“You’ve come to play games,” Kip said. He wondered if this conversation would have been different if they’d held it in the palace’s great hall. As it was, this parlor now held only a few hundred scrolls and tomes, gleaming wood in the natural-unnatural patterns the old joiners here had loved, and only those courtiers closest to him. The Mighty were all here, either on guard, or at the window, or sending or awaiting messages from their other duties—other than Big Leo, who was demonstrating his mastery of the soldier’s art of sleeping anywhere. The big man was sitting at the end of the map table, head back, even as his hands draped protectively over a brace of lamb shanks on a plate in front of him so the servants wouldn’t take them away while he dozed.
A few other servants and palace slaves were bringing and taking letters and assisting Tisis with the great map, but it was nowhere near the crowd that would have attended an official audience, had Kip given one.
Come to think of it, a year ago, Kip would have thought this was quite a crowd. He was growing accustomed to a life lived before others. It was changing him.
“No games,” Ambassador Red Leaf said. “But we’ve work to do, and rapidly, you and me. I simply wanted to show you I’m not a fool.”
“Many would consider showing your cards immediately to be foolish indeed,” Kip said. My grandfather, for one, the best player of them all.
“Many would. But not you. You have shown yourself capable of wielding the truth like a scalpel, but you prefer to use it as a hammer. You like to shock people into silence by telling truths they can’t believe you’d actually say.”
Kip said nothing. This man thought he was clever. Perhaps he was.
Truth was, Kip was a little unnerved. He’d never been aware of being studied before.
“Then let us be direct,” Kip said. “What do you want of me?”
It had been Andross who told him to use the truth like a hammer. Andross, whom Kip could never equal, would have twisted this fat little man before him into knots, and had him thanking him for the pleasure.
“Satrap Willow Bough wants your army.”
“Oh, he does?” Kip asked, all doe-eyed innocence.
“Don’t make me bare my throat for nothing, my lord. I’m trying to avoid wasting your time.”
Kip nodded his head magnanimously, granting the point as a certain someone did when a stupid person made a surprisingly good point. He’d seen that damned nod enough. “What power do you have to negotiate?”
“Total.”
Kip paused for the second time in this brief conversation. He knew to let his arched brows and silence do all the work, but he said, “Meaning . . . ?”
“Total. Without you Green Haven will fall. We’ve sent a hundred messages begging the Chromeria’s help, Ruthgar’s help, the pirate kings’ help, anyone’s help—appealing to treaties, to honor, to greed. We’ve offered anything and everything. In return, we’ve gotten promises, but no one’s coming.” Ambassador Bram Red Leaf cleared his throat. “My good lord Briun Willow Bough is”—despite the few ears here to hear his words, he lowered his voice—“not the most . . . naturally gifted of leaders. But he is sincere. He doesn’t want his people to die. To save his satrapy, he would trade his very life, or if he must, his city.”
“Interesting,” Kip said. “I hadn’t heard he was stupid.”
Ambassador Red Leaf didn’t so much as blink. He didn’t play along like a sycophant would, nor did he rush to his master’s defense.
So he was either disloyal or simply a man capable of holding his tongue.
“Now,” Kip said, “now I’m impressed. Forgive the slander. I didn’t mean it.”
“That . . . that was a test?” the man asked.
Kip gave the nod again.
“And like a cur, I didn’t defend him . . .” The fat man’s sweaty upper lip thinned. “Please, please don’t tell him.”
Ah, but just because I say the test is over, that doesn’t mean it is.
For one wild, inappropriate moment, Kip missed Andross Guile. With that man, Kip was always sprinting to catch up, was always the pupil at the master’s feet. Every victory against him was hard fought and only half a victory at best. What a man Andross Guile could have been. Where had he gone wrong?
“What’s Green Haven’s situation?” Kip asked. It had, oddly, been harder to get solid intel on their allies than on their enemies.
“We have a hundred and ten thousand soldiers, five thousand eight hundred twelve drafters. Of those, honestly, maybe two thousand will be of use in battle. Two hundred pygmies with tygre-wolf mounts from Conn Siofra.”
“Conn Siofra?” Kip asked, shocked. He looked over at Sibéal. He probably shouldn’t have asked that out loud. Too late now. “Is that your father?”
“Little brother,” she said. Kip thought he saw real joy in her pygmy smile. Then she said, “Usurper.”
Well, shit. And now Kip looked ignorant of his own people in front of the ambassador. But it was beside the point. “Other troops?” Kip asked, irritated with himself.
“Twelve hundred cavalry, and a militia led by the woodsmen of forty thousand.”
“And how many of your nearly one hundred sixty thousand have been blooded?” Kip asked. “Ten thousand?”
Bram’s brow wrinkled as if he were trying to figure out some way to pad the total, as Kip’s disgust had made it clear that that was a low number. “If one counts the militias?” the ambassador offered.
Aha. So the commoners in the militias weren’t worth counting, despite that Kip’s army—the only army to have success against the Blood Robes—was composed of such folk.
These morons.
What would Andross do here? Andross would consolidate power into the only hands that knew what to do with it: his own.
“So rather than giving commissions and better arms to your best fighters, you’ve consigned your only veterans into militias under officers who’ve never lifted a weapon themselves except to impress a lady.”
Kip scrubbed his face. It took a lot to change a culture. Here the poorer sort of nobles—men whose sole patrimony had been their fathers’ swords and the right to carry them—didn’t want to share ranks with lumberjacks and poachers, and wouldn’t until they saw for themselves that those were exactly the men who would keep them alive.
Those lumberjacks and poachers were the kind of men their own fathers and grandfathers had been when they earned those swords.
By the time they learned that truth, though, it would be too late for Blood Forest.
Maybe the White King was on to something. Just burn it down.
It was an idle thought, but a monstrous one.
It was too late to change the Foresters now, with the Blood Robes laying siege to the capital itself.
“How many Blood Robes?” Kip asked.
“Forty thousand, give or take. Maybe four thousand of those are drafters. Maybe two or three hundred wights. At least that many will-casters. I know we outnumber them heartily, but . . .” He patted his forehead again with his handkerchief. It had to be soaked by now. “But you’re the only one who’s been able to stop him anywhere. Everywhere we fight, they roll over us. And all our men know it. You might be the only commander for whom our soldiers would stand.”