a grating whisper. “Honour above all, isn’t that your family motto?” Yet it wasn’t honour that stung Egimont to action, but the cool look on Sabates’ face as he stared down his nose and the soft words, spoken past the miraculously healed wound in the man’s throat. “See that it’s so, Egimont.”
Something about that cool voice, the dark eyes, chilled Egimont to the bone and yet drew him in. Licio may have been a young idealistic fool, but he was a fool with money, the only realistic claim to any resurrected throne and some vestige of honour. Sabates wasn’t a fool of any sort, of that Egimont was sure. Maybe he was the only hope Egimont had now that he’d sworn.
He bowed to his king, nodded to the magician and took his leave. They’d given him his orders, and no one could say he wasn’t an obedient man. His footsteps sounded loud on the tiles as he left in silence. He made his way to the stables and wasn’t unduly surprised to see Sabates there before him. The man had a propensity for appearing just where and when you thought he couldn’t be.
Sabates didn’t look his way at first, but stroked the nose of the nearest horse. “Strange things, horses,” he said. “Seemingly intelligent, full of blind courage, a good sense of self-preservation but ultimately brainless, if easily trainable. It makes them the perfect beasts to put to our own uses, don’t you think?”
Egimont said nothing. There didn’t seem much to say. Sabates took his hand from the horse – the beast seemed grateful the touch was brief – and turned to Egimont.
“Your king is like this horse. I think, with training, he’ll become the perfect beast. Let me be frank, Egimont. The country needs us. The clockers are worse than the nobles ever were. They need to go, and you know it. Reinstate the better nobles – like yourself – and leave the idiots to it. The prelate’s dream was equality for all, for positions to be given on merit. But that hasn’t happened, has it? Instead of idiot nobles, we get clockers whose only virtue is making money. And the more money they get, the more they want. They’re more corrupt than the nobles, maybe even more grasping because they don’t have the titles and history to fall back on, to guide them. Some are more equal than others, and those with power use it only to squabble. That’s why you swore to Licio, wasn’t it, because you saw it needed to change? Because you saw the good in him?”
Egimont stared at him. Was the man reading his mind? Egimont couldn’t take his eyes from the swirling patterns on the magician’s hands. They seemed… There, yes. A ducal crest, the one his father had proudly worn until the day the king was stripped of power. Two stags rutting on a blue field. A crest his father had soiled, but Egimont could clean it, given the chance. The crest dissolved and changed into a sigil of two crossed swords – the guild, and didn’t that burn in him more? The guild that had let him down, cast him adrift, and for what? For nothing. More than anything else he wanted Eneko the guild master’s head on a pike and himself to lead the guild, to mould it as he wanted. The guild had only barely scraped by in the last revolution, spared because nominally it wasn’t controlled by anyone but its guildmaster, though in practice it had mostly served the nobles. This time it would not be spared, would be brought under the wing of the monarchy, and Egimont would lead it after the fires had cooled. Only Licio would, or could, give him that.
“Perhaps,” he said at last. No perhaps about it. He’d done what was asked of him for a long time, believed what the prelate had told him. And then he and Kacha – she’d opened his eyes. Even as an ex-noble, he still had privilege, money, a position that paid even while it demeaned. He’d thought the prelate had done a fine job with Reyes, had been brainwashed to think it perhaps, and then Kacha had shown him. Shown him poverty, hopelessness, the deep grinding apathy that only the end of hope can bring. It hadn’t been deliberate on her part; she’d just taken him to where she’d come from, shown him who she was or had been. And open his eyes it had. He’d