by Kirby Crow
Liall did not add the rest of it; that it was Qixa who had obtained the dagger of blood steel—supposedly from inside Ged Fanorl—that Liall had used to spur the barons to war against the Ava Thule. Even Liall was not certain what would happen if that deception unraveled. Possibly, he’d lose his head. Qixa certainly would.
And if there is no war? Then what? You can’t think an entire army will meekly go home unblooded once their enemy is sighted.
“I’m surprised you can read it,” Scarlet said.
“Jarek taught me,” Liall said, rubbing his chin. “A skill that came in handy during the campaigns.”
“We were months at sea with Qixa.”
“Yes. And by the time we docked in Sul, I had discovered his background. You remember Mautan the Mate? Qixa spoke to him in Avak once when they were... well... it was an indelicate moment. You remember that they were lovers? I overhead the love-words he spoke to Mautan in his own language. He knew I’d heard him, and he carried us safely to Rshan, even fought to defend us, when he knew I could destroy him with a word. That’s why I trust him.”
“Trial by fire.” Scarlet mused. “I never understood those words before now. Well, what did the rascal say?”
“Beyond the very pointed message of the language it was written in—which was, I think, to convey how much he trusts me—it was a tally of ships and men who await off the coasts of the Kalaxes, should I have need of them.”
Scarlet fell silent again, staring at the glow of the lamps. “Because Ressanda has ships, and he’s coming.”
“He’s already here.” Liall rubbed his face. The warmth of the good wine had fled from him, and now he was sober and weary. “You must heed this; what I have told you must never be spoken of again, not even when we are alone. Lock the knowledge away. Qixa’s life is in the balance, and probably yours, as well, in a different way, because as long as it is known that I tell you little—and you have done that job admirably well by complaining many times that I do not confide in you—then your value as a captive remains diminished.”
“Your enemies seem more interested in making me corpse than captive.”
“The very effort is a token of how much they are steeped in the past. To take something from a king is a symbolic victory and not a real one, and whoever put the bomb in the Bleakwatch is much like Vladei in this respect; a shallow thinker and a clumsy tactician, and a courtier. A courtier relies much on ancient codes of conduct when it comes to war. Another unfortunate aspect of our isolation, I believe. Those traditions will not command me. They think that if they can deprive me of you, I will be publicly shamed and demoralized, and that will make me turn to my allies. Ressanda, perhaps, which would then put that man in a position to demand something of me, namely a husband for his daughter. This assassin does not want you dead because I love you.” He pulled Scarlet close again and kissed his forehead, inhaling the sweet scent of his soft hair. “Though I do love you, and dearly. But that assassin doesn’t believe that I love you at all. That is how men like him think, how far they are blinded by prejudice. For your safety, that's how we'll continue to let them think. Let them all believe that it's my pride and not my heart that demands my t'aishka be treated with respect. It keeps you safer.”
Scarlet rested his cheek against Liall’s chest and watched the fire burn. When Liall glanced down, he could see the flames reflected in the absolute black of Scarlet’s eyes.
“I know I shouldn’t give a damn,” Scarlet whispered, “but I despise their belief that I’m impossible to love.”
Liall stroked Scarlet’s hair. “Our friends know I love you more than life, but they are our people, redbird. They’ve seen you for the kind of man you are: proud, brave, stubborn, and honorable to a fault, no matter what it costs you.”
“And Qixa? He knows how you feel. He said as much to me on the ship. He reminded me that he knew from the first that if he wanted to kill me, he’d have to kill you as well.”
“Qixa will keep that information closer than his own secrets.”
“Aye. Who would listen to him anyway?” Scarlet said bitterly, pulling away. “I’m a lenilyn. A non-person. An outlander with the eyes of a shark. They can no more believe that their precious king loves me than I can sprout wings and turn into a bird.”
Liall winced and pinched the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb. “I've hurt you again and that's the last thing I want to do.”
“No. You haven't.” Scarlet gestured to the empty bottle on the table. “It’s just the drink talking. Me da always said I was a sullen drunk. Never mind. Are you all right?”
“A damnable headache is all. I’ve been getting them lately. Too much wrangling and worry in the day, and then in the night, when I finally have some peace, this rotten pounding in my skull starts up again.” Liall sighed. “I do love you, t'aishka. The gods know I do.”
“The gods again. Are you turning pious at your age?”
“Maybe I'm just turning wise. Old men are said to be able to do that.”
“You’re not old.”
“Not quite yet. Do you want some che?” Liall asked, changing the subject.
“Desperately.”
Liall went to the door and opened it, intending to call for Chos, but froze when he saw Margun standing several paces, in the shadows of a stairwell that led to the upper floor. Margun was huddled very close to a boy in the shadows, their heads bent together. They both turned as the lamplight from the bedroom flooded the alcove.
His lover? Liall wondered. The boy looked much younger than Margun, a youth with abrupt gray eyes and a pointed chin.
“My lord?” Margun said, turning to attention at once.
Liall exchanged a wry look with Margun and closed the door. And just who are you to disapprove? Liall chided himself. Scarlet is probably the same age.
“I think it’s late to be drinking che,” Liall said as he turned around again. “But I have something that might ease my head even better.” He bent and looked under the dining table, searching. “Ah, here we are.” He proudly deposited a small wooden cask on the table. “I had brought us a few bottles of anguisange from home, aged for twenty years, but I think you'll prefer this.”
Scarlet’s lips parted. He pointed. “That's never...?”
Liall grinned. “Rshani think it a vile drink. I used to feel the same, but do you want to know something funny? After months without it, I began to miss it. I made the happy mistake of saying that to Tesk.”
“Bitterbeer!” Scarlet grinned. “I haven't had it in so long I've almost forgotten what it tastes like. Oh, I hope it's not spoiled.”
“Bah!” After several tries, Liall twisted the waxed cork free and poured some of the dark brew into a cup. Tesk was a wizard at procuring Byzan goods, which Liall often tasked him to do. Over the past few months, Tesk had found many such items, including persa spice and a furled apple tree in a pot. Scarlet never tired of these surprises, and Liall enjoyed witnessing Scarlet’s genuine delight in small pleasures.
“It would take more than four months at sea to spoil bitterbeer.” Liall sniffed the cup. “Smells the same as it always did: cat piss.”
Scarlet laughed. “It does not! Give me that, you want-wit.”
Liall handed it over. “And there are two more casks in my luggage cart. A gift from Captain Qixa. Tesk tried to pay for it, but the old bastard wouldn't have it.”
“This is so grand of him. Bless them both!” Scarlet closed his eyes and sipped the dark ale.
Liall watched Scarlet allow the brew to rest on his tongue for a moment before swallowing.
“It brings back so many memories,” Scarlet murmured. His eyes were damp when he opened them. “Da taking me to Rufa's alehouse for my first pint. Feast days. Old Jerivet. Playing darts with Osa before he left.”
Liall was dismayed. “Deva’s hell, I never meant to make you sad.”
Scarlet wiped his face. “I’m not, really. Just a bit homesick. Or maybe I'm missing my family. There's only Annaya
and Shanshi now.”
“And me,” Liall said softly. “Don’t forget me.”
“I could never forget you. Not for a minute.”
Liall touched Scarlet’s hair, but he knew the meaning behind his words. They were all gone, all of them: Scaja, Linhona, Rufa, Jerivet, old Hipola. Lysia was ashes and nearly everyone his love had ever known was scattered to the winds or under the ground or very, very far away.
I am all that is left to him now. I’m his family. I must not forget that.
Scarlet tried to smile and sipped the bitterbeer. “I'd forgotten how good it was,” he said. “Have some?”
“Of course.” Liall poured and raised his cup.
Scarlet copied him. “To family.”
He always knows what I'm thinking. Liall wondered if he would ever acquire that talent. “And to absent friends,” he murmured, and drank.
After all, absent is a much better word than dead.
THE KING OF RSHAN NA Ostre met his generals on the High Road that led from Kingstone to the fortress of Starhold. Twisted oaks of immense age loomed over the rutted roadway, brimming with spring green. The sun had come out from behind the clouds, and it was brighter now with the burgeoning season, turning the sky the bluest any had seen it since last year.
The king’s soldiers stared at the rangers in tattered leathers and threadbare boots in the company of the King. Silently, they moved aside to make room for them in their ranks, respect heavy in their manner.
Kamaras led them. She was a woman of Jarek's age, a distant cousin of his own family, and she wore her hair very short to fit better under a helmet in battle. She lived for fighting and for her young lover, Ogir, who rode by her side.
The ranks of the men Kamaras presented Liall with were greatly swelled by the conscripts she had gathered from Sul and the southern reaches. There were women, too, but not as many as they would get from Uzna. Unlike in Byzantur, Rshani women were conscripted in wartime like any other adult, and not barred from battle or the study of war. If there were any men who resented the practice, Liall had never heard of it. A sword was a sword. The skill and ability of the arm holding it was all that mattered.
As he rode, Liall studied his fighting force closely. Many of the new recruits had never held true weapons before. They wore stiff leather armor with barely a scratch on it and shining with oil, and their boots were new. He could detect no resentment from them, but he had expected none. Sul was his mother’s barony—now his—and so close to the Nauhinir that the city's fortunes and those of the crown were inextricably linked. There was also a sort of city pride involved for Sul, whose white banner with its compass rose below a gold sun was flown closest to the throne on state occasions, and it was Sul who had supplied the provender for the first leg of their campaign: great stores of barley, smoked and dried fish, nuts, honey, pickled fruit rinds, che, cheese, and salted meat, hauled in a hundred great wagons in the center of the columns, guarded vigilantly by sharp-eyed captains who knew that an army traveled on its belly.
They followed the shore, heading north, where the land began to rise. Their view of the sea dropped away, cut off by the eastward dip of the road. The grade was steady but gradual, and only when Liall looked back could he see how far they had climbed.
To the east was a rugged terrain of jagged black hills and high, rocky tors that stretched for a hundred leagues. To the west, beyond the steep drop of dark cliffs, was the sea. Liall knew the High Road from his youth. He had traveled it on horseback with Jarek when he was Scarlet's age. Liall rode for a full day and a night without rest at the head of his army, Scarlet at his side. He rarely allowed Scarlet out of his sight now, and he worried that such a long ride in cold weather would exhaust his lover. Scarlet remained cheerful and awake through it all, joking with Margun and Jochi, eating bread and drinking wine from the bottle. He drew his horse to the side of the wide road once and dismounted as the soldiers marched past, waving Liall away when he halted.
“Can't I have a piss in peace? On with you!” he complained in perfect Sinha, causing the soldiers to roar with laughter. Even dour Theor was entertained and gallantly leapt down from his saddle to hold the reins of Scarlet's horse.
Scarlet knew how to make people love him. Was that a pedlar's talent? It must be something all his own, Liall decided. Certainly, he had not had any great love for Hilurin before he met Scarlet, though he had come to understand and admire them, and to pity them.
In spring, the only dry place to make camp on the High Road were the bridges between Starhold and Sul, and they were too large a company for that. They continued on without rest. It was noon on the third day when Liall spotted the first gate of Starhold above them, and the tents of the king’s army encamped near it. He smelled them long before he saw them. Thirty thousand soldiers made a stink that not even the sea winds or the altitude could dissipate.
It will be a bigger stink before we're done.
Kamaras had given Liall the numbers: the men under Jarek’s present command were close to twenty one thousand, not including the five thousand from Uzna-Minor, but only four thousand could be raised from Sul. Understandable. Sul was the larder of Nau Karmun and the western baronies. The kingdom must eat, after all, and every Sul hand that could be spared from the campaign was another hand in a fishing boat, field, or store room. They would wait at Starhold for Tebet's twenty thousand to gather, if Ressanda held true to his promise, damn the man to Deva’s shrieking hell. If the baron did not, the Ava Thule would either raid unchecked for another year or descend like a plague on the northern baronies when the weather turned bitter again.
Liall had seen what they could do in a year. Tesk was right; revenge on Tebet would have to wait. His hunger for it burned in his throat like a live coal, and he had to force his mind away from images of Jarad Hallin’s plump neck between his hands. Or Ressanda’s.
I will rip his spine out like flaying a fish, Liall thought. The soft hairs on his arms rose and his vision greyed. Careful.
“Liall?” Scarlet was at his side, dark eyes round with concern. “Are you well?”
He made himself smile. “Just counting fish in my head. Do you think we have enough?”
Scarlet glanced back at the supply wagons, clearly unhappy. “Please tell me that’s not all fish.”
“It’s not. You won’t have to eat smoked fish three times a day on the march, though I fear we have left dumplings behind.”
“Oh bother, whatever shall we do without dumplings?” Scarlet said, affecting a tone so like a foppish courtier than Liall laughed.
“We’ll all be thinner before summer, I fear.”
Scarlet wrinkled his nose as the rank odor of the encampment reached him. “Liall, isn’t this rather the wrong way? You said the Temple Road lies northeast. We’re traveling west.”
“Northwest,” Liall corrected him. “But we are an army on foot and horseback with many wagons. The high mountain passes of the Temple Road in the south are too narrow and unstable for an army. You traveled it once, yes?”
Scarlet nodded curtly. His gloved hands tightened on his horse’s reins. “Yes. The road is a knife-edge against the side of the mountain, with deep chasms waiting below. I saw it the day Cestimir died.”
Liall cleared his throat. “Yes. Can you imagine driving an army through that?”
Scarlet could not.
“Then we must go this way, but it is no easier. In some ways, it is just as dangerous.” He waved his hand to still Scarlet’s questions. “You will see soon enough, I fear. Until then, imagination will have to do.”
THE ROAD INTO THE HEART of Starhold was a wide, seaside path that at first only perched over the sea with a short drop below. As the march progressed, the land rose, the sea fell away, and the path turned to a paved avenue traversing over jagged black cliffs lining the seashore. Then the sands of the shore vanished and there was only the deep bay with its constant roar of thundering surf battering the rocky cliffs. It was hard going, and a steep climb for both man an
d horse.
Scarlet had dozed off in his saddle, but Liall knew better than to suggest he climb into the water wagon and sleep between the barrels.
“If this is how Rshani travel on the march, this is how I'm going to travel,” Scarlet had declared, not an hour ago. Liall left him to doze. He woke once, when the column caught up with a military drover herding a pack of gray urthorns to Starhold. The drover harried the slow-moving beasts aside for the army, likely intending to join the rear of the march once they had passed, and Scarlet startled awake when one of the animals trumpeted a greeting to the horses.
Scarlet turned nearly all the way around in his saddle, staring wide-eyed. “What in Deva’s name are those?”
Liall laughed. “Pack beasts. We call them urthorns.”
The horses shied when the urthorns trumpeted in unison, and Scarlet gaped at the animals and rubbed his eyes as if he could not believe what he was seeing. After a moment, he laughed with Liall. “How odd they are! They don’t even look real.”
“They’re real enough, though they prefer the colder climates of the interior. Urthorns were here long before Rshani, long before the Ancients.” Liall gazed fondly at the beasts. Though only the size of ponies, urthorns—with their thick, woolly coats, four stout legs, small tusks, and leathery trunks—were remarkably strong creatures. They were also intelligent and could understand basic commands. Valued for their ability to easily withstand even the coldest winter, they were nevertheless rare in Sul. There were twenty in the herd, watching the army pass with wise, dark eyes shaded by their long forelocks.
Scarlet looked back at the herd until the road curved east. From there, the road turned to earth and leveled out somewhat for several leagues, rising sharply again when the stone towers of Starhold finally came into view; mottled-gray lancing into a blue sky.