Page 64 of Traitor Son

Thoughts of Ellingen always filled Remin with a complicated mix of guilt and horror and shame, and the belligerent sense that he should feel none of those things. He had offered them a chance to surrender. He had promised that if they returned Ludovin, and opened the gates, he would do them no harm. Instead, they had tortured Ludovin for three days before he killed himself, and so Remin had knocked down the walls, killed everyone who resisted him, and tore down the city until not one stone stood on top of another. Ellingen was destroyed for all time.

Valleth had done far worse, when they invaded the Empire. They had rained terror on the Andelin Valley for a century, offering its citiesand its people to the Lord of Tales. But all that history and self-justification evaporated like smoke when Remin heard the wordEllingen,for that would only ever conjure a girl of fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, who had come at him with a broken sword.

And he had killed her with one blow of his fist.

It was only afterward that he realized what he had done. He could have disarmed her. He should have just taken the strike; the stars knew it wouldn’t have been more than a scratch. But he had seen that shape, that motion from the corner of his eye—

Remin had wrenched off his helmet and stumbled away to be sick in an alley, revolted by what he had done. And that was where Huber had found him, alternately sobbing and heaving his guts up, and guarded him until he had recovered enough to go on.

“And you fear it will happen again,” Juste said softly. He was not speaking from idle curiosity. Juste had always been simultaneously the gentlest and most vicious of Remin’s knights. He never hesitated to take on tasks that would have kept Remin awake for weeks afterward, and he did them with an air of gentle regret that made even the ugliest work seem sadly understandable. “Do you really think it will be necessary?”

This was a dangerous gift. It would be far too easy to rely upon it.

“I don’t know,” Remin said, and drained his cup in a single gulp. “I can’t tell anymore. I don’t…thinkshe would. I don’t think she would want to.”

But he knew all too well that the Emperor had ways of bending people to his will, and even if he hadn’t found a way yet, there was no guarantee that he would not, in time. In his dreams, Remin had already seen the shape of a girl lying broken on the stones of Ellingen, with a face like a solemn owl.

Juste nodded. His pale blue eyes were as placid and peaceful as a pool of water.

“Then rely on me,” he said, as he had for all that other unpleasant work. “If it comes to it, my lord. I will do it.”

* * *

It was amazing to see how much Tresingale had changed in a few weeks.

Remin and his men galloped through the north gate under a clear blue sky, after nearly a week of riding in the rain. The fields were morevividly green than ever, sweeping off to the mountains in rolling hills. On the north side of town, the dark furrows of planting stretched farther away, and though he wasn’t farmer enough yet to guess acreage at a glance, he thought they might just get all the wheat into the ground after all.

Home.

“They’ve been busy,” said Juste beside him, rising in his stirrups to look. Even from the gatehouse, the two white lines of the north and south wall were visible in the distance, like arms stretching out to embrace the east road.

If his horse had been a little fresher, Remin would have gone straight to look. He wanted to see everything and know every detail of how the town had grown in his absence. But he owed it to man and beast to let them refresh themselves before he put them back to work, so he grudgingly trotted them all to the stables and tended to his warhorse, who the stableboys still regarded with popeyed awe. Another year or two of peace and he might finally be able to make himself name the beast.

Then he went home to give himself a scrub. After two weeks in the saddle and sleeping by the roadside, the layers of filth were about to crack and fall off, like flakes of shale.

But when he opened the door to his cottage, he stopped. Stepped back. Looked again.

This washiscottage, wasn’t it?

Yes, that was his trunk under the window, and his bed. But there was a new awning on the north face of the cottage housing a collection of buckets, tubs, and the princess’s bath cauldron, and a small room added to the opposite side that turned out to be a privy closet. He’d forgotten he’d asked Edemir to have that built. And there were several other minor construction projects he hadnotauthorized: sturdy shelves were mounted above the bed bearing the princess’s books, and the washstand was a tiered marvel of shelves and cubbies, with a mirror that could be put on a shelf at his own height.

It didn’t look like a single surface had escaped unscathed. There were bunches of flowers in cups on the table and windowsills, new blankets neatly folded at the foot of his bed, and under the bed were two little pairs of slippers, neatly lined up. The princess’s smaller trunk and battered valise were underneath the other window, and a tin kettle hung on a hook beside the hearth. Which now had a mantle. And more flowers on the mantle.

Remin stepped inside and let the door close behind him.

Most of the shelves on the washstand contained all the soaps and lotions and strange little jars the princess had acquired in Celderline, but one shelf had his own things, along with a bar of plain soap. He put water on to heat in the kettle and stripped down to wash the filth of the road from his body withhot water and soap,then shaved with more hot water in an absolute orgy of good grooming. It all felt so amazing, he was almost ashamed.

His horse needed rest after weeks of hard riding, but it felt good to stretch his legs and he didn’t mind beginning with a look at those projects within walking distance. All weariness had fallen from him at the sight of Tresingale. He was clean, freshly shaved, and reenergized, and now his men were going to pay for it.

Like all other valuable things in town, Edemir and all his records and plans were housed in the storehouse.

“You’re back,” said the stocky knight, looking up from his worktable in his closet of an office. Edemir was a compact and efficient man, economical with word and motion. “I guess we’re lucky you didn’t come straight from the stables.”

“Tell me everything,” Remin ordered, dragging over a stool.

With Edemir, it was a long list of arrivals and departures. A dozen cows had arrived and departed immediately for a new field adjacent to the horses’ paddocks, and Tresingale officially had its first cowshed. More masons had arrived. Bricklayers. Carpenters. A third architect, the renowned Master Sousten Didion, had arrived, seen the cottage prepared for him, and pitched a fit that required an additional bribe of gold. He had been obsessively surveying the proposed site of the manor house ever since.

Remin was willing to forgive a tantrum. Several of the craftsmen and masters he had hired were best described as charmingly eccentric, and Sousten Didion had a reputation not just for building beautiful houses, but unfolding them in stages, planning years of gradual growth as new parts of a noble house became necessary. It was exactly what Tresingale needed.

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