Crownless Tyrant

The letter came five days later, and it was not in Due’s hand.

Alistair knew it was Sera’s before he had it fully open.

Due would never spend good coin on paper this fine.

Sera always did, even now, even smuggled across half a continent. across half a continent.

He broke the seal and sat with it near the one candle he allowed himself.

Sera wrote nothing as she spoke.

In a room, her words carried a dry edge, the kind that could quiet a council table with four of them. On the page, that edge was gone.

What was left read carefully, almost stiff, each line set down as though she expected it read aloud against her one day, before people who wished her ill.

The first page was the dispute, laid out plainly.

Tavin wanted to hold Frument’s western settlement. To move would look like fear, he argued, and fear once shown could never afterward be unshown. A faction seen to flinch would only be circled harder by the other six.

Sera wanted the opposite. She meant to pull the western settlement back to deeper Oasis ground now, while the choice of when still belonged to her and not to the army massing at her border.

They had argued it for the full hour of a council session, in front of Due.

Tavin won the procedural vote of Frument’s own leadership council, and Sera abided by it, since that was the law of the thing she had agreed to belong to.

’She is not the kind of woman who breaks a law the moment it turns against her,’ Alistair thought.

Yet she had set out Tavin’s reasoning honestly on the page, even generously, and that was the detail that unsettled him.

People are scrupulously fair to the side they mean to abandon. The fairness is the apology they make in advance.

Alistair’s jaw tightened as he turned to the second page.

The second page was shorter, and her hand on it was smaller, as if she had written it later, in worse light, after deciding something.

I do not know what you are doing where you are, she wrote. I know only that you are doing something, and that it is costing you, because Due defends your silence too well for the silence to be cheap.

You told us, before you left, that we would not be touched. Due is breaking himself by inches to keep that true, and I have watched him break a little more each week, and say nothing of it, because he believes none of us can see it. We can all see it. I think he knows we can, and keeps up the act regardless, since the act is the only thing left in his hands to give us.

But I have people.

Frument was mine before it was ever Sun Harvest’s, and that is the order of it inside me, and I will not pretend the order is different to spare your feelings, or Due’s.

If the day comes when the only way Frument survives is by leaving Sun Harvest’s protection, then I will take that choice, and I will take it without sending to ask you first.

I will not ask, because asking would only set the weight down on a man already carrying too much, too far away to do a single thing with it except say yes and then hate himself in a foreign city for the saying.

So I am telling you now, while it is still a possibility and not yet a wound, exactly what I will do if the possibility arrives.

I am telling you so that you are not surprised later.

I have decided you are the kind of man who would rather be handed a hard thing early than a soft thing late.

If I have judged you wrongly in that, then I have judged you wrongly in a great deal, and we are all in far worse trouble than I believe.

Sera.

Alistair read it three times.

The first time, he read it as a threat, a crack opening in the wall Due was bleeding himself dry to hold up.

The second time, he read it as a warning given in honesty, which was a kinder thing than a threat, and a rarer one.

The third time, he read it as what it truly was.

A woman telling him she would do right by her own people in the end, and granting him the dignity of knowing it in advance, and asking nothing in return. Not his blessing. Not even an answer.

’She did not ask me to forgive it,’ he thought. ’She did not ask me to agree. She asked me only not to be surprised. In this whole affair, with everyone using everyone and admitting it, that is the most honest respect a single person has shown me.’

He did not burn this one.

He set it instead at the bottom of the false lining of his case, flat beside the old dispatch about Glory.

Two pages, two threads he could not reach from here, both waiting in the one direction he was forbidden, for now, to travel.

After that, he sat in the dark a long while.

He thought about how many people were making the hard choice in his absence, and how every one of them made the choice he would have made in their place, and how that should have comforted him and did the opposite instead.

It truly should have been a comfort.

He had built Sun Harvest, in part, to be a thing that could go on without him. Here was the proof that it could.

Elara was closing houses in the south.

Due was reading armies down to the seams. Sera was deciding, alone and honestly, what she would do to keep her own people breathing. None of them is waiting on him.

All of them right.

Alistair was, for the first time in a long while, honestly unsettled.

’I taught them not to need me,’ he thought, ’and they learned it, and now I sit in another man’s skin and resent that they learned it. That is a small, ugly thing to feel, and I will feel it tonight, and be glad of it tomorrow.’

A faction that does not need its founder is a strong faction. Regardless, a founder who is not needed is only a man in a foreign city, learning that the people he loves have grown used to his absence, and doing it well, because he asked them to.

He set Sera’s page down beside Glory’s silence, and lay back on the hard cot, and let himself be that small, ugly, resentful man for one night.

Then his eyes narrowed at the ceiling, because the arithmetic of the letter would not leave him alone.

If Frument could break away this soon, then the wall Due was dying behind had less time left in it than any of them had told him.

Sera had written to prepare him for a possibility. Reading it again in his head, he understood it was already closer than that.

Tobian Marrow could not afford to wait out the months he had planned to wait.

He would have to move on Verissan far sooner, and far more recklessly, than was ever safe.