Marcus knew the trick, knew that Kit was spinning a tale, but he felt the pull of it all the same. Perhaps because it was half-true. These men had been tricked. Had been held in a kind of dream of noble warfare, of honorable slaughter.
Coe snuck through the crowd with the green scabbard, and Marcus put away the blade. The soldiers around them shuffled, uncertain. There was still rage in some of their faces, but confusion was growing in others. And in a few—maybe two, maybe three—something that looked like hope. Or possibly relief.
“I see your doubt, and I forgive it. From so deep a sleep, you must take a moment to wake, yes? So come, my friends!” Kit shouted, waving his arm in a well-practiced arc. “To the tent of the Lord Marshal! Where all shall be made clear!”
A rough shout came up from the soldiers, halfway between cheer and threat. More of the soldiers were streaming in now, coming from camps in all directions. Even a half dozen from the siege towers that Marcus hadn’t known were guarded. They moved as Kit moved, following him toward Jorey Kalliam and confirmation that what Kit said was true. Which, of course, it wasn’t.
“Well,” Coe said, “this is interesting.”
“Not quite how I’d pictured it,” Marcus said. “But I figure it’ll do for now.”
“Should confuse the hell out of Camnipol when the news gets there.”
“Might, might not,” Marcus said. “With any luck, we’ll be the ones to bring it.”
“Then what happens?”
“We defeat the idea of war itself and end this whole thing gracefully. That’s honestly the plan.”
Coe was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, friend. Neither do I.”
Clara
People of high status in the court were, of course, made of the same flesh and bone as anybody else, and hence died as often. The fact of bodily mortality had never been hidden from Clara. By the time she first witnessed someone entering the last days of their life, she was perfectly clear on what was happening. Still it had come as a shock.
Cerria Pintillien had been an aunt on her mother’s side, and Clara had been eight when she died. Her memories of Cerria before the illness were vague. She was a sort of thick-faced presence in the background of Clara’s childhood home. A deep, almost braying laughter, a sense of judgmental intelligence, an image of almost comically wide hips negotiating a stairway. When Cerria contracted her final illness, it presented at first as a kind of beauty. She lost a great deal of the weight that had broadened her body and face, and her skin tightened and took on a strange sheen, like she’d been carved from wax.
Clara remembered vividly the murmurs of admiration among her mother’s friends before the cause of this transformation was known. Those same tendencies—the thinning flesh, the tightening skin—were not, however, an end, but a direction. Cerria continued to shed the bulk of her flesh until her collarbones cast shadows of their own and her hands lost their strength. Her skin grew less supple and took on a yellow tone, like the fat skimmed off cold soup. There had been no praise for her beauty then. Cerria’s last days had been spent in her solarium, sitting in the warmth, the skin stretched across her face like an artifact from a tanner’s shop. A mask fitted upon a skull.
As Jorey’s army broke its miserable camp and prepared to march through the brown fields of the Birancouri winter, Clara found herself thinking of Cerria. Not reflecting on her, or considering the philosophical implications of her aunt’s passing, but suffering sudden, jolting visual memories. Had she been of a spiritual bent, she knew, she might have interpreted this as a ghost trying to reach her. In point of fact, it was only that so many of the soldiers had the same thinness and pallor, the same pain in their movements, the same sense of a body pushed until it was nearly used up.
And there was still the pass at Bellin to be negotiated. The prospect filled her with dread. So recently these same men had swarmed upon Porte Oliva, a conquering army strong enough to break the strength of dragons. They should have stayed there, in the south. They should have wintered in their captured city where ships could bring grain to the port and fishermen could harvest the seas to feed them. But Geder Palliako’s pride had been hurt, and the inhuman voices of the priests had filled them with lies of invulnerability. They had pushed on, chasing Cithrin bel Sarcour until their strength had almost failed.
In place of food, they had gruel so thin it was more accurate to call it soup. The soldiers hunched over their bowls, empty gazes fixed on nothing in particular. She found it hard to remember that this was the largest part of Antea’s armies. She kept wanting to think there was some other force—in Antea or Elassae or somewhere in the east—where the true strength of her nation lay. That the army that had laid waste to the world had been reduced to these wraiths seemed too terrible to be true. Certainly this could not be what victory looked like.
“Is something wrong, my lady?” Vincen said, and her heart gave its little leap as it did so often when he was involved. The little frisson was complicated—one part schoolgirl joy at her lover’s presence, one part fear that she might somehow reveal their clandestine affair, and perhaps another part the deep frustration that there was nowhere she might conveniently and discreetly take the comfort from him that she craved. From his smile, she guessed that he saw it all in her. She lifted an eyebrow. Until such time as they were free of the army and the field, all their most important exchanges were reduced to such gestures.
“Nothing of importance,” she said, answering his words rather then their deeper meaning. “I am a bit weary.”
Vincen nodded. He had grown thinner since she’d left, though he had less of the emaciation of the other soldiers. He’d spent the time she’d been away recovering from his wounds, and that had meant a slightly less impoverished fodder than the hale and able-bodied among the troops. She shifted to the side, making room on the little shelf of stone she’d chosen for her seat. Vincen hesitated. To sit so near the woman he served would seem uncommonly like taking liberties. He was right, damn the man. Pressing her lips more tightly together, she moved back.
“I’d offer to fetch you better food,” he said, “but I think the wait might be a long one. There’s no good hunting before Asterilhold.”
“It looks to be a long and unpleasant winter,” she said, lifting another spoonful of gruel and then putting her bowl down uneaten.
Vincen hesitated. She could guess what he would say next. He might have saved himself the effort. And yet. “It needn’t be, ma’am. A small escort could take you someplace more comfortable.”
“By which you mean safer?”
“And with decent food and a real bed.”
“To sleep in?” Clara asked.
He looked around before answering. “That too.”
Clara laughed. Hungry as she was, and tired besides, her laughter surprised her. It sounded like something that belonged to a stronger woman. “You are kind to suggest it,” she said. “But no. I began this. I will see it through.”
It was hard to tell. Long days in the field had darkened his skin, but she imagined he was blushing just a bit. He’d embarrassed himself to bring her a moment’s amusement. She wondered whether the gratitude she felt for that might define love as well as anything else did. Part of it, perhaps, though love in general was a vague enough target that she might not be able to define it in any consistent or useful way, had anyone occasion to ask.
“It’s odd, don’t you think,” she said, “how a word can seem so very clear until one gets close, and then it all goes as solid as fog?”
“Such as?” Vincen said. She could still hear the trailing mischievousness in his voice. She didn’t think before she answered.
“Love.”
He went very still, and she realized what she’d said. Where she’d said it. She looked up at him. There were tears in his eyes, and in hers as well. If they won this war, how long would she be able to draw out this utterly inappropriate alliance? How long before she was forced back
into the ill-fitting chair of Lady Clara Kalliam, Dowager Duchess of whatever holding Geder, or perhaps Aster, saw fit to bestow on Jorey? Or perhaps the empire would fall into chaos, and she would live her life as Lady Nothing of Nowhere. Vincen’s heartbroken eyes made that last seem the grandest title imaginable.
“I was speaking of love,” she said.
Their progress was slow and painful. Her short time in the field following the army from the Free Cities to Porte Oliva had taught her something about the movement of a military force. She had walked in the swaths they cut through the flesh of the land. The ruin they left behind them now seemed less only because the land around them already felt dead, a landscape of dry grass and old snow and crows. There were few horses left. She suspected that most had been eaten.
They rose before dawn, often to the cajoling and hectoring of Wester’s actor-priest. He walked through the tents with assurances and broad smiles, much as his predecessors had. The soldiers took comfort in the words—All will be well, you will see your homes again soon enough, your efforts shall meet great reward—and that gave them strength enough to pack their things another time, walk for another day. Or often it did. Two men had died in their sleep since they’d broken camp, exhausted beyond their ability to wake.
When he was not spreading cheerful lies, the old actor walked alone, his eyes shadowed. Clara understood the price that Captain Wester paid for carrying his poisoned sword, and it struck her more than once that Master Kit bore a similar burden. She recalled all the times she’d lied to her own children: promising Vicarian that his favorite toy would be found, telling Elisia that her fever would break the next day. Caring for the innocent wounded involved a surprising amount of deceit, and she could not keep from thinking of the emaciated men staggering through the short winter days as innocent.
Yes, they had slaughtered Timzinae, razed towns, sacked cities. They had torn children from their homes and sent them as hostages to Camnipol. Jorey and his men had blackened the Antean Empire. She was aware of the senseless violence they had conducted in the name of the Severed Throne. But to see a thin face light with hope, to see them leaning on each other as they stumbled up one last hill before the sunset turned the red to grey, was also to give up her ability to stand judge over them.
They were soldiers, but many had been farmers before that. Crofters and merchants and huntsmen like Vincen. The highest among them were the sons of noble houses who should have been chasing stags through the wood, drinking and boasting and singing songs until morning rolled around again. It was as if fragility absolved them. Fragility and the knowledge that they had been betrayed by their kingdom.
Dawson would have loathed it all. The stupidity of the war, the pettiness of Palliako’s vendetta against the banker girl, the failure of the nobility to tend to their vassals. Not that he would have cared for the men themselves. She hadn’t romanticized him that much. He would have shaken his head at the winter-thinned army the way he would have at a dueling sword left un-cleaned after a fight. One took care of one’s tools. Oiled one’s swords. Saw to the well-being of those born too low to see to themselves. To do anything less was to not be fully adult.
Her own hips ached, and the cold and sun coarsened her skin. She slept without dreaming, the chill of the night and the black exhaustion in her body tugging her in opposite directions. By day, she rode with Jorey as often as she could, Captain Wester riding with them in the guise of her servant. They fell into conversation, the two men, awkwardly at first, but as the days passed, they found a greater ease. Wester treated Jorey as Clara imagined he would any client who had hired him, with deference constrained by a brutal kind of honesty.
Yes, making a field camp in the north had been a mistake. If the army had stayed at Porte Oliva, it wouldn’t be in such terrible conditions. No, there was no reliable path north that wouldn’t cross the border into Northcoast, and even if there were, the days would be shorter and colder there. Better to take a longer southerly path. And avoid the Dry Wastes on the other side of the mountains. As terrible as the Birancouri plains were, the Dry Wastes would have killed them all faster. Jorey took the knowledge in, even the painful truth of his own missteps, with a student’s focus. Under other circumstances, Clara imagined her son and the banker’s mercenary might have been friends, though perhaps it was the desperation of the campaign that gave them common ground.
The mountains began as a thicker kind of haze to the east, a complication of the sunrise. Clara had expected them to loom up more quickly, especially once they’d found the jade strip of the dragon’s road to smooth their passage. It was another three days before they reached the field where Antea and Birancour had faced one another in the previous year. A rude and dismal snow clung to the shadows, but the earth there was largely bare brown. She wondered at first who had come to bury all the spring’s fallen bodies. It was only when they paused to make camp that she noticed the bones: a rib here, a knob of foot or knuckle there. The dead were still with them but scattered. Returning slowly to the ground, to be forgotten as so many generations before them had done.
She found Marcus Wester at the siege towers looking over the weapons that Geder had sent to destroy the dragon, and the captain’s expression was oddly rueful.
“Evening, m’lady,” he said as she approached, then he looked around to be sure there were no others close enough to overhear. “Do I need to come play the servant some more?”
“No,” she said. “I was only wandering a bit before the sun went down and it got too cold to move about.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Probably should have left these behind earlier, but I’d hoped the pass would be clear enough to take them. Some of them, at least.”
The mountain pass that led up and to the east glowed like an ember in the falling sunlight. She wondered what it was about sunsets and dawns that made them so bloody. “How bad is it?”
“The trail? Bad enough.”
“Impassable?”
“Won’t know for certain until we’ve tried passing it, but I’ve seen it worse,” Wester said, squinting up at the siege engines. “If there was a better option, I’d speak for it. Your son’s scouts all agree that even Kit won’t be able to talk these great bastards through. We’ll have to abandon them.”
“Should we destroy them, then?”
“Why would we?”
“It’s something my late husband used to talk about. Ruining the things you leave behind so that the enemy can’t make use of them.”
“Assumes you know who the enemy is,” Marcus said. “These things are only good against one target, and I’m not particularly concerned that Birancour will track Inys down and pull him out of the sky anytime soon.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Clara said.
“Don’t suppose the Lord Regent’s made more of them?”
“I couldn’t say. I’d left Camnipol before he made these,” she said. And then, “I’m afraid that trekking back to Bellin may be the wrong thing.”
Wester made a low assenting grunt, then tapped his palm against the tower’s side and turned away. “Under other circumstances, I’d advise against it. Taking the pass in winter’s a gamble at best, and long odds. Going south means food, warmth, shelter. But it also means more of the priests, and giving up on providing Antea anything like a garrison force. So there’s your trade-off.”
“Are we certain that a defense will be needed there?”
“Yes,” Wester said. “And we’ll need to get through before the weather gets warm.”
“Before that?” Clara said. “And here I was lighting candles in hopes of a day that didn’t freeze the water in the skins.”
“Wouldn’t hope for that,” Marcus said. “If you’re going to be the kind of reckless we’re being, you want to do it in midwinter. The snow’s not so fresh that it’s all powder and it’s not warm enough to thaw. Being buried by an avalanche… Well, it’s our biggest risk after freezing or starving or getting caught in a storm. Still, it’s somethi
ng worth avoiding if we can. A long march in winter isn’t a sign things have gone right.”
“This is their second. Or is it third now?” Clara said. “This war feels as though it’s been going on forever.”
To her surprise, he laughed. “Well, count it as the fight between the dragons, and it has.”
“It’s too large, isn’t it?” she said. “War. History. Each battle growing from the quarrels that came before and sowing the seeds of the ones that come after.”
“I try not to think about it,” Marcus said. “Getting these men through another day, and lining up a decent chance of the day after that’s more than enough to keep me busy. All the rest will be there when we’re past Bellin.”
Something in his voice—some combination of mordant humor and compassion and despair—chimed in her breast. He would, she thought, do whatever he could to protect these soldiers from the dangers that lay before them. Though they were the enemy, though they would have killed him where he stood and her besides if they had known a little more of the truth. There was something both noble and doomed about it.
Perhaps she made some sound without realizing it, because Wester shot her a look, lifted a querying eyebrow.
“I admire your willingness to help with this,” she said.
“It’s the job.”
For a moment, she thought he might say something more, but instead he spat, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and turned toward the tents. A colder breeze was coming from the north, not powerful enough to call a wind, but biting. It would be unpleasant if it kept up through the night. They walked together down the slope. Arrayed below them, the army camp looked less like the force that had brought the world to its knees than a collection of refugees at the mercy of the wide, uncaring sky. Wester’s expression was calm. Peaceful, even. It was as if he found comfort in the absurdity of suffering. Perhaps he did.
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