The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

opening of the season, but I’m sure Lady Skestinin would find rooms for all of us. And you could …”
    She could. She could be nearer to the sources of power. She could hear what there was to hear concerning the navy and its plans for the coming year. All of it the kind of thing that might be usefully put in an anonymous letter to Carse. And all she would have to leave was everything.
    “That’s terribly kind of you, dear,” she said. “But it isn’t time.”

Geder
    T he mysterious letters found Geder halfway to the estate of Lord Annerin, four sheets, three of them written in different hands. The night after they’d come, Lord Regent Palliako had given the hunt to Prince Aster, taken his closest advisors—Flor, Emming, Daskellin, Mecilli, and Minister Basrahip—in the fastest carriages in the caravan, and sped for the south without word or explanation. It would be the scandal of the season. He’d shown no one what the letters said, he’d explained himself to no one, though for different reasons. He didn’t care. He didn’t care what they said about him.
    Except that wasn’t true. It wasn’t the hard beds that kept him awake at night. It wasn’t the loss of comforts or the soft music he’d been able to command in the Kingspire. What kept Geder in motion was embarrassment that he had ever trusted these high and mighty lords, and rage. Well, soon enough, the truth would be revealed. Soon enough.
    They left before dawn and rode until after nightfall. At each wayhouse and taproom, they traded their blown teams for fresh and began again as soon as the horses were in harness. Lord Emming complained, but Geder had pointed out that the sword-and-bows they’d brought were all his own personal guard, and if Lord Emming preferred not to travel, they could raise a cairn over him with relative ease. There hadn’t been any more complaints after that.
    They rode through the free city of Orsen like a plague wind and made their way through the pass into Elassae despite snow and ice. The locals all told them that the danger was too great, but Geder ordered them on. They lost three men and two pack mules, but after five days of painfully slow progress, they reached the southern slopes. The dragon’s road cleared, and they began the last leg of their journey.
    The fortress of Kiaria was cut deep into the living stone of the mountains. The brass gates to the first wall stood two hundred feet high and moved on gigantic mechanisms that had lain deep within the walls since the dragons. They stood broken now, the testament to almost a full season of Antean power. The only testament, because the second wall stood intact, and the third and fourth and fifth ones beyond that. At the base of the mountains on either side of the great gates was the Antean army. Geder’s army. The ground all around was a churn of ice, snow, mud, and shit. Hide tents fluttered in the wind that came down the mountain, and where there had been trees to break its power a year ago, there were only stumps now. Everything that would burn had been burned. Everything that could be eaten had been eaten. The army, according to the reports, needed three tons of food a day to stay alive, all of it coming overland from Suddapal and Inentai. Three tons of food every day for months turned to three tons of shit by the morning. The glory and power of Antea was living in its own latrine while the Timzinae sat in their caves and laughed.
    And the man responsible for the war, the man whom Geder had already had to correct once, squatted in his tent scratching his balls and plotting treachery. The night before they reached the Lord Marshal’s encampment, Geder could hardly sleep.
    When the sentries tried to stop them, Geder made them bow down until their noses touched their knees and stay in that position still as stones until he’d ridden past. Lord Ternigan’s tent looked much the worse for wear. Dark marks along the sides showed where the leather was starting to break down from the pressures of sun, rain, and wind. The Lord Marshal stood before the doorway in his dress armor, his own guards arrayed about him. The months had treated him no more gently than his tent. Ternigan’s beard was greyer than it had been in the summer, his cheeks thinner. He watched the carriages arrive one after the next until the open space before his tent was as cramped with the transportation of power as a revel at the height of the court season. Geder’s servants opened his