K Parker - Evil for Evil

Orsea looked round, as if he expected help to arrive. "I don't know, do I?" he said. "I suppose-well, I suppose somebody's trying to make it look like I'm a traitor, and I betrayed us all to the Mezentines. But-"

"But who would want to do that?" Valens interrupted. "Good question. Whoever it was, he was able to procure a letter from an authentic Mezentine official-a pretty high-ranking one at that; so the enemy were in on it as well. Are you going to argue that the Mezentines are plotting to discredit you?"

"I don't know." Orsea rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, as if he was trying to wake himself up. "I suppose it's possible, yes."

"I can't see it myself," Valens replied gently. "To be perfectly frank, why on earth would they bother? Well? Can you give me a reason? Can you tell me why you matter to them anymore?"

Silence. "No," Orsea said.

"Nor me," Valens replied. "Come to think of it, I can't come up with anybody who'd want to frame you for treason, or anything else, except for one person; the only man who's got any sort of motive for trying to get you into trouble, get rid of you."

Orsea looked at him. "You."

"That's right." Valens acknowledged him with a slight gesture of his left hand. "Me. I have a motive for getting you out of the way. What I don't have is the influence to get Commissioner Lucao Psellus of the defense committee to write an incriminating letter." He paused, then added: "And I don't really see me arranging for the Mezentines to ambush my own convoy, slaughter my people and near as damn it kill me in the process. I'm not the nicest man in the world, but I'm not the most stupid, either. I think I'd have found an easier way of getting shot of you-poison, an accident, all sorts of things spring readily to mind." A smile flashed across his face. "So, if it wasn't the Republic and it wasn't me; who else have you been pissing off, Orsea? You're such a mild, inoffensive fellow, always so anxious to do the right thing. Your friend Miel Ducas, maybe? The man you condemned for treason for hiding a letter? We haven't talked about him yet. Do you think the Ducas might be behind all this?"

Orsea breathed in, then out again. "No," he said.

"You don't? I'd have considered him myself, but if you say not, I'm happy to be guided by you. So, forget the Ducas; anybody else?" He spread his fingers on the top of the folding table. "You're really going to have to come up with somebody or something, if you want me to take your denials seriously. Come on, Orsea, help me out. I've been making all the running so far. Suggest something, if only for my sake. Otherwise…" He shrugged. "Well, what would you do, in my position?"

"I can't." Orsea was looking straight at him. "Do you want me to make something up? I can't think of any explanation, any reason. It's just not true, that's all."

Valens sighed, then shifted in his chair, leaning forward a little.

"The legal position," he said, in a rather forced tone of voice, "is complicated. A case could be made for saying that I have no jurisdiction over you, since you are the head of state of a foreign country-one that doesn't exist anymore, but the law can be funny about that sort of thing. If we were to have a proper trial, with lawyers and everything, I can see us getting well and truly laid up on that one. To be honest with you, I haven't got the time or the patience; and something like that, dragging on and on, isn't likely to do my people's morale any good, either. In fact, I'd prefer it if they didn't know that someone I'd trusted had sold us out to the Mezentines. I wouldn't particularly want them to know his motive for doing it-I'm quite satisfied in my mind what that motive was, by the way. I noticed that note of high moral indignation in your friend Psellus' letter-seducing another man's wife, completely unforgivable. For what it's worth, Orsea, I never did anything of the sort. We wrote letters to each other, that's all. Before I came and pulled you both out of Civitas Eremiae, the last time I set eyes on her I was seventeen. Now, maybe what I did was-well, bad manners, let's say, or worse than that, a breach of protocol and bad form generally. For that, I apologize. What you did…" He shrugged. "I've never seen the point of getting angry," he said. "Far better to deal with problems as efficiently as possible, which is much easier to do with a cool head. I'm sorry, but I know what's got to be done."

He paused, as if inviting Orsea to say something. Silence.

"Fine," Valens went on. "As I see it, there're two courses of action open to me. One of them-well, you can guess. The alternative is to send you over to your Mezentine friends, let them have the bother and expense of feeding and clothing you. The risk in that is what you could tell them, things they'd like to know about troop numbers, supplies, future movements. Now, I don't actually believe you know very much; quite likely you've already told them everything you can. Sending you to them wouldn't be too much of a risk, in my opinion. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's what I want to do. Have you got any strong feelings on the issue, one way or another?"

But Orsea shook his head. "I can't believe you really think I'd do something like that," he said. "So all I can think of is, you want me out of the way so-" He stopped, as though he didn't know the word for what he was trying to say. "If that's it," he said, "you're making a very bad mistake."

Valens frowned a little, like a parent rebuking a child's untimely frivolity.

"If you-" Again Orsea stopped short. "If anything happens to me because of you," he said, "she'll never speak to you again. You'll lose any chance you might've had-"

"I know." Valens' face was set, but his eyes were wide and bright. "That can't be helped," he said briskly. "And you aren't helping me make up my mind. Who's going to get you, the Mezentines or the crows?"

"You can't send me to the Mezentines. They'd kill me."

"Orsea." Exasperation; a patient man reaching the end of his tether. "Haven't you been listening? I'm sorry, but you've gone too far, and I don't have any choice." He turned his head to look at Nennius. "Change of plan," he said. "There won't be a formal hearing, I want this business settled straightaway. Please deal with it; now, as quickly as possible. I'll need a report-nothing long-winded, just a note with the date, time, names of three witnesses." He hesitated, then added, "Be reasonably discreet about it, will you? I don't want the whole camp knowing about it; not yet, anyway."

If Nennius hesitated, it was only for a fraction of a second; then he nodded to the two guards, who closed in around Orsea like the jaws of a pair of tongs. Orsea looked at them; he was still sitting in his chair, his hands on his knees.

"Orsea," Valens said. The tone of voice would have suited a man reprimanding a disobedient dog.

"No," Orsea said, and his voice was high and weak. "Valens, this is stupid. You can't honestly believe-"

"All right," Valens said (a gentle man pushed too far). "I wasn't going to mention it, because-believe it or not-I'm really not enjoying this. But so what; it wasn't the first time, was it?"

Orsea's mouth and throat moved several times before he managed to speak. "I don't understand."

"The first attack," Valens said wearily. "On my wedding day. Yes, I wondered about that; I gave it quite a lot of thought at the time, and then other stuff came along and got in the way. The Mezentine cavalry didn't just turn up out of the blue, on the off chance they'd catch us all out in the open. Someone told them where we were likely to be. It had to be someone who knew the plan for the day: which coverts we were going to draw, where the birds were, roughly how long we'd take over each drive. I've been trying to remember who I discussed the plan with; well, the falconers, obviously, but I ruled them out, they didn't have any way of passing on a message. I suppose they could have been reporting back to someone else, but I doubt it. I've known most of them all my life, and the rest are from families that've been in our service for generations. No, the only person I could remember going over the program with in detail was Jarnac Ducas; and for the life of me, I couldn't see him as a traitor, not under any circumstances. Then I found out my friend Mezentius had been spying for the Mezentines, so I assumed it was him; but he wasn't even there, he was away on the frontier. I know, because I wanted him to be at the wedding, but he couldn't make it back in time. Then it struck me, left me wondering how I could've been so dim. You got the details of the plan from Jarnac-you asked him, making out you were interested; he'd have assumed there was no harm in telling you. Then you scribbled a few lines to your friend Psellus-"