"Out," said the King.
The two servants went out. Alfred Cagle went with them, and shut the door.
The guards on the inside were told to join the guards outside of it and not let anybody in.
Ealhelm Farrar put a bottle on the table.
Xerxes eyed the bottle. "Is that—"
"It is."
"Eal, that vineyard burned down."
"It burned down nine years ago and I bought eleven bottles off the widow before the ash had cooled, which I have never told anybody, because it is the single worst thing I have ever done."
Ealhelm sat, heavily, and pulled the cork with his teeth. "There are four left. I have been saving them for occasions and I have decided that this is one."
"What is the occasion?"
"My daughter is going to marry your son. Also I watched a nine-year-old put five men on the floor this morning and I have not slept properly since." Ealhelm poured two. "That is two occasions. Drink."
Xerxes drank.
He took his boots off about half an hour in, which Ealhelm noted and did not remark on.
By the time the fire had been built up a second time they had got through the tenants, the harvest, the state of the north road, and a long and extremely unkind conversation about a man called Odoacer Brewer.
"He is a duke, Eal."
"He is a duke with a face like a boiled ham and he has been trying to marry his son into my house for four years."
"Odoacer's son is eleven."
"And Rachel is nine, and he has raised it twice at table."
"What did you say?"
"I said that my daughter was already promised and he said, and I want you to hear this exactly, he said — " Ealhelm put his cup down to do the voice. " — 'promises can be revisited, Farrar.'"
Xerxes set his own cup down very slowly.
"He said that."
"To my face."
"About my son."
"About your son."
Xerxes was quiet for a moment.
"Do you want me to do something about him?"
"No," said Ealhelm. "I want you to keep sitting there looking like that about it, then I want you to forget I mentioned it, and I want him to keep on not knowing that I told you."
"Eal—"
"He will be at the tournament in the spring. And he will be looking at you." Ealhelm picked his cup back up. "You will look at him the way you are looking now, for about one second, then you will look away and say nothing to him for the rest of the day, and he will go home and lie awake."
Xerxes laughed.
It came out of him properly, for a second and a half, and the man who had made it happen sat back with his arms folded and looked enormously pleased with himself.
---
"He's not right, you know."
The fire had gone down. The bottle was more than half gone.
"Which he?"
"Your boy." Ealhelm turned the cup in his hands. "Xerxes, I've got a eight-year-old. I've had a eight-year-old. I have seen them my whole life from my nephews to my subjects and I know what eight looks like. I know what their arms look like and how they stand and how long they last at anything at all."
"He trains."
"So does every boy in every duke's house on this continent. My nephew trains. He gets up twice a week when somebody makes him and cries about it." Ealhelm leaned forward. "That's not training, what I saw this morning. That's not what training does to a body. He's got muscles on him, Xerxes. At eight."
"He is a Meridius."
"So were you. I've seen the portrait of you at that age in your own gallery and you looked like a stick with hair."
"Thank you."
"I'm being serious with you."
"So am I." Xerxes reached for the bottle. "You have seen one part of it, Eal, and it is the part everybody sees, and it is the least of it. He does not forget anything. Not anything. He read the levy statutes at six and corrected a clerk at seven. He came back from Vradia speaking their language and I have not put a single tutor on it. He went into a mine he was not invited into and came out knowing a guildsman's whole life, and eleven months later he could still tell me the man's name."
"And that's the bloodline too, is it."
"It is the bloodline." Xerxes poured. "Kazer Meridius came out of the eastern hills with fire in one hand and the earth in the other and founded this kingdom in a year and a half. That is in the boy. It has been in every one of us and in him it has come up all at once."
Ealhelm looked at him for a while.
"That's a very good answer," he said.
"It is the true one."
"Mm," said Ealhelm, and drank, and did not say anything else about it for a time.
---
Three floors up, Sito sat in the window of his room with the crystal in his hand.
"They are still down there?"
"Still down there. It's been hours."
"Doing what?"
"Drinking."
"Your father?"
"That's the bit I can't get over," said Sito. "I didn't know he did that. I've sat at supper with that man every night of my life and I have never once seen him finish a cup of anything."
"What do they talk about?"
"No idea. Everybody got sent out. Even Alfred, and Alfred goes everywhere."
"Mm," said Naeva. "My father does that with the Warden. Twice a year. They sit up on the roof of the hall and they do not come down until it is light and my mother always pretends to be furious about it."
"Is she furious about it?"
"She has the kitchen leave bread out for them," said Naeva. "So no."
---
"The treaty," said Ealhelm.
"Ah."
"You knew that was coming."
"I have known it was coming since you got out of the carriage, I am only surprised it took you this long to ask." Xerxes rubbed his face with one hand. "Go on. What are they saying?"
"That Benedictus went north for a mountain and came home with a third of one." Ealhelm shrugged. "Trotter thinks he was outplayed. Coldren thinks he was bought. Brewer says it out loud at dinner, which is Brewer. Machin will not say anything, which means Machin thinks the same and has better manners."
"And you?"
"I think that if Marcus Benedictus was outplayed by anybody, then I should very much like to meet the person who did it, because I would pay to watch that."
Xerxes almost smiled.
"So what happened?" said Ealhelm.
"He could have had half."
"He what?"
"Half, the northern groves and a road. He said it to my face in front of my wife and Reginald and Alfred." Xerxes drank. "Three of their elders would have voted for it out of fright, and he knew it, and he took a third."
"Then he's a fool."
"He is not a fool, and that is the thing I cannot say in public." The King set the cup down. "Eal, in ninety years that treaty comes up for renewal. Every elf who signed it will still be alive. All of them. The same elders, in the same chairs, with the same memory of what we did in the room.
"If we had taken half, then in ninety years my great-grandson has to send an army north to keep a mine. Because we took a third, he does not."
Ealhelm sat with that.
"Nobody thinks like that," he said.
"No."
"Nobody in this kingdom thinks like that, Xerxes, and that includes you, and I have known you since you were fifteen."
"I know."
"So when he told you—"
"I was furious," said Xerxes. "I was furious for about the length of one question and then I understood what he had bought, and I have been furious in public ever since, because the dukes need to see it and because he needs to know that signing a thing without asking me is not free." He shrugged. "He knows. He will do it again. It is why I gave him the ring."
"Right," said Ealhelm. "What's the rest of it?"
"The rest of what?"
"Xerxes."
"Eal—"
"You sent the servants out. You sent Alfred out. We have talked about Brewer's face and your boy's growth and a treaty, and none of those needed the corridor cleared." Ealhelm put his cup down. "So say the thing you have been not saying since I arrived."
Xerxes looked into the fire for a long moment.
"Prepare yourself," he said. "The march is on the horizon."
The room was very quiet.
"How near a horizon?"
"Near enough that you should be putting your house in order and far enough that you have time to do it properly." Xerxes did not look away from the fire. "That is all of it, Eal. That is everything I am going to say tonight and everything I know for certain, and you are the first man outside my council to hear it."
Ealhelm sat back in his chair.
"East," he said.
"East."
"The dwarves."
"The dwarves."
"Xerxes. We have a treaty with the elves."
"This is not about the elves."
"It is about everything, once you start. You know that." Ealhelm's voice had changed. It had stopped being a friend's voice somewhere in the last minute and become a duke's. "We have peace on every border we have. It has held most of my life."
"It has held because nobody has moved."
"That is what peace is."
"You remember Kelder," said the King.
Ealhelm stopped.
"That is not fair."
"It is not fair and it is not a trick. I am asking you if you remember it." Xerxes turned and looked at him. "Because I do. We were sixteen. We came up that road with the relief column four days behind and we walked through what was left of that town together, and I can still tell you the order of the streets."
"So can I."
"Two thousand people."
"I know how many it was."
"They came down out of that mountain and they did that, and then they went back up into it, and there was a treaty afterward and letters and a very long conversation about compensation, and their stonemasons have been working our contracts for thirty years."
Xerxes's voice did not rise at any point. "And nobody has ever answered for it. Not one of them. They sent a delegation with apologies and a cartload of silver and my father took it, because he had to."
"Your father kept the peace."
"My father was a better man than me," said Xerxes, "and he died of it."
Ealhelm rubbed his eyes.
"So this is Kelder."
"It is not only Kelder."
"Then give me the rest of it."
"The elves will stay in their forest. Their love of the trees is the only thing about them I trust absolutely, and there is nothing north of them but ice."
Xerxes counted it on his fingers, slowly. "The dwarves I cannot predict, and they sit in the mountains that command the whole middle of this continent, and any army that wants to move must go past them or through them.
"And I am told Ashina has begun thinking the same thoughts I have. Which means somebody is going to take those mountains in our lifetime."
"And you would rather it was you."
"I would rather it was us than them," said Xerxes, "yes."
"And the boys of this kingdom? The sons?" Ealhelm's jaw was tight. "I have buried men from my own villages, Xerxes. I know what a levy looks like going out and I know what it looks like coming back."
"So do I."
"Then why."
"Because if I do not do it, my son will have to," said Xerxes, "and he will have to do it against an Ashina that has already taken the passes, and he will lose."
Ealhelm sat there for a long time.
Then he let out a breath and picked up his cup and finished it.
"You know I'll come," he said.
"I know."
"Farrar men, Farrar levies, all of it, the day you ask. You have never had to ask me for anything in your life and you will not have to start now."
Ealhelm set the cup down on the table with a small deliberate click. "And I want you to hear me say that I think this is unnecessary, and that I think it is a bad idea, and that I think you are doing it partly because of a road we walked up when we were sixteen."
Xerxes looked at his oldest friend, and the corner of his mouth came up.
"And that," he said, "is why you are not king."
"Oh, sod off."
---
They killed the bottle.
Somewhere past the third hour Ealhelm asked the other question, and he asked it quietly, and he did not look at Xerxes while he did it.
"Does he know?"
"Does who know what?"
"Your boy. Does he know you're proud of him."
Xerxes did not answer immediately.
"He knows what he is worth," he said.
"That's not what I asked."
"It is what I have got, Eal." The King turned his cup around on the table. "I have one son. I have one, and the oracle was very clear that I would have one, and when I am gone he inherits a kingdom and every enemy it has and whatever I have not finished. He does not need a father who tells him he did well. He needs to be strong enough that it does not matter whether anybody tells him anything."
"He's eight."
"He will not be eight for very long."
Ealhelm looked at the fire.
"My father was like you," he said. "Not as clever. But like you. He never said it either, and I spent about thirty years waiting, and then he died in the spring while I was at a hedge dispute in the next county, and I am fifty-one years old and I still think about it most weeks."
"Eal—"
"I'm not asking you to be soft. I wouldn't know what to do with you if you were soft." Ealhelm stood up and put a hand on the King's shoulder on his way past. "I'm telling you it costs nothing to say it once. That's all. Once, in his whole life. He'd carry it about with him for forty years."
He got to the door.
"Also you have got no boots on and you are the King of Epiria and I am going to tell everybody."
---
The carriages went at the ninth hour.
Jenna cried, which she explained at length was on account of the wind. Amestris said four polite sentences and meant one of them.
Ealhelm bowed properly in front of the guards and then hugged the King of Epiria in front of them as well, which caused a great deal of quiet delight in the courtyard that nobody was ever punished for.
Rachel came and stood in front of Sito with her hands folded.
"Thank you for hosting me."
"You're welcome."
"It was the best week I have ever had."
"I had fun," said Sito, and meant it.
Rachel went pink, and looked at her shoes, and then remembered that she was not supposed to look at her shoes, and looked back up so fast that Beatrice made a noise behind her.
"Will you write to me?"
Sito had not expected that.
"If you want."
"I want." Rachel put her chin up. "And I shall write back the same day, every time, because that is proper. And I shall tell you about all the awful people who come to our house."
"Deal."
"Goodbye, your highness."
"Goodbye, Lady Rachel."
---
Ealhelm was last.
He came over to Sito in the emptying courtyard with his gloves in one hand and stood there for a second, and then crouched down so they were level, which was not a thing anybody had done to Sito since he was about four.
"Can I ask you something, lad?"
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Do you like it? The training."
Sito blinked.
"Sorry?"
"It's not a trick question. I watched you that morning and I have thought about very little else since." Ealhelm's face was not doing the almost-laughing thing it usually did. "Do you like it. The getting up in the dark, and the old man, and the five of them at once. Or is it only that they make you."
Sito thought about it properly, because he had been asked properly.
"I like it," he said. "It's the best part of the day. It's been the best part of the day since I was five."
"Truly?"
"Truly."
"Good," said Ealhelm.
He stood up, and put his gloves on, and looked down at him.
"Then keep liking it, lad. As long as you can. That's the whole of my advice and I've been fifty-one years getting hold of it."
He went to the carriage.
Sito stood in the courtyard and watched the Farrars go down the hill, and had no idea at all what had just happened.