Stormcaster (Shattered Realms #3)(61)

“Queen Raisa is not just asking for a truce, Father,” Hal said. “She wants an alliance against an enemy who threatens us both.”

“Who? Jarat?” His father snorted. “Isn’t it enough that we’re no longer supporting the war? She cannot expect us to turn traitor against our homeland.” His eyes narrowed. “Why are we even talking about this? Are you here as her emissary or what?”

“I’m not her emissary, and I’m not talking about Jarat. I’m talking about the empress in the east. Celestine.”

His father frowned. “Celestine. Isn’t she the Carthian pirate that promised Gerard an army of mages? I was never sure she really existed except in the king’s imagination. I haven’t heard another word about her since he died.”

“She’s real,” Hal said. “She’s taken Chalk Cliffs. It looks like she’s here to stay.”

His father stared at him. “Where did you hear that? It’s news to me.”

“I was there,” Hal said. “Being held prisoner in the keep there. I saw it happen.”

“Did she bring an army of mages, as promised?”

“If her soldiers are mages, they’re not the kind we’re used to.”

“What do you mean?” Robert stuffed an end of bread in his mouth and chased it with a swallow of ale. “What are they like?”

“They’re nearly impossible to kill. They don’t have amulets, and I don’t think they use magic in the way our mages do.”

“Really,” his father said. “Do you know that from personal experience? Were you in on the fighting?”

“Yes,” Hal said. Then thought a moment. “Well, actually, no. One of them . . . ah . . . dropped out of the sky when I was up on the battlements.”

“Dropped out of the sky?” Matelon reared back in his chair, as if Hal might have something catching. “They can fly?”

Hal realized how implausible that sounded. “Well, no, I don’t think so. There was a beast, or a bird, that dropped him.”

“A beast or bird. Dropped a soldier on you.” From the skepticism in his father’s face, Hal knew he was losing ground. There wasn’t even a question there.

Robert was instantly on board, of course. “What did it look like? Did it have scales or feathers? Was it a gryphon or a dragon or—?”

“Robert.” Their father shook his head as if saying, Don’t encourage him. “So you didn’t actually see the battle,” he said to Hal.

Hal shook his head. “I was locked in the keep during the fighting, but I could hear it well enough.”

“How did you escape?”

“We . . . we left through the water gate during the battle.”

“We?” His father raised an eyebrow.

“Me and another prisoner,” Hal said. He saw no reason to get into the details and thereby raise more questions than he already had.

Matelon sighed heavily. He drummed his fingers on the table, looking at him from under his bushy brows. “I’m sorry, Son. It sounds to me like the witch queen fed you a story and let you go.”

“She didn’t let me go,” Hal said.

Or had she?

I’m no good at this, he thought. Words are not my weapons of choice. Nobody in her right mind would choose me as an emissary.

“If this was staged for my benefit, the queen went to a lot of trouble,” Hal said. “After the battle, the entire harbor was crowded with ships flying the empress’s siren banner. They were offloading soldiers and weapons and supplies. A huge army. I saw that with my own eyes.”

“Could it have been conjury of some kind?”

“It was not conjury. I spoke afterwards to some who were in the battle, and interrogated one of the Carthian fighters.”

“How did you come to interrogate—?”

“I took a mount from the Carthian horse-line,” Hal said. “I questioned one of their sentries before I killed him.”

“So they are killable?”

Hal nodded. “They are. But it’s not easy. I ran one of them through and he kept right on fighting. The only thing that brought him down was cutting off his head.”

His father studied him. “You’re a good soldier, Son, and a savvy officer, possibly the best in the empire, but you are no politician. Apparently I did not pass on the gene for connivery and subterfuge. Always look for the simplest explanation. If what you’re saying is true, that the Fells is under attack by a Carthian army—”

“Why would Hal lie about that?” Robert put in, then subsided under his father’s withering gaze.

“—the most likely explanation is that either Gerard or Jarat struck a deal with this Celestine,” Matelon went on. “While she sends her armies into the north, it frees Jarat to come after us. Even if there is no collusion between them, he will move against us when word reaches him that the wolf queen is otherwise occupied. So. It behooves us to march on the capital sooner rather than later.”

“That’s just what we shouldn’t do,” Hal said. “While we’re fighting among ourselves, Celestine will be winning territory in the north. Sooner or later she will turn south.”

“And by the time she does, we’ll have united the empire and can contend with her.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, looked at Hal, then away. “Has it occurred to you that the witch in the north has—” He paused, as if reluctant to speak the words. “—has bewitched you?”