Chapter 4 — Castor Vane's Offer

Vane's men found them on the fourth day in Halvenmoor.Not with violence — with an invitation. A sealed letter delivered to the boarding house by a courier in Vane's green-and-grey, requesting the pleasure of Kael Ashborn's company at dinner. The language was so formally courteous that Maren, reading it, said: "He either wants to impress you or he's about to threaten you in very polite language.""Both," said Deven. "That's how Vane operates.""Don't go," said Ren, who had appeared at their door that morning with the completeness of someone who had tracked them down and found the situation satisfactory."I'll go," said Kael.Three people told him this was unwise using three different arguments. He listened to all of them. Then he said: "I need to hear what he offers. I need to understand what he thinks I am. You can't know what you're refusing until you hear the full offer."This was either very wise or very foolish, and the room's opinion divided evenly.— ✦ —Castor Vane was fifty, compact, and had the eyes of someone who had won enough to make winning feel like a natural state. He wore the green-and-grey at dinner with the ease of a man who never stopped being in uniform. His hall was borrowed — a local lord's residence — but he'd made it his in the particular way of people who moved through the world with total certainty of their own authority.He had clearly expected to be impressed by Kael and was visibly recalibrating upon finding a sixteen-year-old from a village who sat down at his table without either deference or performance."You're younger than I expected," Vane said."You're older than I expected," Kael said. He wasn't being rude — it was a genuine observation — but he watched Vane recalibrate again.They ate. It was good food — better than anything Kael had had since leaving Cinder's Edge — and he ate it without pretending not to be hungry, which seemed to put Vane fractionally at ease.The offer came with the dessert."I want to restore the empire," Vane said. He said it simply, the way a man states an objective he has lived with long enough that it has stopped feeling ambitious and started feeling inevitable. "The Cinderlands are fracturing. Four warlords, two legitimate claimants by blood, and a capital city that's been leaderless for six years. Every year without a throne costs lives. Trade disruption, border disputes, the small violence that compounds into famine and plague." He looked at Kael. "I have the army. I have the administrative infrastructure. I have the alliances. What I don't have is the throne's recognition."