I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1452: Two of Them

The cell was not a cell, which was a thing Northern had been slightly proud of until he had to walk somebody’s sister into it.

There was a bed and a table and a bowl of fruit that Rigel had been working through with the methodical resentment of a man who intends to be difficult but is also hungry. Abyss Tyrant stood in the corner where the shadow was deepest and did not move. Lord stood in the doorway with the bone-white mask tipped very slightly, the way a dog tips its head at a sound under the floor.

Rigel looked up from the table when the door opened, a half-peeled fruit still in his hand, and his mouth was already forming something insolent.

He never got to it.

He came up out of the chair so fast it went over behind him, the fruit rolling away across the floor, and he crossed the room in three strides and stopped a pace short of her, hands half-raised and going nowhere, like a man who has remembered in the middle of a movement that he is twenty-one years old and a prince and being watched.

"You’re here."

"I’m here."

"You’re— Nora, do you have the faintest idea what Father—"

"I have some idea what Father."

And then his sister put her arms around him anyway, and Prince Rigel of the Reimgard Empire, the Sixth Prince, who had been beheading Northern in his imagination six hours earlier, put his face down onto her shoulder and held on to her like a much younger man.

Northern watched it from the doorway with his arms folded.

He had prepared for a number of things in this tower. Threats. Bargaining. Some tedious business about imperial dignity. He had not prepared for this, and there was a soft ugly place under his ribs that was reacting to it without asking him first.

’Look away.’

He did not look away.

’This is what it would have been. If any of them had come sooner. If any of them had come at all.’

’...Cut it out.’

"He hasn’t hurt you," Rehema said, into her brother’s hair, and it was not a question, and it was also not aimed at Rigel.

"No," Rigel said, muffled and mutinous. "He’s been unbearable and insufferable!"

Meanwhile, Northern only stood there with his arms still folded, saying nothing.

Rigel pulled back and glared at him over his sister’s shoulder with his eyes red and furious about it, and that, at least, was a family resemblance Northern could recognise without wanting to put his fist through a wall.

Rehema let her brother go and turned around.

"Thank you."

"Don’t."

"I’m going to anyway. You had every reason to take him apart and put the pieces in a box, and I have heard enough about what you do to people who earn it to know that isn’t a figure of speech." She folded her hands in front of her. "You didn’t."

Northern’s jaw worked.

"He’s inconvenient to kill."

"Yes. That’s what I’ll tell Father you said."

’...Was that a joke? Did she just make a joke? Good stars, there are two of them.’

"Now the part you won’t like." Rehema’s voice did not change at all, and somehow that was how he knew it was coming. "Father did not ride a thread inside Rigel to say hello to you. He rode it to find out whether the stories were true. And he has now stood inside your tower, looked at every ward you have, and left without touching one of them."

Northern’s arms came down off his chest.

"Say that again."

"He could have. You know he could have. He did not." She let him get all the way there on his own. "Father does not spare things. He collects them. Whatever he decided about you standing in that room, he decided it in the same breath he read the whole Spire, and then he went home to think about it, and I have never in my life known him to think about anything for more than a moment."

The room was quiet. Rigel had gone very pale.

"She’s right. He doesn’t— Father doesn’t wait. Not for anything. Not ever."

Northern turned and walked to the window, and looked out over the caldera and the half-built Garrison and the mountain full of people who had spent the afternoon deciding whether they still wanted him.

’He looked at everything I’ve built and decided not to break it. Which means he wants it.’

’Which means I have been standing here for a month assembling something to his specification, and I did not notice, because I was busy being pleased with myself.’

He put both hands on the sill, and the stone was cold under his palms.

’Right. So that’s the actual war.’

Behind him, Rehema said nothing, and let him have it.

And that was when the mountain shrugged.

This time there was no pressure in it, only noise, and it came up from the west face, the sound of six hundred meters of scree deciding to be somewhere else, followed a heartbeat later by the low animal groan of the Spire’s foundations taking a knock they had not been designed for. On the table behind him, the fruit bowl shivered an inch toward the edge.

Northern’s head came round.

’No.’

’No, no, no. Absolutely not. Not today.’

He was already moving. He went down the outside of the Spire the fast way, with the wind tearing at his coat and the tower wall streaking past, and hit the terrace, and came out onto the ledge overlooking the western approach with his coat still settling.

The new scar ran a straight furrow up the mountainside for half a kilometre. At the top of it, in the middle of a cloud of pulverised rock that had not yet made up its mind where to land, a very large man was scraping stone dust off his shoulders with the flat of one hand.

He had come up the face. Not the road. The face.

Northern looked at the scar, then at the man standing at the top of it.

"Bairan."

The Sword King finished with his shoulders and looked up, and for a man who had just demolished the western approach of a sovereign nation’s capital he seemed remarkably untroubled by it.

"She’s here, then."

"She’s here."

"Mm." Bairan glanced at the Spire, at the balconies above it now filling with small frantic figures, at the Ryugan horn crews sprinting for the signal towers. He appeared to notice none of it. "Took her nine days. I’d have said twelve."

Northern stared at him.

"You said you were chasing her down."

"I was."

"You were behind her the whole way. Deliberately."

"About a day. Sometimes two." Bairan started down the slope, and rocks the size of carts moved politely out from under his boots. "She’s your sister and she wasn’t going to stop, and I wasn’t going to be the man who put hands on her. So I followed her, and I made sure nothing else did, and now I’m here." He stopped in front of Northern, and looked down at him from a considerable height, and the corners of his weathered mouth pulled down, almost apologetic. "You’re going to be angry about the mountain."

"I am going to be very angry about the mountain."

"That’s fair."

Up on the palace balcony, two hundred meters away and clearly visible, Lord Eryx of Ryugan was standing at the rail looking at the ruined western face with the expression of a man who has been proved right twice in one day and is finding it a great deal less satisfying than he had hoped.

Northern looked up there and held Eryx’s eye for a while.

Then he let out a long breath through his nose.

"Bairan."

"Aye."

"How fast can you fix a mountain?"