Erin Evans: Lesser Evils

Havilar snickered. “I know. I’m teasing.” She looked away, up the road. “You’re not a priest,” she said, and this time there was no doubting she was serious. “You’re ‘His Grace.’ ”

Brin didn’t respond. Of all the things he didn’t want to have to speak-an apology for Constancia, a request for passage back to Suzail, a good-bye to the twins, a good-bye to Havilar-why Constancia had called him “His Grace” was still right at the top of the list.

They reached the portal all too soon, a narrow, gray stone building with enormous wooden doors. Brin’s stomach dropped as-one arm still hooked through Havilar’s-he was pulled into the entryway.

“Hells and broken planes,” Mehen sighed, seeing the masses of people ahead of them in the hall beyond. “Girls, go stand in line, while I get our papers in order. Brin”-the dragonborn’s cold, yellow eyes pinned him in place-“hang on to her shackles.”

“Bye, Brin,” Farideh said, squeezing his arm.

“You’re coming, right?” Havilar asked, releasing him.

“I might …,” he said, taking hold of Constancia’s chains.

“Good!” Havilar said, and she passed into the larger hall with her twin. Mehen stepped aside and set his haversack on a bench carved into the wall below a fresco of Suzail at dawn, pulling out permits and bounty sheets. Brin swallowed against the knot forming in his throat. This was all happening too fast.

And still he had not made his peace with Constancia.

“I never meant for them to blame you for my leaving,” Brin said softly so only she could hear. “Honest.”

“At least there is that,” she said in clipped tones. She tossed her head, shaking the blunt bob of her dark hair out of her face. “Thank Torm. I should like to die here and now, if you turned out to be cruel and stupid as well as disrespectful of your duty.”

Brin looked away. “This is a different sort of duty.”

“A coward’s duty, perhaps,” Constancia said.

Coward -the truth of it stung. He’d run instead of telling the Crownsilvers he wasn’t what they wanted him to be-an eager heir for the Crownsilvers’ share of the royal line. He’d run rather than face his Aunt Helindra down. He’d left Constancia to take the blame and never warned her it was coming. He’d met the twins because they’d had to save him from orcs, and when Havilar was captured by cultists in Neverwinter, he hadn’t been able to do a thing. Brin was certainly a coward.

“ What were you thinking, Aubrin?” she said. “Do you have any idea how terrified I was to find you missing?”

“I left a note,” Brin said lamely.

“And what good did you think a note would be against Aunt Helindra’s ire?”

“I’m sorry,” he tried again. “I couldn’t stay and face it all.”

“You will have to face it all,” she said. “Do you think this is something that will just go away? You could flee to Abeir and you’d still owe your duty to the family.”

Constancia meant the tangled tree of Crownsilvers, the aunts and uncles and cousins and greybeards who spread through the courts of Suzail and the markets beyond, with his great-aunt Helindra carefully watering and pruning them. To those varied branches of Crownsilvers, Brin was sure he mattered as much as a shipment of lumber or an invitation from the Clerk of Protocol to visit after the most recent festival-precious, critical to Helindra’s orders, but only so long as he played his part. Only Constancia-a second cousin on his father’s side, who Helindra had made Brin’s guardian when his father died, and Brin had been spirited away to the Citadel of Torm-really counted in Brin’s mind as “family.” Constancia who’d been kind to him, in her own way, and defended him when he faltered before Helindra, and never made him feel as if he were something she’d been stuck with. Not even at the beginning, when he’d been a lonesome and terrified child, and she, a squire pulled out of training to be his guardian.

“This is to help the family,” Brin said. “Aunt Helindra hasn’t considered-”

“I guarantee you that she has considered everything .”

She probably had. Helindra Crownsilver had probably considered Brin from every possibly viewpoint, every angle … and deemed the chaos a hitherto unknown lord would bring to Suzail a necessary evil. He wanted to stop it all before he ended up like his father, shot full of arrows by rival families before Brin could so much as hold a shield-all for suddenly becoming the Crownsilvers’ best claim to the throne.

Brin had heard often enough how Cormyr was civilized beyond such pettiness, how every lord stood behind their king. On the face of it, it might have been true … but that said not a word for those who stood behind the lords. Even if no one was so treacherous as to assassinate the king outright-and Brin had his doubts about that-there was nothing simpler than killing the lords who stood between one and the throne. Just in case. Just for influence .

“I think you ought to do a little more considering,” Constancia said. “For example, stop thinking of Helindra’s ambition and start thinking about Cormyr’s needs. You are a bright young man with a fair future-you might control the Crownsilvers’ fortunes someday, and someday soon, Cormyr may have need of it.”

“Stop talking like a nursery story,” Brin said. “What do you think I’m going to do? Free a magic sword and lead armies against Shade when nothing else will save us?”

Constancia was quiet a moment. “To be truthful? Yes. Something like that, with a little less scorn.” She regarded him solemnly. “Before I left, the word was that two of the Purple Dragons’ palisade forts in the Marshes of Tun had been razed, slain down to a soul.”

“ ‘Destroyer of the Marauding Bullywugs.’ It does have a ring to it.”

“Monsters don’t wipe out seasoned soldiers that way,” Constancia snapped. “And not twice over. Not with bodies left behind. There may be no evidence to mark Shade’s fault, but it doesn’t take the likes of Vangerdahast to see who makes gains by erasing the defenses along the border.”

No matter where you came from, there was something, someone out in the world or under the bed that frightened you as a child. The dark shapes that lurked on the edge of the world, the ones you knew were real because even adults feared them-because the adults had grown up fearing them. On the edges of the Sea of Fallen Stars, it was the aboleths and their servitors, reaching out from the Far Realm to spread madness and destruction. Near the Underchasm it might be the drow raiders. North, far north, children might worry that the orcish kingdom of Many-Arrows might assault their village one day, without warning.

In Cormyr, Brin had grown up with the fear of Netheril deep down in the marrow of his bones. From the City of Shade, the twelve princes ruled the growing kingdom of Netheril, pressing its borders right up to Cormyr’s frontier. Any day might bring the advance that pressed into Cormyrean territory. Any year might be the one that brought Shade to Suzail. The borders stood, the war wizards kept watch, the military trained, and still, everyone knew, it might not be enough. The Shadovar might ooze out of the dark corners of the city, slipping across the planes to overwhelm Cormyr.

It nearly shook his resolve, but no-Shade wasn’t a danger enough to risk everything. “Lead armies yourself, then. You’d make a better general than I would. Squall would make a better general than I would.”

Constancia sighed. “If this is about that girl-”

“What girl?”

“Please. I saw you and her on the road here.” Constancia shook her head. “I told them it was a poor plan to keep you isolated that way. Better to learn ‘the way of kings’ with suitable maids, than to wait and have you swoon over the first girl you meet in the world.”