Tavi rubbed his face and sat up. "Sir Miles," he said, inclining his head. "Is Kitai… the First Lord… Sir, is everyone all right?"
Miles nodded to the healer, who took it as a hint to depart. The man nodded and clapped Tavi's shoulder gently before making his way down the row of beds, attending to other patients.
"Tavi," Miles asked quietly, "did you slay that Cane we found you on top of?"
"Yes, sir," Tavi said. "I used the First Lord's blade."
Miles nodded, and smiled at him. "That was boldly done, young man. I expected to find nothing but corpses at the bottom of the stairs. I underestimated you."
"It had already been wounded, Sir Miles. I don't think that… well. It was half-dead when it got there. I just had to nudge it along a little."
Miles tilted his head back and laughed. "Yes. Yes, well. Regardless, you'll be glad to know that your friends and the First Lord are all well."
Tavi's back straightened. "Gaius… He's… ?"
"Awake, irritable, and his tongue could flay the hide from a gargant," Miles said, his expression pleased. "He wants to speak with you as soon as you're strong enough."
Tavi promptly swung his legs off the side of the bed and began to rise. Then froze, looking down at himself. "Perhaps I should put some clothes on, if I'm to see the First Lord."
"Why don't you," Miles said, and nodded to a trunk beside the bed. Tavi found his own clothes there, freshly cleaned, and started slipping into them. He glanced up at Sir Miles as he did, and said, "Sir Miles. If… if I may ask. Your brother—"
Miles interrupted him with an upraised hand. "My brother," he said, with gentle emphasis, "died nearly twenty years ago." He shook his head. "On an unrelated note, Tavi, your friend Fade, the slave, is well. He distinguished himself for his valor on the stairway, assisting me."
"Assisting you?"
Miles nodded, his expression carefully neutral. "Yes. Some idiot has already composed a song about it. Sir Miles and his famous stand on the Spiral Stair. They're singing it in all the wine clubs and alehouses. It's humiliating."
Tavi frowned.
"It makes a much better song than one about a maimed slave," he said quietly.
Tavi lowered his voice to almost a whisper. "But he's your brother."
Miles pursed his lips, looked at Tavi for a moment, then said, "He knows what he's doing. And he can't do it as well if every loose tongue in the Realm can wag on about how he has returned from the grave." He nudged Tavi's boots over to him from where they sat near the foot of the bed, and added, so quietly that Tavi could barely hear him, "Or why."
"He cares for you," Tavi said quietly. "He was terrified that… that you would think ill of him, when you saw him."
"He was right," Miles said. "If it had happened any other way…" He shook his head. "I don't know what I might have done." His eyes went a bit distant. "I spent a very long time hating him, boy. For dying beside Septimus, off in the middle of nowhere, when my leg was too badly injured to allow me to be there beside him. All of them. I couldn't forgive him for dying and leaving me behind. When I should have been with them."
"And now?" Tavi asked.
"Now…" Miles said. He sighed. "I don't know, lad. But I have a place of my own. I have my duty. There seems to be little sense in hating him now." His eyes glittered. "But by the great furies. Did you see him? The greatest swordsman I've ever known, save perhaps Septimus himself. And even then, I always suspected that Rari held back so as not to embarrass the Princeps." Miles's eyes focused elsewhere, then he blinked them and smiled at Tavi.
"Duty?" Tavi suggested.
"Precisely. As I was saying. Duty. Such as yours to the First Lord. On your feet, Acad—" Then Miles paused, head tilted to one side as he regarded Tavi. "On your feet, man."
Tavi pulled his boots on and rose, smiling a little. "Sir Miles," he asked, "do you know if there's been any word of my aunt?"
Miles's expression became remote as he started walking, his limp now more pronounced. "I've been told that she is safe and well. She is not in the palace. I don't know more than that."
Tavi frowned. "What? Nothing?"
Miles shrugged.
"What about Max? Kitai?"
"I'm sure Gaius will answer any questions you have, Tavi." Miles gave him a faint smile. "Sorry to be that way with you. Orders."
Tavi nodded and frowned even more deeply. He walked with Miles to the First Lord's personal chambers, passing, Tavi noted, three times as many guardsmen as normal. They reached the doors to Gaius's sitting room, where he received guests, and a guard let them in, then vanished behind curtains at the end of the room to speak quietly to someone there.
The guard reemerged, and left the room. Tavi looked around at the furniture, really rather spartan for the First Lord, he thought, everything made of the fine, dark hardwoods of the Forcian forests on the west coast. Paintings hung on one wall—one of them only half-finished. Tavi frowned at them. They were of simple, idyllic scenes. A family eating a meal on a blanket in a field on a sunny day. A boat raising sails to meet the first ocean swells, a dim city somewhere in the fog behind it. And the last, the unfinished one, was a portrait of a young man. His features had been painted, but only about a third of his upper body and shoulders were finished. The portrait's colors stood out starkly against the blank canvas beneath.
Tavi looked closer. The young man in the portrait looked familiar. Gaius, perhaps? Take away the weathering of time in his features, and the young man could perhaps be the First Lord.
"Septimus," murmured Gaius's deep voice from somewhere behind Tavi. Tavi looked back to see the First Lord step out from behind the curtain. He was dressed in a loose white shirt and close-fitting black breeks. His color was right again, his blue-grey eyes bright and clear.
But his hair had turned stark white.
Tavi bowed his head at once. "Beg pardon, sire?"
"The portrait," Gaius said. "It's my son."
"I see," Tavi said, carefully. He had no idea what the proper thing to say in this sort of situation might be. "It's… it's not finished."
Gaius shook his head. "No. Do you see that mark on the neck of the man in the portrait? Where the black has cut over onto his skin?"
"Yes. I thought perhaps it represented a mole."
"It represents where his mother was working when we got word of his death," Gaius said. He gestured at the room. "She painted all of these. But when she heard of Septimus, she dropped her brushes. She never picked them up again." He regarded the painting steadily. "She took sick not long after. Had me hang it in the room near her, where she could see it. She made me promise, on that last night, not to get rid of it."
"I'm sorry for your loss, sire."
"Many are. For many reasons." He glanced over his shoulder. "Miles?"
Miles bowed his head to Gaius and backed for the door. "Of course. Shall I have someone bring you food?"
Tavi started to agree very strongly but held off, glancing at Gaius. The First Lord laughed, and said, "Have you ever known a young man who wasn't hungry—or about to be so? And I should be eating more, too. Oh, and please send for those others I mentioned to you?"
Miles nodded, smiling, and retreated quietly from the room.
"I don't think I've seen Sir Miles smile so much in the past two years as I have today," Tavi commented.
The First Lord nodded. "Eerie, isn't it." He settled in one of the two chairs in the room and gestured for Tavi to take the other. "You want me to tell you about your aunt," Gaius said.
Tavi smiled a little. "Am I that predictable, sire?"
"Your family is very important to you," he replied, his tone serious. "She is unharmed, and spent the entire night sitting beside your sickbed. I've sent word to her that you've woken. She'll come up to the Citadel to visit you shortly, I should imagine."
"To the Citadel?" Tavi asked. "Sire? I had thought she'd be staying in guest quarters here."
Gaius nodded. "She accepted the invitation of Lord and Lady Aquitaine to reside in the Aquitaine manor for the duration of Wintersend."
Tavi stared at the First Lord in shock, "She
what
?" He shook his head.
"Aquitaine's scheme nearly destroyed every steadholt in the Calderon Valley. She despises him."
"I can well imagine," Gaius said.
"Then in the name of all the furies,
why
?"
Gaius twitched one shoulder in a faint shrug. "She did not speak to me of her motivation for such a thing, so I can only conjecture. I invited her to stay here, near you, but she politely declined."
Tavi chewed on his lower lip in thought. "Crows. It means more, doesn't it?" His belly suddenly felt cold. "It means she's allied herself with them."
"Yes," Gaius said, his tone neutral and relaxed.
"Surely she… Sire, is it possible that she has been coerced in some way? Furycrafted into it?"
Gaius shook his head. "No such thing was affecting her. I examined her myself. And that kind of control is impossible to hide."
Tavi racked his mind frantically to find an explanation. "But if she was threatened or intimidated into it, then couldn't something be done to help her?"
"That is not what has happened," Gaius said. "Can you imagine fear moving your aunt to do anything? She showed no signs of that kind of fear. In fact, in my judgment she traded her loyalty as part of a bargain."
"What kind of bargain?"
There was a polite knock at the chamber door, and a porter entered pushing a wheeled cart. He placed it near the chairs, opened its sides into the wings of a table, and began placing silver-covered dishes and bowls on the table, until he had laid out a large breakfast, complete with a ewer of milk and another of watery wine. Gaius remained silent until the porter took his leave and shut the door again.
"Tavi," Gaius said, "before I tell you more, I would like you to go through everything that happened in as much detail as you can recall. I don't want my explanations to muddy your own memories before you've had the chance to tell them to me."
Tavi nodded, though it was frustrating to be forced to wait for answers. "Very well, sire."
Gaius rose, and Tavi did as well. "I imagine you're even hungrier than I am," he said with a small smile. "Shall we eat?"
They piled plates with food and settled back down into the chairs. After the first plateful, Tavi went back for more, then started recounting events to the First Lord, beginning with his confrontation with Kalarus Brencis Minoris and his thugs. It took him most of an hour. Gaius interrupted him a few times to ask for more details, and in the end he leaned back in his chair, a cup of mild wine in his hand.
"Well," he said. "That explains Caria this morning, at any rate."
Tavi's cheeks flushed so hot that he thought they must surely blister at any moment. "Sire, Max was only—"
Gaius gave Tavi a cool look, but he could see the smile at the corners of the First Lord's eyes. "In most of my life, I would not have minded a lovely wife inviting herself to join me in my bath. But this morning was… I was taxed enough. I'm nearly fourscore years, for goodness sake." He shook his head gravely. "I adjusted to the demands of my station, of course, but when you speak to Maximus, you might mention to him that in the future, should this situation arise again, he should seek some course
other
than to fondle my wife."
"I'll let him know, sir," Tavi said, his own voice solemn.
Gaius chuckled. "Remarkable," he murmured. "You acquitted yourself rather well. Not perfectly, but you might have done a great deal worse, too."
Tavi grimaced and looked down.
Gaius sighed. "Tavi. Killian's death was not of your making. You needn't punish yourself for it."
"Someone should," Tavi said quietly.
"There was nothing you could do that you had not already done," the First Lord said.
"I know," Tavi answered, and was surprised by the bitter anger in his own voice. "If I wasn't a freak, if I'd had even a little skill at furycraft—"
"Then, in all likelihood, you would have relied upon your crafting rather than upon your wits, and died because of it." Gaius shook his head. "Men, good soldiers and good crafters alike, died in fighting these foes. Furycraft is a tool, Tavi. Without a practiced hand and an able mind behind it, it's no more useful than a hammer left on the ground."
Tavi looked away from the First Lord, staring at the floor to one side of the fireplace.
"Tavi," he said, deep voice quiet, "I owe you my life, as do the friends you protected. And because of your actions, countless others have been saved as well. Killian died because he chose a life of such service, to put himself between the Realm and danger. He knew what he was doing when he entered that fight, and the risk he was taking." Gaius's voice became more gentle. "It is childishly arrogant of you to belittle his choice, his sacrifice, by attempting to take responsibility for his demise upon your own shoulders."
Tavi frowned. "I… hadn't thought of it in those terms."
"There's no reason you should have," Gaius said.
"I still feel as if I failed him somehow," Tavi said. "His last words to me were important, I think. He was trying so hard to get them to me, but…" Tavi remembered the last seconds of Killian's life and fell silent.
"Yes," Gaius said. "It is unfortunate that he did not manage to reveal the identity of the assassin—though I suspect that with Killian dead, Kalare's agent will depart."
"Isn't there any way for us to tell who it is before he—or she—leaves?"
The First Lord shook his head. "There is a great deal for me to do to repair some of the damages done. To exploit an advantage or two. So, young man, I'll pass the search to you. Can you apply your mind as ably to finding this assassin as you did to stopping the attack? I should think Killian would like that."
"I'll try," Tavi said. "If I'd only been a few seconds faster it might have helped him."
"Perhaps. But one might as easily say that if you had been a few seconds slower, all of us would be dead." Gaius waved a hand. "Enough, boy. It's done. Remember your
patriserus
for his life. Not his death. He was quite proud of you."