Page 116 of The War of Four Winters

Beyond lay darkness and the faint scent of incense.

I stepped through alone, the door closing silently behind me with disconcerting finality. For a moment, complete darkness enveloped me. Then my eyes adjusted, revealing the dim outlines of furniture, the faint glow of banked embers in a hearth, the silhouette of a figure seated in a high-backed chair.

"I wondered which entrance you would choose." My father's voice spoke, calm and measured as ever. "The Temple would have been more dramatic. The Hall of Records, more practical. But you always did prefer the direct approach."

A lamp flared to life, illuminating Tarathiel's private chamber in soft golden light. My father sat in a chair near the hearth, dressed not in formal regalia but in a simple robe of deep blue. His silver hair, normally adorned with victory braids, hung loosely around his shoulders. A small table beside him held a decanter of amber liquid and a single glass, half-empty.

He reached for the decanter, lifting it to fill a second waiting glass.

I drew my sword, the whisper of steel against leather impossibly loud in the quiet chamber. "You were expecting me." Not a question, but an accusation.

"I've been expecting you since the day you first defied me." His voice held no anger, only a strange weariness I'd never heard before. "Though I admit, I didn't anticipate the Shikami tunnels. Omashii-Kuno must truly believe in your cause to grant such access." He gestured toward the second chair opposite him. "Will you sit? Or do you plan to kill me standing?"

I remained where I was, sword ready. "Where are your guards? Your battle mages? I know you wouldn't face me alone."

"Dismissed." He took a sip from his glass, the casual gesture at odds with the tension coiling between us. "What purpose would guards serve now? The bridges are destroyed. The Assembly island is cut off. My forces cannot leave, and yours cannot enter—not in numbers that would matter." His eyes, so like my own, studied me with clinical detachment. "Except, apparently, through ways I failed to anticipate."

"You expect me to believe you simply accepted defeat? Waited here alone for an assassin's blade?"

He studied me with something almost like pride. "I know you too well, Ruith. You're too honorable to send blades in the dark to do your work for you. You've always needed to face your enemies directly, to look them in the eye as you end them." He set down his glass with deliberate precision. "Come now, Ruith. You've crossed a city at war, infiltrated my most private sanctuary, and found me here alone. Does that not suggest I wished it so?"

Suspicion coiled through me, cold and sharp. This felt too easy, too convenient. My father had never been one to surrender, never one to accept defeat gracefully. This must be some kind of trap, some final gambit.

"You've laid some kind of ambush," I said, advancing a step, sword still raised. "More battle mages waiting to strike? Hidden guards ready to emerge at your signal?"

"No ambush. No hidden guards." He gestured to the untouched glass beside him. "Only an old man who would share one final drink with his son."

The admission—that this truly might be his end, that he had prepared for it—struck me with unexpected force. I approached cautiously, sword still ready, and sat in the chair opposite him. The blade I kept across my knees, a barrier and promise between us.

"Even the most skilled general recognizes when the battle is lost and preserves what forces remain for wars yet to come." He reached for a sealed letter on the side table, its parchment yellowed with age, its seal broken. "Do you recognize this?"

I studied it from where I sat, the significance dawning slowly. "The letter from the Temple of the Sower. The one you received before ordering me to Ostovan."

"Yes. The message that set all of this in motion." He turned it in his hands, studying the broken seal. He pulled something from within the scroll I hadn't noticed before—a second page, folded small and tucked within the first. "What you saw that day was not the entire message, nor was it the most important part. Instead, the letter contained a proposal.”

"What kind of proposal?"

"An arrangement. Michail knew the rot would spread, consume him gradually. He had discovered a temporary solution—a way to slow its progress through blood magic using his brother's life essence. The problem was that he knew if he kept Elindir close, he would eventually find a way out. The human princeling had sympathizers, you see. People who would have rallied behind him if he were discovered still alive. Michail simply wanted me to take the collared prince away. Far away, he said, where he would never find his way home again.”

Disgust rose in my throat, sharp and bitter. "And you agreed? To become the jailer of a human prince whose only crime was being born to the same father as Michail?"

"I agreed to a politically advantageous arrangement." Tarathiel's jaw tightened. "Michail promised regular tribute—gold, goods, additional slaves for our holdings, access to their trade routes. Practical benefits in exchange for keeping one insignificant human confined. A bargain any sensible ruler would have made."

"And you believed him."

"I believed in making practical decisions." His eyes finally lifted to meet mine, clear and hard as winter ice. "The human was already collared. Already being drained. His continued existence or comfort meant nothing to me. He was just another human, barely more than an animal. We've taken thousands of humans as slaves over the centuries. What difference did one more make, especially when his confinement brought such advantages?"

Tarathiel reached to refill his empty glass. "You were supposed to bring the collared prince to D'thallanar. The collar Michail and his physician Modir placed on him was already working, channeling his life essence into Michail in small, controlled amounts. All I required was for you to deliver this valuable commodity."

I remembered the moment I first saw Elindir, collared and defiant despite everything that had been done to him. I remembered how I'd initially kept him as ordered, even manipulating him to serve my own purposes—using his natural leadership to galvanize the other slaves into rebellion. I had seen him first as a tool, then as an ally, before finally recognizing him as so much more.

"You never anticipated that I would see the potential in him," I said, understanding washing over me. "That I would support the slave uprising he inspired rather than crushing it. That I would eventually come to view him as an equal rather than following your plan."

"A chain of foolish decisions that sparked an unnecessary war," he replied coolly. "You turned a simple arrangement into a conflict that has cost thousands of lives. Had you controlled the human as intended, had you seen the strategic advantage rather than allowing sentiment to influence you, none of this would have been necessary."

I surged to my feet, sword in hand. "You speak of it so clinically. As if you were trading cattle rather than a person. As if you hadn't sent me after him, knowing I'd find him there."

"That is what kings must do, Ruith. Calculate the cost in lives and choose the path of least suffering." He didn't flinch, didn't move as I loomed over him, sword in hand. "I chose what I believed would preserve the most lives. One human prince, gradually drained but kept alive, in exchange for peace with Ostovan."

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