Beyond the Shadows - Brent Weeks [145]
“Very prudent, Your Holiness,” Hopper said. His only expression was appreciation for a solid plan.
It was brutal, but it wasn’t cruel. Dorian took no joy in this. He would strike once to the root, and rip out much of what made this kingdom a hell for its people. This way was kinder than waiting for dozens of aethelings to coerce hundreds of others into their plots. Dorian could wait, and have executions every month for years, and his people would live in terror as dark as his father had encouraged, or he could be as brutal as the north itself, and his people would live in peace, unafraid. It would be a clean slate, a new start. Dorian would be Wanhope not for his own despair, but because those who opposed him must despair.
“Yes,” Dorian said. “Monstrous, but prudent.”
Hopper didn’t know how to respond. He bowed low. The Godking dismissed him.
It was a horror to be a god. On his wedding day, Godking Wanhope waded in blood. He’d known that his father had one hundred forty-six children, but seeing them dead and oozing and stinking, expressions frozen in death, bodies still warm, not all the blood congealed, was something else entirely. With vir, he blotted out his sense of smell as he examined the boys.
He’d run out of suitable concubines before he’d run out of aethelings to slaughter. That meant that some of the women—each of whom had witnessed the murder of an aetheling she had expected to be her new master—had to make two trips. Only those who’d been splattered with blood were excused. It had worked though, because the aethelings who’d come later were the youngest, and the least likely to pick up on a concubine’s anxiety.
They’d got them all. Three of the older boys—three!—had broken the compulsion and fought, killing one Vürdmeister and two soldiers. In a perverse way, Dorian was proud of the boys.
Godking Wanhope took his time, steeled against the sight of dead children. Vipers, all of them. He was the fluke; he had always been the only one of his brothers with any moral sense. Vipers couldn’t be tamed. He couldn’t flinch now. He had to know if the job was done, or if he needed to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his reign for a Vürdmeister who could hide his vir and betray the Godking himself—as he had in his own youth. He paid special attention to those whose faces had been damaged. But in each case, he could still smell the faint residue of his compulsion spell on their flesh, and he’d tied it in an unusual way so that he would recognize his own work. That was why he had to examine the bodies immediately.
If a Vürdmeister had betrayed him and hidden an aetheling, the traitor would have to find a boy of the correct age, kill him and destroy his face, change his clothing, examine the Godking’s weave—and notice that it had been altered and how it had been altered—and lay it on the dead boy himself. It was all possible but barely, and by the time he was finished inspecting the boys, the Godking was sure it hadn’t been done.
The next room was worse, though there was no blood in it except what came in on the Godking’s white robes. Hopper had gathered all the wives and concubines. The fifteen women