A Practical Guide to Evil-Vol 7 Chapter ex22: Interlude: Occidental V

It was as if all the world had been cut down to three sights: the night sky above, the pale plains below and the tall tower bridging them. The dark was quiet, and there was not another soul to be found for miles around them.

“We are returned to Creation,” Hanno said, offering his hand to the prone princess.

Cordelia Hasenbach looked at it as it were a snake, then something like contempt flickered across her face. Jaw squared, she took the hand and he helped her rise from the grass. Her legs were unsteady but the First Prince was a stubborn woman: she toughed it out until her stance firmed.

“Do you know how much time has passed?” the princess asked.

“Since you were taken? I can only guess,” he replied. “But between my arrival here and yours, barely time enough for a kettle of water to boil. Arcadia makes sport of any who would measure its time.”

Had it been hours for those in the realm of the fae, moments? More the former than the latter, he guessed, but guesses were all he had to give. Hanno waited as Hasenbach gathered her bearings, taking in the utter emptiness of the plain around them before her gaze moved to the tower. The gate that Christophe had smashed open still lay sagging on its hinges, almost an invitation.

“I suspect,” Cordelia Hasenbach said, “that passing the threshold unprepared would be a costly mistake.”

“It ends soon,” Hanno quietly agreed. “Have your instincts grown enough to feel it?”

Cool blue eyes considered him. No answer came.

“It is in the air,” Hanno told her. “The roads grow short for the lack of ground left to tread.”

It was like a shortness of breath or unease in the limbs. The sensation that the story would soon reach its conclusion and that he was not ready. Here and now, the two of them alone under the sky, was the last chance to turn it around.

“Like an edge,” the princess finally said. “It feels like the moment before defeat, when the wheels and cogs are already moving but just before they snap into place.”

Hanno nodded. It was impressive, he thought, that even as a claimant she would have so sharp an impression. But then the First Prince had always been an impressive woman, hadn’t she? That had never been the trouble with her.

“The threshold is the point of no return,” the dark-skinned man pensively said. “But we have time before that, all the room that can be found in the boundary between Arcadia and Creation.”

That was what the world whispered to him, the current his crippled hand could almost feel. Time was undefined now, made… malleable by the gap between the two realms. But the story would lock into place the moment they crossed the threshold, leaving only the closure.

“Of course we do,” the First Prince said, sounding disgusted. “How many steps ahead did she plan this?”

Hanno’s lips thinned.

“Too many,” he said.

Blues eyes left the tower, returning to him.

“Then this conversation,” Cordelia Hasenbach calmly said, “is what determines victory and defeat.”

Victory and defeat, huh. Loaded words, on a night like this one: whose meaning for them was to be taken as gospel? His, the First Prince’s, Catherine’s? Or maybe that was the point of it all, he thought. Choosing whose lines in the sand determined the nature of the game.

“I am beginning to believe,” Hanno said, “that thinking in those terms is the first mistake. In a fight, someone must lose.”

“And what would you call this instead?” the First Prince of Procer said, gesturing around them.

Grass painted pale by moonlight, the depthless dark above and in between the tower that belonged to neither. Like stairs joining the heavens and the dirt. Going up or going down? Not something you could know, Hanno thought, before your foot first touched the stone.

“A journey, perhaps,” the Sword of Judgement finally replied.

Something with a beginning and an end, but not a battle. Not without struggle, for so few things were, but not something defined by struggle.

“A journey,” Cordelia Hasenbach repeated, tone musing.

The princess’s hand rose, fingers extended, as below them both the grass shivered from the breeze. Like she was trying to catch the wind.

“Maybe,” the fair-haired woman said. “But I am not so certain you and I are on the same one, Hanno of Arwad.”

A reply came to mind silver-quick, from the old law-riddles of Arishot’s Ruminations. Can strangers ever be on the same journey? He’d loved those scrolls as a young court scribe in Arwad, the way they forced you to think. Arishot had not written to make laws but instead lawmakers, asking questions that bent one’s understanding until flaws were revealed. That riddle warned against common blame, Hanno had thought, against faulting a rower and a captain the same way for a crime. But which of us is the rower, Cordelia Hasenbach, and the captain?

“I had thought,” Hanno admitted, “that this would end by the ascription of fault.”

The First Prince studied him, gaze composed.

“But no longer?”

Hanno snorted, suddenly tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.

“What does it matter,” he said, “if the pool one of us drowns in is a few feet deeper than the other’s?”

Hasenbach looked away as if burned by the sight of him.

“She took you to task as well,” the First Prince said.

“With method and great enthusiasm,” Hanno replied.

Some of that he knew she must have sat on for years. Too much of that had felt like a valve being opened, a sac of venom being drained.

“I as well,” the First Prince said, then hesitated.

Hanno patiently waited.

“She is convincing, I know,” the princess said. “That does not mean she is right.”

“I spent most of my time on the grass,” he admitted, “finishing the argument in my mind. Speaking the retorts I could not place, that escaped me in the moment.”

He could see now, looking back, that she had angered him on purpose. He would have spoken better calm, seen more clearly. He could have pointed it out it was absurd to pretend that the Saint or the Pilgrim to killing innocents in the pursuit of ending an evil was equivalent to a villain simply killing for evil. That her sacrifices, the weight they had given her Name, did not make her worthy. Just strong. That Hanno himself had made mistakes, but that if those disqualified him from wardenship then her own would make her the last woman allowed anywhere her title.

Like a fencing match, he had played it again and again in his mind. Every time swatting away more of her points, scoring more of his own. But one had never budged no matter what he cast against it.

“Did it change anything?” Hasenbach asked.

He breathed out slowly.

“Nothing that matters,” he admitted.

That was the difference between a fencing match and a duel, when it came down to it. One was won on points, the other ended when the opponent was killed. A thousand small cuts mattered nothing in the face of that single blow going through the heart. Do you think claimants grow on trees, Hanno? And no matter how much he turned around the words in his palm, looking for the fault, he had found none. Cool blue eyes were studying him again, looking for something in the cast of his face.

“What is it that she said that shook you so?” the First Prince asked.

An unpleasant truth, the dark-skinned hero thought. That I never stopped to consider that you might be right and I might be wrong. That your claim could be the equal to mine instead of an obstacle to overcome.

“That I should have asked you a question years ago,” Hanno replied. “W-

“-hat is it that you want, Cordelia Hasenbach?”

His tone was as serious as it was earnest, and still Cordelia almost laughed. She looked away so he might not notice, eyes finding the vast stretch of the plains. The sea of grass where strands of shadow and light interwove, under the starlit ink of the endless sky above them. Two seeming eternities pressing down on the stark silhouette of the tower, a stubborn nail refusing to be hammered in. But nothing could fight forever, Cordelia knew. Instead you were used up grain by grain until not a speck was left, the defeat so quiet and creeping you did not know of it before it embraced you.

What did she want?

For her uncle to be alive, her family with him. That the realm she had spent half her life healing had not become a wasteland ruin, that she could have kept everyone alive. That she had won more and lost less, that she had been the kind of woman who could have saved Procer instead of being the custodian of its death throes. That Calernia might know one long and lasting summer, a golden peace and time of plenty. That she was not carrying with her so many ugly choices, so many bitter compromises. And maybe, beneath it all, that she was still the same woman than before all the sacrifices she had made.

But that was looking back, and not even the Gods could return the arrow of time to the quiver. So instead Cordelia looked forward and sought her answer, shaving away the dross one cut at a time until there was only the bone of it left. It was even simpler than she had thought.

“I want my successor to be able to hang the Peregrine,” the princess said, then frowned.

That was not quite it. The arrow missed by a thumb.

“No, I speak untrue.”

She breathed out, groping at the truth, and finally the words came to her,

“I want a world where it is a given the Peregrine will hang,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “Where there is no doubt that someone, anyone, who murders an entire town of innocents will die for it. That there will be no excuse, no protection, no talk of a Choir giving absolution or a greater good hiding behind the mountain of corpses.”

Catherine had talked about so many heroes, about that night in the Chamber of Assembly and the crossroads of the Arsenal, but these were not the source from which it all flowed. It was that brutal campaign through the heartlands, the Black Knight burning granaries and villages to kill thousands in starvation. It was the Grey Pilgrim condemning hundreds of innocents to a painful death to catch his foe, only to then keep him alive. It had been the seed of the realization that rules, laws, did not really apply to them. That only Named were entitled to dole out justice to Named, that whatever the first colour of the cloak it always ended up red.

The Sword of Judgement took a step back, turning to face her instead of standing side by side, and Cordelia knew it had begun.

“Princes can destroy towns as well,” the Sword of Judgement said, tone even. “Many have. How many were brought to justice by law?”

I fought the Great War as girl, Cordelia thought. Do you truly think you have anything at all to teach me about the cruelties of princes? She had not led her people south as an army because peace somehow did not occur to her. No one raised in the shadow of the Crown and the Plague could be ignorant of the costs of wars, even the most necessary ones.

“How many were brought to justice by heroes?” Cordelia replied.

Before the man could reply she pushed on.

“And I do not mean in the last decade,” the blue-eyed princess said. “That is the scale of the immediate, the short precedent. It is not an honest examination of the past. Since the Principate was founded, Hanno of Arwad, how many princes and princesses have deservedly been slain by heroes?”

The brown-eyed man frowned.

“Given a few hours I would be able to give you a precise answer,” Hanno said, “but at the moment I cannot.”

Cordelia waved that away. She was not trying to ambush him, pretend that lacking an exact number would mean she somehow won the argument.

“Imprecise would be enough,” she replied. “Thirty, forty, a hundred?”

He mulled that, eyes going distant for a few heartbeats. The air pulsed faintly with power. Aspect, she thought.

“Less than eighty,” he finally said. “More than thirty.”

And more than she had expected, but not enough to prove her wrong.

“It is a drop in the bucket,” Cordelia told him. “There have been thousands of princes since the founding of Procer. Hundreds of them must have been genuinely vile and malicious. Some lived out their lives keeping their throne, I have no doubt, but most of them did not.”

A crown was not power absolute and uncontested. Chosen struggled with understanding that when it came to doing Good, but even more when it came to the other side of the coin: no royalty on Calernia would be able to be truly, genuinely evil without consequence even if there were not a single hero in existence. People did not enjoy being ruled by tyrants, even skillful ones. And in the end, a ruler only had power so long as people followed them.

“Some were tried before the Highest Assembly, but I would wager not so many more than heroes have slain,” she continued. “It is not a common procedure. Most were removed by their families, by the outrage of the people, by blades or poison.”

Hanno shook his head.

“You think of heroes as wandering forces,” he said, “but that is true of very few.”

Cordelia hid her irritation. That was not at all what they had been discussing.

“For every Pilgrim and Saint there are dozens who became Named seeking to end an injustice and would then not stray far from that mandate,” he said. “When finished they will beat the sword back into a ploughshare, return the enchanted ring to the old woman in the woods.”

“We stray from the topic,” she told him.

“We do not,” Hanno calmly replied. “Named are not born out of the Gods waving a hand: those that killed princes were, in all likeliness, brutalized by those same princes. All those means to unseat tyrants you lay out failed for so long and in the face of so great a cruelty that a champion was empowered by Above to end that evil.”

The blonde princess paused, genuinely taken aback. It had not occurred to her, truly, that most of the Chosen who had killed Procerans princes would be Procerans as well. In the back of her mind she had always thought of it as a foreign intervention. An outside force meddling. It was jarring to realize there was no solid reason to believe that was true.

“That such heroes existed at all,” Hanno of Arwad continued, “is the mark of the utter failure of the means you defend.”

He shook his head.

“You even defend the poison and blades of others while condemning the same tools in a hero’s hands,” he said. “I will not force on you my belief that becoming a hero means one seeks to do Good, but are you truly going to argue that it makes people less worthy?”

He was not wrong, Cordelia thought, to chide her for having let her gaze shy away from part of the truth. But that did not mean he was right. His blinders were no smaller than her own.

“It does not,” the tall princess replied, “but neither does becoming Named take someone beyond laws. It is true, I cannot deny, that you have spoken the truth: the Highest Assembly, the natural means, they fail. Have failed and will fail again.”

This was not a revelation for her. Cordelia had spent years convincing, arm-twisting and sometimes outright bribing the Assembly into backing what she believed to be necessary reforms. She had no illusions about the average character of royalty.

“Yet that does not mean decisions about the lives of thousands – sometimes even millions! – should be blindly entrusted to whoever first arbitrarily received power from Above,” she retorted. “Good intentions are not enough: principle will not make up for a bad tax policy or lopsided trade rights.”

Christophe de Pavanie was the man she thought of then. Well-meaning in so many ways, but even now still of narrow perspective and limited in judgement. Paired with power as a Named that could make him rise among the most influential of an empire, it was a recipe for disaster. At best he would be a puppet, at worse a stone around the neck of the people he had taken upon himself to rule.

“Ruling, making the decisions of a ruler, is a skill,” Cordelia said. “One that requires a lifetime of training and that very few Chosen have cultivated. A bad decision by a good man will inflict a great deal more suffering than a good decision by a bad man.”

A deep breath, steadying herself after the long tirade.

“You are right, the… order of things is imperfect,” the princess said. “But that does not mean heroes should be allowed to do as they wish, it means the order must be fixed.”

“Then fix it,” the Sword of Judgement bluntly replied. “Why would any of us oppose the world being bettered?”

“You do not have to oppose it,” Cordelia harshly said. “You make it unnecessary by being who you are. Why should there be significant reform to anything at all, when no matter how dire the situation becomes a hero will emerge to save the day?”

“You are arguing in the favour of disaster,” Hanno slowly said, incredulous. “That lives should not have been saved?”

“I am arguing,” she said, “that heroes have been killing villains and wicked princes since the founding of the Principate and it has fixed nothing. That Chosen excise tumours but do not, cannot heal the sickness that causes them.”

And because of that, Cordelia realized in a moment of clarity, she had come to think of them as being part of the trouble. One of the reasons for it. But that was unfair of her. A suspicion born of the souring experiences she had had with Chosen. Blaming them for existing was like blaming a man for not allowing his throat to be cut. About that much the Sword of Judgement was right and she had been wrong.

“And that does not mean they should not exist,” Cordelia said, “but it means that so long as Chosen remain the final arbiters of what is good, we cannot grow. So long as we leave the decision of what can be allowed and what must be refused in the hands of a handful smiled on by the Gods Above, nothing can change.”

And that was what the Liesse Accords were, deep down, the reason that the Lycaonese princess had fought tooth and nail over provisions and sections but never once doubted she would sign it when the negotiations ended. It was a treaty that let mortals dictate rules to Named.

“That world cannot be built so long as laws do not apply to everyone,” Cordelia said. “Until it is Calernia, not the Chosen few, that decide what the lines in the sand are.”

The dark-haired man had gone still as stone, looking at her as if he had never seen her before.

“They gave us a choice, Hanno of Arwad, the only one that really matters,” she quietly said. “Let us make it.”

The irony, Hanno thought, was that in many ways Cordelia Hasenbach was like the very people she distrusted. The ironclad conviction that made up her spine, that he had not grasped was at the heart of all she did, was the very trait that led people to become Named. It was something Creation reacted to, embraced. And though Hasenbach might despise him for the comparison, as she spoke she had reminded him of no one so much as Tariq Isbili. The Pilgrim’s own iron law had been different – the alleviation of suffering, no matter the cost – but looking at the First Prince of Procer he saw in her the same alloy of idealism and brutal pragmatism that had been the Peregrine’s signature.

It was an unsettling thought.

“The changes you speak of,” Hanno said, “the world would be better off for them.”

The princess’s lips quirked into a smile that did not reach her eyes.

“But,” Cordelia Hasenbach said.

“So long as the first step to them is making heroes obey corrupt authorities,” he told her, “there is no chance of them ever coming to pass.”

If the foundation of her reform was to make Named bow to the very evil they had risen to defeat, then the ideal was nothing but fool’s gold.

“Then let them obey something else,” she said. “Rules that crowns had a hand in making but do not belong to the crowns.”

He was not a fool, to need every word spelled out to him.

“The Liesse Accords,” Hanno said.

Catherine Foundling’s dream, the justification for her every atrocity: a muzzle on every atrocity that would come after her. As was so often the way of the Warden of the East, it was the finest of intentions raised atop a mountain of corpses. Hanno believed in their worth, but not that way that Catherine did. The rules would do good for Calernia, curb excesses, but in time they would become a tool for oppression as well. He had no illusions about their permanence, that their ability to better the world would be more than temporary.

“They can accomplish what queens and princesses cannot,” the First Prince said. “A set of rules all will abide by. A first step heroes will accept.”

“And for that you would become Warden of the West,” Hanno thoughtfully said. “To ensure that heroes follow the rules.”

The blonde princess looked faintly embarrassed as she nodded.

“I am not unaware of my weaknesses as a claimant,” Cordelia said. “I lack knowledge of namelore and have not cultivated many close relationships with heroes.”

Hanno hummed.

“But for what you envision the Warden of the West to be, even with those weaknesses you remain the better candidate,” he plainly stated.

What she described might be best described as the heroes of Calernia being made into a guild and Cordelia Hasenbach as the head of that guild. It was not a position that would require skill at arms or even a great deal of personal power: her function would be that of an administrator and a diplomat, not a captain. It was also a position that would require her to abdicate all power in Procer, Hanno knew, a sacrifice that would earn her some respect. That she was willing to make that sacrifice did not surprise him as much as it would have an hour ago.

Tariq had never taken the Tattered Throne.

“I was expecting more of an argument from you,” the First Prince delicately said.

“I do not agree with your vision,” Hanno clarified. “But I do understand that from your perspective pressing your claim is the most sensible answer.”

“Yet you disagree,” the princess said.

“Not with your intentions,” he replied. “There have been enough misunderstandings between us, so I will speak plainly: you do not need to be Warden of the West to achieve this.”

It would help her, certainly, but it was not necessary. And it was turning the Role to a direction that it did not need to be turned – or should, considering that a guildmistress would not be what Above’s champions would need in the wake of the war on Keter. Coolness returned to the blue eyes considering him.

“Indeed?”

“Cardinal will be the seat of the Accords,” Hanno said. “And your interest lies in them more than in Named themselves. Taking up a position there as a high officer and a diplomat will place you in a position to shape laws and curb abuses exactly as you wish.”

And it would not force her into the position of leader of the heroes, a position she would not enjoy or be particularly skilled at.

“If your worry is lack of influence over Named, then change the Accords to reflect what you believe is necessary,” he told her. “I would support this. And as Warden, I would have no difficulty working with you.”

She studied him for a long moment, then slowly nodded.

“To my own surprise,” the blue-eye princess said, “I find myself believing you would try.”

Hanno grimaced.

“But,” he echoed.

“The question has been long in coming from my side as well,” Cordelia said. “What is it that you want, Hanno of Arwad?”

For all the gravity of the situation, Hanno thought, it felt as if they were children declaiming a play at each other. Taking turns, trading tirades. They were, in a way. Fate was heavy around them, like the air before a storm, and so far in the journey every word mattered. They had run out of room to maneuver. So Hanno considered his answer carefully even though the words came easy, looking for the heart of it. It was too late for grievances to matter, for might-have-beens to be worth bringing up. Instead he looked for the source, the kernel moment of why he had come to stand here.

It was not the Arsenal, he realized to his faint surprise. The disappointments of that fortnight had been long in the coming, more flower than root.

“I want a world,” Hanno said, “where you could not have called the Tenth Crusade.”

The First Prince flinched. She had reason to. It all went back to that first mistake, didn’t it? The moment where the woman in front of him had decided to raise Above’s banner without understanding what that decision meant. Where she had put the lives of tens of thousands, of most heroes on the continent, on the line because of terribly mundane reasons. Because Procer had been plagued by disaffected mercenaries, because it had been wary of a resurgent and hostile Callow on its flank. The real reasons for the Tenth Crusade had nothing to do with the Black Queen or the Doom of Liesse: the groundwork for it being called had begun being laid years before.

“I do not believe heroes should rule,” Hanno said. “We are forged for a reason, to combat an evil, and that defines what we should be: exceptional power granted to fight an exceptional evil. Come and gone in a few moons, like fireflies.”

How many Grey Pilgrims and Saints of Swords were there, really? Sometimes not even a single one in a generation. Hanno believed that a dozen heroes fighting under the Grand Alliance would no longer be Named by now if they had not been drafted into the war against Keter. Their foe and mandate had been clear, stretched into the present only by the great threat looming over all the living.

“But we no longer live in a world where that is possible,” he told her. “Calernia is not the same place it was even a century ago: the kingdoms are more powerful, the cities larger, the borders push ever further into the wilds. It is no longer a place where someone can simply disappear.”

A century ago, the thought of something like the Truce and Terms would have been laughable. Named were too hard to find, too spread out, and who could even enforce these rules even should they be set down? Now half the younger heroes took them for granted and even the older ones expected that when a great Evil next came to Calernia the same bargain would be struck with villains.

“It is no longer possible to take up the sword and retire into obscurity after having hung it back above the mantle,” Hanno said. “Heroes are sought, followed, drawn out by mortal powers. And then they are used for purposes beyond what they were meant for. From that, evil flows.”

Like Christophe, whose power and candour had driven the House of Langevin to try to entrap him into some plot. The Mirror Knight should have never so much as spoken to a Langevin: he had come into his Name to protect the Elfin Dames, to face the Wicked Enchantress that would come to destroy them. If not for the Dead King’s march, he might never have left the lakeside town of his birth. Hanno had not been offended to learn that the Langevins had sunk hooks into him. Why would he be, when the plain truth of the matter was that unscrupulous souls had taken advantage of the vulnerability a good man had risk to save every living being on Calernia?

And it would keep happening again and again, the corrupt and powerful twisting power meant to do Good, so long as there was no one standing between heroes and earthly crowns. Someone who could free their hands to do Good and steer them away from being used.

“There is some truth in that,” the fair-haired princess finally said. “I did not understand what I was unleashing, when I called the Tenth Crusade. I erred and many paid for it.”

He slowly nodded. It was only the shallowest layer of what he had said, but it was the beginning of an understanding.

“But your words are not entirely true, are they?” the First Prince said. “Heroes seek crowns as well, ‘Prince White’.”

The disdain for the title was palpable but Hanno was not offended. How could he be when he agreed?

“Yes,” he enthused. “Exactly. I should not be holding the authority that I took up.”

For the first time since he had met her, he saw the First Prince of Procer visibly taken aback.

“I have had to because Named and kingdoms have become so intertwined as to be indistinguishable,” Hanno said, “which is not a state of affairs that should exist.”

It was not as if he had wanted to seize the reins. But what other choice had there been, when failing to do so might doom all of Calernia? If Hanno did not become the Warden of the West, did not lead Good’s forces against the walls of Keter, he foresaw no victory. The First Prince was fit to rule, but for all that it needed a foundation of authority the Name was not about ruling.

“I have not deluded myself into thinking I am a fit ruler, Cordelia Hasenbach,” Hanno told her. “I have to bear a crown, let it be a firefly’s crown: gone in a few moons, when the darkness abates. And after the need has passed-”

“You would set it down and stand as Warden of the West,” the First Prince calmly said. “Spending your days ensuring that heroes stay true to their purpose by keeping them apart from earthly powers, stand as the intercessor between them.”

“It is not that the world is corrupt and heroes without fault,” he said. “Above’s blessing does not make Named more than men, beyond pettiness or cruelty. But that power comes in recognition of a need to do Good, to make the world a little better.”

And maybe the princess was right and one day the world would have no need for heroes, but that day had not come. Perhaps Calernia had changed, but heroes could as well: they could meet the Age of Order on their feet instead of being overtaken by it.

“All the world needs to do is let them,” Hanno pleaded.

The night air had stillness to it in the wake of his words, the First Prince’s face a bland mask as she studied him in silence.

“I can see it now, I think,” Cordelia Hasenbach finally said, tone eerily calm. “The trap.”

Hanno frowned.

“The Warden’s?” he asked.

“The Intercessor’s,” the First Prince replied, shaking her head. “Because whoever wins, Hanno, whichever of us steps forward, something breaks.”

“Something is lost when a claimant wins over another,” Hanno slowly said. “That is only natural.”

The blue-eyed princess half-smiled but did not explain.

“You do not need to be Warden of the West to achieve what you spoke of,” she said instead.

“It is perhaps the only way to achieve it,” Hanno replied, shaking his head.

“It was pointed out to me tonight on several occasions,” the princess said, “that what Named do not follow laws or titles but the individual. It is power personal, not institutional, and that is the very thing you seek to preserve. Your successors, Hanno will not command the same respect.”

“That can be trained,” he replied.

“Can it?” she said, tone doubtful. “Even if that is the case, it will not change the bone of the matter: the respect will come again from the individual, not the Name. In other words, the Name does not matter.”

Hanno stilled. Looked for a reply, a rejoinder, a way to disagree.

“You can do all of this as the White Knight,” the First Prince said. “You were already the shield of the heroes, Hanno, and you have little interest in the Accords themselves or the ministry of kingdoms. So why do you need to be the Warden of the West to do all this?”

He groped for his answer, feeling lost in a way he had not since the Light returned to him. And he found that he did not have one. That all the thoughts he had put together, building back the wall broken by the silence of the Tribunal, were built on a foundation that did not exist. It was true, all of it, but it was built on thin air. As if from the very moment he had heard- his stomach clenched. And there it was. The root of the mistake.

“Because,” Hanno quietly said, “there is a Warden of the East.”

Clarity, Cordelia thought, could be such a cruel thing.

“We are not claimants,” she said. “We are the bears in the pit.”

And no matter who won, the bears always lost. The hero’s face drew tight but, tellingly, he did not disagree.

“You believe the Intercessor is behind this,” Hanno said. “How?”

“Gods, who knows?” the blonde princess tiredly said. “Perhaps she pulled strings at the Arsenal, or on the night we faced each other in Salia. It could be a hundred other little moments where a push or a pull made a difference and we would never know.”

Her smile was bitter.

“Has anyone aside from the Black Queen ever been able to untangle her plots?”

The hero jerked back as if he had been slapped. That was answer enough, Cordelia thought.

“And so we damage Good, whoever becomes Warden,” Hanno of Arwad said, sounding appalled.

“We already have,” Cordelia said. “To add weight to my claim, I promised by abdication as First Prince to Rozala Malanza and her allies in exchange for their support. There is no going back.”

“And I have let myself be crowned prince in all but name,” Hanno quietly replied. “The divisions will no go away no matter who becomes Warden of the West.”

It was worse than that, she thought. Thinking in the scale of the immediate it was a danger, but there was something else awaiting just beyond the horizon.

“Neither of us would have all of Good behind us,” Cordelia said. “Neither of us would be her equal. And on that hobbled leg-”

“-we would venture out to fight the Hidden Horror,” Hanno finished through gritted teeth. “That is…”

Cordelia’s understanding of namelore was still a shallow thing, but even she could see that it would be a catastrophe for two Wardens to face the Dead King without the full weight of what they claimed to stand for behind them. It would be going to war with a gap in your chainmail.

“Why would the Intercessor ever want this?” the Sword of Judgement asked. “She the Dead King’s enemy as much as our own.”

“She wants us to lose I think,” the princess said. “So that when the darkest hour comes she can save us. Entirely on her terms.”

The Wandering Bard had burned too many bridges to get her way otherwise. She could only dictate terms now if the only choice left was between her and annihilation.

“So she poisons the chalice long before we can think to drink,” Hanno grimaced. “That fits her unpleasantly well. Foresight is two thirds of what makes her fearsome.”

And Catherine Foundling was the one who had caught her out. Again.

“We would have torn each other to pieces until only one was left standing, if she had not done all this,” Cordelia admitted.

If she had not come after their every preconception with a knife and dropped them here in the grass, like misbehaving children in need of making up. The dark-skinned hero peered at her closely.

“We have been wrong,” Hanno of Arwad conceded. “That does not make her right.”

“Bears in the pit, Hanno,” Cordelia softly said. “You saw it before I did.”

A long moment passed, silence hanging between them. The breeze caressed the grass.

“Journeys, not a battle,” the Sword of Judgement murmured. “Yours. Mine. Hers.”

Blue eyes met brown, an understanding. They could still end this right.

She did not know who took the first step, but they passed the threshold together.