Acacia,War with the Mein

CHAPTER

Of all the things that pained Thaddeus as he stood beside the sickbed of his old friend the king, it was the loose manner in which the flesh of his face sagged that most shot him through with regret. It showed Leodan for what he was: a man grown ancient, so tired of life that the muscles of his face barely had the power to contract or to quiver or to register emotion. To say his skin was ashen would speak only to the surface of the truth. He was a powdery white, indeed, but the color and life had been bled from far below the skin’s waxy surface. Thaddeus had the momentary thought that Edifus himself may have looked much the same on his deathbed. And this death-like the first king’s generations before-might well mark a shift in the order of the world.

Thaddeus could barely keep from falling to his knees and bawling his sorrow, confessing everything, denying everything. He felt the truth of both impulses. In a way, this was all his doing. He had believed the message Hanish Mein had sent to him. He had known from the moment he heard it that Gridulan was guilty of the crimes Hanish named. And he had hated, hated the son for the sins of his father. He had wanted to punish him, for Akarans to suffer, for the very land to be thrown into chaos. Several times as he watched the king in his mist trance Thaddeus had imagined laying hands on his throat and slowly squeezing the life from him. It would have been physically easy to accomplish, but he had never done more than imagine it. Instead, he had killed that poor messenger. He had not planned that out. He was not sure why he had done it. It was a vague notion that came upon him that night. She had brought news of threats to the Akarans. Thaddeus wanted those threats living and breathing, and so she had to die. Cowardly of him, but in a way he had been asking Hanish Mein to punish the king in ways he could not himself. So why was he so miserable now that Hanish had succeeded?

As he bustled through the myriad tasks the situation required of a faithful chancellor he was struck again and again by the images of Leodan’s stunned face, the stain on his gown, the fingers of one of his hands as they clasped at the shoulder of the gape-mouthed Aushenian prince. Nor could he shake free of the assassin’s bold candor, he who had named himself. Thaddeus heard the Meinish words issuing from the man’s mouth, their meaning quickly taken in. He watched the man cut a dripping crease of blood across his own neck. There had been such certainty in his face, not a moment of doubt or hesitation, no fear of the gaping finality of his own actions. Thasren had stared about the room as if he were the true prophet of an unknown god; all around him were the ignorant, the damned.

A sound issued from the king’s mouth, little more than a moan. He opened his eyes. Thaddeus grasped him by the hand and whispered his name. Leodan turned toward him, but his eyes did not show the surprise he expected. The king seemed to have known he was there all along. He showed his body’s dysfunction only when he opened his mouth to speak. His tongue, Thaddeus could see, was white and dry, swollen and unwieldy. Clearly, he was not able to speak. This was a symptom of the poison, a sign that he had turned to face his last handful of hours in this world.

But the king had not lost complete use of his limbs. He motioned with his hands, unsteadily at first, until Thaddeus realized he asked for parchment, ink, and a quill. Once he had them in hand-after the chancellor had also propped him up with pillows into a seated position-Thaddeus watched as the king, breathless and concentrating, twisted his hand into position. Staring at the page and at his fingers, he willed them to motion. His hand moved in jerky motions, starting and stopping at awkward moments, letters ill formed and jumbled closely together. The sharp point of the pen on the dry parchment was for a moment the only sound in the room. Thaddeus tugged on his earlobe as he waited, his mind whirling with the most improbable notions of what the king might be writing to him. What accusation would he make? What curse? And he asked himself how would he react if this dying man charged him with the crime he was in fact guilty of? Did he still have enough anger in him to lash back? He could not locate any emotion like that.

Though it took a long time, Leodan’s face showed some satisfaction when he raised the parchment for Thaddeus to see. It read, Tell the children their story is only half written. Tell them to write the rest and place it beside the greatest story. Tell them. Their story stands beside the greatest tale ever told.

Thaddeus nodded. “Of course, sire.”

The king then wrote, You must do this thing.

“What would you have me do?” Thaddeus asked, his relief undisguised in his tone. “Say it and I will.” He immediately saw the contradiction in his words and regretted it. He touched the king at the wrist and indicated that he meant for him to write it. Write it and he would.

Leodan wrote his next message with less care for the shape of his letters. The watching chancellor changed position so that he could see the page and had time to decipher the words. He understood what was being asked of him before the message was completed. The king was reminding him of the course of action he wished to be taken now, because he was to die before his children were old enough to handle the transition of rule. It was a plan that put the fate of the nation in the chancellor’s hands. The steps of it were known only to him, and it would involve just a few others. It stunned Thaddeus to remember that they had spoken of such things before. When they had, it had seemed nothing more than an elaborate formality. Pure fantasy that he entertained only to assuage Leodan’s occasional bouts of morbidness. But some fantasies, it seemed, could not be distinguished from actual life.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said, setting his palm over the king’s hand. “There’s too much we do not yet know. Leodan, you may yet live through this. This attack on you may be the work of a single fool. What you ask might endanger the children instead of protecting them. This plan was idle talk at a different time-”

The king smashed his fist against his lap, his face rigid with anger. With what appeared to be a monumental effort-face twisted, jaw opening wide, tongue and lips and eyes and cheeks all trembling-he managed to say, “Do…this.” He repeated the two words several times, until they lost shape and his tongue could no longer form them.

Such an order was impossible to refuse. Once Thaddeus had affirmed that he would see to it, Leodan relaxed. He exhaled and let his weight settle more heavily against the pillows. He did not try to talk again, but he set his eyes on the chancellor and studied him intently, with moist-rimmed eyes full of kindness. Thaddeus almost turned away, but the king’s eyes held him, no reproach in them. Thaddeus sensed that his friend was asking him to remember the fine things that they had done in the past, the dreams they had spoken about, the moments shared only between the two of them. He realized that despite this man’s sudden nearness to death he had one thing to be pleased about. He was finally freed to challenge his children to fight for the cause he always chided himself for not fighting for himself. It was a huge, yawning, frightening journey he was asking the chancellor to set them on, but it was action. For Leodan there was no other choice anymore. He seemed to have no doubt about what mattered now, and he believed fully in setting his children accordingly on the journey this required.

The king penned another terse order. Bring the children first, he wrote, and then, after…Thaddeus did not have to ask him what the latter request referred to. He would see to both requests.

He received the royal children a half hour later. He felt terribly cold, though he was sure the chill was within him, for the room was heated as normal for the season. He stood with his back steadied against the closed door to the king’s chambers, his hands resting one on the other to calm any tremble they might have betrayed. Seeing the four young faces he was glad he had so positioned himself. The sight of them wrung him through with emotion. As if he were actually their father, he thought, Look at them! Look at the magnificence of my children! Aliver…By Tinhadin, he stood straight! He moved with a bearing both military and easy. How well trained he was, how diligent and serious, how strong to put forth a brave faзade. Usually the beauty of the group, Corinn’s skin was puffy and mottled. She looked as if her face might crumble into ugliness at any moment, but there was something heartrending in the pained nakedness of her emotions. Mena’s eyes were saddened beyond her years, her head lowered as if she knew with quiet resolve just why they had been summoned. And Dariel was as wide-eyed and as tremulous as a mouse. Thaddeus had to squeeze down the swell of emotion within him. It took all his effort to speak calmly.

“Your father will see you now. Please do not tax him. Know that he will communicate with you in the only way he can. Do not ask him for any more than he can give. He is not well at all.” He was not sure how much to go on, how clear and specific to be. He wanted them to know what was happening, but he could not bring himself to say it. Instead, he heard himself ask, “Are you ready?”

A silly question. He knew it was silly, hearing his own words and looking into faces decidedly not ready to see their father for the last time. He turned and pushed open the door and stepped aside so that the way was clear. Once all four had passed him, he reached in and pulled the door shut, staying without himself. He walked away, trying not to think about what was passing in that room, between a true father and his children.

His offices were only a moment’s walk down the hall. He left the door open behind him so that he would hear the children leave and know just when to return to the king. He dispatched his secretary with orders to have the king’s mist pipe readied. As he turned to do as ordered, the man’s surprise-or was it scorn-showed on his face. Thaddeus did not reprimand him for it. He was right in many ways. If the king of the empire was approaching death, should he not be clear of mind until the very end? Were there not so, so many things for him to attend to and should not his last breath be expelled in service to the nation? Of course it was all true, and also all ridiculous. The official record of the king’s passing would include no mention of the drug. Official records never did.

Thaddeus stood beside his fireplace for a time. He hoisted the poker and stirred the logs, though they burned well and did not need it. He thought, Let the old man have what he wished for. It was the great gift of the mist. The drug delivered to its user whatever he or she most desired, most needed to carry on living. Leodan had never taken it before Aleera passed away, but in his grief afterward he discovered the drug so many millions of his subjects knew all too well. The slaves of the Kidnaban mines, the parents of Quota children, the teeming masses in the slums of Alecia, the merchants who floated the sea currents unceasingly, soldiers stationed far from home for years at a time, workers in a thousand different trades they had learned as children and carried on throughout their years: they all depended on the balm of the drug for reprieve from the otherwise unceasing torture of their lives. Their king was no different.

Leodan’s time under the mist’s influence, though, was spent in the manner unique to him-with his dead wife. He had confessed as much. She awaited him just beyond that wall of consciousness. Once he passed through it, she greeted him with sympathy and censure in her eyes, with love for him but with no fondness for this vice. After those first moments she took his hand in hers, accepted him completely, and walked him through the beauty of their courtship. They slipped seamlessly from moment to glorious moment in their life together as husband and wife, as young parents with each child the Giver allowed them, through moments large and small and intimate. The small ones, Leodan had said, often surprised him. Tiny moments during which he viewed her from a certain light, when he remembered the details of her features and the idiosyncrasies of her face or voice or demeanor…How could he love her so deeply and yet forget so much of who she had been during his waking hours? It was these details that the king searched for time and again beyond the mist wall. Aleera led him through a tour of everything that had been wonderful about their time together. All in a single evening.

Life, Thaddeus thought, must have been a pale punishment compared to such bliss. But then he thought of the children. At least Leodan had children, which had been denied Thaddeus himself. At least he did not have to live knowing his love died because of treachery. After Dorling’s death he had been asked a thousand times why he did not remarry and father more children. He had always shrugged and answered vaguely and never with the truth-which was that he feared being the cause of more death. Perhaps he had known all along that his loved ones had been killed to squelch his ambitions.

Ah! Thaddeus jabbed the logs in the fire ferociously, angry that he could not control his thoughts. They were like the coils of a snake writhing in his head, a hungry serpent that at times seemed to eat its own tail. He rested the poker back in place and looked again at the king’s note, at the scribbled words, the looping, irregular sentences, the handwriting only faintly familiar as the king’s. Should this document be found by anyone else, none would believe it came from Leodan Akaran. Few would understand the order. Only he and the king had ever spoken of the plan to which it referred. How strange that something they had discussed casually a few years before-Thaddeus sipping wine and the king glazed by the mist-should now become an actual possibility. But it was not meant for others’ eyes anyway. This was for him. The king was entrusting him with his most precious concern. How strange that he had no idea who his greatest betrayer was.

The note, which he glanced at one last time, went thus: If it comes that you must, send them to the four winds. Send them to the four winds, as we spoke of, my friend.

Having read it again, he loosed it from his fingers at such an angle that it slipped into the fire. It landed at the edge of the logs, and for a moment he thought he would have to nudge it with the poker. But then it caught, flared, and curled and blackened. As quickly as that, it was gone. He turned from the fire and rounded his desk, unsure what he was to do next, but thinking he might face it best if he looked the part of a chancellor at his duties. It was then that he saw the envelope.

It was a single white square at the center of the polished wooden expanse of his desk. It should not have been there. It had not been included in his earlier mail delivery, and if it was meant for him personally it would normally have been delivered into his hands. If he had been cold before, he felt himself made of ice now. He did not touch the envelope but lowered himself stiffly into his chair. The leather protested his weight at first, but then yielded to accommodate him, as it had for so many years.

He broke the envelope’s seal with his fingernail and read the message. The king is dead, it began. You had no hand in it. The credit goes only to my brother. If you are wise, you will feel neither guilt nor joy. But now, Thaddeus, you should think of your future. Turn your attention to the children. I want them, and I want them alive. Give them to me alive and you will have riches along with your revenge. This I promise you. He paused on the signature at the end and stared at it as if it were not a name at all but some word he had forgotten the meaning of. It was signed, Hanish, of the Mein.

There was a noise in the hallway. Thaddeus pressed the letter between his palm and his thigh. Two men walked by outside, talking, their forms visible for a split second through the narrow vantage into the passageway. Then they were gone. Thaddeus pinched out the corners of the message and sat with it bridged between his knees.

He sat for some time, his mind drifting to old memories, unhinged for a time from the dueling things being demanded of him. But then he felt the shift in the breath of the air that meant the king’s door had opened. He could delay no longer. He rose, took the second note to the hearth, and let it slide from his fingers into the fire. He turned to go once more to his old friend. He would take him his pipe and bid him farewell, and then he would decide the fate of the Akaran children.