“Not that I’m complaining,” I said, “but I’m not sure that counts as tea.”

The First Prince emptied the bottom of the flask into my cup, leaving it filled almost to the brim with the pale liquor she’d called bergmilch. My Reitz mostly wasn’t, but I was pretty sure it meant something like ‘mountain milk’.

“There are tea leaves at the bottom, Catherine,” Cordelia serenely said. “Ashuran greenleaf. It adds a bittersweet tang to the taste.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Didn’t take you for the liquor type,” I said. “Much less going for exotic stuff.”

“I am not,” the fair-haired princess admitted. “It was my mother’s favourite drink.”

I hummed. It was rare for Cordelia to speak much of herself during our little talks and even rarer for there to be a mention of her family. Rumour had it she was fiercely protective of her cousin, the Augur, and had been like a daughter to her uncle Klaus Papenheim. I’d only met Agnes Hasenbach the once and been closely supervised by her all the while, which put true to half the talk, but I’d only ever known the Iron Prince as keeping some distance from Salia and his niece. Her mother and father, though, I’d heard almost nothing about save their names and causes of death as written in ledgers. Going by the dates her father had died while she was very young and her mother while she was still shy of womanhood.

Even royalty had a way of dying early, in Lycaonese lands.

“Must have been expensive to get the tea leaves all the way up to Rhenia,” I mused.

“Princess Mathilda have her a large bag as a wedding gift when she wed my father,” Cordelia said, eyes faraway. “They were close friends as girls, rode together against the Plague.”

That’d be Mathilda Greensteel, I thought, the Princess of Neustria who’d died at the Battle of Hainaut. The Hawk had gotten her. I’d not known the woman all that well, having dealt mostly with Princes Klaus instead, but she’d been popular with her soldiers and fairly pleasant in war councils. Still, it was strange to think that all these people I’d only ever known as allies against the Dead King, soldiers sharing my war, had lived entire lives before we crossed paths. That there’d been invisible ties between people I knew I’d never even thought might exist. I leaned forward in my seat, tasting of the drink, and hummed in pleasant surprise.

Creamy and a little sugary for my tastes, but the tea did add a pleasing twist to it.

“Your mother had good taste,” I complimented.

Cordelia laughed.

“Mother had absolutely horrid taste, Catherine,” the blue-eyed princess denied. “Her notion of a ballroom dress was rabbit fur lining instead of bear, and she was obsessed with cabbage soup. She had tried one in a Lyonis roadside inn that she insisted was the finest soup ever wrought by mortal hands, so the poor cooks had to try a different recipe once every month.”

She was smiling, I thought, more genuinely than I’d ever seen her. Her eyes still had that distance to them, almost dreaminess, but there was joy on her face as I’d rarely seen in the First Prince of Procer. What kind of a life she must live, I thought, that she found more to smile among the dead than the living. Best to change the subject, perhaps. I squinted at her.

“So that’s why you’re so tall,” I accused. “Years of cabbage soup.”

A glint of amusement in her eyes.

“Our family physician used to tell me fish made people short,” she idly informed me. “Something about their oils and the Gods having cursed them to live on their bellies.”

“I didn’t even eat that much fish,” I noted. “Bread and soup in the morning, meat and beans once a week and fish from the docks whenever it was under a silver the pound.”

She looked at me in fascination, which might have been interesting in different circumstances but in these served to remind me that Cordelia Hasenbach had never been anything but royalty. She’d been born to rule, and her silver spoon might not have been quite as silvery as those of southern princes but no piece of it had ever been broken off to buy fish.

“Besides, fish oils? Ridiculous,” I snorted. “Everybody knows it’s horse meat that does it. Atrophies the muscles, you know, bunches you up like a goblin.”

I was joking, but it was an old and common superstition. It was bad luck to eat a horse, even at war.

“Your people and horses,” Cordelia drily said, “have a most interesting relationship.”

“Please, like you Lycaonese won’t slap a wolf onto anything given half a pretext,” I snorted. “I once saw a soldier from Hannoven use a laundry stick with a wolfhead on it.”

He’d gone after that tent cloth like it owed him money, half the reason I even remembered it.

“I am told,” Cordelia said, arching an eyebrow, “that Callowans do not eat poultry when geese are flying overhead.”

I glared at her. That was only once a year, when they headed back north to Daoine after winter.

“The soul might go up and entreat its cousins to vengeance,” I replied, a tad defensively.

She eyed me a long moment, then her lips quirked.

“If a woman eats a billy goat on the last day of the year, a son born in the new year will have horns,” Cordelia shared.

I let out a low whistle, impressed. I sometimes forgot that Cordelia Hasenbach wasn’t Proceran because there was really no such thing as a ‘Proceran’, practically speaking. She was a Lycaonese princess who’d adopted many of the ways of her southern subjects to better ruler them, but it wouldn’t do to forget she’d been born far from the places she now ruled. Places now all fallen to the Dead King, even if many Lycaonese had fled south to temporary safety. The King of Death’s long shadow once more soured my mood, bringing me back to the tasks at hand.

“My thanks for the tea,” I said, “but we will have to spoil it by talking of grimmer things as it is drunk, I think.”

“The curse of all affairs, these days,” the First Prince sighed. “I assume you have read the terms as proposed by the dwarves?”

I made myself drink. It was either that or cursing and I’d already lost my temper in front of her once today. The silver cup went down and I licked my lower lip clean of a droplet of creamy liquor.

“I did,” I said, tightly controlled. “They’re not asking for the entire barony of Holden, just a few miles of land around, but that’s already bad enough. It’s coppers to the gold they’re asking for Penthes and Creusens.”

Holden would barely qualify as a city in Procer, barely fifteen thousand people lived there. The amount of land needed to feed them was nowhere as much as a city the size of Penthes or the capital of Creusens would. The Kingdom Under had, accordingly, demanded much more of their surrounding countryside.

“They want Penthes for the water,” Cordelia said. “That is my conclusion. They want the trade up the Wasaliti and access to the sea. Dwarves do not sail, but they will have a large population of human subjects to draw on for the work.”

“Creusens so they get the western roads that go all the way down to the Dominion,” I said. “And Holden for Callow. That’s one a weaker gain for them, all things considered.”

“They want Callowan grain,” the First Prince said. “Though I would not be surprised if they began tunnelling through the Whitecaps within moments of owning Holden. A pass through the mountains would open eastern Procer to them.”

And do so right at the height of some of the richest parts of the heartlands of the Principate – Cantal and Iserre – which also happened to be regions of Procer the Dead King hadn’t reached yet. They wanted their finger on the pulse of the surface trade.

“This is a foothold,” I bluntly said. “They’re looking upwards.”

“In the long term,” Cordelia noted. “The preoccupation with commerce implies that in the immediate they will seek to consolidate their gains underground. A massive undertaking, one that would be made much easier should they have unrestricted access to all our markets.”

They’d hit us up for resources, food and cattle and wood, and when they’d drained us to expand their empire they’d turn their gaze in our direction. They weren’t even being subtle about this, though from where they stood I supposed they didn’t need to be. What we were going to do about it, let the Dead King kill us out of spite? We had no real leverage on the Kingdom Under to speak of.

“I’m not comfortable with kicking that problem down the line to our successor,” I said. “Look, I know that first we need to be able to have successors-”

“I absolutely agree,” Cordelia cut in. “I do not need to be sold on this, Catherine. I would have swallowed being taken advantage of in a time of crisis, as indeed the Principate has done to other nations many a time. It would have been legitimate, if infuriating. This, however, is beyond reason.”

Tension left my shoulders some. Hasenbach was arguably more farsighted than me in many regards, but Procer’s back was a lot more against the wall than mine. I’d been afraid that it might make her inclined to folding whatever the terms, figuring that anything was better than annihilation.

“I wouldn’t be able to sell it back home anyway,” I admitted. “Even if Vivienne backed me, which I’m not sure she would, a lot of my people would rather see everything west of the Whitecaps burn rather than surrender a city.”

“My grip on Creusens is loose at best,” Cordelia replied. “And I would lose all influence should I agree to these terms. No doubt they are aware of both these facts. Their interest is in having the signature, the right. They will then have leave to exercise it at their leisure.”

A pretext to swing at us if we didn’t roll over whenever they got around to taking control, huh.

“That makes more sense than them expecting us to be able to surrender those cities right now,” I admitted. “I’d figured they might expect us to keep the treaty a secret until the war was at an end, but if they’re mostly after the signature that explains why they’re comfortable pushing so hard.”

Cordelia nodded in agreement.

“Though that does raise an interesting question,” she said. “Why would the Kingdom Under need such an excuse in the first place?”

I sipped at my drink, considering that very thing. I had never particularly got the impression that the dwarves were more than slightly wary of surface powers, and only distantly worried about the prospect of a unified front emerging to face them. Which meant it wasn’t about us at all.

“They want it to overcome internal problems,” I murmured. “The Herald is an expansionist, but his faction might not have the pull to just drag the Kingdom Under into war with the surface without something solid to brandish as a pretext.”

Like a treaty promising three cities that was never fulfilled and which Cordelia and I’s successors might not be all that interested in honouring after the horror of the Dead King had passed.

“It might also be that a war of unprovoked aggression against us would be unpopular with their commons,” Cordelia noted, “but I share your conclusion. Which is good news in the sense that it shows their position is not as strong as they have been pretending.”

“If we had another interlocutor on the dwarven side we could try to go around them,” I suggested.

“It might cause the very sort of diplomatic incident that would sink our chances,” the blonde princess replied. “I am not dismissing the idea outright, but we should acknowledge the risk.”

I grimaced. Yeah, it might be the dwarves would react very poorly to even the perception of us uppity humans trying to play their internal factions against each other.

“I’m not seeing a lot of other options on the table,” I said. “We don’t have a lot to bargain with.”

Cordelia smiled.

“I have heard diplomacy compared to a game of shatranj, Catherine, but it always struck me as weak comparison,” the First Prince of Procer idly said. “I have found cards a much more fitting game.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m not great lover of shatranj comparisons,” I said, “but I’ll bite. How are cards the better fit?”

“Because at cards there are two ways to win,” Cordelia said. “By reading the cards, and by reading the players.”

My brow rose even further.

“You think the Herald is their weak point?” I asked. “I might be able to take him in a brawl, Hasenbach, but it’d not be an easy ride. I’m pretty sure that unpleasant type that gets stronger the longer they’re kicking around.”

“Use of force here would be a defeat already,” she said. “What draws my eye here, Catherine, is that you told me this Herald was appointed as the head of the Fourteenth Expansion.”

I nodded.

“Which must have been a feather in his cap after I mediated Sve Noc’s withdrawal,” I said.

“Indeed,” Cordelia agreed. “And his influence must have further spread with the success of this Fifteenth Expansion, the ring of fortresses around Keter. Yet both of these are massive, generational works rather far from finished.”

I cocked my head to the side, following her line of thought.

“So why is he here?” I murmured.

My first thought was that he’d dealt with me before so he was a good fit, but that was the wrong way of looking at this. For a surface nation, in all humility that’d be a valid reason to choose a diplomat if it were certain I’d be part of the talks. I had enough power and influence to warrant that. But for the Kingdom Under to make its choice because of that reason? No, that would be hubris. I was not nearly important or powerful enough for the dwarves to bend their politics around me.

“If these talks are viewed as important,” I slowly said, “then his appointment might be a reward for those two successes.”

“There is likely a degree of that,” Cordelia considered, “but it seems backwards to my eye. Why reward success at the frontier by a diplomatic assignment in the heartlands? Especially when the work is not finished. No, Catherine, I don’t believe he was appointed to this assignment at all.”

I frowned.

“You’re betting he fought to get the position,” I sussed out.

“That is my instinct,” the First Prince agreed. “And there may lay our lifeline.”

“If he burned favours to get this position, it’s to get something out of it,” I said. “So if we figure out what…”

“Then by finding a way to deny it, we gain leverage,” Cordelia finished.

How many people in all of Calernia, I wondered, would have been able to figure this much out from less than an hour sitting across from the dwarven envoys? A handful at most, I thought, and most of them long dead. It was easy to look at the way that Procer had spent the last few years breaking apart and take from the sight the lesson that the First Prince was not so skillful a woman as her reputation implied, but that was looking at it the wrong way. Cordelia Hasenbach was the very reason the place had spent years crumbling in good order instead of brutally snapping after six months.

It would not do to forget how dangerous this woman actually was.

“I don’t even have a decent guess at what he might be after,” I said.

“I have some notions, but I would not venture them in haste,” she mused. “Best to let time pass and consider the possibilities with a rested mind and the help of advisors.”

I conceded with a nod. I wasn’t sure it would help, but given that I was currently drawing a blank there was no harm in trying. We weren’t supposed to meet with the envoys again for a few days anyway.

“You’d think with our armies routed on every front there’d be less of this song and dance,” I sighed. “But ever since I’ve set foot in Salia it has been all schemes and politics.”

“Indeed?” Cordelia idly said. “Then which of these did your luncheon with the Blood happen to be?”

I rolled my eye at her.

“You could at least pretend you’re not spying on me,” I reproached.

“We came by that information coincidentally, I assure you,” Cordelia politely lied.

I weighed my options for a moment. I’d need to get her on board with what the Blood wanted anyway, and there was no real point in not beginning those talks now. My only reason to hesitate was that the matter smelled to me like a pivot. So did this business with the dwarves, for that matter. While it might be true that I was leaning Cordelia’s way in the matter of the Warden of the West, giving her the first bite at two pivots out of – well, I couldn’t be sure but three was usually a safe bet – might be seen as openly backing a horse in that race. If I bring in Hanno quickly enough it shouldn’t matter, I finally decided. Both issues were large enough that a single night of forewarning wouldn’t make all that much of a difference.

“I was invited to mediate a dispute between the Blood and the Barrow Sword,” I said.

She straightened in her seat.

“The request to be added to the Rolls,” the First Prince immediately replied. “They agreed?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I hedged.

I laid out the compromise that’d been reached out for her. That Ishaq as well as all Bestowed and of the Blood after him would need to undertake a trial assigned by the Majilis to be added to the Rolls, that the Barrow Sword’s in particular would be the slaying of a Scourge. And she knew, without my needing to spell it out, that by mediating the solution I had tacitly endorsed it – and so it was now on me to sell it to the Grand Alliance and whoever ended up filling the seat of Warden of the West. Because whoever that was would very much need to consent. If villainous Bestowed could appeal to the Warden of the East over unfairness by the Majilis, then it became necessary that heroic Bestowed would have the same right of appeal to the Warden of the West. If they refused to take up that duty, then it would sink the entire compromise by making it unacceptably uneven.

I had wondered, in private, if that was not Itima Ifriqui’s gamble here. Her silence had not betrayed open dislike of the arrangements, but it had certainly not been a strong endorsement. She might have been hoping this entire affair would collapse without the Blood ever taking the blame for it, keeping good relations with myself and Ishaq without needing to actually let him into the Rolls.

“Ah,” Cordelia murmured, eyes glinting with interest. “An interesting manoeuvre on their part. It solidifies the power of the Majilis by taking over a responsibility that used to belong to the Pilgrim’s Blood. They are aware of the risks of Levant splintering and acting boldly to prevent it by filling the hole left by the end of the Isbili.”

“It’s also a way to harness Named in ways that will be useful for the Dominion,” I said. “Which I don’t particularly mind, so long as it doesn’t get out of hand.”

If anything, it’d serve as a check on the excesses of more powerful Named. If you wanted to get onto the Rolls you’d need to at least not irreparably piss off the four most powerful people in Levant, which ought to provide a measure of restraint.

“I do find it fascinating that you speak of Named as oxen best put to harness when you are one yourself,” Cordelia said, studying me.

“Most of us aren’t all that more powerful than other people in most circumstances,” I said. “It’s the tenth that has too much power and too little sense that needs checking. I can live with another Fields of Streges, but I will not leave behind a world where another Folly would be tolerated.”

“Arguably you are of the tenth,” the First Prince calmly said.

“So I am,” I frankly replied. “And I have done monstrous things, I won’t pretend otherwise. Were I facing another woman like me instead of standing in her boots, I would want her dead.”

I snorted.

“And that’s why we’ll have Wardens,” I said. “One in the East and one in the West. To curtail the worst of both sides, to keep the Game of the Gods a matter for the Gods and Named.”

“The proposal of the Dominion would grant the offices more authority than that,” Cordelia said. “It would allow either Warden to overturn a decision made by the ruling council of Levant.”

“Only regarding Named, and not even in a general sense,” I argued. “The right of appeal would be specifically over the matter of the assigned trial.”

“It sets the precedent of an authority standing above nations regardless,” Cordelia said. “And puts that power squarely in the hand of a pair of Named.”

She wasn’t wrong, I grimly thought. I wouldn’t be able to assign a trial of my own to another villain, but it was pretty much giving me right of veto on a decision that’d be made by literally the four most powerful people of Levant. The thing was, I was comfortable with that principle. I liked the idea of being able to step in if the Majilis were shafting a villain for no good reason, and the more subtle power that there would be in not stepping in should they assign something suicidal to a truly horrid Named. But that comfort came from being raised in a land where Named had the run of the roost: Good Kings and Dread Empresses, Black Knights and Shining Princes.

Cordelia had not been raised in such a land and she did not share the comfort. Procer was the land of the Highest Assembly, but also the realm where people taking to the streets could end a prince. Where priests had told royalty their wars must be just or never waged at all, where Named were honoured but never allowed to rule.

“It grants Named power over Named,” I replied. “And only influence beyond that where it intersects with more earthly powers. The Principate would not be affected.”

“I have not sold the Kingdom Under three cities for salvation, Catherine,” she gently said. “Why would I then sell you all of Calernia for the same?”

Yeah, I’d been afraid of that answer. Pragmatic as she was, Cordelia was no less an idealist than Hanno. It just showed in different places. If she had no principles she held to, I thought, she likely wouldn’t have been in the running for Warden in the first place. Above had little love for those without conviction. The Sword of Judgement, I thought, would not so much as bat an eye before accepting the deal I’d laid out. Of course he wouldn’t. Hanno had broken with me – with us – when defending the independence of heroes in the face of what he saw as encroachment by the Principate. To him, giving that power to the Wardens would only be a natural extension of what we’d begun with the Truce and Terms.

“The days where I could worry first of Procer are coming to an end,” Cordelia said, finger tracing the rim of her cup. “I have worried and worried until it all came to ash, and I regret not a moment of that. Yet I will not slip into the depths of my grief and drown. If these are the end of days, I will spend my last trying to leave behind a better world than I was born to.”

“We’ve been leaving the duty of checking Named to kings and emperors for centuries,” I said. “Millennia, even. It hasn’t worked. Maybe you can pretend otherwise in Procer, where so few of the great monsters rise, but that’s not a luxury Callowans and Praesi ever had. There needs to be a check, Cordelia.”

“And so you would hand the keys of the madhouse to the mad?” she smiled.

“Is that really,” I said, “something someone trying to become one of the mad should say?”

I saw no point in trying to pretend this was not a conversation about her being Warden of the West just as much as it was about my talks with the Dominion. Maybe even more the former than the latter.

“If it must be done,” she quietly said, “let it be done right. Let us not unleash a creeping calamity on our children and their children after them.”

I gestured curtly, irritated at the implication I’d want that unleashed.

“I hear much disapproval,” I said, “but little alternative.”

“Keep the Wardens out of it,” Cordelia said. “Let the hopefuls be given the right to appoint an advocate when seeking a trial that can serve the same purpose as the Warden would have. Better yet, let the hopeful and the Majilis agree on an impartial arbiter should there be disagreement. The power does not need to be in your hands, Catherine.”

She met my eye with her blue ones, unflinching.

“It is simply where you prefer it to be.”

I tamped down on the flash of anger. Instead of leaning into it I made myself consider what she’d proposed. It was, I thought, our differences laid bare. Cordelia Hasenbach, the princess who believed in good and rightful rule, in the might of laws and the virtues of order. Me, I recognized the power in those but I just didn’ttrust them the way she did. She’d been born on the good side of them, but I’d not had that luck. My world had been a crooked city watch and a governor strangling his city, an occupying army more likely to give the people a fair shake than our own guilds. So when I had the choice between putting the power in the hands of a Role instead of a pack of greedy princes and their descendants, the choice was clear.

Cordelia believed the Majilis and the arbiters would do right by the people, because she believed that good governance was the rule and corrupt rule the aberration. I believed the same lot would fuck it all up because that was what people did, when they got to wield power without having earned it the hard way. So she put her faith in the Blood, and I put mine in the Wardens.

I didn’t argue with her. There would be no point, not when where we came from was so fundamentally apart. I could sense, dimly, that this was it. The bone that we would spend our lives picking if she ended up in the seat opposite mine, the prize we’d be fencing over so long as we had blades: where power ought to lie, between kingdoms and Named. So it would not do, I thought, to begin this half-heartedly. If she was going to lay her claim, to draw her line in the sand mirroring my own, then it must be done properly. Let her speak her words and Creation hear them, that she might stand or fall on the merit of her convictions.

“And what is it, Cordelia Hasenbach, that you would make of the Warden of the West?”

She felt it too, I could see it in her eyes. In the way that pale face hardened, those cool blue eyes burning with the same implacable that had once seen her refuse a Name. Her fingers touched a small bracelet hidden in her sleeve, a simple slip of leather set with sharp teeth. I saw them dig into the skin of her wrist, like an apple about to be bit, and she straightened to her full height as tresses fell down her back like a shower of gold.

“The First Prince of the Chosen,” Cordelia claimed. “The court of their justice, their captain in the war against ruin. And when that is not enough, when right bends and the way is lost, the wielder of the blade of mercy.”

The world shivered and I with it. And somehow, somewhere, I heard it begin. A flicked thumb, the coin going up. Spinning, spinning, spinning.

Gods help us all when it landed.