Sofia III

The countryside was bare as a priest's tonsured scalp. Once again Sofia sat in the backseat of a long black car rumbling down the Iron Road to Rassian, but this time it was with an army at her back. The ladies and lords of the Hornea, Brightwater, Welker, Gross, Anchor, and Brahm were all shut up in their castles with what men Laurent had left them. Most of the wealth and arms of the lands around the capital were now nestled in Rassian's bosom, along with the lion's share of the autumn crop. Between that harvest and a constant stream of grain and beef from the Rhydderlands in the south Laurent could sit on his ass until summer without fear of plague or famine in his city.

The snow was melting. Even at night meltwater flowed fast in the ditches beside the road and cascaded down the rolling hills in makeshift streams that would dry up and die in summer. The moon was full and washed the fertile countryside in argent light. The legions left churned earth and stubbled fields in their wake as they marched west to buy a fleet.

The baby kicked and Sofia's stomach roiled. She had reports to go over, clipboards stuffed with messages from her uncle's spies, from Kazimir's, from quartermasters and legion tribunes. Lord Rhovan's legions were embattled at Cold Fords but had both guns and numbers to their advantage. The rail lines running from the Empire's northern half to Rassian had been cut, the bridges dynamited so that the only way in was through the gates or the harbor. This war will bury me in paper. She set the reports on the seat and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her gown was tight and her swollen breasts had been tender since the morning sickness started; it made for frequent headaches.

Sieur Magnus, seated opposite her, looked up. “Are you well, Highness?”

Am I well? I'm losing a war I haven't started and my child is determined to transform me into some sort of dairy cow. “It's nothing, Magnus. I'm anxious to see the night's business done.”

“Lord Norman is a snake,” Sieur Magnus said reassuringly, “but we have his back to the sea. His ships will be yours.”

Gull's Folly, the seat of House Daguerre, was the westernmost of all the Hornea's great fortifications. It was a plain, stark place, a square tower with foundations hacked from the granite and basalt of the seaward cliffs. Its pilings stretched down to the dark, wild surf where the lights of Lord Norman's battle fleet rocked at anchor. Stepping from her car Sofia thought that the armada looked like a city, all buildings moored loosely one to another and subject to the sea's ruinous whims. A hundred ships. Two hundred. Enough to break Laurent ?

Sieur Magnus, Sieur Enri, and Sieur Jayne walked with Sofia toward the lighted tower. In her headpiece of gold filigree and trailing dress of midnight silk, its train embroidered with leviathans rampant, Sofia knew she looked her part. Still her palms were damp with perspiration. Daguerre's black cormorant on blue flew from a hundred flagpoles hammered into the naked stone along the path and at the gates men waited to admit them. Lord Norman's steward, a dour Rhyddish woman all in mourning blue with her Lord's cormorant tattooed on her wrinkled brow.

Sofia held out her hand. The woman kissed it.

“Take me to him.”

The climb to Lord Norman's apartments was a steep one. Sofia counted two hundred steps before they came to a landing with a seaward window on the left and a stout oaken door on the right. She took a moment to catch her breath before waving to the steward to admit them. The old woman opened the door on a long, low-ceilinged room forested with plain-cut beams of cedar. At a dining table sat a long-faced man with a head of thinning grey hair and a great red-veined beak of a nose. He wore a plain silk dressing gown and a stained undershirt. “Your majesty,” he said, looking up from his newspaper and his bowl of fruit and yogurt.

“Lord Norman.” Sofia took the seat at the table's end as her knights took up positions by the door. Mistrust radiated from Sieur Magnus like heat from sun-warmed pavement. I don't trust him either, but I have no choice.

Norman Daguerre folded his paper and set it aside. He produced a silver cigarette holder, extracted a cigarette, and lit it. “You want my fleet.” Smoke trickled from his hairy nostrils. He scooped up a spoonful of peaches and yogurt and, holding his cigarette between the first two fingers of his right hand, ate. “One hundred and sixty-six ships.”

Sofia clasped her hands in her lap as the baby kicked again. She hoped the dress Lord Kazimir's tailors had sewed for her hid her rounded stomach well enough. “I am your Queen.”

Lord Norman took a long drag on his cigarette. “What of it? I have a telegram from Rassian saying there's a king wants my ships as well. He'll pay, too, though that part's what we call a silent understanding.” He spoke the last words in a stage whisper. “So why should you get them?”

“It is your duty, Dominus. You served my grandmother-”

“Duty!” Lord Norman threw up his hands as if to ward off evil. “If I started doing my duty now, then where would I be tomorrow? I fought for Ysandre because I thought she'd win, and when the war was at an end and I knew I'd laid my bets like a fool I hurried off to Rassian to bend my knee to old Hanley.   You'll need a better reason than duty if I'm to send my men off to die with you.”

Sofia leaned back in her seat and let her Eye fall just the slightest bit open. At once the hundreds of minds within the tower assaulted her with their clamor, but she shoved them aside and focused her scrutiny on Norman. The knot in her stomach loosened as she probed the edges of the nobleman's mind. He would be trained against succumbing to a seer's influence, but she could still sound out his thoughts in safety. With a flicker of surprise she came upon herself seen through his eyes, a silly girl playing games with knights and cannon. Very well, let's change the game.

“Laurent is a fool.” She took her headpiece off. Her oiled hair slid out of its elegant knot and fell around her shoulders. “Give him your fleet and he'll take your oath for a year, maybe two, before his mother tells him you're plotting against him, or else he suspects it himself, and what's worse is that you will be plotting against him.” She reached back and loosened the satin ribbons binding her bodice. Dead God, that feels good. “So he'll have your head if he's feeling impatient, and if he's in a patient mood you'll rot in a dungeon less your hands, your tongue, your feet and most likely your cock.”

“A frightening tale,” said Lord Norman, looking thoroughly un-frightened.

“No,” said Sofia, shaking her head. “The frightening part is what happens when he's bored with you and you go down to the harbor to board a ship bound for heaven.”

He stubbed his cigarette out in his half-eaten bowl of yogurt. “The same heaven you would topple. You're an ambitious one.”

“I wouldn't be here otherwise.” She stood, knowing she gave Lord Norman a brief glimpse of her breasts. “I'd be in a ditch beside the Iron Road, where the Throne tried to put me.

“I'll require your answer by sunrise.” She turned to go.

“Exclusive fishing rights for the eastern coast, a one percent stake in all Rassian-based businesses and Imperial initiatives, the patronage of the Imperial Navy at my shipyards, primacy in the provinces of the Hornea and the exile of every living member of House Brightwater with their lands and titles ceded to my family, my son Nathan to assume governance of those lands at once, a one-time cash payment of six million marks, the marriage of your firstborn to one of my own children of fitting age, and...oh, let us say the restoration of my right to whale in northern waters.”

Sofia looked back at Lord Norman. He had lit another cigarette and was slumped indolently in his seat, his skinny legs crossed, his hands on his belly.

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “that should do it. Just.”

She closed her Eye. “Then consider it done, Lord Governor.”

In the shadow of Gull's Folly the legions were pitching camp. From the tower gates it seemed a river of men and machinery stretched back along the road, miles and miles of violence coiled up like a fist. Sofia inhaled deeply. She'd given Lord Norman enough to ensure that if the war tipped in her favor House Daguerre would rest comfortably on the spoils for a century. That Lord Norman had sons and had not so much as breathed the word “marriage” spoke volumes of his confidence in her achieving that outcome. What will he do if I fail? Fall to the floor and grovel, pleading that he was forced into treason by sorcery? She started down the banner-lined track toward the camp's outskirts. She had to piss, an occurrence now so common it no longer even irritated her.

Sieur Magnus fell in at her side like a gigantic bald raven. “You did well, highness.”

Sofia pulled a sour face. “I gave him everything but my underclothes.”

“You needed his ships, highness.” Magnus looked distinctly uncomfortable. “The northern fleet is small and outdated, and Leviathan Bay is strongly defended.”

The council tent was abandoned except for Lord Kazimir and the dwarf, Tilly Lemure. She had come south with her brothers and even wore a soldier's uniform in miniature, Lemure's water strider stitched on the collar. Seated on a high stool she perused a welter of dusty maps and troop movement reports. What a strange little woman, Sofia thought as she left Magnus and Enri and slipped through the tent flap into the musty murk of the tent.

“Your majesty.” Tilly looked up from her study of the maps. “Lord Norman is with us?”

“He is,” Sofia said. She sat down at the table's head and dipped her hands in a silver ewer set out for departed diners. Sieur Jayne brought a towel for her to dry them on. “Once we meet Lord Rhovan we will be ready to take the capital.”

The little red-haired woman had proven herself useful time and time again. She'd plotted courses for their long and troop-burdened advance, advised the quartermasters in planning their camps and even set with deft brilliance supply lines that kept even the poor fruits of the marshland provinces flowing quick and undetected across the breadth of the Hornea. Talia frowned down at a map of Rassian and its countryside. “My brothers say I should return to our fortress at Blackwater Pool.”

“War's a game,” Sofia said. She took a cigarette from a little brass dish on the table and lit it. “Men like to pretend they're best at it, to keep us away from the swords.” She felt cruel, rebellious, and bold. Beside her Sieur Jayne, who had earned her own knighthood driving the Umzadi from the coast, flashed a crooked smile.

The dwarf's oversized brow wrinkled. “Will you be on the battlefield, your majesty?”

“Yes.” Though Sieur Magnus had spent hours trying to convince her otherwise. “I'll command from the deck of Lord Norman's Masquerade.”

“I've read accounts.” The girl deftly rolled the map and returned it to its leather tube. Her face was pale. “I've never been in a battle, though.”

“Neither have I.” It felt strange to admit it when every day was spent playing the Queen, the Empress, the grand commander. The last woman of House Rassianus to take the field had been Queen Valeria the Wrathful, Lysander's youngest daughter who had seen nine of her brothers and sisters buried within the palace walls before herself rising to the throne. It had been she who finished her father's bloody work, bringing the Broken Isle, the Rhydderlands and the deep south of Artaxas into the imperial fold with two decades of brutal war.

“I think I'll stay, then.” Tilly climbed down from her stool and curtsied before leaving the pavilion. As the flaps parted Sofia glimpsed for an instant the lights of her new fleet rocking gently on the black waters of the bay. She watched the ships for a long, cold while and thought of Rassian. What would she do once she'd taken it? Bigger wheels than me are spinning. I have to be prepared.

“Highness?” Magnus, still standing like a pillar beside the tent's entrance, looked at her. “Do you need anything?”

A wave of nausea swept over Sofia, a tidal swell of it. Her stomach, now noticeably rounded, clenched and roiled. She looked up at the night. “No.”