Chapter 269 - 260 — The Night the King Died I

Chapter 269: Chapter 260 — The Night the King Died I

It was the second day.

Baldwin walked the north wall with the captain of the household companies and the captain of the city garrison, asking them when they had last drilled a joint response.

The two men looked at each other.

"There’d be a procedure, your highness," the garrison captain said.

"Written where?"

Another look.

"Find out tonight," Baldwin said. "If it takes you longer than an hour, there isn’t one."

It took them until the following afternoon, and there was not one. The order that fixed it assigned liaison officers between the two structures, and Baldwin chose them himself, from his own household, because his own household understood what he wanted without being told twice.

Nobody remarked on it. One of the two captains thanked him.

On the fourth day he brought a stack of northern dispatches to the council and laid them across the table in the order they had arrived, at four different desks, over eleven days.

"This one went to the quartermaster’s office," he said. "This one to the war table. These two came to me. Nobody compared them, so nobody noticed that the same road appears in three of them."

The silence in the room was the silence of men who had not noticed.

"One point of assessment," Baldwin said. "Everything northern comes to one desk, gets read against everything else northern, and goes up as one report."

"Whose desk?" somebody asked.

Nobody had an answer that was not obvious, and it was granted before the session ended.

On the sixth day he requested readiness orders for the Crown units within two days’ march of the capital. Alaric signed that one himself, in the morning, without reading past the first paragraph.

"Good," his father said, handing it back. "Somebody should have done this in the spring."

---

That evening Baldwin ate with him.

They talked about the eastern harvest, and about a grey Alaric had bought at midsummer that had turned out to be four years older than the man selling it had claimed.

"Four years," his father said. "In front of my own master of horse. Who said nothing."

"He was being tactful."

"He was being a coward, and I’ve told him so." Alaric was laughing. "Your mother would have had the animal’s teeth in her hand before the man finished his first sentence."

Baldwin laughed as well, and meant it, and ate his food, and refilled his father’s cup.

At no point in that hour did anything catch in his throat.

He noticed the absence on the way back to his own rooms, turned it over, examined it, waited for the delayed arrival of whatever a man was supposed to feel, and found nothing there at all.

He put it aside and went to look at the rota.

---

On the seventh day he tested it.

He sent a written order down to the garrison repositioning a company for a readiness drill, and he sat in his rooms and waited to see how long it would take somebody to come up and ask him for the king’s seal.

The company moved inside the hour. Nobody came.

The next morning he moved a watch two hours early, and nobody came then either, and one of the liaison officers he had appointed sent up a note thanking him for the clarification.

He read that note twice and put it in the box with the others.

That left the couriers.

"How long," he asked the master of the gate that afternoon, "to have a rider across the river?"

"Twenty minutes at night, your highness. Less if the roads are dry."

"And to recall one?"

The man thought about it. "You wouldn’t, your highness. Not once he’s across."

The order Baldwin wrote that evening required overnight messages leaving the inner palace to be cleared until the morning muster. He justified it in one line — a capital on emergency footing could not have unverified accounts of the northern situation reaching the provinces before the Crown had read them.

Alaric approved it the following day and said it was sensible.

It was sensible. It also meant that between last light and the muster, nothing left that building unless Baldwin permitted it, and it took nine days to build and every hour of it was signed for.

---

The eighth evening; he nearly stopped.

A dispatch came in from the north in his brother’s hand. It was the usual, clear, unpanicked, no inflation. Two positions under increased pressure, one probe repelled, casualties listed, requests appended.

Raymond was still holding.

Baldwin read it four times.

He caught himself doing it on the third pass and kept going anyway, and by the fourth he had admitted what he was looking for, which was a sentence somewhere in his brother’s neat hand giving him permission to wait another month.

It was not there. Raymond did not write sentences like that.

He put it down and opened the next thing on the desk, which was a supply assessment out of the southern granaries, and read four lines of it before he stopped.

The reserve would carry one major reinforcement effort this season. Or two minor ones. Not both.

Baldwin sat back and looked at the two documents lying next to each other on the desk — the frontier holding, and the reason it would not keep holding — and did not move for a while.

Then he put both of them back in their boxes, in order, and blew out the lamp without opening anything else.

—

On the ninth night, there was nothing to arrange.

That was the strangest part. He had expected the last hours to feel like a plan being executed, and instead he simply walked through a palace that was already the way he needed it to be.

The men on the inner corridor were from a company he had assigned there under liaison orders six days ago, and they straightened when he passed and said nothing.

The usual pair who had stood at that particular junction for eleven years were on the outer wall, where the rota he had signed had put them.

And no rider was going anywhere until morning.

Alaric was still King of Caerleon. He simply happened to be king inside a building where, for the next eight hours, nothing moved without Baldwin’s permission.

Baldwin went to his father alone, and he did not draw his sword, and he wanted very much for it not to become the other thing.

---

He asked for it plainly, one last time.

Emergency authority sufficient to act — to withdraw the eleven positions, to consolidate the frontier commands under one structure, to secure the supply corridors and build the central reserve. Not permanently. For the duration.

Alaric listened to all of it without interrupting.

Then Baldwin said the second part, which he had not planned and which came out anyway.

"And if you cannot give me that while you remain king," he said, "then give me the crown now."

There was a long silence in that room.

"No," Alaric said.

"Because you still believe the frontier can be—"

"Because of the way you just asked."

Alaric got up from his chair, slowly, the way he did everything now.

"Eighteen months ago you would have come to me with the numbers. You did, often, and you were frequently right, and I told you so." He moved toward the table. "Tonight you have come to me and offered me a choice between doing what you want and ceasing to be king. You did not notice yourself doing it. That is what frightens me."

"People are dying while you preserve—"

"People are dying. Yes." His father’s voice did not rise. "And you have begun to speak of them as a debt I owe you for having been correct."

Baldwin did not have an answer to that, and he hated that he did not.

He watched Alaric cross to the table, and he watched him stop halfway, and he saw the moment the old man’s attention shifted from the argument to the room.

Alaric looked at the door.

"There was no announcement," he said.

"Sire—"

"There is always an announcement." He turned. "Who is on my corridor tonight?"

Baldwin could have lied. It would have bought him nothing and he did not particularly want it, and so he did not.

"My men."