The Seer - eARC Read Online Free

of the princess. Together they had outthought, outfought, and outcourted the rest of the Cohort.
    Together. Always together.
    Perhaps it would be simpler for him to return to Yarpin without the body. Say he had not seen Pohut at all.
    Or perhaps that his brother had cursed him and the king as well and headed for lands south, now both a traitor and a deserter.
    “On a ship, Sire,” Innel mouthed, to see how the words would sound. “Ashamed to face you after drawing his knife on me.”
    But no—uncertainty about Pohut’s fate led to doubt about Innel’s story, and there would be enough of that. The body had to come back with him, along with Pohut’s knife. The knife he had indeed drawn on Innel but had never had a chance to use.
    Because of the girl’s prediction.
    Or he, Innel, could go elsewhere. Leave the empire entirely. Find some remote place to call home. A self-exile.
    He could not stomach that either. They had worked too hard, too long. Year by year, spending what little influence they had being so close to the throne, grooming contacts, building loyalties. The two of them had been generous with favors but miserly in trust; raised in the Cohort among royals and scions of the Greater and Lesser Houses, he and Pohut had long ago realized they had only one true ally.
    Since he could remember, the trust between them had seemed unshakable. But it was not; these last few years, it had eroded.
    The king had told him, in words he could not mistake for anything else, that there was no longer room at the palace for the both of them.
    And then his brother had betrayed him.
    Now there was plenty of room.
    “Damn you,” he said to his brother.
    There was a saying in the palace that blood speaks with one voice. It meant that what the aristo families shared was stronger than what divided them. This was why the king bred dogs and horses. It was why, when Innel’s father had died a general and hero of the king’s northern expansion, their mother and her three children were taken to the palace and inducted into the Cohort.
    Breeding mattered. In dogs, in horses. In children.
    As he stared at the bundle that was his brother’s body, he could see Pohut’s face and hear his voice.
    Blood spoke, all right. He just didn’t much like what it was saying.

    Innel arrived in Yarpin at the first hint of dawn’s light, gray stone streets and tall brick buildings engulfed in pools of shadow under fast-fading stars. The mare picked up her pace, eager to get home.
    Or perhaps she was trying to escape the stink. Even autumn-chilled, the stench of trash against the wall and the sewers was a foe no arms could subdue, a pungent insult to the nose that overshadowed even the nagging scent of his brother’s body.
    It didn’t matter how many sewer pipes were installed down-city if the Houses on the hill consumed every drop of water for their baths and flower gardens. The palace was no better, with glassed-in gardens and soaking tubs.
    The stench did not distinguish between common and noble noses; everyone gagged on entrance. Wealthy merchants, foreign dignitaries. The Houses and the king should have been embarrassed, but they simply ignored it. As soon as he and his brother gained some measure of authority, they would do something about it.
    His brother.
    He could still reverse direction, find a country far away, his actions this last tenday left unknown.
    Along with everything else he had labored to accomplish. A ragged mutt with nothing. Common, in the truest sense.
    No. He was not ready to give up.
    Around him, tradesmen and clerks were rushing out into the dim light of the streets to start their day, stumbling out of his way, then staring. He had thought to attract less attention by seeming to be a trader going up-city to deliver a rolled tapestry, his soldier’s uniform hidden under loose clothing and cloak, but it was now obvious to him that a body didn’t hang over a horse’s shoulders the way a tapestry would. A lesson that, oddly,