great deal for innocents. A crown is not a privilege, she’d once told Frederic when they’d been younger. Unsure of their power, of where they stood. It is a duty. He’d not asked a damned thing for any of it, the Kingfisher Prince.
Cordelia had known few men worthier of being a prince than Frederic Goethal.
“Brus will soon begin seeing fighting,” the Librarian agreed. “The captains in Neustria sent too many reports of their fortresses being bypassed by raiders. We send your refugees further south, then. Segovia?”
“The ships will make a difference in evacuating further south still, should the principality collapse,” Cordelia mused, and so it was settled.
The Highest Assembly had voted her emergency powers allowing her to settle refugees wherever she wished in the Procer, so long as part of the financial burden was shared by the high throne. She’d nearly faced a revolt in the Chamber over the motion, which stepped on the neck of all traditional conceptions of royal sovereignty, but they’d not quite had the nerve. Cordelia had unearthed too many of the skeletons her princes had buried for them to want to risk it. When she’d passed a measure allowing her to appoint superintendence supervising the collection of princely taxes, the First Prince had gotten a closer look at their finances than any of them were comfortable with.
No wonder they’d been willing to fight her tooth and nail over the motion: a little over half of them had been cheating the high throne on taxes. In times of peace that would have been a minor scandal, but in times of war? Cordelia had the authority to have their heads for it, and that wasn’t even the part that terrified them. All she needed to do to ruin them was spread word to the street: entire cities would riot, screaming for the blood of the traitors. The way she kept ramming measures through was making her no friends, and even losing her allies, but Cordelia Hasenbach was not reigning for pleasure or friendship. If there was enough of Procer left to rebel against her after the war ended, she would walk to the headsman’s block with a smile.
The Lafran Stretch, Belles Collines, Faudefer and Patrin. The last two had still been full of people when the dead tunneled under the walls. Grey spread across the map, and not only to the north.
Cordelia’s dying homeland was but a third of the war, if even that, and dooms never came alone. Hainaut had come out the best of it, irony of ironies. The Black Queen had stripped the principality of most her armies before retreating, but she had left her last general – Lady Abigail Tanner – in a solid defensive position at the Cigelin Sisters. The grounds won against the dead by the victory at Hainaut had been promptly lost anew, the dead claiming them quicker than they could be defended, but the White Knight had broken the bridge to the north and so ended the immediate looming threat.
The Chosen had followed that up by scoring an upset victory at Malmedit that collapsed the tunnels and anchored the eastern defence line before dedicating himself body and soul to the war on Keter. He had led regular sorties into enemy territory to break up their forces before they could mass in large numbers, to great success. The White Knight had in truth been so effective there’d been talk of trying to seize and fortify the ruins of the capital to secure the locked Hellgate there, though General Abigail had forcefully stamped out any such notions. Once Cordelia would have enjoyed the White Knight’s successes, the way they proved Damned were not the only ones who could lead in dark times, but no longer.
Hanno of Arwad had crossed a line in the Arsenal, when he’d made the choice to stand in the way of the preservation of Procer. If it had been only a moment of hard-headed principle divorced from the realities of the situation, in time Cordelia might have grown to forgive it. Trust would not have resumed, but wariness would have ebbed. But it was not as simple as that. Cordelia could not think of the way the White Knight had refused to negotiate, to compromise, without hearing in those terse answers the echo of another Chosen’s voice. Laurence de Montfort, the Saint of Swords, feet on the table as she told Cordelia that the Procer must burn so something better might come of it.
Would Hanno of Arwad let them burn too, for his principles? Cordelia found she was not sure of the answer, not anymore. There could be no trust there, no relying on the Chosen. As in so many things she stood alone.
“The Heights were a body blow, but it’s Cleves that will kill us if anything does,” the Librarian sighed on a cold winter morning, sipping at a mug of tea.
The third and last front, Rozala Malanza’s. For years it had been the story of victory, the proof that the dead could beaten back that’d been so instrumental in keeping Procer from sinking into despair. And to her honour the Princess of Aequitan had stubbornly held even in the face of a Hellgate yawning open while she still suffered the siege of a great army of the dead. She could not be everywhere, though. The northern point of Cleves still held, and parts of the eastern shoreline as well, but Keter had swept out of Lake Pavin and devoured whole the western shore.
Tertre, Sengrin, Lagueroche. Grey spread like a sickness in the blood.
The walled city of Atandor was now under siege, and should it fall then the dead would have a way into the lowlands of Cleves. More terrible still, the forces of the Kingdom of the Dead would find nothing in their way as they spilled further south onto the plains of Brabant and Lyonis. And Atandor would fall, in three months at the latest. Agnes had been clear on that, as clear as the Augur could ever be. Its defenders had not run out of valour, but they had run out of food.
When the dead made it that far south, the war was over. Even if all they did was burn the crop fields before retreating, the ensuing starvation would collapse the Principate. Then even should the Kingdom of Callow be willing to starve itself feeding Procer, which was highly dubious, in practice the grain simply could not be moved and distributed quickly enough. There was a secret truth behind it all, though, one Cordelia had grasped in the wake of her uncle’s death at Hainaut: the war was already lost. For Procer, anyway, if not yet the rest of Calernia. This was no longer about winning, it was about saving what she still could. Who she still could.
“We will have to recall Princess Rozala and her army before Atandor falls,” the First Prince said.
It was giving most of Cleves over to the grey, but then it had already been made into a wasteland by Keter’s Due when the Hellgate was opened near Trifelin. With so many of its best farmlands blighted, the principality could no longer feed itself.
“If she puts up a defence line around Peroulet it could hold for a few months while the dead are still massing,” the Librarian muttered. “It won’t be a popular decision, mind you, but it’s the right one.”
It was more than the army Cordelia wanted to salvage. Should she get assassinated – and it was becoming more likely that she would be with every measure forced through the Highest Assembly – then the only other royal in Procer that could feasibly be elected to the high throne without too much quibbling was Rozala Malanza. The Princess of Aequitan might be one of the finest generals left to Procer, but she was now simply too valuable to keep risking in Cleves. Malanza would hate her for the order, but what did it matter? She had hated Cordelia to the bone since the Great War, and there would be no mending a hatred born of a mother’s death.
“Gods forgive me,” the Librarian suddenly said, “but we’re not going to win this war, are we?”
Cordelia went still, for a heartbeat. She had not thought anyone else had noticed, not quite so soon. She needed a few months still before it became known, before panic and chaos spread-
“It’ll be out east it’s decided, in Praes,” the Forgetful Librarian continued. “If the Black Queen can bring back diabolists and reinforcements in time for a strike at Keter to still be feasible.”
The First Prince did not allow her relief to touch her face.
“Catherine Foundling will do what she must to settle the East,” Cordelia said, dimly surprised to find she meant every word. “We must simply keep Procer afloat until she returns and the last gamble of this war can be taken.”
That, though, was a lie. There was one last gamble awaiting beyond that, if arms failed and it all came down to the spectre of annihilation looming over all of Calernia. The First Prince had found the funds and the men, ensured all that could be done was. The corpse that had been dredged up from the depths of Lake Artoise could be awoken, the priests had promised her. It could be used as a weapon. One that would destroy Procer, perhaps, but Procer was already halfway into the grave. If it all else failed, Cordelia Hasenbach was not only the First Prince of Procer: she was also the Warden of the West. She had a responsibility to ensure at least some of Calernia survived the Dead King’s fury.
And that responsibility, now, was as a finger laid against a trigger.
Alaya did not enjoy war.
It’d surprised her when she had understood as much about herself, as she’d believed herself a harder woman than that. No tyrant had ever climbed the Tower to less than a stairway’s worth of corpses and she had certainly been no exception, so she’d wondered what it was about war that made her balk. It was not the violence, surely, for Alaya was no stranger to the use of it. Rarely by her own hands, but to a Dread Empress of Praes assassination was no less a necessary tool of ruling than laws or taxes. Was it the magnitude, she had wondered? Edmund Inkhand had once written, in that sardonically pointed manner so typical of his journals, that men only disapproved of murder so long as it did not involve banners and great numbers.
Yet though Alaya had enjoyed reading the old king’s writings as a girl and then differently so as a woman, she simply did not have it in her to care for people – strangers, people in the abstract – the way that he so obviously had. Grief at the human condition was not burden she had to bear, so what had been the source of her unease? It was the indiscriminate nature of it all, Alaya had later come to understand after decades of wondering. The Conquest had been one of the cleanest, most efficient wars in living memory: it had been largely soldiers that died during it, no cities were sacked and the countryside was not ravaged. And still the entire exercise had been like a stone in a shoe.
War could not be controlled, not really. It could not be contained the way that assassination and intrigues could, risk and results balanced like lines of a ledger. To Alaya’s eyes, using war to achieve one’s ends was rather like setting fire to a house to kill a man: dangerous as much to you as the enemy. No without reason was it an old saying in the Wasteland that a lit blaze knew neither friend nor foe.
Knowing all this about herself, Dread Empress Malicia found herself darkly amused that she had regardless spent the last five years and change at war with other powers to various degrees. Most ironic of all was the civil war that Praes was still in the throes of, which she had spent no small amount of effort to start and then maintain in order to preserve her interests and that of the Empire. Perhaps that was why even going from success to success had somehow only increased her unease.
The dark-skinned beauty ran a finger across the obsidian table at which the Imperial council sat in session, admiring how it was all sculpted out of a single piece. Reputedly it was the work of Regalia II, carved when she’d been out campaigning in Callow. Given her death abroad it’d never been used by the empress herself: it was her successor, Maledicta II, who’d been the first to sit at it. In some parts of Praes there was even a turn of phrase about the tale: ‘carving an empress’ table’, which meant undertaking an effort that would benefit only your successor.
Alaya was not particularly fond of the sculpted rim, which was a parade of twisting devils and kneeling foes, but she had fond memories of the table itself. She’d spent many hours seated at it during some of the best years of her life, those heady days after she had climbed the Tower and she had set to reforming Praes with the people dearest to her in the world. Back then the heart of her council had been made up of a trusted few: Amadeus, Wekesa and Ime. On occasion others had been brought in for a few months or years so that particular issues might be settled with their expertise, but they had always been temporary additions.
Nowadays Alaya found her council was little like the old one, for all that Ime and a Black Knight still sat on it.
The mirror above the ever-burning fireplace in the back subtly fogged over, the polished bronze growing clouded as the old enchantment bound to the hallways outside the council room were triggered. Malicia retreated towards the end of the table, ensuring she would be seated by the time the first of them entered – she took the time to array herself in the throne-like seat, draping the folds of her bronze and green dress in a way that she knew lent her a regal air. Ime was the first to enter, as was her habit. Malicia’s spymistress was visibly aging these days, the alchemies and spells that had slowed the ravages finally unravelling.
It was not an unusual thing in highborn, who all suffered the same fate when their flesh inevitably grew inured to the alchemies and began rejecting the spells. Some became desperate and began dealing with devils then, but only the foolish dared and Ime was nothing of the sort. It was a graceful aging, too, for all that the spymistress resented it: though her hair was now turning white and her skin creasing, she remained in good shape and firm flesh. Not that Ime would see it that way, of course.
Alaya was well aware that Wasteland aristocrats had an instinctual disgust towards the signs of old age, most of them having come to associate it with the lowborn as a consequence of being raised by ageless and seemingly forever-young relatives. It was a self-reinforcing shame, as highborn visible aging tended to retreat from good society to maintain the illusion of agelessness through their discretion. Malicia’s spymistress offered a short bow, her modest blue robes whispering against the floor as she did, and wordlessly headed for the seat to the empress’ left as she had for decades. The other woman she had been awaiting took longer to arrive, and took a different route.
It was necessary, given that Malicia’s current Black Knight was an ogre and so physically incapable of squeezing through most doors.
High Marshal Nim – raised above other marshals after coming into her Name – was a very deliberate individual. The eastern door had been heightened and broadened for her but even so the ogre opened it slowly, as if she were afraid of slamming it into the wall. The Black Knight lowered her head to pass the threshold and only straightened when she was under the heigh ceiling of the council room, her plain armour of dark steel plate pulling taut against her. She wore no helm, leaving bare two dark braids framing a tanned face as the rest of her hair went down her back untied. Her large eyes were a pale brown that leaned into pink, and her face seemed pulled into a permanent frown that made her large nose even more prominent.
She looked like something of a brute, as all ogres did, but Malicia knew better. Amadeus, on one of their evenings drinking terrible wine together, had noted that while Grem One-Eye was likely the finest general in the Dread Empire the ogre was a closer match to him than Ranker by a significant margin. Nim inclined her head and chest in the approximation of a bow, taking her prepared enchanted steel seat at the end of table facing Malicia. If there were others the Black Knight would have been seated at the empress’ right, as was customary, but there was no need for such pageantry when it was only the three of them. There would be no fourth: Malicia had not allowed the honour of the Warlock’s seat to any of the mages serving her.
The empress opened the council herself, voice ringing out.
“We have word from Foramen,” Dread Empress Malicia said. “The Confederation of the Grey Eyries was… emboldened by news of the Black Queen’s coming. They have resumed their attacks against Foramen and High Lady Wither.”
Nim grimaced, thick lips pulling at thicker skin. All expressions looked exaggerated on ogres, by virtue of their size. It often made them seem foolish or stupid, so most who left the Hall of Skulls learned to school their faces into neutrality to avoid the impression – and so now their kind was known as being inexpressive instead.
“That tangles up the entire south for us, Your Dread Majesty,” the Black Knight said. “Wither won’t move while the enemy is at her gate, and Kahtan will be looking to sink a knife in her back.”
High Lady Takisha of Kahtan would no doubt phrase it differently, Malicia thought, but Nim was essentially correct. With Thalassina a blackened ruin and Foramen in goblin hands, Kahtan had become the last high seat in the hands of a Taghreb highborn and so incredibly influential among their people. High Lady Takisha was much more interested in putting that influence to use in reclaiming Foramen for one of her kin that fighting battles on Malicia’s behalf, not that the empress had pushed hard for such contributions. Until recently, it had suited her for Kahtan to largely sit the war out: it lent credence to the perception of stalemate between Sepulchral and the Tower that had been the keystone of her diplomatic strategy. Malicia has bled Kahtan dry of gold and mages as recompense for the feet-dragging, too, both of which had been useful in pursuing her plans abroad.
“High Lady Takisha has called her vassals to Kahtan,” Ime shared. “Most Taghreb nobles in Praes will be there, considering she’s the last human high seat in the south. We could skip her and attempt to muster them directly when they’re gathered.”
“It would be hasty to attempt as much,” Malicia said. “We’re not intending on extended fighting against the Grand Alliance.”
And once peace was made the empress would be able to use Takisha Muraqib’s absence as a reason to draw heavily on her troops for the Empire’s contribution to the war on Keter. It would weaken her significantly going forward, hammering down one of the last nails that might potentially stick up to challenge Malicia’s authority in Praes.
“We can settle this without the Taghreb,” the Black Knight calmly agreed. “The key is making sure the Black Queen doesn’t end up backing Sepulchral for the Tower. That would be an alliance difficult to beat on the field.”
“From what we’ve intercepted of their correspondence,” Ime said, “it seems like the Grand Alliance is keeping High Lady Abreha at a distance. Not hostile, but hardly allied.”
“That could change,” Malicia said, “should we damage Foundling’s armies too much. If Amadeus were there to back I could not fathom her choosing Sepulchral’s candidature over his, but he remains in the wind. Incidents will have to be arranged to turn that distance into enmity.”
And sometimes Alaya did wonder if that wasn’t the very reason Amadeus was absent: so that nothing could coalesce around him too early. If he was not putting pieces into place without binding himself to them, getting forces in motion without himself needing to be at the helm. But if that was truly the case, where was he? Even now, with his old apprentice at the gates, there was no hint of a plot in sight. Malicia knew better than to believe a man like him would disappear quietly into obscurity. It was worrying, that even Ime’s best efforts had not been enough to find his trail.
“Assuming Callow begins by linking up with the deserters in the Green Stretch, as is most probable, I’ll have infiltrators in place by the time the Army of Callow begins marching north,” Ime said. “Given the positions our people in Sepulchral’s ranks, arranging those incidents is achievable.”
“It won’t be enough,” the Black Knight said. “Foundling didn’t fight half a dozen wars to roll over for the Tower at the first sign of trouble, Your Dread Majesty. We’ll have to bloody her before she even considers terms.”
“It will take more than that,” Ime frankly said. “It’s been personal for her since the Night of Knives. If she’s not forced to choose between drastic consequences and dealing with us, it’s my belief she will absolutely keep pushing.”
Neither of the two looked at her, even though the so-called ‘Night of Knives’ had been ordered by Malicia personally. It’d had unfortunate long-term consequences, she would admit, but the notion had been sound at the time. It’d been only tangentially a reprisal for Foundling’s assassination attempts of her in Keter, after all. The most important motives had all been political in nature. After securing the Dead King’s aid to keep Procer in check, Malicia had believed that the last major loose end to handle was Callow. She’d had allies in the Free Cities and ways to collapse that alliance’s coherence, meaning that the last potential territorial threat to Praes had been a resurgent Kingdom of Callow under Catherine Foundling.
Decapitating the small but skilled cadre of individuals that the young queen had been relying on to rule her realm and carry out her reforms had only been logical, and in that aspect worked exactly as intended. Unfortunately, instead of returning home and licking her wounds the Black Queen had instead disappeared for a year and re-emerged as high priestess of the drow with a set of fresh armies at her back. There had, in Alaya’s opinion, been no way for her to really predict that. It had effectively set the balance of power in the other direction and begun a cascade of events that’d made Callow into the most influential member of the Grand Alliance, which had in turn forced the empress to implement drastic measures to compensate.
And it might have been dangerous, it might have been hard and Alaya had more than once hesitated, but her plans had borne fruit. Foundling was now here in Praes, on grounds Malicia had prepared for years and desperate enough to accept terms when she was brought to the table. Now Malicia only needed to walk the path a little further still and it would all fall into place – she was, in other words, in one of the single most perilous positions of her entire reign. The last inch to the finish line was always the most treacherous. Alaya would know, considering how many people she’d killed there.
“I do not disagree,” Malicia finally said. “I naturally leave picking the battlefield entirely to you, High Marshal. All of the Tower’s resources are opened to your office in the pursuit of bringing Foundling to the table.”
“A great honour, Your Dread Majesty,” the Black Knight said, bowing her head.
Ime seemed about to speak when she suddenly closed her mouth, and a heartbeat later there was a polite knock at the door. Malicia’s spymistress glanced at her and the empress nodded permission. Ime slipped out a few moments and Malicia made small talk with Nim about her eldest son, who had recently wed, until she returned. Both women gave the spymistress their full attention when she did.
“The Black Queen has arrived in Praes,” Ime said, closing the door behind her.
Malicia smiled. Finally.
“How close to Satus did she gate out?” the Black Knight asked.
Ime’s lips thinned.
“She is not in the Green Stretch at all, High Marshal,” the spymistress said. “The word came from High Lord Sargon: she’s less than a day’s march away from Wolof.”
Dread Empress Malicia went still. Wolof, which was on the other side of the empire from any sort of ally of Callow’s. Wolof, whose high lord she held in her thrall. Wolof, where Malicia had laid seeds for a great victory – the filling of a fourth seat at this very table.
Someone had just made a mistake, and to Malicia’s sudden disquiet she was not certain whether it had been her or the Black Queen.
