“The man responsible for commanding those deaths is himself dead.”
“Is he?”
“Yes. He died shortly before the last few murders.”
“You are certain.”
“I am certain.”
“If such a death did take place, Private, why were the witnesses recently sought by the Halls of Law killed?”
Severn met eyes that were orange. Red was the Dragon death color; gold the happy color, as it was in Tha’alani eyes. The Emperor’s hair, jet-black, was pulled back over his forehead and tied or braided; his unwavering gaze meant Severn couldn’t tell.
Severn didn’t immediately answer the question. This was a mistake, judging by the shift of eye color; more orange darkened the Imperial eyes.
“They were killed by a Barrani man who did not wish the information contained to resurface.” No, he thought. That, too, was wrong. He bowed his head for one long moment, and accepted that there was nothing he could hide from this man; nothing he could leave unsaid.
He lifted his head. All of Elluvian’s many lessons on proper posture and proper speech, admittedly less of the latter, Severn now set aside.
“One witness survived. If it is your desire, the Tha’alanari can be called to confirm what I now say: he, and the three who did not survive, were participants in the decades-old murders. They weren’t present as witnesses, but as accessories. But I would ask, as one of the officers investigating this case, that the Tha’alanari not be called in. The memory of one such man was enough to cause possible permanent damage to the Tha’alanari.”
“And you believe that the other three were killed in order to preserve the sanity of the Tha’alanari?”
“I believe that was the intent, yes. The Tha’alani were not involved in these crimes.”
“And the man who was?”
“The man who was is a Lord of the High Court. A ruler of one of the familial lines of that court. He came to power twenty years ago. He was not expected to rule; he was, however, expected to be a powerful tool for the line he now rules.
“He took the line itself in order to stop the murders of the Tha’alani. His lord at the time was responsible for the deaths that had occurred. Had he not assassinated his predecessor, the murders would have continued until either the Tha’alanari were entirely broken, or the Tha’alani themselves were.”
“What did the Tha’alani know that made this desirable?”
The silence that followed the question was far too long. Severn drew breath and held it, considering the man—the Dragon—who sat above him. He was the man to whom Severn would swear personal loyalty—a vow that had not yet been demanded, although Rosen had said he was no longer on probation.
Personal loyalty meant many things to many people.
It meant one thing to Severn Handred. He had not fully assessed its meaning when Elluvian had brought him to the Halls of Law on that first day. Nor had he assessed the meaning when he had been offered the job. When he had been accepted. He’d had little time in which to do so.
Little desire to do so. His focus had been the Halls of Law, and some method of legal employment that would allow him to hang desperately to the edges of the only oath he had ever made that mattered to him. He had thought that it would be the only oath that would.
But now he saw clearly. What the oath meant to men such as Elluvian or the Wolflord was not lodged in the spoken words they had offered upon their own inductions. The words themselves were said by every single man or woman who had ever joined the Wolves, but the weight of the oath, the personal meaning, would be different for each.
Would have to be different for each; they were not the same people.
Severn had not, since early childhood, sworn oaths of convenience. He understood, facing the Dragon Emperor, that the oath he swore now—or in the future, when such official ceremonies might take place—could not be an oath of convenience; it was an oath. It was the measure of his value as a person in his own eyes.
He had sworn to protect Elianne.
Could he swear to serve the Emperor if the new oath came into conflict with the old? And if he could not, could he offer the Emperor assurances that his duties as a Wolf came before all other duties?
It depended, he realized, on the Emperor himself. His first oath, the driving force of his early life, had been offered when he was ten years of age. Ten had seemed profoundly and terrifyingly adult to him at the time. He had not made the vow having judged that Elianne would be worthy of a life of service, had he? She’d been a child of five—a child almost certain not to see six, had she been left to her own devices.
Did he regret that vow now?
No. Nor would he break it. But Elianne was at home in the Halls of Law; she had the protection of the Barrani Hawks, and the tolerant affection of the only Leontine officer. She had a roof over her head, a guarantee of enough food that she wouldn’t starve or freeze to death, and there were no Ferals in the streets of Elantra. Only in the fiefs, which they had both escaped.
He couldn’t spend the rest of his life tailing Elianne; he didn’t believe she required it. His mantle as her protector had been destroyed utterly when he had made the choice he had made. And that choice had somehow proved his fitness—his terrible fitness—to be what the Emperor demanded of his Wolves.