Interlude: Defend

I spent last night with Cawti, an Eastern girl who has agreed to marry me. She has a wonderful smile and a good hand with a dagger, and she knows how to listen. We lay in my bed, pleasantly exhausted, her hair all over my chest and my arm around her shoulder, and I spoke with her about the proposal from Sethra the Younger. She listened without a word until I ran down, then she said, “And?”

“And what?” I said.

“And why did you expect anything different?”

“Well, I don’t suppose I did.”

“Are you still angry?”

“Not so much. Like you said, I should have expected it.”

“And what about her proposal?”

“What about it? Can you imagine me accepting it?”

“Certainly.”

“You can?”

“I have a great imagination.”

“Among other things, yes. But—”

“But, if she hadn’t been so annoying, what would you have thought about it?”

“Why should I care?”

“Aliera.”

“What about her?”

“She’s why you should care.”

I sat up just a little, found a glass of a very dry white wine that we’d kept cold by setting it in a bucket of ice. I drank some, then held the glass for Cawti. She squeezed my shoulder by way of thanks, and I said, “You think I owe her something?”

“Don’t you?”

“Hmmmm. Yeah. What with one thing and another, I suppose so.”

“Then you should probably tell her about the offer, so she can decide for herself.”

“I hate the idea of doing a service for Sethra the Younger.”

“Yes, I know. I hardly blame you, but…”

“Yes, but.”

The wine went down nicely. A welcome breeze came through the window.

“I think it’s going to rain,” said Cawti.

“I’ll speak to Aliera tomorrow,” I said.

“Would you like me to come along?”

“Very much,” I said.

“All right. I think I’m sleepy now.”

“Sleeping comes highly recommended as a cure for that.”

“You think? Next you’ll tell me that eating is a good cure for hunger.”

“Temporary, but it’ll take care of the symptoms. Are you hungry?”

“Yes, but I’m more sleepy.”

“Then we’ll have breakfast tomorrow. One problem at a time.”

“Good idea,” she said sleepily, and nestled into my shoulder.

“I wonder what Aliera will say. She doesn’t think much more of Sethra the Younger than I do.”

Cawti didn’t answer. If she wasn’t already asleep she was close to it. I set the wineglass down next to the table, then pulled the covers up. Outside, it began to rain. I thought about shuttering the windows, but it was too much work, and the rain smelled nice.

That was yesterday. This morning Cawti and I found Aliera in the library of Castle Black. Going there today, after spending so much time thinking about, remembering, those first few times I’d been within the walls of that peculiar place, caught me up. I looked at it as if seeing it anew—as I’d first seen it years ago before war and love and war. To me Castle Black has always seemed palatial, with the grand, sweeping stairway and the three great chandeliers lighting the enormous hallway, all of them decorated by artwork one might expect to find in the Imperial Palace itself, artwork that is violent and beautiful at once, as, I suppose, are the Dragons at their best.

At their worst they are brutal and ugly.

Aliera said, “Greetings, Vlad, Cawti.”

We both bowed. Cawti said, “How is Norathar?”

“Adjusting. Becoming reconciled. She’ll make a good Empress.”

I glanced at my betrothed, but if the subject was still painful for her, which I was certain it was, she gave no sign of it. Every once in a while I wondered how the House of the Dragon felt about its next Empress having once been a Jhereg assassin, but chances were good I’d be long dead by the time the Cycle turned, so I didn’t give it that much thought, and it was one of the things Cawti and I still had trouble talking about so I don’t know how she felt about it.

I said, “I have a proposal for you.”

Aliera put down her book—I didn’t catch the title—and tilted her head. “Yes?” she said, in a tone that indicated, “This is bound to be good.”

“It comes from Sethra the Younger.”

Her green eyes narrowed and appeared slightly grey. “Sethra the Younger,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

“What does she want?”

“Kieron’s greatsword.”

“Indeed? The sword of Kieron the Conqueror. She wants me to give it to her. Well, isn’t that sweet.”

“I’m just passing on a message.”

“Uh-huh. And what is she offering for it?”

“I think you can guess, Aliera.”

Aliera studied me, then slowly nodded. “Yes, I suppose I can, at that. Why don’t you both sit down.”

She looked at us, her grey eyes squinting. She held her wineglass, a fine piece of cut crystal, so that the chandelier made a rainbow through it that decorated the dark wood table next to her.

“What do you two think?” she said at last.

“We’re delighted, of course,” I said. “We’d like nothing better than to have Sethra the Younger butcher a few thousand Easterners.”

She nodded. “There’s more to this than that, however.”

“Yes,” I said. “There is.”

“I’m surprised you’re even bringing me the proposition.”

“I wasn’t going to,” I said. “But Cawti talked me into it.”

Aliera turned an inquiring gaze at Cawti, who said, “It’s something you should know about.”

She nodded. “Morrolan claims to have an idea what it is, but Sethra the Younger claimed it, and he didn’t have the—well, he chose not to dispute it.”

“If you get it,” I said, “he still won’t. Unless you give it to him.”

“It may be,” she said, “that, whatever it really is, a Great Weapon, as we suspect, or something else entirely, it has been trying to come to me all along.”

I thought back on the Serioli, and on the Wall, and on everything that had happened, and I said, “That is a disgusting thought.”

She turned her glance to me, frowning as if I’d spoken in a foreign language, but continued her thought without answering me. “If so, to fail to take it would be to ask for more trouble, and greater.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “I seem to remember Kieron the Conqueror promising to come after you if you gave his sword away.”

“Yes,” said Aliera. “And that is, of course, another advantage.”