B3Ch56-Margarets Plan (Patreon)

Henri walked up through the Landing and tried to remember what it had looked like the first time he had seen it.

He couldn't quite. In fairness, he had been distracted at the time, on account of the chains. A man's first impressions suffer when he is being marched as a prize. Now the streets under his boots were laid stone, swept, and level, and the buildings rose up on either side of him. A mason two lots over was setting a course of dressed granite, and a carved lintel lay waiting on the ground beside him with a design already cut into it. A vine. Or a river. Something no one had needed, someone had troubled to make beautiful anyway.

That was the blasted frustrating part. Not the size of the place. That they had found the time for beauty. He caught himself worrying the corner of his mustache and made his hand come down.

He would have given a great deal to be home instead, watching his own town do the same. He had spent a good stretch there finishing his Grail quest, and it had come along well — better than well — though it would never be this. The landscape down there on the coast was beautiful. It reminded him of the south of France with its soaring cliffs and hidden grottos. The beautiful beaches. Toulon. He missed his home. The elegance of it and its history. Still… here he had a chance to put his own name in its history.

He would miss the bathhouse though. The one built over the mana spring, where the water came up warm and heavy with it and a man could lie back until his thoughts finally, mercifully, stopped. There was nothing of the kind there. A man of any refinement learned to make his peace with cold water and worse tea, but he did not have to pretend to enjoy it.

He missed his home.

Harold had called him back for the celebration and then, nearly in the same breath, gone north himself. Henri had assumed he would follow. He was Harold's, after all — the man made a point of keeping him close, close enough that the joke had gone all the way round the Legion. And then the column had formed at the north gate, and Henri had not been on it, and no one had thought it necessary to tell a lord of the realm why.

And now, a meeting. With Councilor Margaret.

He breathed in, and the mana in the air pressed on the inside of his chest, thick this close to the keep, thick enough that a man who wasn't ready for it would stumble on his own next step. Henri had had to relearn how to breathe here.

It always smelled of a scheme when it involved Margaret. But with Margaret one could never be certain; the woman was not readable, and Henri — who had spent another life reading the sort of people who thought themselves unreadable — found this both professionally admirable and personally intolerable. He had gone out once, early on, with a few of the guard to one of the taverns springing up in the lower town, and had spent a very pleasant hour charming a very beautiful woman, only to learn afterward that the woman had been Margaret, and that the guard had all been in on it. Oh, how they had all chuckled at him. He had passed whatever test it was, but failed spectacularly the one that mattered to his pride. He did not go drinking with the guard anymore, and they hadn't invited him. They didn't even have any wine here; it was intolerable.

He needed her, though. That was the truth, and Henri had been force-fed unpleasant truths. If he was ever to be a lord in his own right again, on his own ground, standing on his own two feet, he needed Margaret on his side. The way Dalen had her on his side.

And blasted Dalen. Frustrating man. Sent north with a mission that mattered and had been rewarded a Mana body token. Of course he had done it too. Held off a concentrated Blackjaw attack when it came down out of the passes onto his new village, and by the last dispatch the northern cohort had become the most used and most tested body of men in the entire legion, blooding themselves daily against horrors that made basin monsters look like an afternoon's drill. Harold would reward him for it. Richly. As he should.

Henri's thumb went to the base of his ring finger and found it bare, the way it had been since the day he set his signet in Harold's palm and knelt. An old habit with nothing left to turn. He made his hand be still. He did not envy Dalen the fighting. He envied being handed something and trusted to do it. That was all. He did not envy Dalen in the slightest.

The Grail quest had been a beginning. And sailing into Three Rivers at dawn with the pirates' colors struck and towed behind him in the grey water — that had been more than a beginning. That had been the finest night this world had yet given him. He wanted more of those. Not politics. Not standing at Harold's shoulder as a lesson the other lords could study at their leisure. Something a man could take in both hands and be excellent at.

He pulled his path panel into the corner of his vision as he walked.

True Path of a Sailor — Common PathPrime Perk locked. Waypoints charted: 6 of 10.Each waypoint completed grants a lesser mariner's perk. On completion of the Path, these perks merge into the Prime Perk: Sailor.

Sea Legs — Granted: Deckhold. Improved footing on any deck the sea can move.Salt in the Blood — Granted: Weathered. Cold, wet, and glare off the water trouble you less than other men.Reading the Water — Granted: Sailor's Eye. You read current, shoal, and depth in the face of the water.Hand on the Tiller — Granted: True Helm. You hold a truer line than the wheel alone should give.Wind and Canvas — Granted: Rigger. You work sail and line faster than other men.Blooded at Sea — Granted: Boarder. You fight surer on a heaving deck than most men do on land.By the Stars — Bring a ship across open water, out of sight of land, and make your port.The Long Glass — Mark what others miss, before it is close enough to matter.Storm-Tested — Carry a ship and her people through a great storm and out the other side.Keep Her Afloat — Bring a crippled ship home under jury rig.

He let it fade.

Only a common path. He knew it wasn't the fanciest path. But it had given him the sea, and the sea had given him something he learned to love. A choice of horizon. Freedom.  For one night, running the pirates down on the water while the legion broke them on the land, he had felt like Bonaparte. Like Darlan. Though if he was honest, he had always been partial to Villeneuve.

He stepped around a dwarf coming the other way, a roll of drawings under one arm, and inclined his head to the man out of habit. The dwarf did not appear to notice; Henri had found that was in general the dwarven attitude toward courtesy.

There were not many of them left to step around, in any case. Most of the Gemheart had gone west, up to the mountain Harold had given them where the river came down into the valley, near the land Harold had gifted to Josh and Beth. Harold had told Bram that he wanted a power on the western side of the basin he could trust without reservation. Then Bram had taken the mountain and his people and gone — quickly, too. Only a handful of their craftsmen had stayed on to teach.

It showed everywhere Henri looked. The homes went up faster now and stood straighter, the stone came out of the ground with fewer seams and softer lips, and somewhere in the last few months the men laying it had stopped building for mere function and begun, God help them, to flourish. The Landing had stopped being a large town. It was a small city that simply had not filled up yet.

He came up on the fountain at the base of the hill, where the road bent to climb toward the keep, and slowed despite himself.

The dwarves had built it where the Stele used to stand, and they had not been modest about it. They had carved the theft of the Verdant Mushroom.

Everyone in the county knew the story — the raid on the shrine deep in the Verdant Forest, in the first year, when the whole enterprise had been a couple hundred frightened people. Bram had it from Mark and had loved it immoderately; he had declared drunkenly and loudly that the Landing must come from a proud tradition of thieves, given how neatly they had also stolen the Gemheart Stone. He had seemed to intend this as the highest possible compliment.

The dwarves had cut the moment into stone at the foot of the hill: the shrine's great domed mushroom rising in dark marble, kobolds carved mid-scatter around its roots with their little spears facing every wrong way at once, and at the center of it one figure caught in the act of lifting the relic free — a woman already half-turned to run, the small carved mushroom raised over her head in both hands as though she could not quite believe she had done it.

It could only be Sarah. Henri had never met the Count's sister, and from what he had gathered, he was not entirely certain he wished to. There had been some grumbling about a statue of the woman standing in the middle of the town. Harold had not cared in the slightest. By every account he had simply thrown his head back and laughed when he saw it, said that Sarah would loathe it, and pronounced it therefore perfect. Privately he had also found this the single most understandable thing he had ever known the man to do. He would immensely love annoying his own sister.

The water did the rest. It welled up from inside the stone mushroom's cap and ran down its flutes in thin sheets, pooled around the scattering kobolds, and spilled off the lower basin in a steady curtain, and someone had worked a green light down into it so that even at midday the whole thing held a faint drowned glow, the color of the relic it remembered. It was the most extravagant thing he had seen since the old world. The dwarves had no restraint whatsoever, and thank God for it.

And it stood where it did because of a hole. Harold had used that Stele relocation token from the auction, and pulling the Stele had left a wound in the ground the dwarves had filled with this. The Stele stood up inside the keep now, past stone and men and doors, where a man would have to fight through the whole of it to reach the county's heart.

Henri stood at the fountain a moment and felt the same low, grinding frustration turn over in him. Not at the fountain. At the man. It was maddening, how far ahead Harold thought — how much he simply knew that no one else knew and moved his pieces years before the board would show anyone why. A gentleman explained himself. Harold did not, and had the appalling manners to be right anyway. He dragged a thumb along his mustache and hated, freshly, how much he had come to admire the man.

He pulled his cloak tighter against the chill and started up the steps.

At the top, a pair of guards stopped him, and he let them. Nothing good would come from arguing with the men guarding the entrance.

The first held out a bar of cold iron. Henri closed his bare hand around it and held it while the man counted. Nothing. The second offered a disc of silver on a cord, and Henri laid his palm flat against it and held that too, and again nothing. Then the mercury — the sealed little instrument the new imbuer had finally managed once the cinnabar came in, the one that did its work without any man having to set quicksilver to his skin. The guard passed it slowly along Henri's arm, watched its face, and stepped back.

"Councilor Margaret's expecting you, my lord. Top of the stairs."

"She always is," Henri said. He shot his cuffs, squared the set of his coat, and went up.

Iron for the fae, silver for the beastshifters, mercury for the shapeshifters. The three tests were going in everywhere in the basin now. As far as Henri knew, they had not yet caught a single one of the tricky races out — but he had stopped, some months ago, wagering against Harold. It was an expensive habit to keep. It would only be a matter of time until he was right.

The meeting room at the top was warm, at least — a brazier in the corner, the shutters drawn against the wind — and two people were in it already.

Elia sat at the near end of the table, bent over a sheet of paper with a stick of charcoal, lost in whatever she was drawing. Her hair splayed across her face, and across from her, entirely at his ease, sat the new mayor. The man from Alnor.

Henri's step did not falter, but something in him drew tight. He did not enjoy dealing with the Alnor man, and the worst of it was that he could point to nothing the man ever did. He simply answered, in a manner that left whatever he had said sounding agreeable and reasonable. And Henri — who had spent decades in council chambers, and longer than that among nobles who lied for the pure sport of it — found himself trying to counterargue and found he couldn't do it.

He would have to mind himself in this room. Elia looked up.

Her hair shifted when she did, coming loose around her face and stopping him cold, and her eyes — a deep forest green that had no right to be like that — found his and rested there a moment, reading something, before she returned to her sketch. His heart, the traitor, pounded.

He allowed himself, for the length of one breath, to imagine it: that fierce personality beside him on a deck, the wind up, the two of them running down a horizon that belonged to no one but them. Where he could chart his own course. The way Harold now had Adeline.

And there it was again. Harold.

He sat down rather harder than a man of his composure should have, and made himself stop. He had to stop. It never once ended anywhere good, this measuring of himself against that man. How was one meant to measure oneself against the sun, or the moon? The comparison did not even hold; it did nothing but make a man small.

For God's sake, the man had fought half his own guard and the monster Jack Churchill at once, alone, and won. Henri had the story from five separate guardsmen, and not one of them had told it easily. They had wounded him gravely, over and over. It was the only thing that slowed him — and each time the wound had healed, and Harold had kept coming. They had broken good swords against him. He had fought like a thing out of legend, flinging himself onto their blades to reach them, taking cuts that ought to have finished a man only to open cuts of his own, and the blood those wounds spilled had run back into him and left him stronger than before. In the end Jack had been reduced to taking his legs off. Twice. And when even that would not keep him down, Josh had sealed him inside the stone itself — and Harold had broken the stone.

Henri shuddered, in the warm room, and put the thought away with the others. No. No good had ever come of measuring himself against that.

He set his hands flat on the table to still them, and waited.

The door opened.

Margaret came in with her ledger against her chest, crossed to the head of the table, and set it down on the wood with a flat, deliberate crack that was not quite a slam and was not remotely an accident. Behind her, her own guard drew the door shut, and Margaret turned the key in the lock herself, and left it there.

Then she looked at the three of them, folded her hands atop the ledger, and did not sit.

Her eyes went over the three of them, quick and complete. Then they settled on Henri and stayed there, appraising, weighing him for a use he could not yet see.

"Count Harold has left the basin," she said. "He will be in the north until the spring campaign is finished. Sometimes likely into late summer. His enemies know it."

Henri kept his face still and waited.

"When a strong man steps off his ground, the ones who want that ground come out to test it. That has already begun. Over the winter there were two attempts on the Count's interests here that I would call assassinations, and neither will be the last. More are coming." She set one hand flat on the ledger. "I would rather not spend my spring swatting them one at a time as they arrive. So I intend to give them something they cannot resist. A door left conveniently open."

Something cold began in Henri's stomach.

He was not a stupid man, whatever else he was. He had sat at enough tables to feel the shape of a plan before it was spoken. And he did not like this one at all.

"Henri," Margaret said.

"Councilor."

"You made contact with your sister and your brother at the solstice auction." She said it without any inflection at all, a line out of his own bookkeeping. "You have kept up that contact since. Quietly through the forums, buried inside trade messages. It was neatly done."

The cold in his stomach turned to ice all at once and climbed.

How. He had been careful. He had been more than careful, because he had understood exactly what it would look like if it were found — a sworn vassal whispering across the water. The words buried six deep in dull cargo manifests.

She was telling him now not because she had only just learned it but because she wanted him to know that she had known, and waited, and chosen the moment.

He got his voice level before he used it.

"And what," he said, "would the Count have of me?"

"I want you to write to your sister and your brother," Margaret said, "and let them understand that you have found a loophole in the oaths that bind you. That you are not so content in your Count's shadow as you appear. And that you have begun to build something against him and you are looking for allies and others who want to join."

There it was.

He understood now why he was still here. Why the column had formed without him, and no one had troubled to say why. He was not being kept behind. He was being positioned.

He was the bait.

Every enemy the Count had, every lord across the water who wanted the basin cut down before it grew larger, would hear that Lord Henri — the beaten rival, the leashed man, the one they all assumed hated his collar — had a crack in his loyalty and a plan behind it. They would come to him. They would come with money and men and promises, and every one of them would be watched and counted.

And in the meantime, to every soul outside these walls, and to his own family most of all, Henri would be exactly what he had spent a year trying to stop being. The traitor. The bad man in the story. And in the end he would be even more tied to Lord Harold. Who else would have him at the end of this?

His face did not move. He had years of practice keeping his face from moving. He looked at Margaret, let nothing show, and searched her for any give. He found none.

"Will this be a problem, Lord Henri?" Margaret asked.

"No." His throat had gone dry, and the word came out rougher than he wanted. "No. No problem at all."

It was a lie, and they both heard it. Margaret smiled at him. She had never needed him to want the task. She needed him only to do it.

"I'm sorry."

Elia had put her charcoal down. Henri had never in his life been so grateful for an interruption.

"Why am I in this room?" she said. "I make potions. I grow herbs. I'm an alchemist. What do I have to do with any of this?"

Margaret opened her mouth, but Henri — who wanted very much to be discussing anyone's difficulties but his own — got there first.

"Because you have reason to resent him," he said almost frustrated. It made so much sense why she was here.

Elia's green eyes came around to him.

"The Count punished you. And he has kept a rein on what you are allowed to learn ever since — you, who by every account are one of the finest alchemists he has, and who spends her days teaching others and growing herbs up a mountain." He spread one hand. "Anyone hunting for cracks in the Count's house would look at you and see a gifted woman made smaller than she is and told to be grateful for it. That is a very useful thing to be, if a man is fishing."

Elia stared at him. She had not expected that from him. Neither, quite, had he.

Margaret tipped her head toward him. "Lord Henri's summary is blunt. But also accurate."

"There is more," Henri went on, exasperation carrying him now past his own better judgment. "She is placed high enough to reach rooms most people cannot. And once it is known she has joined, others will find their own courage in the company — nothing feeds a conspiracy like the sense that important people are already in it." He looked back at Margaret. "And the part you did not say aloud. She is trusted by the Count. A traitor no one suspects is worth ten they do."

Margaret regarded him a moment with something that was not warmth but was at least respect.

"Correct again." She made a small note in the ledger without looking down at it. "I had wondered whether the man you were on your own world survived the crossing. I am satisfied that he did."

A year ago it would have pleased him. Now Henri sat with his hands flat on the table and thought that when he had told Jack that he wanted a task he could go and be excellent at — this had not been in his mind at all.

"And my part in this conspiracy?" Aske asked.

The man from Alnor had said nothing until now, and he said it now the way he said everything: mild, even, reasonable, as though he were asking after the weather at sea.

Margaret drew a single folded sheet from inside the ledger and slid it down the table to him.

Aske unfolded it and read it, once, slowly. His composure did not change, but he took his time, and when he set the page down he was nodding.

"They will agree to these terms," he said. "The chance to send their own people to train beneath a mana spring is something Alnor refuses." He tapped the page once. "Though you have asked for less than you might. Permit me to negotiate on your behalf. Lord Henri's navy will need trainers, and shipwrights, if it is ever to be more than a handful of galleys. I can have the kingdom send those as well, and be thanked for it on both shores."

Margaret nodded once, as though he had passed a test she had set.

Henri sat still and worked at what was not being said. Why was he here?

Most of the lords who came sniffing would have money. Very few of them would have ships. And here at the table sat a man whose kingdom's hulls lay thick across the inland sea, invited in the open to arrange training and trade — and quietly, beneath it, to arrange passage. Transport for men who needed to reach the basin unseen. And if passage, then landing sites. Staging grounds. And if it ever came to it, if the sea lanes ever had to close at exactly the wrong moment for exactly the wrong people —

Henri stopped the thought before it reached his face.

She was building a machine. And she was building it a year ahead of when it would be needed, out of a disgraced alchemist and a beaten lord and a diplomat no one in the basin fully trusted, and she was doing it while the Count was away. And she would compartmentalize it. He would never see the whole. He would see the piece she put in his hand and no further, and there would be other hands on other pieces. It’s how he would do it after all.

It was magnificent. It was playing with fire.

"I have a list of tasks for the two of you," Margaret said, and turned a page. "You will report on them to me regularly, through the proper channels. Nothing goes onto the forum that is not precisely what an enemy is meant to read." She looked up. "To play your parts, you go where you are of use. Lord Henri, you return to your town. Elia, you remain here, in your post at the alchemists' school, where everyone can watch you go unappreciated."

Henri opened his mouth to ask through whom he was meant to send anything worth sending.

"Lord Henri," Margaret said, "your handler is Lukas. You will receive instructions from him and he will be available to help you."

"I have no—" Henri began.

"My lord."

The voice came from just behind his right shoulder, close, and Henri was half out of his chair before he had decided to move.

A young man stood there snickering slightly. A heartbeat ago he would have sworn no one had been there. The ice came down his spine a second time, colder than the first.

Lukas. Henri knew the name the instant he saw the face, and wished he did not. Everyone in his old camp had learned it eventually, after Arjun's town. 

"I look forward to working together, my lord," Lukas said it kindly. "You won't know I'm there. Call me Ezio if you want."

He inclined his head, polite as a footman, and sat down next to him while pulling out an apple to snack on.

Henri sat back down, made his hands be still on the table, and understood with a strange, level calm that Margaret had not sent him a handler. She had sent him a reminder of exactly how far he would be allowed to wander. And the kid was an Assassin's Creed fan. Never mind how he knew the name.

"Elia." Margaret had already moved on. "You run through Vera."

Elia frowned. "Vera's laid up. She's still recovering from the Cascading Seal — she burned her own life force to put the guardian down, everyone knows it, I've been brewing for her for—" She stopped.

"You have been brewing for her for weeks," Margaret agreed. "You will go on brewing for her for a while more. The Count healed soon after she returned; she has been whole ever since. She will continue to appear otherwise. A healer's visits are a thing no one questions. It gives the two of you every reason in the world to keep your heads together, often, and alone."

Elia thought it over. Henri watched her get there — watched the frown ease, and then go, very slightly, sly.

"This clears the rest of my weirgild," she said. "Doesn't it. The debt."

"It does," Margaret said.

And there, at last, a small warm light came on in the cold that had sat in Henri since she first said his name. Of course. He had been so busy being afraid that he had missed the plainest fact in the room. Men were not asked to walk into fire for nothing. There would be a reward waiting at the far end of this for him too — and if he lived to collect it, it would not be a small one.

He almost hated how much better that made him feel.

"Any questions?" Margaret asked.