A Practical Guide to Evil

“The advantage of fair laws is not inherent but rather in the people’s appreciation of them. It is therefore just as useful to offer only the perception of fair laws, and easier to attain.”

– Extract from the treatise “On Rule”, author unknown (widely believed to be Prince Bastien of Arans)

I’d avoided going to speak with the Red Axe.

I’d actually even gone further than that, avoiding sending anyone I trusted to speak with her in my stead. She was in a heavily warded cell, where she would benefit from the finest care the Arsenal could offer as a full contingent of armed soldiers guarded the door day and night with orders to let no one inside. It wasn’t that I was afraid of speaking with the woman, though I suspected I’d come out of that conversation feeling like the monster that these days I so often was.

It was to prevent accusations, more or less. If she did something… strange during the trial and I’d been alone in a room with her at some point, odds were it’d end up blamed on me. One of the Woe or even just a Named I was on good terms with were likely to end up facing the same sort of accusation if they went in my stead, so I’d been cautious and ensured she was isolated instead. Aside for meals and healing, the Red Axe saw no one.

Of course, the identity of the man now accompanying me meant that I’d be able to afford taking this risk. Frederic Goethal was both one of Above’s and a prince of the blood, both things which would silence the Mirror Knight if he tried to kick up a fuss. If anything, the political inconvenience that was Prince Frederic refusing to ask for the Red Axe’s head on a pike would only lend him greater moral credence should he vouch I’d been up to nothing. Why would the Prince of Brus enable by plot what he might have easily obtained by law and patience?

In truth I could probably have arranged an interrogation earlier, but it would likely have come at the price of Christophe de Pavanie or one of his still sparse following sitting in attendance of the talk. No so great a cost, on the surface, but the opposite on closer look. It’d be implying the that Mirror Knight and his crew had the right to oversee my activities as a high officer of the Truce and Terms.

I had no intention whatsoever of making that concession, not even in so unspoken a manner.

Over the last few days, in between bouts of thinking that some viperous tongues insisted might be brooding, I’d come to wonder if the trial ahead of the Red Axe was not just another avenue for the Intercessor to damage the Truce and Terms. I couldn’t know how closely the heroine was aligned with the Bard, or even what she was truly after, but it did not take knowing either of those things to understand that the Rex Axe would be put in a room with some of the most powerful people in the Grand Alliance and allowed to speak her piece. I knew better than most how dangerous words could be if they were the right ones, spoken into the right ears. On the other hand, what else could I do but let this proceed?

If I’d let the Sinister Physician quietly dispose of her the risk would have been avoided, true, but only at the price of another, arguably worse risk. Gods, but I hated fighting the Bard. It had all the manners of unpleasantness of fighting Kairos and Akua to it, and then some nastiness all her own. I needed more information, in the end, and I now had a good opportunity to get it.

The Prince of Brus had sent for a coat before we headed out in the small nameless section where the prison cells of the Arsenal stood, conversation between us sparse as we moved. The intensity there’d been between us, down there in the sands, had cooled the further we got from them. I was not certain whether or not to be pleased by that, but the conversation I knew lay ahead of me put out any remaining embers there might have been anyway.

I was not unaware that yet another reason I’d had to avoid the Red Axe was that I’d known the necessary would become harder once I had a face and a story to match the Name. It should not be, I knew. I’d killed, both in cold blood and in the heat of battle, and this heroine was nothing to me. No one. But while the orphan girl who’d played in the streets of Laure had grown into someone else, I’d not forgotten her.

Or that she’d taken her first steps down this road slitting open the throat of a rapist, something I was now going to hang another woman for.

“It is my understanding that she travelled with Lady Archer for some time, before coming to the Arsenal,” Prince Frederic quietly said as we walked.

“Archer was the one to find her, or close enough,” I confirmed. “Her intention was to drop her off here at the Arsenal, where her talents could be tested until the White Knight could decide on which front she might best assist the war effort.”

I’d have been consulted as well before decisions were made, at which point the Wicked Enchanter would have come up and we’d have ensured those two would be as physically far from each other as possible. Distance and well-informed officers had served us well in this regard so far, and would have again if the pieces hadn’t ended up aligning in just the precise way to foster a disaster.

“Then you will be aware that there were… circumstances,” the Prince of Brus delicately said.

“I knew what the Wicked Enchanter was when he was brought into the Truce,” I replied. “Disgusting as his actions were, they were granted amnesty.”

Didn’t mean I didn’t have him marked in the back of my head for when the Truce and Terms ended, though. Under the Accords I owed the man nothing, and if heroes wanted to bury him in steel and Light the moment he resumed his old habits I would have raised a damned toast to the kill.

“I do not envy your office under the Terms,” the fair-haired man admitted. “I am glad it is held, as I’ve seen what villains can bring to bear for our side of the war, but I envy it not in the slightest. It seems like a duty that would wear away at one’s soul.”

My lips thinned. That’d cut a little too close to home for comfort.

“That’s the thing about being taught by Praesi,” I blandly said. “You learn that, for all the preaching, souls are just another commodity to bargain with.”

That killed the conversation the rest of the way to the cell.

The Red Axe – I did not know her real name, leaving me only this to refer to her by even in my own mind – was looking rather healthy, for a woman who’d been shot by almost two dozen crossbow bolts. Fired by my legionaries looking to kill, too, not by sloppy amateurs. There were so many bandages wrapped around her torso that even through her dull brown prisoner’s shift I could see them peek out. Though she was hardly in a state to walk around and I’d been told she still spent most of her days asleep, the heroine was not visibly feverish. There was a certain sickly pallor to her otherwise tan skin though, I judged, and her breathing was laboured. A heroic constitution and a swarm of priests had seen to an impressive recovery, though and when we entered her pale brown eyes were wide awake and unclouded.

“I’d get up if I could,” the Red Axe greeted us in accented Chantant, “but my legs will not allow.”

Even if they had, she was still shackled at her ankles. Cleverly done work with a loose enough chain she’d be able to move around some but not walk. A similar set was around her wrists, to be loosened only when she was helped to bathe once a day. She had still had the muscles arms I remembered from seeing her fresh to the infirmary, but they’d grown thinner. Even healing with Light had costs, and she’d needed a great deal of healing to pull through.

“Lady Red,” the Kingfisher Prince greeted her, offering the slightest of bows.

“Prince,” the heroine replied, grimacing.

“If I might introduce-” Prince Frederic began, but she interrupted him with a tired gesture.

“That cloak speaks,” the Red Axe said. “Well met, Black Queen.”

I did not let my frown touch my face. I’d been studying her as she spoke, but when she’d looked at me I’d not found any hostility. Was she a natural talent at obscuring her thoughts? Given that she’d come from the middle of nowhere, it seemed unlikely she would have been taught. Not impossible, though. It seemed unlike the Intercessor to linger around teaching anyone, but then I still knew depressingly little about her methods when out of my sight. There was a simpler explanation, too, but it struck me as unlikely.

“You’re looking healthy,” I said.

“Enough for the noose?” the Red Axe chuckled.

Blunt, but then when you were down in the pit there was rarely a point in pretending otherwise.

“The block’s a lot more likely,” I replied. “But there’s to be a trial first.”

“A trial,” the brown-haired heroine said, her distaste clear. “Just get it over with, would you?”

“You have rights, Lady Red,” the Prince of Brus reminded her.

“I also cut open your neck, Prince,” the Red Axe said, tone calm. “Don’t come in here pretending that’s all forgotten. I won’t have any of that.”

“I have not forgot a moment of it, I assure you,” the Kingfisher Prince replied, tone cool.

I noticed his hand twitch, on the side of his pale neck where the scar could be seen.

“But it does not change that you have rights and protections under Terms,” Prince Frederic said.

Measuredly, the Red Axe turned to me.

“Can I renounce those, Black Queen?” she asked.

“I’m not your representative under the Terms,” I said. “That’s the White Knight, who’ll be here soon enough.”

“I remember the Archer’s speeches,” the heroine dismissed. “You did not answer my question.”

I breathed out, studying her. She did not look angry or afraid, although there was something to her expression… Impatient, I decided. She’s impatient. Yet I found none of the despair and hopelessness I would have expected of someone actively trying to hurry along their own death.

“No,” I said. “Or I suppose it’s more accurate to say that you could, but it’d hardly matter. You agreed to the Terms before coming here and committed breaches while a signatory. What follows will not change whether or not you renounce anything.”

In principle an argument could be made that if I she signed a renunciation of her own free will before witnesses I could follow up by snapping her neck in the moment that followed without breaking the Terms, but in practice that’d just be throwing oil on an already crackling fire.

“The cogs of your bureaucracy are soaked in blood, Black Queen,” the Red Axe said, offering a hard smile.

And in her eyes then, for the first time, I found something like hate. Not for me, which had been the part that tripped me up, but for the rest. I’d done her a disservice, I thought, in thinking that she could not hate the tower without also hating its architect. Something of that must have shown on my face, as the brown-haired prisoner let out a bitter chuckle.

“Sharp,” the heroine said. “Sharp enough to cut yourself, Black Queen. Or everybody else.”

There was pain there, I thought, and hurt. But it didn’t own her, it didn’t drive her. Whatever horror it was her Named had been forged out of, it had made her hate a cold and measured thing.

“You didn’t kill the Wicked Enchanter in a red rage,” I stated. “This was deliberate, and you know exactly what it is you’re doing.”

Thinking of her as a victim or an accomplice had been dead ends from the start, I was beginning to realize. It is all objects in motion, the Intercessor had told me. This wasn’t the plot of an eldritch abomination in a woman’s shape, not really. The Red Axe hadn’t been manipulated into this. She’d wanted this, perhaps before the ever saw the Bard – if she’d ever seen her at all.

“I don’t think you’re a monster, Black Queen,” the Red Axe told me. “A bad woman, maybe, but those aren’t rare. I’ve seen a real monster, the bleakness at the heart of him, and I don’t see it in you. I don’t think the Archer could love you like she does, either, if you were like that.”

“It’s the Terms that are your enemy,” I quietly said.

“I don’t think you’re a monster,” the heroine repeated. “But your Truce and Terms? They’re the most monstrous thing I ever saw. You took in every scrap of filth this world has to offer, knowing what they were, and you’re protecting them.”

“Without the Damned, we would not be alive to have this conversation,” the Prince of Brus said.

I started, having almost forgotten his presence, and saw that same surprise on the prisoner’s face. Frederic Goethal’s silken coat had been pulled close around him as he leaned against the wall, the only overt sign of what I suspected to be discomfort.

“What was done to you…” the prince began, voice trailing off. “There is no excusing that. But the Truce and Terms are not responsible for that evil, and they are responsible for a great many saved lives.”

“What was done to me,” the Red Axe snorted. “Do you know, Black Queen? What it is he’s tiptoeing around?”

“No,” I admitted.

I had suspicions, though. Rape and torture highest among them. What sparse details we’d found of how the Wicked Enchanter had lived on the lawless outskirts of Procer had been a sickening read. The dark-eyed heroine glanced at me.

“Would it change anything, if you did?” the Red Axe asked.

I could have lied. But I was going to see her killed, one way or another, and so part of me felt like I owed her the truth.

“No,” I repeated.

To my surprise, she smiled. As if obscurely proud or pleased.

“You’re a cold hand, aren’t you?” the heroine said. “The kind ones, like Prince here, they go all soft-touched the moment rape’s even hinted at.”

“You are a tragedy, Red Axe,” I honestly said, “but hundreds of those come across my desk every day. Even a bleeding heart eventually bleeds dry.”

And, truth be told, I’d started with a lot less blood in mine than most. The jury was still out on whether or not that’d been for the best, in the greater scheme of things.

“The Wicked Enchanter was a monster,” the heroine said. “The details of it don’t matter, save that what he got he deserved a hundred times over.”

“If you’d decided to kill him the heartbeat the Truce was over, I would have looked away and covered my ears,” I said, meaning every word. “But you didn’t wait, and you took a swing at more than just the Enchanter.”

“I’m not a child, Black Queen,” the Red Axe said. “You don’t need to take me by the hand and lead me down the path to where this is headed. I knew before I ever raised my blade how this was all going to end.”

“This wasn’t justice,” Prince Frederic quietly said. “It was just blood, and many more lives might be lost because of it.”

“You’re guiltier than she is,” the Red Axe said. “She’s not supposed to be better than this, Kingfisher Prince. You are.”

“And you?” the Prince of Brus replied. “Are you not supposed to be better than this as well, Chosen?”

“I give my life for what I believe,” the heroine said. “What more is there left to squeeze out of me? I am not the one baring steel in the defense of the indefensible.”

“It is defensible,” I said. “Just not to you.”

I was not bitter of that. How could I be? No, instead some part of me wondered if this was what the Grey Pilgrim had felt like, that day he’d looked at me and called me the culmination of old sins come back to haunt Calernia. If I was the punishment of the apathy and pettiness of the west when Callow fell, then was this woman not my own for the practical brutality lying behind the ideals of the Truce and Terms? I could not be angry or bitter, no, not when this was richly deserved.

“Don’t-” she began.

“I won’t take you by the hand, like you insisted, so forgive my bluntness,” I calmly interrupted. “If we don’t extend the amnesty part of the Truce to animals like the Wicked Enchanter, we lose Named. Those who have skeletons in their closet, who’ll wonder if maybe their sins will be enough to get them the noose instead of the Truce should they come out of the woodworks. And most of those will be of mine, but there’ll be some of your end of the Book too – those on the fringe, who learned to love striking at evil just a little too much. And even more costly than the lost champions, it’d mean the reliable Named would be up north, fighting the dead, while the radicals would be down south with no one left to handle them.”

I breathed out and began to resist the urge to spit to the side before quelling that reflex and going through with it. It was not a pretty habit, but then nothing about this was pretty. It was blood on cogs, exactly like she’d accused.

“It’s an ugly truth, and bare of morality, but in the end getting you a semblance of justice would have simply cost the war effort too much,” I said. “I’d apologize, but I knew there would be people like you when I began to head down this road. I did it anyway.”

I couldn’t fix the world, in the end. Even if I had the power to shape it as I willed, I knew my own limitations well enough to be aware I’d likely do as much harm as good. Yet the Truce and Terms, for all their occasional dip into brutality, they worked. We’d gathered nearly seventy Named now, heroes and villains and those circumstance could cast as either. Near seventy Named, pointed at the great enemy to the north. Not even the First Crusade, when all of Calernia had risen to topple Triumphant, had fielded so many of our kind. It had not been painless or bloodless and certainly not without sweat, and neither I would not pretend that the system was without flaws, but Merciless Gods it worked. If these were kinder times, I hoped I would have been kinder as well, that what I’d built would not have been so harsh.

But there were not kind times, and I could not be more than I was. It was either the Truce and Terms or rolling the dice on the annihilation of life on Calernia.

“I don’t want an apology,” the Red Axe said. “I want all these swords and oaths to be defending something worth defending. You spawned a monster that cares nothing for the past and looks hungrily at the future, Black Queen. Maybe it was the best you could, for all your famous cleverness.”

She laughed, the sound of it bleak to my ear.

“So think of me as the voice Creation uses to say that this is not good enough,” the prisoner said. “Your Truce and Terms will break, and you’ll either do better or be cast aside.”

Just another hero, lighting a torch and declaring it wasn’t enough without ever offering another way. There was an echo of so many I’d faced in that voice, in that castigation. The Lone Swordsman, willing to make our home a wasteland so land as it was our own banner flying above it. The Grey Pilgrim, willing to choose war over peace because it wasn’t the peace he’d wanted. The Saint of Swords, eyes hard as she decided to risk the death of all Iserre rather than compromise. I’d heard this refrain before, sung by different voices or with different words.

I’d won against this many a time, and I would again.

“We’re not that special, you know,” I said. “Named. In the right place at the right time we’re able to do things that no one else could do, it’s true, but we don’t matter as much as we like to think.”

The Prince of Brus breathed out sharply. He was Alamans, and well-taught, so he grasped my meaning before the other.

“The Truce will hold,” I said. “The Terms will hold. If they were hated, if we were facing anyone else, it might be that enough wounds would kill them. But that’s not the world we live in, Red Axe. They’ll hold, if only because there are simply too many people that want them to.”

And I believed that, I genuinely did. Something fragile, without a proper foundation or results to point at? A mess like the one ahead would break it, sure as dawn, even if everyone was trying to keep things together. But I had bartered away kindness for sturdiness, and so my creation would withstand the storm. Some dangers were born of the same strength that allowed you to beat them back, weren’t they? Creation’s sense of humour had not grown any less vicious as I aged.

“You will try,” the Red Axe said, and the calm certainty in her eyes was troubling. “You will fail.”

I met her eyes, for a moment, and wondered what to say. I would give no apology, for any I might offer would be meaningless.

“It’ll be quick,” I said. “That much, at least, I can promise.”

I left, after, sensing that neither of us had anything left to say.

The Prince of Brus stayed in the cell after my departure and I was not in a mood to wait for him. My leg was starting to pain me again, an unhappy turn, so I ambled off towards the Alcazar and counted on my slow gait being enough to ensure he’d catch up to me if he wanted to. He did so, though after long enough I’d come to believe we would be parting ways. I half-heartedly went through the usual courtesies after he joined me.

“There was little change after your departure,” the Kingfisher Prince told me. “She tired of speaking to me quickly.”

I grunted, noncommittal.

“It is a useful conversation to have had,” I said. “I thank you for the opportunity.”

“I can take pleasure in having provided that, if not the outcome of the journey,” the fair-haired man said. “Have the Red Axe’s words informed your opinion on other matters?”

A very polite way to ask if I was more open to taking Cordelia’s offer of pushing through the Accords in exchange for ceding jurisdiction over this particular Named. Which actually seemed halfway possible, now, considering the Red Axe had tried to renounce any rights she might have under the Terms in front of a credible witness. It was a more than decent excuse to throw her at Procer, were I so inclined, though I suspected Hanno would see it otherwise. Which was why Hasenbach wanted me on her side in the first place, when it came down to it. Officially there were three crowned heads in the Grand Alliance: the First Prince of Procer, the Holy Seljun of Levant and the Queen of Callow. If she got me in on her side, not only was she securing Below’s side of the Terms but also ensuring that whoever ended up speaking for the Dominion in this would be very reluctant to side against two thirds of the alliance.

“It has,” I simply said.

He left it at that, as I’d thought he would. It’d be uncouth to try to press me for a quick answer on so delicate a matter.

“So what part of that was it that you wanted me to see, in specific?” I idly asked.

He did not look surprised, and though he did not deny what I’d said neither did he look abashed.

“It might be argued, given her enmity to the Truce and Terms, that she was never really a signatory,” the Kingfisher Prince simply said.

Ah, clever man. If she’d been an enemy from the start, then she was not under anyone’s protection. Procer would be free to have at her. It was still a relatively shaky excuse, to my eye, but before I’d met with the Red Axe I probably would have dismissed it outright. He’d read that correctly.

“To my knowledge, you never spoke with her in depth,” I said.

I’d sent him to ensure her safety during the assault on the Arsenal but fleeing clandestinely through corridors was not the time for the sort of conversation that would have allowed him a solid read on her. I’d not been made aware of any visit to her since, either, and considering my orders to the guards I would have known within a quarter hour of such an attempt at most.

“I had much time to think, while recuperating,” Prince Frederic said. “If she were Damned, I would have noticed. I have seen enough Named I am certain of this. Yet she was not, and still attacked me. There was a likely reason for that, given what I know of her past.”

Meaning he’d deduced her antipathy was towards the Terms before we ever set foot in that room. Competence was attractive, I reluctantly admitted to myself. Especially so in attractive people. My eyes narrowed as I fit another set of details together.

“That’s why you don’t want to press charges under the Terms,” I slowly said. “You don’t believe she was actually trying to kill you.”

“In a sense,” the prince said. “Regardless of whether my death was meant or not, or perhaps even hers, it was not Frederic Goethal she struck. It might have been a signatory of the Terms or a prince of the blood, but for all that she has she my blood I cannot truly consider her an enemy.”

“All three of those people you mentioned happen to live in the same body,” I drily pointed out. “I suppose they are all of a forgiving temperament.”

“I am not a saint, Queen Catherine,” Prince Frederic quietly said. “I am not pleased to have been attacked by someone I was risking life and limb to save. Yet, knowing what I know of why this came to pass, I cannot in good conscience seek her death for it. I am not blind to the nature of some of those who have been protected by the Truce and Terms, or the injustice matching the expedience of enlisting their service.”

“You’re not an officer of the Terms,” I said. “Or one of their architects. You bear no responsibility there.”

“I have chosen to uphold the Terms, to participate in them, and so bear a personal responsibility,” the prince replied, shaking his head.

It was torturous chain of logic, as far as I was concerned, but not entirely senseless. A little to labyrinthine, though, for the amount of passion he’d been speaking with all this time. I suspected that under all the talk of conscience and responsibility, the truth was that Frederic Goethal’s heroic hindbrain believed the Red Axe was at least a little right bout all this. That would make it an utterly repulsive notion to him to ask for her death, even when it might be convenient. Perhaps even more because it’d be convenient, I mused. Where he’d be standing, it was that sort of liberties taken with justice that would have started this mess in the first place.

“I’ve already given my opinion of this,” I said. “I doubt you’ve forgotten it.”

“It would not dare, Your Majesty,” the blue-eyed man said, a tad ruefully.

We’d gotten into the Alcazar as we talked without my even noticing, nearer to the heart of the section than my rooms but not all that far. That sudden realization had me closing my mouth, eyeing the pretty prince from the side. It wouldn’t even be particularly suspect, I thought, to invite him into my rooms. Which were warded. Private. The kind of place where I’d be able to take my time peeling him out of those clothes and get at the much more interesting body beneath them. I’d not said anything, but the Prince of Brus caught the corner of my gaze and his steps stuttered for the barest fraction of a moment. Without a word being spoken either side, my blood quickened again. It wasn’t a very good idea, I reminded myself

It might turn out to be a thoroughly enjoyable idea, though.

I glanced at his face and found a conflict I suspected might not be too different in nature from mine. There were quite a few temptations I considered myself apt in dealing with, more than most at least, but this sort of thing wasn’t one of them. I saw movement form the corner of my eye, dark robes and a long stride, and to my relief and dismay – more dismay than relief, honesty compelled me to admit – I found Hierophant headed towards us with intent too obvious to be mistaken.

“It appears I have other claims on my time,” I said.

“I can only look forward to our next meeting then, my queen,” Prince Frederic replied.

Without my being entirely sure how it happened, I found my hand being kissed as smoldering blue eyes looked up at me. Fuck, I thought even as he retreated. All right, so I was probably going to end up sleeping with Frederic Goethal. I just needed to be smart in going about it, and maybe not do it too much. I could probably handle that. I wasn’t looking for anything serious and he was headed back to Twilight’s Pass before long anyway, so really you might even say I was being responsible about this.

“Catherine?” Masego said, interrupting my thoughts.

“Zeze?” I replied.

“Is there a particular reason you are looking at this man?”

I pondered that for a moment.

“None you’d enjoy hearing about,” I honestly replied. “I take it you’re looking for me?”

It was only then I took a longer look at him, and noticed how visibly exhausted he was. Physically, anyway. There was a fervour burning in him I’d long learned to recognize as him reaching a particularly interesting stretch if his research.

“I was,” Masego said, then lowered his voice. “I did it, Catherine.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Did what?”

“I found the crown of Autumn,” Hierophant grinned.