The Uncrowned Emperor

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 20

The servants flung back the draperies and the late-morning sun filled the room with light — much of it reflected in a blinding glare off new-fallen snowdrifts. Padrec sat up growling, wondering why the servants had the gall to rouse him when he could have slept into the afternoon, and what matter that he missed the midday ceremonies for his sister and her betrothed — surely half the nobility would be sleeping off the night before? And as he opened his mouth to berate the black-clad servants, he saw the faces crowding round, and the words vanished into a soft hiss of surprise.

“Prince — Prince Padrec,” Lord Arellwen said haltingly, fingering the seal of office that hung, chain-linked and clinking, about his neck. The chancellor’s gaze darted to the men flanking him — Secretariat, City, Army, Exchequer and Ethred the Archpriest — before coming to rest on a point just to the left of Padrec’s heaped pillows. Behind the council stood the chamberlain and Lord Captain Wentwain of the Falconguard — and there were others just outside his doorway, faces he could not make out as he blinked in the sunlight, crowding the corridors with eager whispers.

“What is . . . what is going on?” he said after a bleared moment.

“He's dead, Padrec,” a female voice said softly — his sister’s voice, from a corner of the room where the drapes were pulled back into a shadowy column. “He’s dead,” Alsbet repeated, stepping into the light, clad in black with that broken-nosed Captain Gavian beside her, and her blue eyes seemed to contain winters worth of sadness.

For a moment Padrec thought she meant Maibhygon, and a wicked happiness boiled in his breast.

“Yes, he is dead, Your . . . Majesty,” Arellwen said haltingly. Then, in an alarming clatter, the group of men dropped to their knees, and the chancellor found his voice.

“The emperor is dead!” he cried, and the walls and windows muffled his voice but not enough — it still rang clearly out into the halls where the whispers were loud and the faces hidden. “The emperor is dead — Long live the emperor! Long live His Imperial Majesty, Padrec the Second, lord of All Narsil!”

“Long live the emperor!” the crowd responded. “Long live Padrec!”

“Long live Padrec,” his sister said softly, on her knees with the others, her black skirts pooling on the room's floor, and the uncrowned emperor blinked in the glare of sun on snow and heard, for the first time, the distant pealing of bells.

So Edmund Montair died in the last days of the year of the world One Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Nine, three hundred and twenty-five years after Andarion Narcilis had begun constructing the Con Rendala in whose throne room the late emperor now lay in state, his broken features patched up with thread and painted into a semblance of life.

There was glorious sunlight on the day of his death — “emperor’s weather,” the people called it — and an aperture in the vault was propped open, allowing a single perfect sunbeam to reach the tiles below. The ray crept slowly across the long, banner-hung hall, and when it crossed Edmund’s bier in late afternoon the light gilded the body, as though his corporeal form lay ready to join his soul among the angels.

Afternoon passed into evening and night; the next day the sun was gone, and the emperor’s weather gave way to a fierce mountain storm that descended upon the city spitting sleet and icy rain. The freeze that followed coated everything — wooden walls were sheathed in silver, detritus from the storm lay in glistening heaps like piles of discarded jewelry, and the temple’s bell-ropes were hung with icicles, so thick that the mourning peals fell silent.

The city-folk called the storm a sign of darker days to come, as they skated on iced-over streets and filled the temple with murmured prayers. Meanwhile the Castle became a place of warmth and claustrophobia, where all conversations seemed public, and everyone watched everyone else — as the empire's nobles waited for the storm to pass, for the ice to melt, for the funeral to go forward, for Padrec to be crowned.

Waited, and let the rituals of the empire sweep them up. The day after the storm they walked the long cold way from Castle to temple, dressed in black and trailing a party of Azrielite priests, to hear the archpriest’s prayers for the gentle repose of Edmund's soul. That done, the entire company retraced its slippery steps, and stood for an hour in the high-ceilinged silence of the throne room while the black priests chanted the deathwatch, the ancient syllables echoing upward amid the incense and the dust motes that swirled in the vaulted darkness high above.

The priests’ faces were pale moons in the night of their robes and hoods, and Padrec's nostrils burned with the incense and his eyes teared up so that some in the clouds of watchers believed that their uncrowned emperor was crying.

This was not the truth. Beneath his sorrowful exterior, Padrec exulted. It was as if the Archangels had dropped a supernatural headsman's axe on all the long miserable years he had anticipated — a long agony of impotent waiting from which his father’s drunken plunge from Matheld’s Tower had spared him, by delivering power into his own hands at the proper time, which was now.

Now, before the dukes grew too powerful; now, before the possibility of war with Bryghala slipped from his fingers; now, because that way there was no need for them to end where other princes and emperors had ended, with a disastrous ruler in his dotage and a son tempted, understandably tempted, to give his beloved father a push

and in his mind’s eye he saw Edmund falling, falling, and a pair of hands on the tower above forcing him over the edge, his hands

but that wasn’t what had happened, because he had been abed and asleep and his allies had been ferreting out a plot against the emperor, and that plot had not yet come to fruition, Aengiss was sure of it, and the only footprints in the snow atop the tower had been his father’s, Wentwain had said as much, and a drunken tumble made so much sense, it fit spiritually with everything that had gone wrong for his father, and perhaps even explained how Caetryn had somehow anticipated it with her sight, well enough to write him a note that he had probably been reading at the very moment when his father, soused and reeling, had fallen to his death

and sometimes he thought back to that night and tried to parse his conversations with Aengiss and with Paulus, tried to remember details through the haze of drink, and found himself guiltily relieved when he couldn’t remember all the details, just Aengiss asking him for trust and patience and Paulus telling him to get to bed for his own safety, which he had done of course, and anyway no one had pushed his father, not his enemies and certainly not him, no one

and so he stepped from the darkness of these thoughts into the light of his new imperial power. The ambassadors came to him and found him charming and gracious, more so than expected, willing to guarantee the treaties and accords of his father's time, full of promises of Narsil's continued friendship — and they did not see the visions of southward conquest that danced in Padrec’s thoughts.

But those visions would have to wait, because there was Bryghala to deal with — yet even that could not be dealt with just yet. Prince Maibhygon came to the new emperor as well, and the two men exchanged careful pleasantries under a host of watchful eyes — and then Padrec confirmed his father's treaty and his sister’s marriage, and sent Maibhygon back to his rooms in Blind Tower without even hinting at his desperate desire to tear the parchment down the middle and cast it into the fire.

“The excuse will come,” Aengiss promised his new sovereign. “Before your sister leaves the borders of the empire, it will come.”

Yes, Aengiss was full of promises now, and full of advice as well, advice that Padrec chafed at but accepted all the same. Accepted, even though his old commander was still unwilling to discuss the details of the plot against his throne, swearing up and down that he knew that Edmund’s death was not the plotters’ work, but otherwise putting him off with promises of revelations soon to come.

“Your father’s death will have altered all their plans,” the old general told him, when Edmund was twenty hours dead and the mourning bells still pealed without ceasing in the city. “Give me a few days to gather knowledge, while you tend to what must come first — including settling on the men to advise you, the men who will help you rout your enemies once I can name them without a shred of doubt.”

To which Padrec told Aengiss his plan for the council, how he would probably take Dunkan as Lord of the City, Paulus for Secretariat, Elbert for the Exchequer, and finally to create a new seat dedicated to Brethon affairs, and to bring one of his circle, maybe Cadfael, east over the Yrgheim to represent Brethony on the council.

“As a first step toward a dual monarchy?” the general said with a faint smile. “Where his majesty rules half the year from the throne across the mountains …?”

Padrec flushed; the thought had been in his mind. “I don’t have clear plans, Aengiss. But I’ll do whatever’s necessary to make sure Brethony is fully part of the empire, an equal part, no matter if some fat Heart lords would prefer to see it plundered.”

The general’s bird-of-prey smile widened. “That’s a fine speech, and a fine intention. And then who would you have for chancellor?”

“Why not you? Would you accept?”

“Me? I am flattered, majesty, but wouldn’t there be a danger of appearances? The young adjutant chooses his old general to run the empire for him? You must do as you will, you are the emperor, but I would say for now you should mostly leave the council as it is. Certainly leave Arellwen as chancellor. The man has kept the empire running amid difficulties, and he's loyal. Not qualities to be taken lightly.”

“But if you think I’d risk looking a lapdog — shouldn’t I have my own men, if I’m to be my own man? These are my father's lords there now! Won’t I look like I'm afraid to change anything?”

Aengiss nodded. “A fair point. The dukes are watching — so make a beginning by packing off Gaddel and making Elbert Lord of the City in his place. He’ll be good at the job, and the administration will begin to train him to become your chancellor when Arellwen retires. But leave Exchequer in place — the man knows coin, and you will need an experienced hand for that if all goes well. Secretariat and Army, too, for now. For now. Oh, and by Uriel, don’t put Dunkan on your Council! Your brawn doesn’t need to sit table with your brains.”

“And nothing for Paulus?”

A wintry smile. “I wouldn't tie Paulus down to any one post. He knows how much you value him. As for the Brethon seat — it’s not a bad idea, but just picking one of your friends isn’t crafty enough. Better to bring in one of the dukes, Cymrin or Aedevys, and find a way to make them think it’s their idea, that the seat will be theirs permanently even though you have other plans.”

“And Ethred? I’ll need my own archpriest …”

“Yes, but in good time. You don’t want someone too, shall we say, pious” — Aengiss made the word cut with its contempt — “and you don’t want to open your reign with a move against your own blood, however many streams removed. Speaking of which, there is a letter you must write, and soon.”

“A letter?”

“To your brother … your brother and your heir.”

“Elfred?” Padrec waved a hand. “Arellwen and my sister have tried to bring him back. He seems happy as the scholar-playboy of Antiala.”

“Others may have tried; you can command. He might be an asset, he might be a threat, but either way you cannot know so long as he is frittering away his life and your gold in a foreign land. So write him a letter, cajoling and commanding all at once, and send a loyal man south to fetch him. Perhaps he should have a seat on your council, perhaps a post in Brethony, perhaps — something else entirely.” The veiled threat was not so very veiled. “And then at the same time you know what else you must do.”

“A wife,” Padrec said.

“A wife. Here make no great moves yet; we must await certain developments, and the unwinding of your sister’s betrothal. But a year from now, wherever matters stand in other policies, you must have a bride.”

Padrec nodded, deliberately postponing actual thinking on the matter, deliberately not thinking about Caetryn, not at all.

For now, he would move carefully and let himself be steered. There would be time enough later to make his own mistakes.