Chapter 8

The Baron’s private dining chamber at Ironwatch was smaller than the great hall and considerably better heated, which was why Theron Ironwatch used it for conversations he did not wish repeated. A fire burned low in the hearth. The servants had been dismissed after the third course, and the three men at the table had been left with a decanter of the southern red and the freedom that comes of knowing no one is listening.

Gregory of Blackwood was enjoying himself.

“—and the beauty of it,” he was saying, turning his cup slowly by the stem, “is that I never once argued against martial ability. Not once. Had I done so, Benjamin would have marked it, and Benjamin marks everything. He writes it in that cramped little hand of his and reads it back at you a month later. No. I argued for other requirements, and let them crowd it out.”

Prince Corin Solmar leaned back in his chair. He was a lean man of thirty, dark-haired, with his father’s long jaw and none of his father’s patience. “Explain it plainly.”

“Plainly, then. The Spell Requirements Scroll is a vessel of finite capacity. Every virtue you write into it draws upon the same well of mana and the same breadth of the search. Write ten requirements, and the working must find a soul that answers all ten, which means it will answer none of them supremely. Write three, and it will find you a paragon of those three and a cipher in all else.” He spread his hands. “So I sat with Benjamin over the better part of two months and spoke to him, very reasonably, of what a Commander of Armies would actually do today. Will he stand in the shield wall? He will not. Will he trade blows with champions upon the field, as in the old songs? He has not done so in five hundred years. What will he do? He will feed thousands of men. He will move them across rivers. He will assess where the enemy will come and why. He will make men obey him.” Gregory took a swallow of wine. “Strategy. Tactics. Knowledge of arms and their history. Organization. Leadership. Five requirements, each of them unimpeachable, each of them precisely what a commander requires. And at the very bottom of the scroll, as an afterthought among afterthoughts, competence at arms.”

Baron Ironwatch stirred. He was a heavy, comfortable man of fifty-odd, and he had been listening with an expression that had grown steadily less comfortable through the telling.

“But surely,” he said, “those requirements are, in fact, precisely what is needed in one who leads a large army. The Commander of the Armies would hardly ever be in direct battle. You have described the office correctly.”

“That is why it was so easy.” Gregory let out a delighted bark of a laugh. “That is the whole of the art, my lord Baron. I did not have to deceive anyone. I had only to be right. Every man at that table agreed with me because every man at that table could map my words onto the type of commander needed to defend against this invasion and could find no fault in the mapping. Benjamin thanked me for the clarity of it. Magnus called it the soundest set of requirements the Academy had drafted in a century.” He set down his cup. “Not one of them, not one, thought to ask what would become of such a person if some discourteous soul were to demand the Trial of the Champion.”

“And the summoning produced a woman,” Corin said.

“The summoning produced a woman.” Gregory’s grin widened into something close to beatific. “My lord Prince, I have cast workings for twenty years and I have never once been visited by fortune so generous. I had prepared three separate grounds on which to object: bearing, ignorance of our customs, obvious want of martial ability. I needed none of them. She stepped out of the star, and I had only to open my mouth and be outraged, and every man in that chamber accepted it as the most natural thing in the world. No one questioned the challenge. No one asked by what right a mage demands a Trial. They were too busy being embarrassed on her behalf.”

He turned to the Prince, and the humor went out of his voice, leaving something more businesslike behind it.

“Which brings me to the one matter that wants tending. The challenge, as it stands, is mine. A mage’s challenge, which is a thing with no proper standing in the books. You hold the authority. The Trial is the Captain of the Guard’s to demand, and his alone. So when the Trial is called in the courtyard, see that it is you who formalizes it. Speak the words yourself, before the assembled Guard. Let the record show the Captain of the Guard demanded the Trial of the Champion, as is his ancient right, and the matter becomes unassailable.”

Corin nodded slowly, and grinned. “It shall be done.”

He reached for the decanter himself, there being no servant to do it, and filled his own cup.

“My father believed,” he said, “that by exiling me to the frontier I should be forgotten. Oh, he dressed it finely. Captain of the Guard at Ironwatch is the largest garrison in the realm, and its Captain a position of the highest regard. It is also a position with no political consequence whatsoever, in all the years of peace, which is to say in all the years there have been. He sent me four hundred miles from the capital to count spears and hear complaints about the quality of the salt beef, and he counted himself clever for it.” He drank. “He did not anticipate the Foretelling. He did not anticipate that the oracles would look into the dark and see an invasion coming. It is a gift. I will not pretend otherwise.”

Baron Ironwatch had set down his own cup some while ago and had not picked it up again.

“A Champion,” he said slowly, “is summoned only when the Oracles have foretold that the realm stands in dire need. That is the only circumstance in which the working is ever permitted, and the only circumstance in which the Crown has ever consented to bear the cost of it. There is no precedent, none that I know, for the replacing of a summoned Champion.”

“Which is precisely why the Trial was needed.” Gregory inclined his head, patient as a tutor. “My lord Baron, consider. It did not matter in the least who the spell called. A scholar. A quartermaster. A grey-headed general from some world of their own. Whoever stepped out of that star was going to possess exactly as much martial ability as I permitted the scroll to ask for, which is to say enough to hold a sword without cutting himself. A defeat in the Trial of the Champion satisfies custom entirely. The office falls vacant. The Guard has judged and the judgement stands. And then you, my lord, you need only nominate Prince Corin as Commander of the Armies, as the Baron of Ironwatch has every right to do when the office stands empty.” He spread his hands again. “No one will object. You will be following custom. No law is broken. No custom is violated. Not one word of what we do here could be laid before the King as a wrong.”

“My father will certainly not object,” Corin said. “He exiled me to keep me from politics. But my father has never in his life unmade a thing that was already made. Present him with a fait accompli. His own son being lawfully raised to the command of the realm’s armies in the hour of the realm’s need, with the Baron’s seal upon it and the Guard’s acclamation behind it, and he will support the appointment within the week. He will probably take credit for it.”

“You misunderstand me,” the Baron said.

Both men looked at him.

“My concern was never the law.” Theron Ironwatch turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, and did not drink from it. “I do not doubt that you have threaded this needle neatly. I am sure that every parchment will bear scrutiny and that every custom will be observed and that a clerk reading the record in a hundred years will find nothing amiss in it. My concern is simpler than that, and I will put it simply. This places the realm at risk. If the Foretelling is true, and we have staked a great deal of the Crown’s treasure upon the assumption that it is, then we have gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain the one thing the Oracles say we require, and we are now arranging to throw it away.”

“We are in better fighting form than we were fifty years ago,” Corin said, with the dismissiveness of a man who had heard the objection before and did not find it compelling the first time. “The garrisons are fuller. The levies drill twice yearly now where once they drilled once. And we won that war handily, Baron. Eldrenmark came over the passes and we broke them and sent them home.”

The Baron let that pass. He looked, instead, at Gregory.

“What happens if the summoned Champion wins?”

Gregory laughed outright.

“You have not seen her, have you, my lord?”

“I have not.”

“Then permit me to describe her to you.” Gregory leaned forward on his elbows with the relish of a man producing his strongest card last. “She is large, I grant you, large for a woman, taller than many men, and I will not pretend otherwise. But she is soft through the middle. She is, I am told, some manner of tutor in her own world. A teacher of history.” He said the word as one might name a mild and faintly embarrassing ailment. “My lord Baron. In all your years, have you ever once seen a woman as swift or as strong as a man? One who could fight? I have not, and I have travelled. The summoning requirements asked for strong, but not exceptional, martial ability, and the summoning delivered what was requested. She has no chance. None. The thing is not in question.”

He sat back, pleased with himself.

“And to be certain of it, I have withdrawn myself from the council of mages who advise her. I let it be known that my outrage at her very presence was too great to permit me to sit at table with her — which has the dual virtue of keeping me clear of anything that might later be laid at my door, and of ensuring that whatever counsel she receives, she receives it from men who have never in their lives thought about a sword.” He chuckled. “I am told they have sent her into the Training Pocket. Very diligent. Very earnest of them. But there are only a few days before the Trial, my lord, and a man emerges from that place half-dead and fit for nothing for a day and a night afterward. She will have time to pass through it two or three times. Three, if she is stubborn, and I grant she may be stubborn. Three passages through the Pocket against a lifetime at arms.” He shook his head. “And recall who it is she will face. Our champion is the most capable knight in living memory. She will die in the courtyard in front of eight hundred witnesses, and the custom will be satisfied, and we may get on with the business of defending the realm properly. You have my word upon it.”

Baron Theron Ironwatch sat with that for a long moment. The fire popped. Somewhere beyond the door, a servant’s footsteps went by and faded.

“I will take your words as given,” he said carefully. “That if the summoned Champion is defeated in the Trial, then the Oracles may be taken as erroneous, or the working as faulty, which comes to the same thing. In that case, I will appoint Prince Corin as Champion and Commander of the Armies immediately, before the body is cold, and I will set my seal to it in the courtyard itself so that no man may say the realm stood leaderless for an hour.”

Corin raised his cup. “My lord Baron is gracious.”

The Baron did not raise his. After a moment the Prince drank alone, and did not appear to mind.

Frances woke in a bed, in a stone chamber in the Academy at Ironwatch, with grey morning light coming through the window, and for the first time in what her body insisted had been the better part of a year, she had no plan to train and die.