An audience of five thousand ringed the stage on all sides, a sea of eyes watching as the final preparations were made. Civilians’ dress for half the crowd, and blue uniforms for the rest. Soldiers from Royens’s 1st Corps, given the honor of being the vanguard for taking the city, while representatives from among the Gand nobility, priesthood, and merchant classes watched with wide eyes as the Sarresant soldiers formed ranks at the center of their promenade.
“Her Ladyship the General Marianne Chamberlain, Commander of the Armies of Gand in the Reach and the Far Side of the World, hereditary Countess of Verben and Devonshire.”
The crier made the announcement with no pomp, no formal introduction or statement of purpose. That had been Erris’s doing, the swift ceremony a nod to the fact that Etaigne and de Tourvalle’s corps were already on the march along the northward roads. Even with the Great Barrier’s collapse, she’d made the call to finish this campaign first, and finish it she had. She was too late to stop whatever was happening in the north. If they were to have any hope of standing against what was coming, it meant establishing a hold over as much territory as they could claim, and it started here, with an almost bloodless victory over an incompetent fool.
That fool trundled forward from their side of the line, a too-fat woman who nonetheless shone as though she had servants employed full time to do nothing more than polish her boots and the gold buttons on her coat. General Chamberlain made a show of her signature, taking up a pen and scanning the document as though she meant to read it again before she signed. A quick turn made for her name, and an aide offered her wax for the seal that followed, pressed firm on the Gand side of the document’s line.
“Erris d’Arrent,” the crier called. “High Commander of the Armies of New Sarresant.”
She strode forward to the table that had been prepared at the center of the stage, feeling the weight of ten thousand eyes on every step. A knot rose in her throat, but she forced it down. Now she doubly regretted not waiting on the ceremony until Voren could arrive, at the very least. But she was here, the Gandsmen were here, and defeat smoldered in their eyes as they watched her, doubtless already seeing provocation in her soldiers’ ragtag attire. Gods but she had no skill at politics, or at giving speeches.
“Sons and daughters of Gand,” she said in the Sarresant tongue. Enough of them spoke it, and one of them would translate as she went on, she was sure. “For two years you have been my enemies. You’ve fought hard, and claimed the lives of many good men and women of Sarresant. I have never faced an enemy more cunning, more dangerous, more deserving of being called my equal.”
Never mind that the sentiment applied to their onetime commander, the beast behind the golden eyes, and not to the overdressed woman now standing at their head. It served to stir them, the Gand soldiers shifting in their places, and she heard her words translated and carried from their line down into the crowd. She paused to give them time to translate, then spoke again.
“I accept your surrender today, not because I wish to see you subdued, beaten, and brought low. No. I wish to lift you up, for your lands to be merged with ours as part of a representative, united colonial government. Our Great Barrier has come down, the shelter we’ve shared from the hostile wilderness native to these lands, and we will need our combined strength to rebuild it, to face whatever power engineered its collapse.”
A risk, to share the information, when the first reports about the barrier were only just being confirmed. But she’d seen it with her own eyes, and a shared struggle was good as anything to make men and women come together.
This time a buzz rose, with a hint of panic.
“Forces align against us,” she continued. “A great evil you have already foresworn—the man behind your use of the golden light. I have confronted this man, I have faced him and can confirm: He was no friend of Gand. I know you will see us no better—as conquerors, not liberators—but I propose for you to see us as peers in the struggle placed before us. Red coats and blue, side by side against the wild, and the unknown. Dark times are ahead, and we must all of us be strong, together, before the end.”
She finished, and once more let the translators pass her words from ear to ear. It would have to serve. She couldn’t even be certain of the true cause of the Gandsmen’s rejection of the golden light. But the man was evil. He’d butchered thousands, sacrificed Gandsmen like chaff in furtherance of a plan to find her, not achieve any military objective that she could see. Even the barrier’s collapse was surely another ploy, another angle to draw her into the field.
When her words were finished propagating through the crowd, she paused at the center table and offered the Gandsmen a salute, fist-to-chest. She held it as they stared, until General Chamberlain herself offered a countergesture in the Gand fashion, bladed hand to forehead. The rest followed, her officers in the Sarresant style and the others following Chamberlain’s example. Good enough for now. She let her hand fall, and the rest did the same. Then she turned to the document, took up a pen, and signed her name.
“Their wine tastes like boot piss,” Field-Marshal Royens observed, taking care to keep a brave face as he took light sips from his crystal glass. The finest wares, prepared in a rush to host a fête for a thousand guests, the sort of propriety that wouldn’t have occurred to her without noble-born aides to ensure that the New Sarresant High Commander acted the part. Gods damn her if she wouldn’t rather be on the march. But Aide-Captain Essily had insisted on staying at least the night, to abide Gand traditions and Sarresant ones alike. She’d acquiesced, if only for the comfort of a goose-feather bed before the Oracle knew how many weeks she’d be spending in the field.
“Give the old country one thing,” Field-Marshal Etaigne said. “They can tend a grape, and press it without slipping loose their cocks and pissing in the vat. Ah—begging my ladies’ pardon.”
Vassail snorted, caught between a laugh and a sip from her own glass. Erris raised hers in a mock salute. “You don’t know the women of the general corps, Field-Marshal, if you think you need a pardon for that.”
“Careful praising any aspect of Old Sarresant,” Royens said. “Don’t let them catch you speaking ill of the Republic, or you’re like to kiss a guillotine.”
Across the room a group of Gand officers laughed in unison, where one of their number appeared to be gesturing to emphasize the better part of a story.
“We ought to mingle,” Etaigne said. “Send the right message to our troops.”
The notion soured their group, even as the Gandsmen redoubled their guffaws. If Voren were there he’d doubtless have them all dancing the latest gavotte step by now.
“Bugger that,” Vassail said. “I woke up this morning intending to kill as many of the red-faced bastards as I could put in the ground. We’re the victors here, and the guests. Let them come to us.”
“No,” Erris said. “Etaigne is right. We’ll need their loyalty, never mind what the politicians and diplomats work between them. Power comes from musket shot and cannon fire. All the rest is window dressing.”
Vassail fell quiet. It was the simple truth, as far as she saw it. Let the scholars quibble over legitimacy and cultural pressures and the rightful boundaries on the map. The fact was, if a commander fumbled their attack, if a flank collapsed when it should have held, any nation in the world could fall, bend its knee, and start looking for justifications for how it could have been no other way. As with battles, histories went to whoever put the greatest numbers on the choicest ground.
“Royens, Etaigne, with me,” she said, pausing to fetch a fresh wineglass from a servant meandering through the hall. The stuff did taste like piss, though she’d never made it a habit to drink in the field.
Her field-marshals walked with her as she approached the still-laughing group of Gandsmen, where General Chamberlain stood surrounded by majors’ stripes, colonels’ hawks, and generals’ stars.
“High Commander,” General Chamberlain said, sobering at last, from the joke if not th
e wine. “It is the giving me great pleasure for you to be joining of us.” The woman’s command of the Sarresant tongue was thick with the chopped, harsh accents of Gand, but she noted the gesture, and spoke slowly in reply.
“My corps commanders,” she said, indicating to her left and right. “Field-Marshal Reginald Royens, and Field Marshal Marcél Etaigne.”
Both men bowed, precisely low enough to avoid giving offense and not a hairsbreadth lower. Chamberlain effected the same gestures. “These are being the generals and command staff of the Gand Third Army.” She recited names Erris had known only from scouting reports; passing strange, to match names and faces for commanders whose men she’d killed by the score if not the hundred.
“A fine speech at the signing, High Commander,” a Gand officer said, a cavalryman by his uniform, one Brigadier-General Wexly, a tall man with the bearing of a soldier, through and through. “Did you mean what you said?”
The rudeness of the question snuffed any remaining mirth among the group. Shuffling steps served as a proxy for the instinct to withdraw among the Gandsmen, and her field-marshals went stiff, just shy of snapping to attention.
She took a moment before replying, imagining Voren standing behind her, watching and weighing her movements like her father had done, when she’d first learned to stalk and skin a kill. Socialites at a party were as foreign to her as beavers had been, when she was five. She knew soldiering, not politicking. But she needed their support, and they stared at her, expecting her to fail.
“Which part, General Wexly?” she said at last. “My praise for the Gandsmen’s skill at arms, or my condemnation of the commander who led you all astray?”
“You will not to be finding supporters of that creature here,” Chamberlain said, still half butchering the Sarresant tongue as she spoke. “My officers retook our army from his hands, and right it is to have done it. The general refers to your promising to bring Gand’s colonies into your Republic. Into governance. We were discussing it, a moment ago.”
“I meant it,” she said. “The colonies are stronger together, strong enough to challenge the Old World. Strong enough to rebuild our barrier, and stand against the forces that engineered its collapse.”
“What do we know of such things?” Chamberlain asked. “Could it have been the natives, perhaps? Are we to be deploying our forces to invading of their lands, now we’ve submitted to your rule?”
“Forgive me, General,” Wexly cut in. “But I would know whether Commander d’Arrent is in position to promise a political union. Or, more likely, whether we’re to see our peoples reduced to table scraps while Sarresant lords gorge themselves on our estates.”
Once more the group went quiet, and all eyes turned to her.
This was the heart of it, and the place she knew she’d overstepped. Voren would upbraid her for such loose talk, absent any vetting from the diplomatic corps. She didn’t care.
“The Old World is all but in the hands of the man behind your golden light,” she said. “And every instinct tells me he’s behind the Great Barrier’s collapse. We’ve been enemies for eighteen months, but I need unity if we’re going to face him. I need strength. I need your armies, and I need you.”
“With respect,” Wexly said, “that is not an answer, High Commander.”
Wexly took a sip of his wine, and she saw a hint of the gambler in his eyes. Chamberlain was a fool; her tactics had proved it at Ansfield if Erris hadn’t known it before. But even the Gand army had its men and women of skill. One more burden to bear, reorganizing their chains of command to promote soldiers daring enough to cut to the heart of a challenge.
“I have the loyalty of the armies of New Sarresant,” she said. “And I have it for a reason. I need not tell men or women of our nature that a throne—or a Republic—is only as good as the armies at its command. So I say yes. If any think to oppose your equality under our laws, they will face me, and the army at my back.”
“A good answer, High Commander,” Wexly said, returning to sip his wine.
Murmured agreement passed among the Gandsmen, and an introspective silence. She might have made an attempt to turn the conversation to lighter fare, but instead she fought down the urge to gasp.
The golden light.
It shone like a beacon at the edge of her vision, on the opposite end of the chamber.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “I must withdraw for a moment. Field-Marshals Royens and Etaigne will carry on in my absence.”
There would be a water room or some other contrivance for privacy. She could have jumped into the nearest broom closet, for even the slightest sign Need might behave differently, now she’d conquered the Gand colonies. It had been weeks since the light appeared unbidden.
A door latched behind her, the first empty chamber she found away from the main hall, and she tethered Need, shifting her senses into the far north.
“Ra’ni amanai chuqu’an, niral a’rai’et, qu—sa che si?”
The tribesfolk’s tongue sounded in her ears before her vision cleared, enough to set her on edge by the time her vessel’s sight resolved into a forest clearing, surrounded by men, women, and the scent of blood.
No officers that she could see, nor soldiers. Two tribesmen kneeling beside a tribeswoman opposite a woman in civilian’s clothes. Recognition dawned a moment later.
“High Commander,” the civilian said. Not just any civilian. The girl. Sarine. “Thank the Gods.”
It meant she had to be connected to Rosline Acherre, and it took only another moment to recognize one of the tribesmen: Arak’Jur, the man she’d treated with at the height of the battle, and his woman, the one now injured, though she seemed to be moving without concern for the blood caking over her fur-lined dress.
“What passes here?” she asked. “And where are you?”
Sarine pivoted where she knelt. “We’re just outside the Great Barrier; or rather, we’re beyond where it used to be. It’s fallen, Commander. The barrier has fallen.”
“I know. Is the city in danger? What can you tell me of the situation in the north?”
“An’ni kepai dan di sur?” the man—Arak’Jur—asked. “Di Erys d’Aru?”
“Yes,” Sarine said, giving him her attention and using her trick of speaking in both tongues at once. “It’s her, the High Commander. Erris d’Arrent. She asks whether there is danger here, for the city—”
“My time may be limited,” Erris snapped. “I need to know the situation here, girl. Now! Were these tribesmen responsible for bringing down the barrier? Have you been captured? What are their intentions?”
“Captured? No. And no, it wasn’t the tribesfolk who brought down the barrier. It was—”
All three tribesfolk spoke at once, raising a protest, gauging from the tone, though she couldn’t understand their words.
“Slow down,” Sarine said. “It wasn’t them, High Commander, and they want to be certain you know it. It was Axerian—the assassin, the man Acherre and I were tracking. I don’t know why he did it, but he attacked them as well.” She gestured to the tribeswoman, and the blood. “The tribesfolk had nothing to do with the barrier coming down.”
“Then what are they doing here?”
She wasn’t about to trust the judgment of a novice girl. She’d hear it for herself and form her own conclusions about why exactly one of the most powerful men among the tribes was at the barrier at the moment it went down.
Sarine paused, then relayed the question. Evidently she hadn’t asked it yet herself.
The tribesman—Arak’Jur—listened, then replied in solemn tones, meeting Acherre’s eyes as he spoke.
“They’re in danger,” Sarine translated. “All of them. They’ve left their village, and traveled here, fleeing what he calls an Uktani army—men and beasts, the great beasts of the wild, working together.”
Arak’Jur spoke again, still locking eyes with her. She stared back, weighing him.
“The Uktani hunt him,” Sarine said. “
He says he is marked, as an Ascendant of the Wild, that they mean to …” She trailed off into silence.
The stares broke between her and Arak’Jur, both of them looking to Sarine to continue.
“Zi says it’s true,” she continued, just above a whisper. “He says Arak’Jur is on the path to ascension, and you are, too. The golden light, Need; it’s a sign. It’s why they’re hunting you. Axerian, Paendurion, and Ad-Shi.”
“What under the Nameless are you talking about, girl?” she asked.
Arak’Jur spoke at the same time, a forceful insistence behind his words.
“No, Zi, don’t say any more,” Sarine said, and only then did Erris notice the snakelike creature she’d seen in Voren’s office, coiled beneath a blanket around Sarine’s forearm. Sarine appeared to be crying; tears streaked down her cheeks as she stroked the creature.
Arak’Jur spoke again, repeating whatever he’d said a moment before.
“Yes,” Sarine said for her benefit. “Yes—he says his people wanted to shelter here, behind our barrier, while he goes in search of the cause of the evil that has driven his people mad. And I’m going with him. I have to find Axerian.”
“His … people?” Erris asked. “How many are there? And a tribal army, marching south, while we have no barrier to protect us?”
Sarine translated her words, and then the other tribesman rose to his feet beside Arak’Jur, speaking with an earnest passion in his voice.
“Ilek’Inari says their people can offer better protection than our barrier. He is a shaman, he says, and gifted with visions of things-to-come. He says he and another man, Ilek’Hannat, will use their gift to tell our soldiers where the threats are. He says this is how the tribes survive, in the wild. Their visions, and our bindings, to protect both peoples from the beasts of the wild.”
She cast a dubious look at the speaker, the so-called shaman. Superstition at best, and no easy matter to convince Voren and the other members of the Assembly even if she had believed. But the tribes did have their magic, there was no denying it, and she had no inkling what forms it took. Perhaps it was true.
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