A puffing runner met him while he was still halfway up the mountain. “Your Excellency, you are ordered to Count Thraxton’s headquarters over by Proselytizers’ Rise as fast as you can get there.”
“Oh, I am, am I?” Earl James wondered what sorts of plots and counterplots were sweeping through Thraxton’s army now, and what the commanding general wanted him to do about them. Cautiously, he asked, “Why?”
“Because…” The messenger paused to draw in a deep, portentous breath. “Because King Geoffrey’s there, your Excellency. He’s come east from Nonesuch to find out what the hells is going on here.”
“Has he?” James said. He’d been with the Army of Franklin for three weeks now, and he wondered about that himself. But regardless of what he wondered, only one answer was possible, and he gave it: “I’ll come directly, of course.”
He hurried down the mountain, so that he was bathed in sweat when he got to flatter ground. Heaving his bulk up onto the sturdy unicorn that bore him, he booted the beast into a gallop as he went off toward the southwest.
The unicorn was blowing hard when he reined in beside the farmhouse from which Thraxton led the army. He hadn’t made the acquaintance of the sentry who took charge of the beast. After a moment, he realized why. He’s not one of Thraxton’s men. He’s one of the king’s bodyguards.
“Go on in, your Excellency,” the sentry said. “You’re expected.” James nodded. What would have happened to him had he not been expected? Nothing good, most likely.
As he started for the farmhouse, Leonidas the Priest rode up, gaudy in his crimson ceremonial robes. Leonidas waved to him and called, “Now, if the Lion God so grant, we shall at last see justice done.”
James of Broadpath cared less than he might have about justice. Victory mattered more to him. He just nodded to Leonidas the Priest and strode into the farmhouse. Baron Dan of Rabbit Hill waited there. So did Count Thraxton. And so, sure enough, did King Geoffrey. Careless of his pantaloons, James dropped to one knee and bowed his head. “Your Majesty,” he murmured.
“Arise, your Excellency,” Geoffrey said. His voice was light and true. Like his cousin and rival king, Avram, he was tall and thin as a whip. There the resemblance ended. Avram looked like a bumpkin, a commoner, a railsplitter. Geoffrey was every inch the aristocrat, with sculptured features, a firm gaze, and a neatly trimmed beard than ran under but not on his chin. As James got to his feet, Leonidas the Priest came in and bowed low to the king: he went to his knees only before his god. Geoffrey nodded to him, then spoke in tones of decision: “Now that we are met here, let us get to the bottom of this, and let us do it quickly.”
Count Thraxton looked as if he’d just taken a big bite from bread spread with rancid butter. “Your Majesty, I still feel your visit here is altogether unnecessary. This army has done quite well as things stand.”
“I know how you feel, your Grace,” Geoffrey said. He was not normally a man to care much for the feelings of others, but Thraxton was a longtime friend of his. Nevertheless, having made up his mind, he went ahead; he was nothing if not stubborn. “I have had a number of complaints from these officers here” -he waved to James, Leonidas, and Dan- “and also from several brigadiers about the way the Army of Franklin has been led since the fight at the River of Death. As I told Earl James, for the sake of the kingdom I intend to get to the bottom of these complaints, and to set the army on a sound footing for defeating the southrons.”
“Very well, your Majesty.” Thraxton still looked revolted, but he couldn’t tell King Geoffrey what to do and what not to do.
Geoffrey swung his gaze from the unhappy Thraxton to the Army of Franklin’s subordinate-and insubordinate-generals, who were just as unhappy for different reasons. “Well, gentlemen?” the king asked. “What say you? Is Count Thraxton fit to remain in command of this host, or is he not?”
James of Broadpath blinked. He’d never expected King Geoffrey to be so blunt. Geoffrey was a good man, a clever man, a brave man, an admirable man… but not a warm man, not a man to make people love him. James could see why. Avram would have handled things more deftly-but Avram wanted to wreck the foundations upon which the northern provinces were built. And so James, like the rest of the north, had no choice but to follow Geoffrey.
And, like Leonidas the Priest and Dan of Rabbit Hill, he had no choice but to answer Geoffrey’s question. Leonidas spoke first: “Your Majesty, in my view you must make a change. Count Thraxton has shown he has no respect for the gods, and so we cannot possibly expect the gods to show him any favor.”
“I agree with the hierophant, though for different reasons,” James of Broadpath said. I must not hang back, he thought. As the king said, it’s for the kingdom’s sake. “Once we beat the southrons, we should have made a proper pursuit. We should have flanked them out of Rising Rock instead of chasing them back into the town and letting them stand siege there-not that it’s a proper siege, since we don’t surround them and since they keep bringing in reinforcements.”
“They have a demon of a time doing it,” Thraxton broke in, “and they will have an even harder time keeping all those men fed.”
“They never should have had the chance to get them into Rising Rock in the first place,” James returned, his temper kindling.
King Geoffrey held up a slim hand. “Enough of this bickering. Too much of this bickering, in fact. And I have not yet heard from Baron Dan. How say you, your Excellency?”
“Oh, I agree with Leonidas and James here,” Dan of Rabbit Hill replied without hesitation. “An army is only as good as its head. With Thraxton in charge of the Army of Franklin, we might as well not have a head.”
Thraxton glared. Dan glared back. James wondered whether, in all the history of the world, a commanding general had ever had to listen to his three chief lieutenants tell his sovereign that he wasn’t fit to hold the post in which that sovereign had set him.
By King Geoffrey’s expression, he hadn’t expected those chief lieutenants to be quite so forthright, either. But he could only go forward now. “Very well, gentlemen,” he said. “You tell me Count Thraxton does not suit you. To whom, then, should command of this army go?”
Again, Baron Dan didn’t hesitate: “The best man this army could possibly have at its head is Duke Edward of Arlington.”
Well, that’s true enough, James thought. He’d asked James of Seddon Dun for Duke Edward himself. Edward was the best man any Detinan army, northern or southron, could possibly have at its head. King Avram had thought so, too. He’d offered the duke command of the southron armies as the war began. But Edward, like most northerners, had chosen Geoffrey as his sovereign, and had been making the southrons regret it ever since.
King Geoffrey knew exactly what he had in Duke Edward. He didn’t hesitate, either, but shook his head at once. “No,” he said. “I rely on Edward to hold the southrons away from Nonesuch.”
Dan of Rabbit Hill had to bow to that. But, as he bowed, he muttered under his breath, loud enough for James to hear: “If we hang on to Nonesuch and nothing else, we’ve still lost the stinking war.”
The king, perhaps fortunately, didn’t hear him. “Earl James,” Geoffrey said, “perhaps you have another candidate in mind?”
“Perhaps I do, your Majesty,” James of Broadpath said. “If you cannot spare Duke Edward from the west, Marquis Joseph the Gamecock might do very well here. The kingdom has not got all the service it might have from him since he was wounded last year and Duke Edward took charge of the Army of Southern Parthenia. He’s a brave and skillful soldier, and I happen to know he is quite recovered from his wound.”
King Geoffrey was not a warmhearted man-that had already occurred to James. But the icy stare the king gave him now put him in mind of a blizzard down by the Five Lakes country. As Geoffrey had once before, he said, “No,” again, this time even more emphatically. “Whatever Marquis Joseph’s soldierly qualities-and I do not choose to debate them with you-he does not hold my trust. He who names him again does so on pain of my displeasure.”