Chapter 68: Five Assassins Dressed Me for War and Argued Over Who Got to Die For Me

Arming an emperor for a tunnel fight takes nine minutes when he does it alone and forty when five women each insist on handling one item personally.

I filed no complaints and regretted nothing.

Lunara took the sword belt, which she has never once done, because sword saints regard other people’s harness as a personal insult.

"Second time," she said, and drew my knife, turned it, and handed it back hilt first, watching my face while she did it. "You know what this means now."

"I know what it means."

"Good."

She cinched the buckle hard enough to lift me onto my toes.

"Then understand the rest of it. Down there you walk behind me. Not beside. Behind. If I look back and find you level with my shoulder I will assume this body has been possessed again and act accordingly."

"Miralys gets the ceiling, doesn’t she."

"Miralys took the ceiling an hour ago." A ghost of a smile crossed and went. "Go finish arming. Before I remember I’m supposed to be reasonable and spoil everything."

Miralys herself wasn’t reachable for goodbyes, being three stories up on a roofline with her bow strung and the night wind working her braids loose, but she had left something on my gear anyway: a bowstring, waxed southern yellow, looped twice around my left wrist and knotted in the fashion her people use for promises between soldiers.

Saoirse delivered the last item in person, holding the copper spine out flat on both palms.

"It’s a compass now. More or less."

She’d etched a ring of fine ticks around its middle overnight, and inside them a needle of light swung slow and steady.

"It points at whichever carrier account is nearest zero. Right now that’s Roderic. If Ansel starts installing himself instead, the needle swings to him, and you’ll have perhaps ten seconds to change the outcome. Don’t blink."

She pushed it into my hands and then didn’t let go of it.

"Also. Hypothetically. How angry would you be if I came along?"

"Saoirse. Someone competent has to stay above with the receiver research."

"That’s what I assumed you’d say, so I taught Teo the tick pattern before dinner and paid him in advance." She adjusted her bag strap and lifted her chin. "Science doesn’t take messages. I’m coming."

"You realize your wives will object," Zelina said from the armory door.

"I have one wife and she’s holding a compass." Saoirse finally released the spine. "She outranks all of you on this specific question."

Zelina came down the last step rolling her sleeves, and she was carrying her work case, the long one, the one that has its own reputation in three capitals.

"Nobody said poison doesn’t go underground."

She set the case across a bench and opened it, and forty little compartments caught the lamplight in neat rows.

"Vaelion. Left forearm. Hold still."

She worked a pale salve along my skin with two fingers, thorough, silent, businesslike, and if her hands lingered anywhere it was nobody’s business but the lamp’s.

"Bitter orange base. Anything that cuts you tonight gets eaten at the wound before it can close wrong. Including silver."

She tied off the wrapping.

"It buys you six seconds against anything Ansel grows out of those matrices. Spend the six seconds moving."

"Understood."

"And this." She caught my wrist, turned my hand over, and pressed her mouth to the center of my palm. "Paid in advance. Now you owe me a victory by Friday, and I collect on Fridays."

Calista met us at the head of the cistern stair, because of course Calista was already there, lantern lit, sleeves rolled, standing on the seal-stone that Lunara’s grandfather’s order had laid sixty years ago.

"No," I said.

"You don’t get to spend half the night being armed by your wives and then skip my part."

She raised the lantern higher, and light ran down the worn steps ahead of us until it ran out of steps to reach.

"I’m not asking to fight. I’m telling you that whatever is down there has spent twelve years starving beside a warm body. Starving things don’t meet logic with logic. They meet it with food."

She handed the lantern to me instead of keeping it.

"So I carry the light, and when it’s time to talk him off whatever ledge he built, that job was never going to be yours alone. You handle the proposal. I handle the communion."

"No one dies for me tonight," I said. "That’s an imperial decree. You can all get wounded a little."

"Decrees are for people who can enforce them," Zelina said.

"I own thirty seven guards, a sword saint, a war princess on the roofline, and every poison east of the mountains. Watch me enforce it."

"Then let’s settle the actual question,"

Miralys called down from her perch, patient as a metronome.

"If it goes wrong down there, who carries him out? Because I shoot from above, which means I’m last through a doorway. Lunara’s first through every doorway by religion. That leaves carrying."

"I carry him," Lunara said immediately.

"You carried him out of an ambush in January and dropped him twice," Zelina said. "Once into a fountain."

"The fountain was tactical."

"He was face down in it."

"Tactical,"

Lunara repeated, with the flat finality of a woman whose honor has been questioned at fountains.

"Very well. New arrangement. Nobody carries him, because nobody is going to need to. He walks out on his own feet or none of us answer to him again."

"That’s not how oaths work," Calista said mildly.

"That’s how mine works. Ask it sometime."

I let them argue the whole way to the stairhead.

It was, and I would deny this under oath, one of the better sounds of my life: five women arranging my survival out loud, each of them certain she alone had the plan right.

Down we went.

The old cisterns under the west wing are brick throat after brick throat, dry these sixty years, vaulted high enough for banners nobody hangs anymore.

Our footsteps came back to us doubled, then doubled again, until thirty seven guards moved on Lunara’s hand signs quiet enough to hear their own heartbeats.

Bren Olvar took the rear the way he has taken every rear since the day he rode south uninvited: three lengths back, present, unexplained, armed with things he refuses to name.

Twenty minutes down, the compass light bent hard left. The tunnel bent with it, and then opened without warning into a chamber that stopped the entire column where it stood.

Somebody had furnished the dark.

One long table. One chair, facing the approach, angled to command the doorway. On the table sat a plate, a knife, a folded napkin, one lit candle, and a chessboard mid-game, black up two pieces.

In the plate, warm bread. Still steaming.

"He sets dinner," Calista said beside my shoulder, barely above the candle flame. "Down here. For himself. Every night."

"Why?" Miralys’ voice drifted from some ledge above, arrow nocked, conversational. "Why eat alone at a table like that when he owns eleven houses?"

"Because tables were never for eating," said a voice from the far arch, mild and tired and familiar from forty-one forged lines of paper. "They’re for being expected at."

Ansel Vosk stepped out of the dark with his hat in his hands, and behind him, deeper in, the compass needle flared white and began to spin.