Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

'Magad the Rake was driven from Arqual. He fled east, to the Isle of Bodendel, under the flag of the Noonfirth Kings. His father disowned him, and the Abbot of Etherhorde cast him from the Rinfaith. In Castle Maag some months later, the blacksmith's daughter bore a son: Magad the Fifth.'

'His Supremacy,' said Thasha.

'A title invented by his father the Rake,' said Hercol. 'Alas, the blacksmith's girl was still in love with her foul seducer, and blamed herself for tearing the royal household apart. It seems the royal servants blamed her too. One day, for spite, they told her how the Rake had kept other women scattered about the city, and had often declared that the mother of his son meant less to him than the hunting-bitches in the kennels. The girl left Castle Maag, went straight to her father's smithy and drank hot lead.'

Diadrelu closed her eyes.

'The Emperor had no other son, it is true. But he did have his beloved daughter, Maisa. She took the orphaned princeling, Magad the Fifth, as her own child, and vowed to care for him always. And her father, in the finest deed of his life, named Maisa his heir.

'The old man lived another six years, and in that time Maisa wed a baronet, and bore two sons of her own. They were never jealous of their cousin, who would rule when Maisa's time on earth was over; they did not hunger for more blessings than those life had already showered upon them. But jealousy there was: somewhere in East Arqual, Magad the Rake was plotting his return. And the Secret Fist took his side, for Sandor Ott feared to serve under a woman. He knew also that Empress Maisa would not let him run the occult affairs of Arqual as he saw fit — a practice he had grown used to under her father. This was, after all, when Ott first began dreaming of the use he might make of a certain heretic king in the Mzithrin lands.'

'The Shaggat,' said Pazel.

Hercol nodded. 'Ott's agents provoked the skirmishes that grew into the Second Sea War, and the old Emperor, weakened by tales of the ghastly bloodshed engulfing the west, died halfway through the campaign. Maisa was crowned Empress, and at once sent emissaries of peace to the Mzithrin capital. Among them was a young genius of a surgeon by the name of Chadfallow.'

'Ignus?' said Pazel in disbelief. 'But that was forty years ago! He can't be that old.'

'He does not look it,' Hercol agreed, 'but he is past sixty without a doubt. Years ago I asked his age. "Old enough to be your father," he told me shortly, "and to be spared such idle questions." In any case, he went to Babqri as Maisa's standard-bearer. It is to the Empress that Chadfallow owes his career as special envoy, although at times I think he forgets this.

'The war was by now quite out of control, raging throughout Ipulia and the Crownless Lands. Still the last, worst years of it might have been prevented, but for what happened next. In great secrecy Ott brought Magad the Rake back to Etherhorde, and with the aid of certain generals who had always loathed taking orders from a woman, drove Maisa from the city. Her baronet was killed, her birth-sons driven into exile beside her. Magad the Fifth, the Rake's child, was torn from her arms and taken to the father who had tried to drown him before his birth.

'To make the people accept such treachery, Ott spread rumours about Maisa: rumours of corruption and graft, and uglier sins. A pack of lies, of course; but by the time the people saw through them it was far too late.

'Having seized the throne, the Rake set out to seize his son's heart by equally brutal tactics. Magad the Fifth was a boy of nine, and loved his stepmother dearly, but his father and a thousand sycophants filled his head with tales of Maisa's wickedness, and kept at them so relentlessly that the boy at last started to believe the lies. They called her embezzler, deathsmoker, torturer of children, unnatural lover of animals and Flikkermen, practicer of dark Western rites. By the time young Magad's half-brothers were found and slain in the Tsordons, the boy was denouncing Maisa himself. And to this day our Emperor repeats these lies, whenever he forgets that his stepmother does not officially exist.'

'But can he truly believe them,' Pazel asked, 'after Maisa raised him as one of her own?'

'A fine question,' said Hercol. 'All I can say with certainty is that when it mattered most he permitted Ott to go on hunting Maisa and her children. I do not know if he has ever repented. Still, there was a rumour in the Secret Fist that the death of Magad the Rake was no hunting accident, as the world was told: that he was not tossed from his horse but pulled from it, by his son. The man who is now our Emperor then took a stone and crushed his father's skull — and the word on his lips as he did so was, "Mother!" '

'And yet he sits upon her stolen throne,' said Dri, 'and pretends that she never existed.'

Hercol nodded. 'Worse, he has never pardoned her. If a foreign king or bounty hunter laid hands on Maisa, he could claim to be holding an enemy of the crown. Ott, after all, only let Maisa and her sons flee Etherhorde to save appearances. He always meant to kill them, at a prudent distance from the capital. And as I have already told you, he succeeded with her sons.'

'How has the mother survived so long?' asked Diadrelu.

'Good luck, in part,' said Hercol. 'Even a spymaster has but so many men at his command, and for decades now they have been occupied with their Shaggat deception. And the Mzithrinis have certain brilliant agents of their own, both within the territories of Arqual and in the Crownless Lands, and much of the Secret Fist's efforts go to fighting them. But Ott scorns the very notion of luck. His edict was always Leave nothing to chance. And so I think it was with Maisa. He must have decided that an ex-Empress living out her declining years among poor mountain folk was better than a slain Empress who could become a martyr.'

'But she's not in decline, is she?' said Pazel. 'I mean, I saw her, and-'

Hercol looked at him, and a bright ferocity shone in his face, and the memories seemed to dance once more before his eyes. 'They slew her children,' he said. 'And they took her hopes for peace, and her faith in goodwill and honour among nations, and dragged them through sewers of treachery. No, she is not in decline. There is an avenging fire in her that could yet change the fate of this world, and sweep away the lesser men who bleed and abuse it.'

Dri was watching him intently. 'Is that your dream as well?' she asked.

'Yes,' said Hercol. 'And I am far from alone, although I have sometimes felt so. And with the approach of Treaty Day I feared I would lose her at last. I wrote letter upon letter, begging her not to gamble with her life on a visit to Simja. No answering letters came. Only once — days before boarding the Chathrand — did I receive a scrap of paper, slipped into my pocket by a stranger in a crowd. The words were in Maisa's hand: Have you forgotten our toast, Asprodel? I assure you, I have not.'

'What's that name she called you?' asked Pazel.

Hercol smiled again. 'In her service we all bear false names. Her Majesty chose mine.'

'Asprodel,' said Dri, looking up at Hercol. 'The mountain-apple, whose flowers open before all others, even in the melting snow. I would not call that name a false one.'

'But what did she mean?' pressed Thasha. 'What toast?'

Hercol remained silent for a moment, as if struggling to fit words to memory. 'Before Simja,' he said at last, 'I had not laid eyes on Empress Maisa in ten years. Not since the day we learned for certain that her sons were dead. On that day she called me to her cold chambers, in that forgotten colony of timber men, and sent her one servant from the room, and poured us each a cup of steaming wine. "Today I turn, Asprodel," she told me. "Henceforth I shall face the wind, and cease to live as a hunted thing. My own hunt begins, and by the souls of my children, I swear it shall only end with my death."