The Eve
Two days after I brought Marcella into the fold.
Marcella, eldest daughter of Radamel Udrina. We appoint you once more as Great Warrior. Discharge with diligence your charge to protect our indivisible people beneath the World Tree. Furthermore, every fault of yours shall be stricken from the record by resolution of the Elder Council...
She was a Great Warrior again.
I stood and watched the reinstatement go through without a hitch. I was the one who had proposed her pardon and restoration in the first place, spinning a plausible pretext about a symbol of reconciliation and talking the elders around with it.
A Great Warrior was, ordinarily, a warrior's office representing a single clan. Marcella, she had told me, was specially called the Great Warrior of Medellin—something like an extraordinary post, stood up to prosecute the conflict with the Britannia Empire. On the strength of that authority she had led elite warriors in a guerrilla war. This time, she had simply taken her place back.
Not that it was a simple return to duty.
"Marcella. Do you still oppose heroin?"
"No, Great Elder. My judgment was rash, and I caused the elders trouble. After hearing Consul Allan's explanation, I let go of my misunderstanding."
"Welcome words."
Marcella had withdrawn her opposition to heroin. For the elders, there could hardly have been gladder news.
Restored to her post, she looked over them and added one line more.
"If only to make up for my fault, I will work all the harder."
At the sight of her so thoroughly reformed, the elders nodded, well pleased. A few wore blank faces, as if Marcella were beneath their notice—but it wasn't that they felt nothing. It was the heroin. They could have as much as they wanted, and some of them smoked four or five times a day. Five times a day meant they spent nearly every waking hour intoxicated. Heroin, and nothing but heroin.
The elder in the worst state even tossed this out.
"So now Marcella's... givin' us the heroin?"
Not one of them laughed at him or corrected him. They only grinned vacantly, let it pass without expression, or nodded.
Marcella giving them the heroin? Not exactly wrong.
It was truer still, once you considered what she and I were plotting.
The moment the ceremony ended, we made contact in secret to discuss the stroke we would carry out before long.
"Marcella. I'm going to ask the imperial house for troops to shore you up. Reinstated or not, you can't seize the government alone. It goes without saying that the form of it will be you reaching out to collude with the Empire."
"...So it won't look as if you put me up to it. It becomes me having asked first."
"I met your terms. From here on, you listen to me. And it's better for you as well. Rather than play the Empire's puppet..."
"I know. Better to dress it up as me dragging you in because I wanted the power."
The answer was short. Her mind was already set. She meant to become the traitor who willingly colluded with the Empire, if that was what it took to keep heroin from spreading to ordinary elves—the ones who farmed, foraged, and tended the forest. That was how she needed to come out. We were going to have to keep working together anyway.
"I'll issue the details soon, Marcella."
I told her that much, then reached out to the imperial house. Moving the troops I meant to attach to her required the Emperor's leave. The numbers would be modest, but I intended a bloodless entry into Medellin by an elite of at least brigade strength. I couldn't report to him directly by communication magic, so a messenger had to carry it.
The messengers I sent were the two princesses. Even now, on the face of things, I was carrying out a secret charge under their supervision. That was not the reality of it. On the surface, it was.
Now that the youngest had turned out that way, had the remaining daughters gone strange as well?
That was the thought that came to Edmund III, Emperor of the Britannia Empire, as he regarded the two princesses who had suddenly requested an audience.
At a glance, they were still his beloved daughters. First Princess Victoria: blunt, yet utterly devoted in her worry for her father, and a reliable eldest besides. Thanks to her, he had never fretted over the succession. He was only delaying her investiture as crown princess, since he could not send her to serve in the army once she held that rank; his mind was already half made up. Victoria, at least, did not seem likely to repeat the war of kin he himself had lived through.
And Second Princess Sienna. She never ceased to hand him worries, and she was also the daughter he loved and watched over most—a pitiful child who had lost her mother the moment she was born and grown up in a wet nurse's hands. Lately, though, she had grown docile to an uncanny degree, and that had lightened his cares. He had even wept, once, watching her show filial devotion to an empress with whom she shared not a drop of blood.
Daughters as precious to him as his own life. And those two were talking madness. Had it been anyone else, he would have dismissed it as nonsense and removed them from office. Because they were his daughters, he could not.
"Say it once more."
When the Emperor asked, Victoria reported with a calm that said she had expected as much.
"I said that Medellin will soon collapse, Father. Great Warrior Marcella has requested support through Allan Madoff. We must assist her so she can purge the leadership without obstruction, and then bring the Great Forest under our sphere of influence."
"An elite built around the Imperial Escort Knights must be dispatched, swiftly and in secret."
"Victoria."
"Father. Have I not already reported the situation in Medellin? And the results Sir Allan has been producing? This is only the fruit arriving a little sooner than expected. Even if no traitor had emerged on their side, it would have happened eventually."
She delivered it without a single stumble, each word set neatly in place.
Had it really crumbled like this?
He had been receiving the reports for some time, of course. How Allan Madoff—a name one heard rather often these days—had made sport of the elves, and what he was doing after slipping into Medellin. Unable to believe it, the Emperor had even had the Foreign Ministry cross-check the account. All of it was true. Even so, it did not feel real. That a single knight could so easily set the Great Forest on the road to ruin. Why had the elves gone and purchased a poison called heroin, paying good coin for the privilege? If the knot was going to come undone this easily, then what had been the meaning of all those soldiers who had died or been maimed in the Great Forest until now?
Too uncanny for anything but sigh after sigh. And then Sienna stepped forward.
"Why are you hesitating?"
"Sienna, this is a matter of war. You—"
"Don't make it complicated. Their entire ruling class is thrashing about, sunk in a heroin revel, and all we're doing is taking the country without spending our strength."
"If it succeeds, the Great Forest becomes an imperial protectorate—a vassal in everything but name. The resources pouring out of it will make the Empire stronger still. On that foundation, we should even be able to square the trade balance with Jin."
"Sienna."
"So why are you stalling? Dad."
Not Father. Not Your Majesty. Dad. A familiar, welcome form of address that felt, instead, like a doubt laid against his fitness to rule. Sienna would have aimed for precisely that. She had always been a calculating one. Even now her violet eyes were pressing him without a word, as if to ask whether he truly meant to let a chance this good slip away.
He did not think her insolent. He felt like a vacillating sovereign—the sort who hesitates even with a chance to strengthen the Empire lying before him.
An opportunity is an opportunity. That much is certain.
But could one really topple an enemy nation this way? How was any of it possible? It still astonished him that a few kilograms of powder had accomplished what three brigades of the imperial army had not. He was putting off the decision, and Victoria offered him something like comfort.
"It is only natural that you cannot bring yourself to believe it at once, Father. Had I not seen Leon in the flesh, I would not have believed it either. Rather, right now... no. It would be better if you simply did not look. It is too gruesome."
"Victoria."
"If you cannot bring yourself to trust the heroin, then trust Sir Allan. He is a man who made morphine out of pity for the wounded, and who this time volunteered—accepting the danger—to infiltrate enemy ground, so that Medellin might be subdued without a war."
"He is a loyal subject of the Empire. It is the duty of the imperial house to help an able servant use his ability. ...Isn't that so, Sienna?"
"I don't know about loyal. Capable, though. That part's true, Sister."
When his daughters went this far, how was he to refuse? In the end Edmund III set his hesitation aside and nodded.
"Very well. I accept Great Warrior Marcella's request for support. I shall form the force with Viscount Grant, vice-commander of the Imperial Escort Knights, at its head. Once we have watched how matters proceed, we will set about an armistice, for the settling of a lasting peace."
At last the Emperor had decided. The two princesses, their sanction in hand, exchanged a look. Victoria wore a smile she rarely showed, pleased to have gotten what she came for. Sienna, for reasons of her own, had narrowed her eyes. That look handed him a fresh worry. It meant, did it not, that the two of them had joined together to back that Allan Madoff.
Come to think of it, the medicine that treated the Empress was that man's work as well, or so they said.
And now the same Allan Madoff had brought the elves down on his own. An achievement so immense it was difficult even to know how to judge it—so far beyond him that he had no notion of how it ought to be rewarded. And of course, even after the Great Forest lay within the Empire's influence, they would still have to depend on Allan's drugs to some fixed degree. That, too, was a deeply awkward problem.
For the moment, though, taking the Great Forest came first. He was not so incompetent an emperor as to turn his face from a victory set before his eyes.
Five days later, word came that the force the Emperor had rushed out had reached the border city.
I had already finished preparing to take Medellin, and Marcella was throwing herself into her own preparations. She said she had picked out the officials likely to follow her once the business was done, making a show of having no better choice—a bare handful who were not users, not yet steeped in the drug.
All that remained was to carry it out.
And what we meant to carry out was, in the end, a coup.