“No,” she admitted at last.
“A proxy war is when two nations fight through the medium of a third party,” said the General. “A few years ago, we captured a barbarian leader who spoke some of the common tongue. After intense questioning, along with some of the Wise Men’s truth serum, the ruffian told us that the mountain tribes had all been retained by…” He unrolled the map further, revealing the lands to the south and east of the mountains. He tapped a finger on a land mass that jutted south into the Adessian Sea. “Here. The Kingdom of Persopos.”
“Why?” Tasia asked, surprised. She’d never heard it said before that the Kingdom of Persopos had anything to do with the war. “What quarrel do we have with them?”
“We had no quarrel,” General Remington said. “The Kingdom is small, secretive. A place that doesn’t look kindly upon outsiders and which our Wise Men therefore know very little about. We have tried and failed to plant spies within the upper ranks of the Kingdom; all we have managed to learn is that the current king is rumored to be a madman obsessed with sorcery. Sorcery,” he said again, sneering. “He might as well be obsessed with hop-and-fetch.”
Tasia nodded. In the Empire, the last of the so-called sorcerers had been expelled by the Wise Men centuries ago. Pockets of commoners here and there probably still engaged in the superstitious practices of old, but for the most part, the Wise Men had debunked the old gods and the “magic” rituals that went with them, replacing primitive superstitions with reason and logic. Tasia wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that the barbarians were still practicing their magic, but it did surprise her to hear of a king from a civilized land obsessed with sorcery.
“At any rate,” the General continued, “for years, we wondered how the mountain barbarians had gained the equipment and the organization to carry out sustained attacks in the East. Without doubt, the mountain tribes have been harassing farmers on the border in little raids for the better part of a century. But their attacks were always seasonal, carried out in bands of no more than fifty men, and ended as soon as the first leaf browned and fell. Now we understand they are being financed and trained by the Kingdom of Persopos. We just don’t yet know why.”
Tasia studied the map. “The Kingdom couldn’t be trying to expand their borders into our lands,” she said, thinking out-loud. “There must be a thousand miles of independent territories and city-states between their western border and our eastern one.”
“A ‘border’ can be a strange thing, Princess,” the General said. “In the Empire, we believe in hard borders — in rivers and mountains and other lines on the map that divide one piece of land from another. But the Kingdom of Persopos… their borders may be smaller than the Empire’s on a map, but in practice, they control many lands outside those borders through other means. They fight us through the barbarians, for example, and as you said, the barbarians are a thousand miles from their western border. So perhaps from that point of view, the kingdom is rather bigger than it looks.”
“No one ever told me about the Kingdom of Persopos’s involvement in the war before,” Tasia said.
General Remington’s face twisted into a dangerous snarl. “That’s because your father’s Wise Men refuse to believe that the Kingdom is involved,” he said, his words filled with bitterness. “A single captured barbarian who spoke of Persopos over a fifteen year period, they said, does not make a case against them. The Wise Men may know logic, but I know men. The war lingers on because the Empire continues to fight the wrong enemy.”
Tasia was startled to hear the General speak so plainly. He was coming dangerously close to disagreeing with the Emperor. At the very least, he was in open disagreement with Norix.
“Recently, however,” the General continued, “we’ve gotten our hands on evidence that even that old twit Norix can’t — ”
A soft knock came on the door, then it opened a few feet. Joslyn’s hand went to the hilt of her sword; General Remington’s to the dagger at his waist. But it was just Nathan, one of the Emperor’s errand boys.
“Lord Hermant is here, sir,” Nathan said. “The Emperor requests your presence in his offices.”
Lord Hermant?
Why was Tasia’s grandfather here? Lord Hermant of House Farrimont was her mother’s father, a man Tasia had interacted with so little over the years that she could probably count each meeting with the fingers of one hand.
“Go ahead of me,” Remington said to the boy with a wave of his hand. “Tell the Emperor I will be there shortly.” He turned to Tasia. “We will pick this up next week, Princess.” He stood from the table, rolling up the map and tying it closed. Then he crossed the room with his odd, hitching gait to his desk, picking up what looked like a letter before heading through the door. He acknowledged Joslyn with a respectful nod on his way out.
Tasia listened to the sound of his peg leg thudding rhythmically down the corridor until it faded to a vague echo.
“Well, Guard,” she said to the nomad. “So much for my military history lesson today.” She glanced at the candle clock burning in the sconce on the wall of the General’s office. “And only four of the clock.” She stood from her place at the table. “Let’s see what trouble we can get into before the evening meal, shall we?”
But Nathan reappeared in the doorway. “Princess Natasia?”
“Yes?”
“The Emperor requests your presence as well.” When Tasia lifted an eyebrow, the boy added, almost apologetically, “I didn’t know when I came the first time for the General, your Highness. One of the palace guards stopped me on my way back to his office and sent me back to fetch you.”
Tasia made an effort to wipe the surprise from her face and compose her expression into something more dignified. Her father never invited her to meetings with lords or ambassadors or advisors. But neither had he ever asked General Remington to fill her in on the current state of the War in the East.
This, she supposed, must be what it meant to be his heir.
8
Tasia heard the shouting before she ever reached the heavy cedar doors that led into her father’s offices, but with the doors closed, the sound was muffled and indecipherable. Palace guards stood on either side of the doors, solemnly erect with black spears in their hands. Nathan walked briskly ahead of the Princess and spoke to the guards as he approached.
“He called for her, mates,” he told the silent men at the door, dropping any pretense of formal speech. “And he said to let her guard in, too.” Nate melted away down the corridor without waiting to be dismissed.
One of the guards turned his head slightly in the direction of Joslyn. His upper lip curled, twitching into a sneer. “A nomad?” he said under his breath, and added something else Tasia couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like a muttered curse.
Granted, Tasia had nearly the same reaction when Cole introduced her to Joslyn a few hours earlier, but she also couldn’t allow someone to insult a member of her staff in front of her without repercussions.
“Watch your tongue, Guard,” she said sharply. “And open the door.”