The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

from the walls as an announcement and a boast. Any lingering resentment he’d felt over Dar Cinlama and the other expeditions was gone. The Lord Regent had gone to Nus, and the city had fallen. Geder left the next day, but ten of Basrahip’s priests remained with Ternigan. Sarakal would fall before autumn, and the rest of the empire had gone without his attention for long enough.
    Aster threw another stone into the pond as the ripples of the first reached the edge and either echoed back faintly or died.
    “Lord Regent?”
    Geder turned to look over his shoulder. The servant at the edge of the garden bowed until he was bent almost double.
    “Yes?”
    “Your advisors await you, my lord.”
    Geder rose, but Aster only scowled at the surface of the pond.
    “Are you … would you like to sit in?” Geder asked, then when Aster didn’t answer, “All this is going to be yours. Probably best that you see how it all works.”
    “Not today,” Aster said, and threw another stone. This one skipped twice before it sank.
    “Is something wrong?”
    The prince didn’t respond, and Geder, for want of a better idea of what to do, let the servant lead him away. As they walked along the paths of crushed marble, he brooded. He’d been selfish, perhaps, to go to Sarakal and leave Aster behind. The prince was usually so mature and well contained, it was easy to forget he was still a child, and more than that, a child who’d lost his father. Who’d been the target of assassination. Geder was his protector, and he’d gone off to the war. And now he was making jokes about his own death and his replaceability. He reimagined the conversation that he’d just had, but from Aster’s point of view, and he cringed. He’d only meant to make Aster see that being prince made him special and important, and instead he’d brought up the idea of yet another person Aster relied on dying. Little wonder the boy hadn’t taken comfort in it.
    “Stupid,” Geder muttered to himself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid .”
    “My lord?” the servant asked.
    “Nothing. Keep going.”
    The official meeting room was halfway up the vast Kingspire, so it wasn’t used except for great ceremonial occasions. The more common business of the empire took place at ground level. Today, the men Geder had set to help him manage the kingdom were seated at a low stone table not far from the dueling grounds. The Kingspire rose up to Geder’s left, the vast chasm of the Division away to his right, and the gorgeous sprawl of Camnipol before him.
    Canl Daskellin sat to his right with Cyr Emming, Baron of Suderland Fells, at his side. Across from them were Noyel Flor, Earl of Greenhaven and Protector of Sevenpol and cousin to Namen Flor, and Sir Ernst Mecilli. Had Lord Ternigan and Lord Skestinin been in the city, they would have sat at a larger table. As Geder sat, it occurred to him that a year ago this same group would have included Lord Bannien and Dawson Kalliam, both of them dead now as traitors. And the year before that, King Simeon would have been in his own seat. Of them all, only Canl Daskellin and Noyel Flor had served as steadying hands on the rudder of state for more than three years. It was sobering to realize that so much had changed in so short a time.
    “Well,” Geder said, “thank you, gentlemen, for keeping the city out of the flames while I went to help Lord Ternigan. And now that that’s done, where exactly do we stand?”
    Noyel Flor stroked his beard and made a sound like a cough but with greater intent behind it. Mecilli nodded, took a breath, held it, and then spoke.
    “The food, Lord Regent, that we had hoped to gain by attacking Sarakal is not in as great a quantity as we had expected. In specific, the grains we’ve recovered are half what we’d projected, and the livestock hardly better than a third.”
    “On the one hand,” Daskellin said, “Ternigan’s not moving as quickly as we’d hoped, so more of it’s being eaten by the locals. And on the other, they’ve been slaughtering their own stock and leaving the grains to rot rather than let us put hands on it. We’re looking at a thin year. But I’ve been talking with my friends in Northcoast, and if we’re willing to pay a small premium, I think we can import enough of their wheat to see us through.”
    “I don’t like it,” Lord Emming growled. Between his tone of voice and the bulldog flatness of his face, he seemed almost a caricature of himself. “We should be