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“I borrowed some rich clothes to disguise myself and I went looking for the highwayman. I rode up and down the Lowespass Road until he held me up. I disarmed the swine in a minute and he knelt, begging for mercy. Before I handed him over to the magistrate-he was hanged-I…I cut him…I took him apart. Until he told what he had done to my poor father.
“The first night he buried the body in the woods outside town. He could only scrape a shallow hole because tree roots blocked the soil. The following day he fretted that a passerby might find the grave and unearth his crime. So the second night, in raw weather, he dug it up, carried the body to the Miroir moor and buried it in a deep hole. But then the idea tormented him that the moorland peat would preserve it forever and the disturbed grass would reveal the grave. So the following night he dug it up again. He threw it into the river from the top of a rocky outcrop. The river’s flow brought the broken remains straight to Governor Merganser’s door…I am sorry for what I did to the highwayman…”
San made no comment, so Wre
“My dreams of the Circle returned. Thank god, my skill rather than my background is what matters to the Castle, I reckoned; there’s a way out of this circus. For five years solid I spent all my off-duty time training. I was full of doubt and hope. I thought I was a dupe and a wretch to consider fighting the Swordsman. I nursed the idea for years and did nothing about it, then one night on a mad impulse I sent a letter to him. He chose to fight using rapier and dagger, which is my forte…Um…” Wre
“Answer my questions,” said the Emperor. “Have you ever fought Insects alone?”
“Yes, my lord. I’ve killed Insects one at a time in the Rachiswater amphitheater and hunted a couple found lurking by the town.”
“Have you ever felt fear?”
Wre
“Yes…” he said eventually. “I have never been as frightened as I am right now. But I master my fear.”
San asked, “Do you have a partner to bring into the Circle?”
Wre
There is no way you can lie with the Emperor’s gaze on you; it’s impossible to hide anything. Wre
We all privately remembered how terrible it is to speak alone in that vast space and felt sympathetic. I had witnessed the ceremony as an Eszai three times before, firstly when Tern joined at my wedding, and most recently when Ata Dei became Mist. I glanced at Mist; she looked shifty, probably recalling how during her initiation she tried to lie but instead found herself confessing that she murdered her husband for his place in the Circle.
San stated, “You swear to serve me, in my service to the Fourlands, in god’s name, for as long as I give you life.”
“I swear,” said Wre
The Emperor raised his right hand, bony fingers and prominent joints. “Come forward.”
Wre
The Emperor extended his hand to Wre
Wre
A smile broke slowly over Serein’s face. He dropped to his knees at San’s feet, in silence. Then as if he could not bear such close proximity to the Emperor and aware that the rite was over, Serein quietly backed down from the dais, turned and passed the benches. We all stood as he passed. Lightning and Rayne glanced at each other; they had felt the ripple in the Circle as San made the exchange: one out, one in. After the transfer they’d feel Wre
A babble of a hundred conversations hung in the air of the Great Hall. I wanted to climb up to my rafter where I customarily sit, legs dangling, to watch the party. But I couldn’t do that with my arm around Tern. I led her through a dozen conversations.
“Is he here yet? I want to meet the boy. I’ve questions to ask him…”
“He’s twenty-five, bless. How rare it is to be so adept so young.”
“Try the smoked venison, it’s excellent.”
“Eleonora? Busy revitalizing the kingdom. She’s good, by god, I only hear praise.”
“But the court’s full of scandal. What she does with chambermaids, I-”
“‘For an Eszai everything is easy.’ Ha! How can they think that?”
“Look! There’s Comet. He’s back! Hais-gelet, Jant?”
The Emperor was seated at the high table on a raised stage. He did not touch the feast before him. Tern swayed her skirt a little to the music-a young lad slammed away at the piano, lissome women in jasper red played fiddle reels.
Confetti on the carpet, candelabra; people leaned on the oak paneling, kissed under the arches. Frost was building a cantilevered bridge out of forks and salt cellars. Rayne and Hayl played chess with marzipan pieces on an enormous pink and yellow cake shaped like a chess board.
What platters and plates and bowls of food! There were sugared almonds, edible stars, spiced wine, iced wine, spring water, wheat beer and cream liqueur. There were flambéed swordfish, sliced lengthways on silver trenchers.
There were packets of Cobalt cigarillos on the table for those who wanted them. Boar pies-speciality of Cathee, charcoal-roast mushrooms, fat onions, saffron rice from Litanee, steak that juices up your mouth. There was peppered asparagus and kale from the Fescue fields; squash, tomatoes, baked potatoes cracked and oozing butter, Shivel cheeses like crumbly drums with fat blue veins. There was fruit: glazed, glacé, covered in cream.