Chapter 239: Fear of the unknown

LYSANDER

The gravel was still warm beneath my bare feet when I took the phone from the sentinel. I walked until the red door and its yellow-lit windows had receded into the distance, far enough that no one inside could overhear the conversation.

A pale moon hung above the pines. At the bottom of the lawn, the lake lay black and still, its surface disturbed only by slow, widening rings. I stood there with a damp towel knotted around my waist and a stranger’s phone pressed to my ear, feeling rather like a boy who had been caught sneaking out of bed.

"Bradley."

"Your Majesty." His voice came through rough and hoarse. There was something raw in it that I didn’t care for, as though he had spent the evening shouting or had taken a blow to the throat. "Forgive the hour. I wouldn’t have pressed your man if it weren’t necessary."

"I heard you’ve been trying to reach me all evening. My apologies if I caused you any concern. I was occupied." I kept my voice even. "What happened?"

"I’ve just come from Bellowstand."

I closed my eyes. So it was about the Lycaon situation.

I had sent that message at noon, expecting it to sit in his inbox until morning. Instead, Bradley had done what he always did. He had taken the information as an instruction and acted on it without waiting for further direction. Admirable, certainly, though I hadn’t expected him to ride out and deal with it before the day was over.

"You went to the Shelters?"

"I did."

"I hadn’t expected you to do anything tonight. It’s rather late."

"The sooner the families were informed, the sooner they could begin to make arrangements." There was no hesitation in his answer, much less an apology. "I took two sentinels with me. And..." He paused briefly. "I brought the body."

"You brought her back."

"It seemed wrong to inform her father by text, or to leave him ignorant any longer than necessary. He would have found out eventually." Another pause followed, longer this time. "Part of me thought we ought to have waited. But the reasons for doing so would have been selfish, and frankly, foolish. So I told him as I believed you would have wanted, Your Majesty. As gently as I could."

I looked out across the lake.

"We also showed him the recording, so he wouldn’t suspect we had any involvement in what happened to his daughter. I made certain the footage of the healer using her gifts on the girl was excluded. There was no need to introduce that complication."

"And how did he take it?"

"He took it as a father would."

I let the answer settle between us.

Somewhere behind me, an owl began its slow, uncertain call. A gust of wind swept across the lawn, tugging at the towel around my waist, and I turned my back to it.

"Tell me everything."

Bradley obliged. He recounted the events in the same flat, methodical manner with which he approached everything, as though he were reading from a ledger rather than describing the destruction of a man’s world. I stood beneath the moon and listened.

He told me about the white fire in the Supreme’s eyes, the invisible acolyte, and the sentinel hurled against the wall with half his face burned away. He told me about the laughter that had preceded it all, and the terrible collapse that followed. And finally, he told me about Folke, crumpled on the floor with his dead daughter gathered in his arms.

By the time Bradley finished, I realised I had been gripping the phone so tightly that its casing had begun to creak beneath my fingers.

"So he agreed to nothing."

"He did say he would think about it."

"Which means no." I exhaled through my nose. "You can be honest with me, Bradley. I can take it."

"If you want my honest opinion, I believe that when Folke has had time to think, he will decide that being polite to us was a mistake." Bradley’s voice hardened. "Your Majesty, I will be plain. I believe Folke Shelter is blinded by his grief. He will go home and sit with it, and every hour he spends doing so will make it harder. A man like that does not simply retreat into silence. He is the Supreme of Bellowstand, after all. He has sat at the table with every old family in this world for years. He will pick up the telephone. He will tell his friends that the royal house killed his daughter and then came asking him for favours. And he will tell it so convincingly that they will believe him."

"He didn’t say that."

"He didn’t have to. It was written all over his face."

I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. "Then we speak to the others first. Before he has the chance."

"In that respect, we are of like minds. But we cannot approach them the way you intend to. We cannot afford to make it look as though we are pleading or asking for their cooperation."

I went still.

"Say that again."

"We do not ask," Bradley said, his voice firm. "We tell them. We frighten them, if necessary. Lycaon is loose in people’s dreams. A demigod who has had perhaps twenty years in the dark to plan his return, and who can reach into a sleeping mind and Goddess knows what else. There was something Folke said that stayed with me. He wondered whether his daughter might have been corrupted by Lycaon. I dismissed the thought at first, but the more I considered it, the less unreasonable it seemed. A witch has already died from it, and the effects reached a Delicate too, like a falling line of dominoes."

He fell silent for a moment, allowing the implications to settle.

"Fear of the unknown moves people faster than any appeal to goodwill. Show them what is at stake. Make them understand that the next victim could be someone in their own household, someone sleeping in the safety of their own bed. They will come to the table because they have no choice. And they will not care whether we shed tears over Folke’s daughter before asking them to sit down."

"No."

"Your Majesty..."

"No, Bradley."

"I knew you would say that." His breath left him in a slow exhalation, almost a sigh. "I’ve known you since you were a boy. I know your nature. You are your uncle’s nephew, and yet you are nothing like him in that regard. You would sooner surrender a crown than lead a frightened man by the nose. I respect that. Truly, I do."

He hesitated, and when he spoke again, the weariness in his voice had given way to something more urgent.

"But this business with Lycaon is happening. It is not a rumour, and it is not some distant possibility we can afford to debate at our leisure. It could even be happening tonight. And we cannot build our response around the goodwill of people who practically owe us nothing now."