Notes:
I don't know what it is about old-school Americana that gels so well with Elder Scrolls, but have another chapter title in that vein.
A look at UESP makes me sorely wish that ESO, and particularly the Summerset expansion, had existed when I wrote chapter three. Ah well. We must live with my relative lack of imagination now.
The Shore, Dimly Seen
Fiorana was not forced to endure Arranelya's memorial for Ocato until after the fact. That speech was given in Alinor Square, for the benefit of the masses, and Fiorana was not, after all, a part of the common herd.
No. On the day after Shasten was given passage to the mainland, when the Crown Prince was either fled from the palace or completely at Arrinaro's mercy (there was no way of knowing), Fiorana was pressed into that far more rarefied herd that populated the New Crystal Tower, there to honor the return of the heroic Agents.
All that was asked of the herd in Alinor Square was to be reasonably gullible. The herd of the New Crystal Tower, however, was to watch carefully and determine, with pinpoint accuracy, in what aspects to be gulled.
Fiorana and her herd welcomed the Agency of Hammerfell enthusiastically. Fiorana and her herd welcomed the Agency of Colovia with a precisely equal enthusiasm, until Lord Fintar spoke of the death of worthy Serranur. Then, they all roared their undying support of Moonglimmer Manor and cried justice for Delbar, though half the room was aware that Arreis the Unbowed was due to fall out of favor the instant her husband's memory had served its purpose. When they lauded the Agency of Nibenay, they forgot as one that there had been two Agencies in that region, and only the Agents of South Nibenay had actually come home. The father of the First Agent, North Nibenay, stood just cater-corner from Fiorana, indistinguishable from the others in his loud praise from his glad mouth under his cheerless, calculating eyes.
The Imperial City Liaisons and the Agency in Valenwood had been so systematically forgotten that no special effort to forget them was required today. The Liaisons, of course, were forgotten because they were now busy with a noxious task for which an ugly war of succession was an absolute prerequisite. Fiorana could not be sure Valenwood's Agency had a similar weight of responsibility. At the New Crystal Tower, a thing could drop from the general memory because it was deemed a vital secret, or because it had fallen into ignominy, or because it was inconvenient to whatever Lady Sage Arranelya was telling Summerset that season, or for no discernible reason at all.
Nor was Lord Emissary-General Fintar very clear on what heroic pursuits the heroic Agencies had been getting up to; the war they had fled was presented as an entirely external crisis. The unspoken expectation was to act very knowing and very laudatory whether you knew anything or not. Certainly, Fintar knew precisely. Quite possibly, others here did as well. Fiorana, however, thought it likely that there was still another missing Agency at this meeting, an informal one but the most perilous of all: the Agency in Summerset, now gathered at Alinor Palace for the coup.
If the coup was still on. If Prince Shadyrn had failed in his escape. Or if he had succeeded, for that matter. They'd have plenty to occupy themselves with in that case, too.
But this laudatory meeting was too intricate and perilous a dance to admit much thought for such distractions as that.
Though Prince Shadyrn wore the garb of a common laborer, he still felt at nonexistent seams and creases for any remaining traces of blood.
Bidrasha laid a hand on his arm.
"He looks guiltier groping for blood than he would spattered in it. Have peace, prince. Arrinaro's blood is not worth such pains."
Shadyrn regarded his arm: a pale and delicate thing, not a laborer's arm at all, and even the longest sleeves his companions could find, amid the spare supplies in the old warehouse, showed wrists accustomed to a firm buttoning at the cuffs.
He and Bidrasha had thought of every possible route of escape – but Arrinaro had thought of everything they had, and his forces numbered considerable more than two. They had set out to escape, and the best they managed was to seal themselves in the Queen's Wardchamber.
They filled the room outside. Arrinaro had informed him his mother the Queen was now under questioning for aiding and abetting him, but would of course be excused it if it turned out he had been in the palace all along.
He would have given himself into their hands, if not for Bidrasha. She held him forcibly through the deep watch and told him, over and over: even now, the Thalmor could not hope to keep their mastery over Summerset if they tortured or executed the High Queen. They could not hope even to throw her in a cell. It was the one power play that overstepped their bounds – and if it did not, if it did not, the fact still remained that it was Shadyrn, not Faltana, who was the one great power in Alinor actually thwarting their aims, and it was Shadyrn who they must not have.
Had three squadrons of Blades not stormed the Palace this morning and spirited him to a long-abandoned recess of the docks while most of the city was wrapped up with Arranelya in Alinor Square, all he would have gone on to accomplish in Alinor was to die of thirst in the Wardchamber.
He looked unsteadily back to Kellorn, the Blade who had organized the strike. Even now, he looked mostly like a dockworker. "Do I... under the circumstances, do I address you as Grandmaster?"
"The Blades answer to Cloud Ruler Temple," said the Bosmer firmly. "That didn't change with the fall of the Remans and it won't change today. So long as Cloud Ruler Temple is unavailable for comment, you may treat me as your provisional Grandmaster – for I will treat you as I would the Emperor – but call me Captain, Your Highness."
"Captain Kellorn, then." He drew in a shaky breath. "There is a messenger, Firrino by name, without whom I would have been powerless beyond the palace door. He was to return from Skywatch the day after tomorrow. I would have you greet his return, before the Thalmor do."
"All the help we can get," Kellorn agreed. "Especially if they'll still let him in Alinor Palace."
"What is the Blades' connection in Lillandril?" put in Bidrasha.
"Substantial," said Kellorn. "The strongest support you have, in fact, but – well, Arranelya told all Alinor that her aim was to keep us out of a civil war, but that was about when we were storming the palace and killing her brother. Not to mention that her word has, historically, not been worth a fig. The way Cloudrest's deteriorated, they're bound to start patrolling the western border after this, and a royal messenger isn't going to have the right skillset to get past that. That's our purview."
Shadyrn shook his head as though to clear the water from his ears. "Please apprise me of the current situation, and the next steps, Captain."
"First thing, Your Highness: let's see how you lift an empty barrel. If you can't blend in here, we'll have to find you another point of operations. As to the situation, your rear patrol is loading a supply ship bound for Firsthold as we speak. If the High Queen really has been thrown in prison, trust me, people will talk of it."
The High Queen was imprisoned, and no one was talking of it. For the prison was Alinor Palace.
High Queen Faltana paused on the rail of the central stair, at the wall where hung an elaborate scene of a Bosmer feast day, the birds' bright tropical plumage all intact on the dinner table.
"Your Majesty?" said her attendant, meek and demure. Her advice had always been so sensible, so elegantly put and always a middle ground between her way and the Council's.
Yet what was a way, but a path that one walked? In that sense, Faltana had never really had a "way". She had simply had a home. Middle ground meant only that she had been drawn out, slowly and surely, out of that home, onto the path, into the darkness.
The sensible middle ground had meant a provision against the Mythic Dawn. It meant an embargo against the Empire. It meant the Queen's Council should self-appoint. It meant any agent behind Delbar's murder ought to be regarded the same way as the murderer. And not an hour ago, this same attendant had, with all courtesy and deference, with all reason in the world, advised her to put a death warrant on her only son's head.
"Shadyrn was with me, when I commissioned this." She closed her eyes. "He didn't approve, of course. He never did. But to think it would come to slaughtering half the Council... who knows how many beside..."
Indeed, they never saw eye-to-eye on art – Shadyrn thought her tastes garish, preferring what he called subtlety. Light hints of romanticized spriggans in what otherwise looked like wood grain. But his objection had not been to the bright colors. His objection had been to the placement.
This was the place on the wall where Last Stand at Crystal Tower had been.
Rynandor had been a traitor, she had known. He had used the daedra as a tool for his own vainglory, and the fall of the Crystal Tower had only been the monstrous height of it. He had sabotaged the Tower to be seen saving the High Queen. In a desperate attempt to evade justice, he had told her, without any basis at all, that the Thalmor aimed to see her dead in the city square.
She could not remember what the painting had looked like. She could not really remember what Rynandor himself had looked like, nor the sound of his battle cries at the foot of Crystal-Like-Law.
Shadyrn was no traitor, she knew.
She knew, too, certain as a stone wall that had always been there, that she could not refuse to make a decree against him. Alinor Palace had been her prison for a very long time, she thought, even if it was only today that she felt the fetters. She did not know how long; perhaps it was from the day she took that painting down.
Lillandril found itself under embargo.
It was not as complete as the embargo on the Empire – on the remains of the Empire. Summerset's ships of the line were without parallel, and the sea held no crevice where one might escape their sight. Land passage was a somewhat different matter.
If mer knew what they were about (mer, and whatever men had not fled to Lillandril long since), they could get past the Cloudrest border. Information passed with relative ease. And so Lillandril knew that the Crown Prince was in hiding. They knew the High Queen had issued a decree, affirming that the slaughter of councilmer and others in Alinor Palace was, indeed, a violation of the rule of law and that Prince Shadyrn was, indeed, complicit, after the fact at least. The ramifications were clear, but left entirely unstated.
A trickle of Lillandril's hardier citizens even crossed the border the other way, led, so it was said, to Shadyrn's secret stronghold.
But Lillandril was among the least arable Holds on Summerset, and when it came to passing the border,a wagon of wheat was of a different order from a messenger or a militiaman. The embargo, though incomplete, was enough to threaten starvation.
In a month, the King and Queen of Lillandril, in desperation, sued to negotiate with High Queen Faltana. It was a well-worded specification, but to no avail; it was the new head of the Queen's Council who came to negotiate on her behalf. He asked only two things in exchange for the lifting of the embargo: the heads of the King and Queen.
Perhaps they had even had a choice.
By decree of LORD CARYEL OF LILLANDRIL
The Lady Sage Arranelya wisely counsels us that the risk of war is an intolerable one. Further, that there is no greater risk of war than that posed by the races of men and beastmen. Their presence in this Hold will not be tolerated longer. They have been confined to their homes, and they shall not leave them again to sow discord among us. All true citizens of this Hold are to take up the native fire of their hands and raze these dens of iniquity to the ground at the next dusk.
ALL GLORY TO THE ALDMER!
Andrathel's fingertips stood rigid against the notice on the table. One had been tacked to every pillar of the ampitheatre. Many had been ripped away before Cilandrin had torn this one, but just as many stood.
"He's serious," said Melthis, frantically shaking her head from side to side. "He's really going to do this, this is really happening..."
"But is Lillandril going to do this?" said Cilandrin. "I really don't think we will, do you?"
"With everyone who's come in since they re-opened the border?" asked Melthis desperately. "Flocking to the one Hold with a Lord in charge, straight after the King and Queen were... were... it's practically Sunhold all over again. This is going to happen."
Andrathel's hand fell.
"Has it?" he said quietly.
Melthis glanced in his direction. "You mean... in Alinor."
"No, it hasn't," said Cilandrin. There was something that tried to gel in her mind but didn't quite make it. "Fiorana would have told us. Any number of people would have told us."
Fiorana... what would Fiorana say?
No guarantees Bidrasha is alive, regardless, she might say. The Crown Prince did have a fairly narrow escape. Yes, Fiorana would say that (and Cilandrin would not repeat it now she'd thought of it), but that wasn't quite...
"Why didn't it happen in Alinor?" she asked aloud.
"Well..." Melthis shrugged miserably. "We have a lot more humans than Alinor does."
There was a knock on the door.
It was Nindiel, who pushed the bakery cart. In making bread their side of the bargain, the Thalmor had inadvertently gotten the most prolific Blades contact in the Hold back on her rounds.
"Everyone's making a fight of it," she said, soon as she stepped in with Andrathel's softloaves. "You are too, if you're all together and Cilandrin's girl is in the bedroom. Warning the humans or preparing for battle?"
"How many are fighting?" asked Cilandrin.
"Hundreds so far," said Nindiel. "Two thousand when we're done, I think, and that's only the mer. This is Lillandril. They've overplayed their hand here once... looks like they haven't learned their lesson."
"But then..." Cilandrin paused.
Just like that, it came together.
"Why Lillandril first?" She turned wildly to Melthis. "Would there be so many people making a fight of it, if it were Alinor – or Sunhold?" She turned to Andrathel. "What if it were Firsthold? Is there anyone there willing to fight anymore... or are they all here? Here, with all those humans that used to live there?"
Andrathel's look of vague alarm was all the answer she needed. She closed her eyes.
"Nindiel. How many have come into this Hold, since the murder of the King and Queen? More than two thousand?"
Nindiel was silent a long moment.
"I've led you all into an ambush."
"No." Andrathel shook his head, jerkily. "You've led us nowhere. Nowhere we wouldn't gladly go. What is the point of all we've done, if we won't fight... this?"
"I was going to fight," said Cilandrin, sitting down uneasily. "I was going to die. And the humans' houses would still burn, and Faralda would lose me. She'd be a royal ward, and that means raised according to what Lord Caryel deems fit, and... and she's bright. Like Leyaro's girl. Only she wants to be a magister in the Imperial City. Not... the things Elenwen wants."
"We need to fight," said Andrathel firmly. "But if it's something they don't expect. If we don't try to kick Caryel's people out of Lillandril – if we all go south, or east, instead, and join Prince Shadyrn-"
"No," said Nindiel, holding up a hand at once. "No. Shadyrn's location is a vital secret. He's glad of the ones who have come to him, he's training them up, but if thousands of refugees and untrained rabble beat a beacon of dust toward his hideaway... he dies."
Melthis sat forward suddenly. "Do the Blades have ships in this harbor? Ships of the line, I mean?"
"Three," said Nindiel delicately. "Enough to ram the blockade. Unfortunately, we're keeping them reserved, in the event of... ah..."
"A major crisis," supplied Andrathel.
"Yes," said Nindiel, falteringly. "You... you are aware of the situation on the main continent?"
"They're at war," said Cilandrin. "And this... this is peace. I would give Faralda war."
"To say nothing of the humans," agreed Nindiel quietly.
The six hundred Lillandril mer the Blades had already contacted were as good as lost. They were cut down on the perimeter of human settlements that morning, and on the fringes of very well-organized mobs that night. But after Nindiel left (screaming, for the sake of her cover, that if the bread was so bad as all that, they could try another week going hungry), those who were willing both to fight and to leave – seven hundred only – were organized into a rescue force. They struck at a quarter past one.
Melthis volunteered to parlay her alchemical collection into a set of distractions. She stood on a roof just fifty yards away from an area concentrated with humans and tossed them at random from a sling. As Cilandrin's rescue force went in, one agent lying in wait was blinded by a flash of light. Another was transformed into a Northern catamount. Cracks and bangs and calamities filled the air, and the main force went in virtually without unsheathing a sword.
As Cilandrin's rescue force fought its way out, swollen with human fighters but beset by archers who aimed toward the refugees in the middle, she saw Melthis again. Her body was broken on the ground, pierced by arrows from three different directions.
Though the Thalmor archers pursued, only a token force was lying in wait at the harbor. This was, indeed, not an expected move.
Andrathel, who could not handle so much as a traveling-knife in a fight, was in the protected center from the beginning, carrying Faralda. On the way out, he raised his forearm against an arrow that would otherwise have gone through Faralda's head, and the arrow threaded the needle between the bones. He had intended to stay in Lillandril, but the arrow left no hope of it: if he stayed, he would be recognized as a violent dissident and executed. He was loaded onto the ship of the right flank, quite against his will, as he screamed Bidrasha's name.
Fortunately, there were two sides to most events. Here, it had become clear there was a power unaccounted for in Summerset, capable of marking the steps of the Queen's Council and then putting them to the slaughter, quietly taking over whole ships of the line, even breaching the blockade. And that was why Fiorana was not quite herself, in the summer that Summerset was lost.
Oh yes, the Queen lived; perhaps she even waked. The Prince gathered strength. The Blades fought mightily. But Summerset was lost, all the same. Just decapitate a couple of minor monarchs, and the strongest resistance in all the Isles can be routed by an undercover army that wasn't even much noticed entering the Hold.
A decade ago, Lathenil had said, with all truth, that the Thalmor aimed for key points, but there weren't many of them. Fiorana had cried Rynandor and Summerset in one voice with him, and Shasten, and Andrathel, and Melthis, and all knew the two names to be synonymous.
Now the people of Summerset were the Thalmor, and it was safest to presume that everyone she had shared drink and hope with that day was dead.
And so Fiorana was not herself, that summer. Her colleagues saw the crisp, overcautious cynic deteriorate into a barely-sheathed snapping paranoid lunatic. She retained her bureaucratic and clerical roles but was not deemed mentally fit for anything so refined as torture; that part of her routine was temporarily reassigned to the shipyard, where she might inflict her temper on hapless Bosmer tars instead.
She ranted to nobody about the idiocy of artists and historians and other callings she did not understand. She bought lumps of hard tack from dockworkers, and did not eat them. Any yardworker who was the least bit deft with a paintbrush learned terror at her approach: if a peaceable vessel of any size were in the yard, Fiorana would be sure to decree a decorative trim along the whole length of its border, and punishment for mistake on any detail was swift and painful.
The worst case, after all, was that no one lived to read the cipher, and that her lament went out only to the Aedra.