Empress of Flames
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Synopsis
Princess Lu knows that the throne of the Empire of the First Flame rightfully belongs to her. After all, she is the late Emperor's firstborn and has trained for the role all her life. And she can't forget made a promise to shapeshifter Nok, the boy she came to love, to win justice for his now powerless people. But even with an army at her side, Lu will need to face down a major obstacle: the current sitting Empress, her once beloved younger sister, Min.
Princess Min used to live in Lu's shadow. But now she can control a powerful, ancient magic, and she's determined to use it to forge her own path and a strong future for the Empire, even if that means making enemies in court. But Min's magic isn't entirely under her control, and she must learn how to tame it before it consumes her . . . and the entire realm.
Lu and Min are set for a confrontation that can't be stopped. But the Empire faces threats greater than their rivalry, and even if they choose to stand together, it could cost them both the throne-or their lives.
Release date: August 19, 2021
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Print pages: 496
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Empress of Flames
Mimi Yu
Dust
Adé lit the altar candles from right to left, like reading words on a page. The Mak family’s shrine was modest: a red-lacquered cabinet as high as her knee, its doors propped open to reveal a wood statuette of the Mercy Goddess, her painted face smiling sweetly down at the incense and flowers Ori and Nobi had left at her feet. Normally her twin brothers would offer a bit of food as well – a bowl of rice, a peach, a pair of tangerines. But not with the shortages of late.
Adé shook out her pinewood match and bowed thrice. Beside the incense sat her late father’s silver compass. She kissed the tips of her fingers and touched them reverently to its cold face. This part was her own private ritual, something she’d invented just for him.
Grant my mother peace, and my brothers joy, she prayed, her usual recitation. And keep them safe from harm, she added. Unrest had fallen upon the Outer Ring of Yulan City in the wake of the food shortages. Heated protests at the gates of the Inner Ring – and thieves borne of desperation padding across the rooftops. At night, her mother had taken to barricading their door and windows.
During the day, the whispers were all over the streets: granaries in the borderlands picked clean, fields that should have been forests of millet and sorghum this time of year blanched dry as old bone. Starving farmers selling their babies and eating the corpses of their neighbours. Oddly, despite these gruesome rumours, Adé had yet to hear anyone utter the word itself: Famine. As though to say the thing would draw it to the city.
One trouble at a time. There were other matters close at hand. She hesitated at the altar. She rarely asked anything for herself, but tonight … And please, don’t let me make a complete fool of myself at dinner, she prayed quickly.
‘Adé, is that you? Shouldn’t you be leaving soon?’ Her mother emerged from the bedroom. She was smiling, until she saw Adé crouched on the floor before the altar. Lin’s eyes darted to the compass and the candles. She didn’t frown, exactly, but the muscles in her face twitched, working against the impulse.
Adé stood quickly. Their mother had stopped tending to the shrine after their father died, and while she’d never told the children to follow suit, Adé had taken to performing the daily ritual only when she wasn’t looking, as though it were something shameful, or maybe just hurtful. Something Lin couldn’t be allowed to see.
‘You’ve already dressed,’ her mama said. ‘Well, I can plait your hair at least.’ But all the merriment had slipped away. The hand she held out was limp, as though sagging with the spectre of grief.
Adé could have kicked herself. Nothing to do about it now; she followed her mother into their shared bedroom and positioned herself before the dented brass mirror – one of the few remnants of her mother’s childhood home, her old life.
‘The Ellandaise style suits you,’ her mama said, looking her reflection up and down. Adé’s dress had been a gift from Carmine, imported from his homeland. It was structured and stiff in the bodice, with a dense trail of golden buttons flowing from the low-cut neckline skimming her collarbones, down to a severely flared peplum. Below, the dress gave way to an absurd confection of tulle that served as a skirt. The colour was nice, though: a rich, deep burgundy that gave her skin a plummy glow.
‘It’s a pity the Ellandaise couldn’t make your wedding dress this colour,’ her mother commented, as though reading Adé’s mind. ‘White wedding gowns! The colour of ash and death. Barbaric. But I suppose we can’t help that.’
Adé hid a smile. Nothing lifted her mother’s spirits quite like cheerfully insulting others.
Lin loosed the silk scarf wrapped protectively around the tight, springy coils Adé had inherited from her father. Adé stared at their metallic, warped reflections as her mother set to work plaiting with strong, wiry hands. Adé’s own hands fluttered open and closed as she gazed at the well-heeled stranger staring back at her. She reached for the pendant hanging around her neck: a dove carved from pure silver, the contours of each tiny feather painstakingly engraved. Its little jewelled eyes, lustrous blue-green, flashed as they caught the light.
Fluorite, Carmine had called the gems when he’d given Adé the necklace a week prior. How much rice could such a trinket fetch at market? How many tangerines or turnips was this hunk of silver worth? She swallowed the thought; her mother would never tolerate it. The shame. It seemed Carmine had a new gift for Adé every time she turned around, but they were never things a person could eat or use, only look at.
She tugged the dove charm absently back and forth along the chain. Back and forth, caught on its terse, tight, little track.
Her mother smacked her hand. ‘Ouch!’ Adé yelped.
‘You’re going to break it.’
Adé dropped the charm. It fell back inside her bodice, where it hung, cold and heavy against her chest.
‘Make sure you eat a lot tonight,’ her mother said. ‘It will be the last full meal you’ll see for heaven knows how long.’
Adé had to bite her lip to stop herself from asking again if her mother and the boys might join her at the Anglimns’. It would ensure they too ate something substantial this week. But she knew her mother would never accept it.
Lin had been born wealthy – the daughter of landed gentry, raised in a sky manse that been in the family for generations. But she’d lost it all – for love, Adé always reminded her, what better reason was there? – and being around Carmine’s family would remind her of what had been, and by contrast, what she was now. Another harried mother in Scrap-Patch Row with coarse hands and broken teeth, eking out a meagre living cooking for labourers and darning aprons and socks for their neighbours.
There was nothing shameful in it. Never anything shameful in the ferocity of her survival, the brutality of life writ on her body, in the tired way she held herself. Not in Adé’s eyes. But Lin had been raised on different values from her daughter.
‘You’re beautiful,’ her mother said, binding her plait and letting it fall against the back of Adé’s neck. Then she rested her chin on Adé’s shoulder, kissed her cheek and smiled at the both of them in the mirror.
‘It’s a pity you didn’t get your father’s height. But the dress makes you look taller, at least.’
Adé’s eyes cut to her mother’s reflected face, but there was nothing haunting the comment; Lin was only saying what she’d said. Adé let herself breathe. It felt wrong to find relief in her mother forgetting the pain of losing Adé’s father, even if it was only for a moment. But that was life in Scrap-Patch Row; sometimes things were so dire you had to celebrate the less-bad option because there were no good ones.
‘We should hire you a rickshaw to take you to Carmine’s,’ Lin said. ‘I don’t want to risk your getting caught up in the riots. Especially going into the foreign sector and dressed like that.’
They’d think I might be worth robbing, Adé thought ruefully.
‘It doesn’t feel right,’ she said. ‘To go to a fancy dinner when we – our neighbours – don’t even have a speck of barley to their name.’
Lin sighed and tucked a stray curl back into the upsweep of Adé’s braids.
‘The shortages won’t last forever. Empress Min’s reign is young. Transitions of power beget precarity, even in the best of circumstances. Everything will sort itself out eventually.’
Adé watched her brow furrow in the mirror. ‘Was it like this when Emperor Daagmun was enthroned?’
‘Not quite like this,’ her mother conceded. ‘There was no drought. But there were similarities. Everyone questioned whether Daagmun would be strong enough to lead. He was the unfavoured youngest brother, and only ended up on his throne because Prince Hwangmun was killed in that terrible accident.’
A rockslide while riding in the borderlands. Adé knew that much.
‘You know, I met Hwangmun, once. My father took me to court with him. I must have been Ori and Nobi’s age. Gods, was the prince handsome. Like something from a fable. And such broad shoulders.’
Adé groaned. ‘Mama!’
Lin gave a rare laugh. Then she went solemn again. ‘Don’t worry yourself about the current climate. Emperors – and Empresses – play their games, time moves forward, and the rest of us find a way to move along with it.’
Except for those that don’t. The people as a whole might carry forth – but what of the bodies left in their wake?
‘You carry such heavy burdens on your little shoulders,’ her mother murmured, as though hearing her thoughts. ‘Try to enjoy yourself tonight. A bit of indulgence would do you good.’
The silver chopsticks in Adé’s hand beat a nervous staccato against her porcelain plate. Such a delicate, pretty sound. It matched the delicate and pretty everything-else of Carmine’s parents’ grand dining room: the brocade tablecloth with its bracken of prickly gold stitching, the stiff-backed wooden chairs and their tufted ivory cushions. The silk rug, and in the corner of the room, a gilded hutch larger than many of the shanties in Scrap-Patch Row. All of it capped with the coloured glass-plated dome that formed the ceiling above.
The Anglimns lived with the rest of the Ellandaise in the foreign sector of Yulan City. Located south of the Milk River, close to the harbour, it comprised a cluster of homes that had been inhabited by wealthy Hana a half-century prior, before shifting fortunes had changed the neighbourhood. While the area had fallen into disrepair during the intervening years, the properties maintained the haughty, elegant bones of their beginnings: sprawling estates of many buildings connected by wooden bridges arching over ornamental gardens.
The foreign sector was heavily defended by their own guards, as well as a combination of imperial soldiers and local mercenaries hired by the Eastern Flame Import Company. And if that weren’t enough, each property on the street was shrouded behind high, gabled stone walls with elaborately painted – and securely locked – doors.
The Anglimns’ home was easily among the largest. It was hard to take it all in without gawking. One didn’t live in such splendour if they didn’t wish for others to look, but Adé didn’t wish to seem covetous in front of her soon-to-be in-laws.
In-laws. The thought made her tap her chopsticks harder, their rhythm quickening as though mimicking her pulse.
It occurred to her that chipping a dish might also leave an unfavourable impression, and she stilled her hand. Grace renewed, she lifted a tiny bite of what Carmine had told her was venison to her lips.
‘We pleased, so much, you are here,’ Carmine’s mother said to her in halting Yueh. The woman’s name in her native Ellandaise tongue was something unpronounceable, but it translated in Yueh to Fuchsia, and that’s what she had insisted Adé call her. It felt wrong, calling a parent by their given name, so Adé did her best to avoid calling her anything at all.
‘Mother, you can speak in Saxil,’ Carmine reminded her. ‘Adé is nearly fluent, now. She has a talent for language.’
Adé flushed. ‘Fluent’ was an exaggeration, but not by much. She had been a quick study.
Missara Anglimn pouted, perhaps at the implication that she herself had not been such a quick study in Yueh. A small gesture, but one that reminded Adé that she was an interloper, not just in this family, but in this house. In this part of the city. No matter how proper her Saxil was.
The increased presence of household guards didn’t help. Two at every entrance to the dining room, and more circumambulating the perimeter of the outside gate like nervous, oversized monks. They were all Ellandaise, garbed in stiff, high-collared wool uniforms, their eyes shadowed by helmets trimmed in fur.
The riots.
Violence hadn’t yet reached the foreign sector, and given the wealth and steel protecting it, Adé had trouble believing it ever would. Elsewhere fear was an inevitability; here it felt like playacting. But the way Missar Anglimn kept making searching eye contact with the men, or ducking away to furtively speak with them, set her on edge.
There was a good deal of anti-foreigner sentiment among the rioters. The drought, the hunger, the unstable throne, and the Ellandaise with their money and their grasping – each had been a separate bit of kindling, but once set alight, they were indistinguishable in the flames.
‘Adé?’
She blinked and looked around. They were all staring at her. She felt her cheeks burn, as though they could see the memories she was conjuring reflected in her eyes.
‘I-I’m so sorry. I was just feeling a bit faint.’
‘Oh, I hope it’s not our food,’ Missar Anglimn – Parthan – said. ‘I know our cuisine must seem strange to you.’
‘No! Of course not! The food is delightful. I especially like the …’ Adé gazed down at her plate. Everything was mashed. Even the meat. ‘Thank you for having me. It is a … a joy to be here.’
‘The joy is all ours,’ said Missar Anglimn. He folded his napkin and placed it on the table. ‘Is everyone ready for the next course?’ Without waiting for a response, he raised a little silver bell next to his plate and rang it. The double doors at the eastern end of the hall opened, and two Hana serving men entered to clear their dishes, then left as quickly as they had come. Immediately, the western doors opened and two different Hana men wheeled in a new cart of food on covered silver plates. Adé felt a pang of guilt when one of the men took her setting; I’m no better than you, she wanted to tell him. I’m no different.
‘Adé, my dear, has Carmine discussed baptising you into the church?’ Carmine’s mother said as the men set a new array of porcelain plates in front of them. ‘We must see you converted before the wedding, and the date swiftly approaches!’
‘Mother,’ Carmine chided, as though this were something they had talked about before.
Adé looked between them uncertainly. ‘Conversion?’ Carmine and his parents weekly attended their church, a rather pointy-looking building larger even than their home, but she hadn’t considered that they would expect her to do the same. Though perhaps she should have. Their priests were a fanatical breed, ranting in the streets about idolatry and demanding passersby surrender to the will of their jealous god, until imperial troops or annoyed merchants chased them back into the foreign sector.
‘The idea of baptism must be confusing to our Adé,’ Missar Anglimn interjected with an air of mild academic interest. ‘The Hanaman are not monotheists. Nor many of the Westermen. A very novel combination of blood, the Westermen and the Hanaman.’
Adé reached for her wine glass as Missara Anglimn eagerly nodded in agreement with her husband. ‘I hardly think anyone back in Elland would believe such a … a mixture!’
The wine caught in Adé’s throat. Mercifully, a rap came at the dining room door just as she began sputtering. An Ellandaise guard detached himself from the wall and answered it. Another guard entered, strode over to Missar Anglimn, and leaned down to whisper in his ear.
Adé couldn’t hear the words, but Missar Anglimn’s brow furrowed, and a moment later he stood.
‘I must beg your forgiveness,’ he said, wiping immaculate hands on his cloth napkin. ‘Something unexpected has arisen and I must attend to it at once. Please, continue supper without me.’
‘Business, Parthan?’ scolded Missara Anglimn. ‘At this hour?’
Her husband gave a tremulous, distracted smile. ‘The flow of capital never rests. Neither can I.’
‘I’m sorry we don’t have anywhere to go,’ Carmine said as they strode through the gardens after dinner, cutting through the wide, neatly clipped lawn. It seemed absurd to Adé, to have such an enormous garden and grow nothing in it but grass. If she had a yard, she would fill it with fruit trees and flowers. A bed of greens could be planted there, in the shade of the outer wall, and the heat-loving hot peppers Ori liked so much would thrive right in the centre. She’d spent most of her life in the city, but she knew a little about gardening from assisting Omair …
Omair.
She’d been back just once to Omair’s house since the incident three moons ago. The front door had been swinging open on the wind, all his tiny apothecarist’s drawers yanked open, bereft of their contents. Nearby villagers had ransacked the abandoned property, most like. It had been eerie, a violation of her second home. But worst of all had been the blackish stains: one on the wall at the height of a man’s head dragged down to a much wider patch on the floor. She’d told herself the first had been too high to be Omair or Nok. Still, more than one man might die in a room at a time, and there were ways of killing that did not involve shedding a single drop of blood—
Carmine squeezed her hand. ‘Did you have a nice time tonight?’
‘Of course.’ She groaned and rubbed her belly with her free hand. ‘So much food, though. Do you Ellandaise always have three courses for dinner?’
‘Only when we have important visitors.’
‘I’m important?’ she teased.
‘Very.’
Not important enough for your father to stay for the duration of the meal.
‘Your family’s house is as big as a sky manse,’ she said instead. ‘Well, I’m guessing it is, at least. I’ve never actually been inside a sky manse.’ Her mother’s family had owned one of the historic homes, embedded in the massive inner wall that circled the Immaculate City where the emperor resided, but that had been before her mother’s disownment, and the subsequent collapse of the family’s fortunes.
‘If I could, I’d buy it back for you.’
For a moment Adé did not understand. ‘Buy it back … you mean, my family’s sky manse?’ She couldn’t help it; she laughed. ‘You can’t buy a sky manse. Those plots were gifts directly from the first Hana emperor to his most trusted friends. They’ve been passed down by families for centuries. Even when one falls vacant due to the absence of an heir, the current emperor decrees a new holder. No amount of money could—’
‘I know, I know,’ he interrupted. ‘We learned all about it in school: the properties are symbols of the emperor’s friends’ commitment to protecting the capital and the integrity of the kingdom, each plot is like a brick in a wall, or a link in a chain, each deriving its strength from unity … and so on.’
Something about the way he recited it annoyed her. But he was being kind, so she allowed him to reclaim her arm in his own.
It took her some time to work up the courage to say it, but finally she could stand it no longer. ‘Are you going to tell me, or do I have to ask?’
He looked genuinely baffled. ‘Ask …? Ask what?’
‘Carmine.’ She put a hand to his chest, stopping him short. ‘I’m the daughter of a dead foreigner. I come from Scrap-Patch Row. What could your family possibly gain from our union?’
‘We’re foreign, too,’ he pointed out evasively.
‘Yes, but you have a home you can go back to. A home where you would be just as rich as you are here. Richer, even, if half of what you tell me about Brekton is true.’
He cast his eyes around the empty garden before turning back to her, pale eyes full of something like guilt. ‘You know I love you, right? Truly, I do. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known … ever seen.’
‘If you love me that much then be honest.’
‘My father thinks it will suit the company’s interests here if I marry a Hana,’ Carmine conceded. ‘He says the empire’s rulers are so insular that the only way to gain true access to power here is to … you know, become part of the family, so to speak.’
A giggle escaped her. She couldn’t help it. ‘Are you serious? What connections does your father think I have?’
‘It’s less about connections at this point than appearances. He tried to arrange marriages for me before,’ Carmine admitted slowly. ‘Long, long before I met you. When we first arrived here from Elland.’
‘First Ring girls?’ she guessed.
He gave her a rueful look. ‘Think higher.’
‘A minister’s daughter?’
‘Higher still.’
She covered her mouth. ‘No!’ She looked furtively up and down the street before whispering, ‘He thought the emperor would let you marry one of his daughters?’
‘Not just one of the daughters.’ Carmine grinned. ‘The daughter. The elder one. His best beloved.’
Adé giggled. She couldn’t help it. The thought of a princess wedding a merchant’s son …
‘Well,’ Carmine continued, ‘his best beloved, before she killed him.’
The laughter caught in Adé’s throat as she remembered a carnelian stone the size of a pigeon’s egg, embedded in the pommel of a sword that was resting incongruous on Omair’s cluttered kitchen table. Remembered turning to see the barbed end of a crossbow bolt aimed at her head. A tall girl dressed neck to toes in custom finery, glaring as Nok pushed her toward the door …
‘My father didn’t understand,’ Carmine said. ‘Here, everyone likes money, but not the dirty business of earning it. In Elland, there’s no stigma against traders or merchants. In fact, wealth and honour often go hand-in-hand. We have a saying, “you cannot have a Capital without capital”. Anyway, he assumed Emperor Daagmun would welcome the match if it meant an influx of Ellandaise silver, given all his debts.’
Adé forced out another laugh that sounded more like a cough. ‘Well, obviously that plan fell through.’
He shuddered. ‘Thank the gods someone explained why that would be a mistake before he could offer. Otherwise, I’m sure our family would be short a head or two.’
Carmine pulled his pipe out of his jacket, dusted tobacco into the bowl, and lit it. As they passed a pair of guards stationed along the wall, he spoke to them in the flat tones of Saxil around the stem of his pipe. ‘Evening, men. Looks like everything is peaceful?’
‘Let us hope it stays that way,’ one of them said, glowering out into the darkness. The long rifle slung over his shoulder made Adé shiver. Suddenly, she was very glad the violence would not reach this part of the city – not out of fear for the Ellandaise, but for the rioters.
‘Are you cold?’ Carmine asked.
She pulled away so he couldn’t feel her shiver again. ‘No – I just had too much wine. I need to relieve myself.’
‘I’ll help you find the lavatory.’
‘I’m sure it’s in the same place it was last time,’ she assured him. ‘You stay out here with your pipe. I know your mother doesn’t like seeing you smoke.’
The lavatory was not in the same place it had been last time. Or, Adé had to admit, perhaps she was simply lost. She found herself in a long hallway that was lined with heavy wooden doors on one side, glass-paned windows on the other, and empty save a Hana carpet and several quite detailed sculptures of women in scandalous states of undress. Those were definitely not Hana.
‘But they had her buried!’
Adé jumped. Missar Anglimn’s voice emanated from behind the nearest door.
‘Did anyone see the body?’ The voice belonged to a man and had a deeper, baritone quality. Blustery in contrast to Anglimn’s reedy, academic tenor. Both men spoke in Saxil.
Praying they hadn’t heard her, Adé made to leave, stepping as lightly as she could—
‘She didn’t lie in state, didn’t have a funeral. Isn’t that odd?’ the blustery man continued.
‘Not for a disgraced princess who killed her father, it isn’t.’ Missar Anglimn sounded unimpressed.
Princess? Adé paused. Once more, she saw a crossbow aimed at her face, glinting copper eyes. Nok, leaping between them—
‘This isn’t just one sighting from some drunken cadet,’ said the other man. ‘There have been multiple reports of a band of armed Yunians and slipskins, led by a girl with a sword bearing the imperial insignia. They ran into an imperial scouting party last week – killed all but one of their men. And, listen to this: they were headed south.’
‘Hmm,’ mused Anglimn. ‘You said this information comes from the captain of the city guard?’
‘It does. He says there’ll be a curfew tonight, by the way. More riots expected.’
Adé leaned in. This was the first she’d heard of a curfew.
‘This food shortage is becoming a true a hardship.’ Anglimn sighed and wood creaked, as though he were leaning back in a chair. ‘The crown declined my request to send more soldiers, so I had to hire mercenaries out of my own pocket – the passage here is not cheap when you have to pay it for thirty men. And that’s on top of their fee. But what was I to do? Fuchsia can hardly sleep for worry. I had to get the best men available.’
‘So sorry to hear,’ the other man said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘Anglimn, are you hearing what I’m saying? If the elder princess is alive, the throne is still in dispute. Empress Min’s rule is even more precarious than we thought.’
‘It’s certainly not ideal. But I’ve been assured by Minister Cui that they have the leaders of the army and navy in their pockets. I don’t foresee Princess Lu mounting a coup without either of those.’
‘Still. Lu has the better claim, whether or not she murdered her father. And she has more charisma than the sister. Better-looking, too.’
‘And harder to control.’ Anglimn sounded irritated.
‘What about the rumours of the younger one’s … dabbling in sorcery?’
‘Contained. Cui assures me that wormy little priest with the shaved pate has her on a steady regimen of soporifics. We are well-situated. Cui even thinks we will be able to work out a trade deal for poppy tar within the year—’
‘If her reign lasts that long.’
‘It will last long enough for us to gain a foothold. And who knows? If we do it well, we may even be allowed to help select the next monarch.’
‘You need to think bigger.’ The man’s voice came from closer to the door and Adé stumbled back, startled. But then she heard the click of his boots – he was pacing. ‘There’s a chance for real power here. We need to make use of this instability.’
‘Instability,’ sniffed Anglimn, ‘is bad for business.’
‘Instability is business.’ The man’s tone was annoyed. ‘Use your imagination! Even you must have had one at some point, to have built a company like yours.’
‘I have a family to think of, now. I’m comfortable where I am.’
‘A comfortable man is as good as dead,’ drawled the other. He had an air of lazy superiority that suggested he was not subordinate to many, and certainly not to Anglimn. ‘Think on it. If we reach out to Princess Lu—’
‘You don’t know where she is!’
‘It won’t be hard to find her once she returns to the city. Something tells me she won’t stay away long.’
‘Need I remind you, we have an audience with the Empress – Empress Min – tomorrow? Whatever creative notions you have, I would strongly suggest laying them to rest. We’ve worked hard to get this alliance. The Ambassadeur has his orders from King Ryvan—’
The other man made a dismissive sound. ‘The Ambassadeur … now there is a man without imagination.’
‘Lamont,’ Anglimn chided. ‘What more could you want? Empress Min will do as she’s told, and we will have her ear whenever we like.’
Lamont, Adé thought, turning the name over in her mind. She had heard Carmine mention the man before, though she could not recall the context.
‘What good is an ear if someone else has the rest of her?’ There was a long pause, and Adé leaned in, wondering if something was amiss. When he next spoke, his voice was pitched low and quiet, an excited orange ember of a thing. ‘Think if we were the ones holding the puppet strings. No intermediary necessary. You’ve seen the wealth of this land. We could be as kings, Parthan.’
‘I already have a king. And so do you, or have you forgotten?’ Anglimn said primly.
‘I’m not suggesting we break away from Elland – far from it. But imagine doing here what we’ve done in the South. That Governor-General of Banga, what’s his name—’
‘Visconte Elgyn,’ Anglimn supplied.
‘Right, Elgyn. He has all but free rein. If we were to take this place for Ryvan, he would happily allow us control, so long as we sent a steady stream of silver across the sea.’
‘There’s still the small matter of the imperial army and navy,’ Anglimn reminded him.
‘Their navy is weaker than ours,’ Lamont dismissed. ‘And as for the army, they’re armed with what? Crossbows? A few rifles here and there? We have the superior weaponry. And need I remind you, we have …’ Lamont said a word Adé did not understand.
‘The—?’ Anglimn repeated sharply. Fearfully. ‘That was … Let it go, Lamont. If the stockpile Set spoke of ever existed, it is long gone, or—’
‘We know it existed. I still have the samples the boy gave us, before we offended him – what a prissy idiot he was … Heaven above, Anglimn, you look as though you’ve seen a ghost. You don’t really believe that nonsense he fed us about magic and other worlds, do you?’
‘Of course not,’ snapped Anglimn. ‘A thing doesn’t have to be … “magic” to be dangerous. And I thought you sent those samples to King Ryvan for e
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