New Decameron Seventy-Seven: Alexandra Rowland (Patreon)

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

by Alexandra Rowland

It's only just turning towards autumn and we've already had eighteen kings so far this year.

I'm not much of one for politics. Never have been. Politics and I, we nod politely to each other on the street, but we don't stop to shake hands. Me, I keep my head down and get on with my life. I want roads built, and the sewers maintained, and the fire brigade to have new buckets when they need 'em. I want someone besides the guilds to complain to when a merchant tries to sell me shoddy product. And I don't much care what the face on my coins looks like, as long as I can use them to pay my rent and my bar tab. I'm tired of having Politics barge in and upend my life twice a week. I'm sick of it. I've got other things to worry about.

#

When I heard about the most recent king, I went straight to the Spell and Spindle, hoping to beat the rush. A mopey bunch it was; there wasn't a soul in the room who wasn't staring dolefully into their cups. I bought myself a bottle of something vile and found a seat with a couple of my colleagues, both wizard-folk like myself.

“A glass raised to her,” Riccaro said, doing so. Tulas and I followed suit – who can blame us? The arm gets tired, hoisting glasses this often. 

“May she rest in peace,” I said. 

And Tulas: “In pieces. She was drawn and quartered.” 

Riccaro drained his glass in one draft and tried to refill it, but the jug in front of him was only dregs. I sloshed him some from my bottle, and he sucked that down too. “Gods. I liked her. I really, really liked her.” 

I patted his shoulder. “Yeah,” I said. “Seemed like she would have been a good one.” I did some quaffing of my own and got a memo book out of my satchel. Among the fifteen or sixteen scraps of paper tucked in between its pages was one worn softer than the others with much folding. “Pencil?” Tulas poked one over to me and I licked the tip. “Creseyde, regina,” I read off from where I'd written it on a night much like this one. “Reigned from the fourteenth of Thalin to... what's today?” 

“Twenty-sixth,” Tulas said. 

Riccaro sobbed.

I marked 26th down neatly in its own column. “Drawn and quartered,” I mumbled, adding that too, and then I moved my pencil to the next line. “Do we know the name of the –“ I swallowed the bastard what done her in and coughed to cover it, “– the new one?” 

“Balaforthe,” Tulas said.

“Never heard of 'im,” I said.

“Nor I,” she said. “I think he paid for it. Had help, either way. Drawing-and-quartering takes a few psychopaths to pull off—er. To accomplish, I mean.”

“How's he styled?” My pencil hovered over the next space. 

She shrugged. “Haven't heard yet.” 

I nodded and left that column blank, and marked Thalin 26th, afternoon in the Reign Commenced column. The paper went back in my memo book, and the book back to my satchel. I refilled my glass again. “A toast, friends,” I said. “King-or-whatever Balaforthe. Long may he reign, I guess.”

“So long as he isn't another Mad Allard, then long live the king,” Tulas said, and we all grunted. None of us had much hope of that, after how he'd handled Creseyde. 

Long live the king. A genuinely a fervent prayer these days, and one we had all repeated too often in the last year.

#

By the end of the week, I was back at the Spell and Spindle again. Tulas and I sat at our usual table and stared, bleak and silent, at Riccaro's empty chair. 

“We have the real story on how it happened?” I said after a while (in pub time, four and a half drinks). 

“The damn fool was all broken up, still grieving,” said Tulas. “Scabs and I were here with him last night, so sloshed you could have wrung the beer out of him like a dishtowel. He was talking all kinds of nonsense. I didn't think he was serious. I mean, it was Riccaro. He was just...” She sighed. “A soft heart. Parthea bless him and keep him.”

“What did he say, exactly?” 

Tulas shrugged. “Just that someone ought to do something about it. That Balaforthe was a damn wretch of a king and that Riccaro couldn't stand to think of him on the throne. Thought it was the drink talking, you know,” she said, defensive though I hadn't accused her of anything. “We poured a few cups of tea into him and sent him home. I even walked with him as far as Blackthorn Square, but...”

I reached across the table and put my hand on hers. She quirked the corners of her lips like a puppeteer tweakin her strings and turned her palm up to squeeze my hand back. “You're not trying to take responsibility for this, are you?” I asked. “It's not your fault.” 

“No. Not... really.” She took a breath. “I should have gone the extra couple blocks to make sure he got home safe. But it was late, and there aren't any lamps on his street, and I don't like walking alone in the dark, and I'm not so stupid as to try for any spell when I'm that drunk, even a birch twigful of witchfire. So I sent him off by himself. He seemed like he'd sobered up enough. It was only a block or two.” 

“Maybe it would have made a difference,” I said. “Maybe you could have bundled him inside and he would have passed out on the doormat. And maybe he would have turned straight around the moment you'd left. Maybe he would have gone haring off to the palace all the same. How were you to know how serious he was? You did your best for him.” 

Tulas sniffled and nodded. “He was like a little brother to me, is all. Lady above, this is too much.” She pulled her hand away and pressed her shirtcuff to each eye in turn.

Another couple drinks later, I had enough of a buffer of alcohol to get out that folded piece of paper and mark down the necessaries:

Balaforthe, King-in-Splendor. Thalin 26th, afternoon – Thalin 31st, the wee hours. Burned by witchfire.

Riccaro Giuliaso Nastarre, king by right of arms. Thalin 31st, the wee hours - Thalin 31st, ~5 minutes later. Pincushioned by crossbows.

I stared at those last six words. No one would recognize Riccaro's claim. No one would recite his name in the rolls of history. He was just some madman who managed to get himself into the palace and assassinate the king before the guards caught up with him. He'd be forgotten – not even remembered as the shortest-reigning sovereign in this year of short-reigning sovereigns. But for now, for tonight, on this scrap of paper worn soft with many foldings...

And now the throne was empty. We'd just have to wait and see how long that lasted. Maybe a few sensible people might try to throw together some kind of republic. Like as not, any sensible enough to think of that would have already decided to quietly sit on their hands for the duration of this massacre. I certainly wasn't going to make a move, and I'm as sensible as they get.

We hoisted a glass for Balaforthe, and another for poor stupid Riccaro, and we prayed for an end to this madness: Long live the next one.

#

Tulas went a bit odd. I didn't notice right away. Don't rightly remember what it was that caught my attention, but I started slowly wading deeper into a certainty that I ought to keep an eye on her. Make sure she didn't do anything stupid, you see? 

I think the thing I noticed first was that she was getting quieter. Harder. She was a question mark aimed at the world on the tip of a crossbow quarrel. 

She never missed meeting me at the Spell and Spindle, but in our long nights of conversation, she began to allude to people I'd never heard of, declining to explain sufficiently where she'd met them and asserting with increasing enthusiasm that I ought to come meet them myself. 

So I did. 

Wasn't impressed. 

Some sort of support group, it seemed like – all young people, Tulas' age, who had lost someone in the crossfire of the ongoing royal massacre. They all met up once a week and drank shitty wine in someone's empty basement, because that was the biggest room available for free. 

They'd mill around for half an hour or so, and then someone would haul out an old crate and stick it at one end of the room and people would take turns standing up on it and talking about things. I tuned most of it out in the beginning because a lot of the people on the crate were angry, and I have a hard time paying attention to angry people. They start shouting, and it just slides right out of my ears. 

I'd been there most weeks, just to keep an eye on Tulas, but the weeks went on, the kings rose and were crowned and died – twenty, twenty two, twenty five... – and I went to the meetings four weeks in seven, then two in five, then one in three, until finally I was sticking my nose in for about half an hour once a month, just to see if Tulas was still there. 

His Radiance the Patrician Eriset took the throne then, and he decided that the thing to do to hold his throne was to “suppress the distasteful elements of our fair city”. Everyone liked the idea of that, because hardly anyone bothered to turn to their neighbor and say, “Which bits d'you think he means, specifically?” 

At first, “distasteful” meant “criminals”, and we were fine with that. More city watch patrols went by on the streets, we saw the jail wagons go past with sulking, surly, filthy sorts inside, and we all said, “Ah, they must have done something wrong; I'm glad they're off the streets.” Didn't occur to us to ask what they'd done or what happened to them later.

Then “distasteful” also meant most of the aristocracy which hadn't already been offed in the crossfire. We were used to that, bored to death of that, so we didn't even bother saying anything beyond, “Oh, this mess again.” 

Our brows only started to furrow when “distasteful” began overlapping with “our friends:” 

The street illusionist from up north, who stood on the corner where White Road met Up-and-Down and conjured comical images of our many monarchs in lights and mists above his head and made them dance and squawk and fart merely by singing under his breath until the coins poured into his hat like hail... 

Ephresa Tal, the woman who owned and wrote and printed The Dawn Herald and City Breezes, both popular publications amongst Tulas's new set...

The family who owned the Azari bakery in Temple Street, which was found empty one morning with its front door swinging loose on one hinge... 

My neighbor, Mehree, to whom I had never spoken beyond learning her name and occasionally commenting on the weather as we passed in the hall. 

And that group of students. Thank the gods that I wasn't going to the meetings much anymore. I wasn't there when that cellar was raided by soldiers, armed and armored, and warmages with their hands full of spells. 

Some of the people labeled “distasteful” just vanished, same as the criminals had. Some were showily put on trial, to make an example of them – Ephresa Tal was one, though we can't say that it was a trial in the dictionary sense. She was publicly harangued by the presiding judge for four hours straight, the only evidence presented against her a crumpled copy of City Breezes brandished in his fist during his endless bombast. She was convicted (if convicted is even a word we can use) of fomenting unrest, conspiracy to commit treason, and jaywalking. 

She was hanged.

There were trials, too, for some of the students in Tulas's group. Convicted, all of them: Fomenting unrest and conspiracy to commit treason.

They were hanged, some of them. A dozen or so, all in a row, ashy faces looking so young and so scared, and we all watched as they dropped, and we all heard the crack of the ropes snapping tight and breaking their little necks, and we stood there, hundreds of us, silently, and we watched them drift in the air.

I found my friends and we drank at the Spell and Spindle with two empty chairs, and I wept openly. Tulas had not been among the hanged; she was one of the vanished. There had been many.

And outside in the streets, the city rumbled, softly crying out – they had been just kids, most of them, and they were us. They had clean collars and they scrubbed behind their ears, and the worst any of them had done was to skip out on a bar tab. They were us. They were impossible to other – not criminals or foreigners, not a group we could put in a little box and point to and say, “Ah, but they might have been getting up to any kind of nonsense.” Our native-born children, our children. 

This is why I don't care for Politics. Politics leaves nothing but dead children and weeping parents in its wake. No one cares until you hit them where they live.

There comes a point where you realize that everyone counts in someone's our children. I wish we'd all thought of it sooner. I wish we'd broadened our own definition of who our children were, enough that it included Mehree, and the Azari bakers, and Ephresa Tal, and Qevdel the illusionist, and the so-called criminal sort we'd all been so pleased to see rounded up. Whose children were they?

#

I was walking home one night, and the only spell I had prepared was a touch of witchfire to light my way home, anchored into a birch twig because I knew that by the end of the night I'd be too drunk and upset to cast it fresh. I'd spent a lot of my time drunk and upset since the hanging of the students. Since the moment we knew we'd been betrayed. 

There were barricades up all over the place. Neighborhoods blocked themselves off and patrolled their borders to protect themselves from the unmerciful and unpredictable hand of the law. Blockading did nothing for them but bring them further under suspicion. I had to scramble over or around a couple of the barricades to get home, singing out the whole time who I was and what I was doing. Most of the time I wasn't bothered too much – strangers just kept a real close eye on me, and when I got back to my own place, where they knew me, the people there would give me hand up over the pile of junk and scrap furniture and pull me inside. 

That night, though, I stumbled straight into a bit of a fracas. Swarms of soldiers came up, tearing the barricades with their hands while their warmages snapped their twigs, or untied their knots, or took off the rings on their fingers and blew through them to cast the spells anchored therein. 

People screamed. Ran or fought all around me, and died either way. 

And the only spell I had prepared was a touch of witchfire to light my way home.

It's a strange memory – it's like it all happened underwater, like my pounding heart and my weak knees and shaking hands were all someone else's. 

I made a mistake, but the only other choice I saw was death. 

I took the birch twig from my pocket, and held it in front of me. I snapped it and I shoved at the spell, blew it from a spark into a conflagration, and I pushed the mass of turquoise-black flames into the mass of guards, into the warmages. 

I wish that I'd spelled real fire into that twig, though it isn't as stable and I would have had to bring a lantern with me all the same. It would have been better. It would have done more. But I suppose the witchfire did plenty. Killed people – some of the soldiers, some of the warmages, some innocent people just trying to protect themselves and the things they held dear. 

And, because witchfire doesn't burn as hot and produces no smoke, they took a long, long time to die.

When things calmed down, they came for me and found me sitting against a wall and shivering with panic or adrenaline or something. They lifted me to my feet and I felt like things were rattling around in my brain like the the stuff you find at the very bottom of your pockets – old coins and pins and stale bread crumbs and bits of string and lint. 

They took me to the palace, and the Patrician Eriset announced that I was a true patriot and a model citizen, that I had saved the lives of twenty soldiers, et cetera, et cetera, and they hung a medal around my neck and said I was a Hero of the City and some other things, and Eriset appointed me Royal Wizard and Junior Minister of the Fifth Chamber.

And I stood there, unspeaking, shaking from my ears to my boots, and my primary concern was how my lungs didn't seem to be working properly anymore. Panic, you know.

My secondary concern was that there weren't very many people at all in this hearing chamber of Eriset's – him, me, two guards, an attendant off to one side. 

My tertiary concern was a vague reflection on how Eriset, a damn wretch of a king, looked just like anybody else. 

And my quaternary concern was that it curdled my stomach to see him sitting on the throne like it belonged to him, like he hadn't stolen it.

#

I was sick for a week or two after that, and I honestly don't remember much of it. I think I'd gone away a little in my own head. I woke up one morning and it was like I had really woken up. 

I live in the palace now. Royal Wizard, Junior Minister of the Fifth Chamber – it's all nonsense. They want me here, and they trot me out every couple days to remind everyone what a patriot looks like. 

I'm thinking I'll have to start shaking hands with Politics after all, just for the right to resign as quickly as possible and then live my life quiet-like. Sensible people like me ought to go into Politics. After all, someone's got to go into the sewers and start wading through it when things are blocked up. Someone's got to do the job that no one wants to do. Better if it's someone who just wants things to work like they ought, instead of someone with a sewage fetish who gets off on going down there and splashing around in it, because that just makes things disgusting for everyone else. 

I haven't the faintest interest in Politics, and I've made no secret of it. But Eriset only keeps two guards and an attendant in his receiving room. 

And I have a birch twig. 

**************************************************

"That was a lot of kings," Maya says. 

He nods. "I think it might have been about Plato's thing about those who are unwilling to rule will be ruled by those less worthy than themselves," He stands and stretches. "Isn't it about time for you to do laps around the library?"

"Why, do you want a race?" she asks.

He grins and gets up. They race three times around the library and collapse, laughing, back in their chairs.

"What shall we read now?" Maya asks.

"Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars, book four of Terra Ignota?" he suggests.

"For real? No. The first chapter, right?"

"Not the whole book, but not the first chapter either. A couple of extracts that make sense on their own, or at least, are interesting out of context," he says.

"I want that book so much," she says.

"Well, the library's just giving us extracts. Magic only goes so far." He shrugs.

Maya grabs the book, and they read.