The track curved around an outcropping of rock, and a voice came across the snow, sharp and angry. “Stop there! What’s the watchword?”
Five archers, arrows nocked, stepped out from behind the stones. They looked terribly thin, the dark leather of their armor hanging loose against their sides. Clara remembered the story—wholly imagined—that the dead rose at night to march in Geder Palliako’s army. She didn’t know if it was amusing or tragic.
“Watchword?” she said crisply, her accent perhaps a bit thicker than it might have been. “Why, I haven’t a clue, dear. Who would have been the one to tell me?”
The archers hesitated. The lead man lowered his bow. “Lady Kalliam?”
“Yes, of course. You are… no, wait. You’re Sarria Ischian’s boy, aren’t you? Connir?”
“Ah… yes, ma’am.”
“I never forget a boy child,” Clara said, something like victory singing in her veins. “The fathers are always so put out if you do. I’ve just returned from Porte Oliva. I hope it’s all right that I haven’t got the watchword? Because it would be terribly inconvenient to go back now.”
The other archers lowered their bows as well. Wester and Kit stayed carefully behind her, as they ought. The more the guards looked at her, the less they saw anything else. Guards and servants weren’t the sort of people one paid attention to anyway, not when a baroness was present.
“Of course not, ma’am. Only we didn’t know to expect you.”
“My fault,” she said, waving the comment away. “I should have sent word. Where would I find my son?”
“The Lord Marshal’s tent’s up on the western side of camp, ma’am. If he’s not inspecting the troops, he’ll be there.”
“Lovely.”
“Permit me, ma’am. I can lead you.”
“Thank you, Connir. That would be very welcome.”
The mask of habit slipped on so easily, it almost frightened her. Was she the somewhat touched woman of the court wandering about the field of war like it was a garden party? To them, she was. It wasn’t that appearances were deceiving. That was a given. What astonished her every time was that they were so fluid.
Her weeks away had done the camp no good. Dawson had always spoken of supply lines and provisioning men in the field, and she had listened with half an ear. These men had been away from their homes for years. The little city of tents and shacks they had cobbled together in the fields of Birancour were less than those of the beggars and thieves who made homes on the sides of the Division. What food there was would have to arrive by cart from Porte Oliva. There was no allied city nearer. All the woods nearby had been cut down for firewood, the game, she had no doubt, hunted to extinction. They were hungry, cold, and far from home.
And she had watched them kill the innocent of Porte Oliva. Had seen the pain and horror in the Timzinae woman’s eyes. These men she walked among, by whom she was greeted with pleasure, had killed. Had stolen. Many, she was sure, had raped. And her son, her Jorey, was their leader, as Dawson had been before him. Soldiers of the glorious empire or monsters of violence and suffering. So much depended on the story one told about them.
And then he was there, in a group of emaciated men, his hair under a knit cap he’d gotten somewhere. Her Vincen, his eyes bright and his smile as rich and full as it had ever been. Tears leapt to her eyes and she blinked them away. He touched his hand to his heart, and she melted. No one seemed to notice when she dabbed her cuff to her eyes.
The news of her arrival had run ahead of her, and Jorey was standing outside the leather walls of his tent when they arrived. The spider priests, thankfully, were not with him. She saw the exhaustion in his face and the relief.
“Mother,” he said. “I was worried you wouldn’t be coming back.”
“Oh no, dear. Nothing could have kept me away.” She waved absently over her shoulder at Wester and Kit. “These are my men. They’ve been very good to me during the journey. Now do let me come in and warm my feet, won’t you?”
“I’m afraid all we have is grass tea and hard bread,” Jorey said, ignoring the two newcomers magnificently. “But I can’t think of anyone I’d rather share them with.”
Clara walked past him and to the door of the tent. She patted his cheek gently as she passed. “You have always been such a good boy. Come along, you two. You can rest for a bit inside while I talk to my son.”
Once they were inside and the door closed behind them, Clara made her introductions. She could tell from Jorey’s reaction that Captain Wester’s name meant more to him than it had to her. She also caught a flash of distrust in Jorey’s eyes at the sight of Master Kit.
“What’s the news from Carse?” Jorey asked.
Wester was the one who answered. “Six kinds of hell have broken loose in Elassae. And possibly Sarakal by now. We’ve come to kill your priests and put in our own, such as he is, and get you and as many of your men as will survive the trip back to Antea in hopes that you can keep things from falling apart entirely.”
Jorey scowled, looking from Wester to Kit to her. They ought not to have let the actor-priest come along. It looked too much like another faction, another schism, another apostate come to champion another side in the war. And yet, would Jorey have been able to lead his men home without the perverse gift of the goddess?
No, not the goddess. The dragons.
“This is bel Sarcour’s plan?” Jorey said. “To send us home so that we can defend Antea against the consequences of the Lord Regent’s overreach?”
“It is. Assuming that you’re willing to abandon the plan to abduct her and hand her to Palliako for whatever unfortunate revenge he has in mind,” Wester said.
Jorey Kalliam was silent for a long moment, then let out a long sigh. “Can’t say my heart was in that to start with. Yes, I’ll turn back the army if you can keep it from mutiny when I give the order. I’ll tell Geder I had to. It won’t be a lie.”
“Well, we’ve an understanding then,” Marcus said. And then, “Just between us, it feels damned strange doing it. You and your men have killed some friends of mine. Helping your kingdom? Working with you? It feels more than half like betrayal.”
Jorey’s too-thin face broke into a bitter smile. “Well, at least we’ve that in common.”
Geder
It was a fit of pique,” Geder said. “I was angry. I wasn’t thinking straight. We can’t kill all the Timzinae children with parents in Elassae.”
“As my lord wishes,” the chief gaoler said.
“We have to keep enough back so that there’s incentive for them to put down their swords,” Geder said. “So maybe half? Does that sound right?”
A light snow was falling in the prison yard, dots of white too small to be called flakes. The Timzinae children were lined against the wall. Their scales were a light brown that would darken with age. Well, would have. The witness cull had already taken place. The ones who were set to watch and carry the word out to the farms huddled in a corner of the yard, the guards knotting leads around their necks, ten to a rope. Their inner eyelids flickered open and closed.
They didn’t know yet that they were the lucky ones.
“If my lord likes half, we can do that,” the chief gaoler said. He was a thin, grey-haired Firstblood man with skin almost as dark as the Timzinae, though of course his was real skin and not the insectile plates of the enemy. He lifted his whip, handle first, and the guards by the line stood to attention. “Count ’em off by twos. All the ones go back to the cells. The twos come with.”
Geder nodded to the chief and smiled. One of the children—a girl with pale-brown scales—tentatively smiled back at him, and he looked away.
The others were waiting in the street. Aster and Daskellin, of course, but a few other of the great houses had representatives. Coul Pyrellin was there. Mallian Caot, hardly older than Aster and standing in for his father and elder brothers. Some distant cousin of the Broots. If it could have waited until summer—or even until the King’s Hunt was e
nded—there would have been more. It couldn’t, of course. Tradition was all well and good. Geder had even read an essay once that said the rituals of tradition were what defined a kingdom, even more than the bloodline of its kings. But if that were true, it would mean Antea now was a wholly different empire than it had been when Geder became Lord Regent, and that couldn’t be right.
Their carriages stood at the ready, the horses’ breath pluming in the cold. His private guard surrounded him as he walked to the gold and silver carriage at the fore of the group. As if there were any danger to him here. Aster and Basrahip were waiting.
“Is there a problem?” Aster said, his voice strained and anxious.
“No, no,” Geder said. “Just some last-minute details. Nothing to be worried about.”
The carriage was more open than Geder would have liked, given the weather. It was designed to let them be seen from the street, which was important for the occasion, but since most occasions for the prince and Lord Regent to be seen happened in summer, keeping in the warmth wasn’t a priority. Aster wore a richly embroidered hunter’s jacket, Basrahip a grey wool cloak. Geder himself slipped under a thick lap blanket and a servant boy draped his shoulders with a throw still warm and smoky from a brazier.
High above and to the north, the banner of the goddess—red and pale with the eightfold sigil in black lines at the center—hung from the temple at the top of the Kingspire. The iron gates of the prison swung open, and a dozen guards with whips and blades paraded the prisoners out. Geder watched the small bodies trooping across the icy cobbles in double file. They were the witnesses, he thought. These weren’t the ones who were going to die, these were the witnesses. But they kept coming, so he was mistaken.
“Does something trouble you, Prince Geder?” Basrahip asked.
Geder shook his head, but said nothing. For some reason, he found himself recalling the burning of Vanai. There had been a woman in the city, on the wall. He remembered seeing her silhouette against the flames. That was a strange thing to recall now. Today was nothing like that. No fires. No smoke.
“I hear the Hunt’s sparse this year,” Aster said.
“Mm? Little game or few hunters?” Geder asked.
“Few hunters,” Aster said. “Everyone’s at war or busy with their new holdings.”
“Stands to reason,” Geder said. “It all stands to reason. All of it. We do what we have to do, and it’ll come out right in the end.”
The last of the Timzinae emerged. The iron gates closed. The carriage lurched. The procession began down the eastern side of the Division, sometimes along the cliff edge, sometimes turning down a street that only ran alongside it. Geder’s belly felt odd, and there was a thickness in his throat he couldn’t explain. The wet or the chill. Something.
“It’s a shame they’ve made us do this,” Geder said. “But they knew. They knew from the first, and they made their choices. And the death throes of the enemy are on them.”
“They are,” Basrahip said. “We are her righteous servant as she is ours, and the world is made whole through our works.”
“Even this one,” Geder said.
“Especially this,” Basrahip said. Geder tried to take comfort in it, and managed a bit. The Timzinae had, after all, brought all this on themselves. He had to remember that. They were the ones who’d tried to kill Aster. They weren’t even human, not really. Not like the other races. Even the Yemmu with their jaw tusks and the candle-eyed Dartinae were more purely human. The Jasuru might have dragon-like scales, but Timzinae were dragons at the heart. Turn over a stone, and the grubs died of exposure. Turning over the world was just the same.
The Prisoner’s Span was the bridge farthest to the south. The cages that hung from it held the guests of the magistrate’s justice. The crowd that stood on the bridge was the families of the prisoners or their detractors, tossing down food or throwing stones. But all went quiet when the Timzinae arrived. Guards cleared the bystanders from the bridge, but once removed, the citizens didn’t leave. The sides of the Division grew thick with people. Witnesses. There were voices, but no cheers. No shouts. No jeering at the fate of the enemy. Geder didn’t know whether he was pleased or disappointed at their solemnity. The cold of the air tightened his chest. Just the cold. Nothing else.
The guards lined the children against the side of the bridge in ranks. They covered it with their bodies. How many children had been in that prison? A nation’s worth. Hundreds at the least stood here in the cold. The maw of the Division itself gaped below them. For a moment, Geder saw the great urban canyon as a titanic mouth. The city swelling up to swallow the world, and all of them in the path of its hunger. The witnesses stood together, still bound by ropes. The others stood anxious and confused, looking to the north, toward the Kingspire and the crimson banner of the goddess.
The carriages, his own included, stopped on the bridge. Crows shouted from the sky. Sparrows darted across the wide air, as if agitated by their presence. Or celebrating it. Geder couldn’t tell which. He looked to the west. It wouldn’t be ten minutes’ walk to the little ruined yard where he and Cithrin and Aster had hidden during the insurrection. It seemed like it should have been farther away. In some other city, or vanished perhaps into a kind of legend. He imagined her there, dressed in white, her pale body among the dark-chitined Timzinae. Her eyes hard and rich with contempt. Or weeping from fear of him.
It’s not me, he thought. It’s them. I didn’t want to do any of this. It was all of them that forced this.
And then, worse. No, not just them. It was you. You’ve made me do this. This is your fault, not mine.
“My lord?” someone said, and he realized it wasn’t for the first time. The chief gaoler stood waiting at the carriage door. Geder felt a sudden and powerful urge to talk with the man, to ask where he’d been born, where he came from, how he’d happened to become a gaoler for the crown. What he thought justice meant. He didn’t even care what the answers would be, only that he wouldn’t be giving the order.
The Timzinae children stood in the cold. Some were shivering. If they wept, they did so quietly. And in the carriages, the great men of the empire waited, growing colder themselves. He saw the one girl who’d caught his eye at the prison. Who’d smiled at him. Geder pointed to her.
“She’s in the wrong place,” he said. “She’s to be a witness. Pull her back.”
“Yes, my lord,” the gaoler said. “And… the others?”
“You may begin.”
The gaoler saluted with his upraised whip. The first child in the line was a boy, perhaps ten years old. He wore grey rags and a soiled bandage on his right arm. The guard standing behind him put a foot on the boy’s back and shoved. Geder watched the boy’s arms fly out to catch himself on ground that wasn’t there. His screams were taken up by the other children.
It went on for a long time.
It was almost evening when he came unannounced to Lord Skestinin’s house. It was always a bit hard going there. Lady Skestinin always greeted him, a mixture of hope and dread in her eyes. She never said the words, quite, but she skated around them. Is my husband free? Is he dead? Is there news of any kind? And of course, there wasn’t. He hated seeing the relief and disappointment when he asked only whether Sabiha and her new daughter were accepting visitors.
As Lord Skestinin had been away with the navy more than in Camnipol, it was a smaller compound than other lords of equal dignity might have. The gardens were modest, the stables frankly small. There were servants and slaves, such as anyone might have, but fewer, given the needs of the house. For most of the time he’d known it, the house had actually been overfull.
Jorey Kalliam and Sabiha had lived there together after Lord Kalliam’s failed revolt. And later Jorey’s mother Clara and her retinue. And when Sabiha’s birthing had been in danger of failing, Geder had very nearly lived there with his guard, and a full complement of cunning men besides. The sense he had as he sat in the withdrawing room, that the house was empty and hollo
w, actually just was that it wasn’t unnaturally full. The Kingspire would likely have felt the same. Or anywhere. Anywhere in the world.
The door opened, and Geder jumped to his feet. Sabiha entered. Since the baby had come, her color had gotten better. Her hair had lost its ashen dullness. He’d never been around new mothers before. He didn’t know whether this was normal. If he imagined that she hesitated or that her smile was just a degree forced, it was surely just his unquiet mind. She was his best friend’s wife. Maybe his only friend’s wife.
It was why he’d come.
“Lord Regent,” Sabiha said, and he interrupted her.
“Geder. Please. It’s only us.”
“Geder,” Sabiha said. “Mother said you wanted to see me?”
He wiped his hands on his thighs. “Well, I wouldn’t, wouldn’t have said it that way quite. I mean, I did. Want to see you. I do. But really what I said was to ask if you were, were free.” He was stuttering like a child. No. Not like a child. Like something else. But he was stuttering. “Is the baby well? She’s not, she’s not with you.”
Sabiha’s brows knit and she turned her head a degree, like a bird uncertain whether it was seeing a vine or a snake. “She’s sleeping. She does that quite a lot.”
“Is she all right?”
“Yes, she’s fine. It’s what she’s meant to do. Geder, is something the matter?”
He laughed, but the sound came out strained. Thin and high as a violin badly played. He walked to the window and then back as he spoke, unable to keep from moving. “You’re the, the second person to ask me that today. And the first was Basrahip, so I couldn’t, couldn’t really answer him, could I? Not when I don’t know the answer. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be a trouble. I really don’t. It’s just that Jorey isn’t here, and you are, and you love him, and he loves you, and you have a baby, and so you’re like him. I mean you aren’t like him, but you’re connected to him. And I don’t have anyone.”
He stopped. A plume of white rage rose from his gut to his throat, as sudden and unexpected as a lightning bolt in bright sun. “I don’t have anyone,” he said through clenched teeth.