One Side of a War

The map room smelled of wax, leather and damp paper. Nobody had built it to impress visitors. Shelves crowded the walls. A brazier smoked under a narrow window. Someone had left a heel of bread beside a stack of dispatches, and a clerk snatched it away with the embarrassed speed of a man caught sleeping at his post.

The king told him to finish eating.

That--more than the circlet--changed the room around him. The clerk did as he was told.

We gathered at a long table where a map had been weighted down with stones. Wooden markers stood along a river in the east. Several positions had been crossed out in red and redrawn farther west.

Aoi stayed by the door. I was starting to suspect she picked doors on purpose.

"The main fighting is here," the king said. "The river crossings and the southern military road. These towns remain supplied. These do not."

His finger moved over three names.

Nothing in his voice separated them.

"What does your Demon King want?"

"Control of the crossings. Recognition of territorial claims my grandfather rejected. Withdrawal of our forces from the disputed districts."

"That is more specific than the destruction of mankind."

"It is."

Corvane shifted.

The king kept going.

"It does not make the villages burned outside those districts any less burned."

"And your forces?"

"When soldiers under my command commit crimes, they are punished."

"When discovered."

"Yes," he said. "When discovered."

I studied the map. There was nowhere to put contempt. He kept admitting the limits of his answers before I could expose them. It was like fencing somebody who apologized for every parry.

"Who began the war?"

"The present campaign began when eastern forces crossed Harrow Ford before the thaw."

"And before the present campaign?"

"Raids. Retaliation. Settlers moving into disputed land under armed protection. A border inherited from men who preferred ambiguity when it favored them."

"Your predecessors."

"Some of them."

"You acknowledge responsibility."

"I acknowledge that you are asking for several centuries of history while my quartermaster waits outside with tomorrow's shortages."

No anger in it.

Which made the correction cleaner.

"Then a shorter question," I said. "Has peace been offered?"

The king looked at Corvane.

The adviser's eyes dropped to the map.

There.

"You refused it."

"I did."

The answer came too easily.

I should have noticed that.

"Then this is not a war without an alternative."

"No," the king said. "It is a war in which I rejected a particular alternative."

"You had terms on a table."

"And you have decided what those terms were from the movement of my eyes."

For a moment the brazier was the loudest thing in the room.

I could feel the scribe's attention. Aoi's, too.

The king took a folded document from a leather case. One edge had been mended with a strip of cloth. He laid it beside the map.

"The most recent proposal required three river districts to pass under eastern military occupation while their allegiance was arbitrated. Our garrisons were to withdraw first. Their inhabitants were forbidden to leave."

"Hostages."

"Citizens," he said. "Who might have become hostages."

"According to your interpretation."

"Yes. According to the interpretation of the man required to order his soldiers out."

I looked at the marked districts. Three small shapes by a river. On the table, I could have covered them with one hand.

"How many inhabitants?"

"Forty-three thousand at the last reliable count."

Okay.

Okay. So. Forty-three thousand people, and I had just--from the movement of a man's eyes--decided that he'd thrown them away for pride. Out loud. In front of witnesses.

Solvane's face didn't move. Underneath it, I wanted to crawl under the table with the clerk's bread.

I could have asked whether there'd been guarantees. Whether the terms were negotiable. Whether refusing them had condemned more people than accepting them would have.

All legitimate questions. Right then, in that order, they would also have been a pretty transparent way of not admitting I'd just walked into a wall.

"I assumed," I said, "that you had refused an offer you could reasonably accept."

"You assumed I had refused an offer you would have accepted."

An exact distinction.

I hate exact distinctions when somebody else makes them.

"Very well."

He waited.

I could have hated him for that too.

"I do not know enough to judge the refusal."

"No," he said. "You do not."

Corvane touched the edge of the document.

"Perhaps that settles--"

"It settles that proposal," I said. "Not the years before it. Not whether other terms were considered. Not whether either court has found the war useful in ways its citizens would dislike."

The king looked at me for a long moment.

"Correct."

Aoi's eyes moved between us.

I hadn't won back the ground I'd lost. I had stopped losing more. For now, I'd take it.

A knock at the outer door. The clerk went and came back with a slip of paper. The king read it, asked one question about wagon teams, gave an order allocating animals from the palace stables, and turned back to me.

Under a minute. It reminded me--unpleasantly--that he had a job beyond being the subject of my analysis.

"You believe," I said, "that summoning strangers is necessary."

"I believe it may keep enough people alive for us to find something better."

"At their expense."

"Yes."

"You say that very easily."

"No," he said. "I say it briefly. There is a difference."

That one landed without any help from me. I looked away first, supposedly to study the river.

The king rested his hands on the table.

"We had champions born here. Men and women who trained for decades. Some are still fighting. Some cannot walk. Some are names on memorial stones we have not yet had time to carve."

"And so you require replacements."

"I require help."

"You give it a kinder name."

"I am not asking you to admire the decision."

"What are you asking?"

"For you to understand why a man who knows the summoning is wrong might still authorize it."

I thought of the ledger. The bandage under Aoi's sleeve. The stretcher hitting the archway.

Understanding was turning out to be a lot less fun than I'd expected.

"I understand," I said at last, "that desperation makes an excellent argument to the person who benefits from it."

"And an insufficient one to the person made to pay."

He'd taken the end of my sentence before I could deliver it.

We stood on opposite sides of the map. For the first time, I didn't feel like I was facing a badly prepared actor.

"Then we have reached the useful part," I said.

"Have we?"

"Yes. You know why you did it. I know why I object. Neither condition is likely to improve through repetition."

The king's mouth moved. Almost a smile.

"On that," he said, "we agree."