“That will do fine,” I said. A museum was more than I had hoped for. “Have the scout officers meet me at the museum storehouse. I’ll go there as soon as you can find someone to show it to me.”
“Anything else?” he asked.
“I’ll need about a week.”
“A week.” He seemed unsure of how to respond to that.
“No reason to stretch it out any longer.” I started for the door. “If you can send someone with keys to the museum, I’m sure I can find it. I’ll see you at mess this evening. I should have a plan by then.”
Actually, I already had a plan. I just wasn’t sure yet whether it would work.
* * * *
By the time the clerk in charge of the museum arrived, I was already looking through the exhibits, accompanied by a scout captain and oversergeant—the other scout officers were on patrol until morning. The museum displayed a reasonably impressive collection of weapons from the time of the Holy War on, along with models of the aqueduct and the forts that had defended it at various times in its history. A few uniforms in glass-fronted cases filled out the collections.
The clerk caught up to me next to a prominent case in the center of the museum, which held an old-style blade on a padded velvet display area. The blade’s cutting surface looked slightly broader than modern designs, black from the cold iron that jacketed its steel spine. It had no sheath, just a worn baldric of woven gut which sat beside it in the case.
“This is our most important artifact,” he said. “It holds—”
“Open the case, please.”
“But ’captain, it contains—”
“I know what it contains. I read the description. Fannin, consort of the first Empress of Ananya, fought here, before he became the model for the Snake Slayer in the festival pageants. They have another of his blades at the palace, I’m told, though I haven’t seen it. I want to see this one more closely.”
“Impossible, ’captain. I must insist—”
“Insist all you like, but open that case.”
He sputtered, but complied.
I lifted the blade out, tested its weight and balance. Lighter than it looked: lighter than an iron-jacketed weapon had any right to be. The blade felt slightly point-heavy. A few practice cuts revealed the techniques it had been weighted for: I remembered them from the essays on various fey in the book of anatomy I’d read in the academy library so long ago. I tested the edge with a finger—still sharp.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“What? You can’t just take the Snake Slayer’s sword. It’s the very soul of the museum.”
I shrugged. “I need something that’s killed fey before, and his blade’s done plenty of that. Do you have any more like it?”
“We have barrels of this design. But none of the others so famous,” the curator said. “Perhaps you would be satisfied to take some of them?”
“I’ll take all of them. You can have the ones we don’t need back afterward.”
“And the Snake Slayer’s sword? Will you give that back?” he asked.
“I’ll do better.” I unbuckled my sword belt, and put the sheathed blade and belt in the case. Then I pulled the Snake Slayer’s baldric over my shoulder and slid the sword into place by my side. It hung comfortably. I tested and it drew smoothly.
The curator looked down balefully at the standard-issue officer’s blade, its only adornment the overcaptain’s stripes on the sheath. “It really isn’t the same, ’captain,” he said. “You presume a lot by comparing yourself to such a great hero.”
I smiled grimly. I could see the scouts smiling as well; they were enjoying this. “Why don’t we play a little game, then,” I said. “I will take this blade and leave mine behind. You wait until I’m dead like he is, and we’ll see who’s more famous. In the meantime, I have things to kill. Sergeant”—I nodded to the scout—“please be kind enough to follow this man to the storage room and secure enough blades for the scout company. And a few extras, perhaps.”
I turned and strode off, the scout captain with me, while the curator stood sputtering next to the sergeant.
* * * *
After three days of training, most of the scouts looked comfortable with the blades, and with the new drills I’d shown them. They were as good as promised: mostly on the small side, but fast and tough and able to run for hours at need. More women ended up in the scouts than in line infantry, and scout units in general seemed to be a lot more diverse than line units, which tended to be mostly composed of soldiers from their home region.
I had picked out the comparative handful of scouts I planned to take with me in the active part of the fight, stationing the others at crossroads and a few other places I thought would be likely places for fey to cross, letting the cold iron in the scouts’ blades act as a deterrent and, hopefully, encourage the enemy to head for the trap that I was baiting with myself and a blade famously hated by fey. I liked setting traps: I had a knack for knowing what people would believe. This would be my first chance to see if it worked on fey as well.
I had surprised Nemias when he asked how many channelers I needed for the fight and I said none. But I did borrow a channeler from the town beforehand, one who had created a fair number of engagement tokens.
The fey swarmed us before I knew whether the trap would work. An isolated group of scouts marking trees to cut for fortification-building, led by a lone officer with a famous fey-killing blade, must have been too much temptation to pass up. Especially since being silent, magical, and all-but invisible unless your target knew what to look for did give them a natural advantage despite their small numbers and smaller stature.
What had been an empty clearing suddenly filled. Giant ravens swooped from above, aiming for eyes and faces. Woodsprites leaped out to grab at axes, jumping from trees onto troopers’ backs, long knives slicing at exposed necks or knees.
Seemingly exposed, anyway. I had thought the fey might see through disguised blades to the lethal layer of cold iron, even magically disguised ones. But the thin layered strips filled with memories of cutting wood and blazing trails seemed to have hidden them effectively. The fey barely had time to recoil as the disguises fell from the blades.
I smiled as I lifted the Snake Slayer’s blade—my blade now. Time seemed to slow down as I stepped forward. I felt like I had time to plan each cut precisely: beheading the first woodsprite, severing a raven’s wing, slicing the hand from another woodsprite before its knife could connect with a scout’s neck.
The fight took only seconds. Two of the scouts were wounded. Eleven fey lay dead or writhing from the pain of cold iron. The others fled or flew.
We took no prisoners, after what they had done to our soldiers. Afterward, I marked each of them with the Snake Slayer’s blade, for whatever fey recovered their bodies to see.
Eleven fey dead would have been like losing a regiment to us; their numbers were few in the mountains. For all of their hatred of the humans who had expanded into their forests and mountains after the gods they fought beside had abandoned them at the Holy War’s end, fey rarely attacked unless sure of a relatively painless victory. The attacks on Nemias’s troops and supply lines ceased, and within a few weeks I had been recalled to another battlefield.
Sperrin
Mud Otter Crossing: Eleven years before the Loss
“This is going to be a god-sucking fiasco,” Nemias said to me under his breath. That had become something of a catch-phrase for Bhales, and very nearly managed to be her last words. (Her actual last words had been the more soldierly “Don’t let the beer go to waste.”) Of course we’d told her husband, a scholar and poet who’d become famous for a book of children’s verses he’d written before it became apparent that the Empress wasn’t about to let a company commander with a reputation for coolness under pressure leave the service to raise children, that his name had been the last thing she’d said.
A channeler or bureaucrat could raise children and continue to do the job the Empress h
ad assigned, with the help of nurses. For a field soldier that simply wasn’t possible. Which was why I saw so little of my own daughter, whom I had to practically become reacquainted with every time I took leave.
Bhales had been a soldier for forty years, since she’d been a teenager, but Nemias and I were practically the only soldiers at her funeral. If Bhales had died fighting at the head of her company, her soldiers would have been given a few days to mourn, rotated off the line and allowed to hold a burial ceremony. But she had died after a long sickness, eventually sent home to convalesce when the cough she acquired at Davynen set into her lungs. Rotating a company off the line for a few days was at worst a minor inconvenience for the new governor-general. Giving a company two weeks leave and alloting transportation to a funeral was unthinkable to the governor who had browbeaten an army to victory at Davynen, and who personally oversaw the army’s logistics with complex schedules of his own devising. The army ate better and traveled faster than it ever had, but leaves no longer occurred outside of precise timetables, and commanders who used more supplies or took more casualties than the schedules provided for found themselves swiftly transferred elsewhere.
For Nemias and I, promotion in the wake of that campaign had removed us from the governor’s command and sent us to other fights, only the one at Kelpie Aqueduct together. But our work together in bleak causes had led to a new posting: After the funeral we would be serving a different governor and his appointed captain-general by taking joint tactical command of an expedition along the Powder River, where we were expected to clear defensive emplacements along both banks of the river to allow troop transports safe passage. Command of the expedition had been declined by a number of more senior officers as operationally hopeless. Even the captain-general in nominal charge of the expedition had chosen to remain behind with the rear guard at the fortified river port where we would begin the expedition. The better to ensure our supply lines, he explained, but also the better to avoid blame for the expedition’s failure. It had been ordered by the Empress against the advice of her senior military advisers; it would be carried out.
Having found two successful overcaptains willing to take the tactical command—and the responsibility—for the expedition, the captain-general was more than willing to grant us leave to attend an old comrade’s funeral while he massed supplies and troops at the depot. We spent the trip poring over maps and supply lists and gaming out tactics, along with the pair of sublieutenants who’d been dispatched as aides. We’d given them the morning off; they would attend enough interment ceremonies for friends over the next few months without asking them to mourn a captain they’d never served with.
That was how we’d gotten to the funeral. Now a part of me was wondering why. Military funerals tended to be short and to the point. An officer spoke about the service the soldier had rendered for the empire and the army, recited the soldier’s service record, or at least the interesting parts of it, and comrades might share some memories. Then the body was interred while a band played the “Dead Trooper’s March” (which had another name that no one ever used) and perhaps a few favorite songs of the deceased, then closed by playing the company and regimental themes. Then everyone retired to a mess tent or restaurant, depending on where the funeral took place, got gloriously drunk, sang a bit more, and told exaggerated stories about the dead soldier.
At this funeral, no one but Nemias and I even wore blades. People recited poetry, and most of them barely seemed to have known Bhales. Unless she had a very different sense of humor on leave than she did with the army. Mostly, people comforted the husband, who I gathered had written or translated most of the poems people were reading. Bhales had loved poetry, so it wasn’t totally inappropriate, but the ceremony was a lot more reflective and less celebratory than I expected. With a lot less drinking.
I never had much of an ear for poetry, and couldn’t really tell a good poem from a bad one—something Bhales had mocked me endlessly about. I suppose these were good ones, but the only ones that really stuck with me were a series of translations and modern renderings from old verses. Toward the end a young man with a beautiful baritone voice sang a haunting version of “Keir’s Lament.” The traditional version, which I’d read in school but never cared for, mostly focused on the politics of the Holy War’s end, and on social mores that no longer existed. The husband’s adaptation cut to the heart of the story: General Keir’s stunning victory in battle, tempered by the loss of his sons and the disappearance of his wife Juila, herself a major figure in the war; his search for the missing Juila, hampered by enemies and allies alike who didn’t want wounds reopened that the treaty negotiations had barely papered over; and his embittered marginalization at the very moment that a triumphant empire celebrated his exploits and made his name synonymous with victory. While the young man sang, I understood for a moment Bhales’s love for poetry, and the clarity it could bring to emotions that otherwise defied description. But then the next speaker started reciting something about children bathing that I’m sure was a metaphor for something in this curious world outside the army that I visited sometimes but didn’t live in.
By the end of it, Nemias and I were sitting in the back row, heads bowed to look respectful, while we planned out skirmish tactics for the river campaign.
Ketya
Delamyen Province: Eleven years before the Loss
I was eight years old when I first realized my mother was sick. By then she must have been pretty far along, but she lived another year. It was one of those diseases that preys on channelers, one of the side effects of magic if you’re really unlucky. It affected a lot of channelers who had served at Davynen, and even though she’d only been there a little while, she caught it too. Her lungs gradually solidified and it was harder and harder for her to breathe. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. I just know that my mother had less energy, and walking from one room to another would wear her out.
Until I realized there was something really wrong, it was a sort of golden age for me. I had never been so happy. My mother had always been so busy with her duties for the Empress that my moments with her were precious and fleeting. Now we spent hours together: I would sit cross-legged next to her on her giant bed, pink satin coverlets swirling all around us, and she would help me with my reading and history. She would tell me long stories when I asked her questions. Now I can see that she was trying to teach me all she could in the time she had left, but at the time I just felt glad for the attention.
For a while my father was around a lot, too. Then he was gone all the time, and more and more easily provoked when he was home. I had never seen my father lose control before, but when he was in the room with my mother sometimes he would forget I was there and cry. Usually he would send me to the nursery, unless my mother asked me to stay.
Then he was away for a long time, and by the time he got back, my mother had faded badly. She could barely shuffle across the room with me helping, and she gasped for breath at every step. I had finally realized that she was really sick, that it wasn’t something that was going to get better. I still had no idea that she could die from it, and nobody told me that. She just spent all the time with me that she could.
When my father came back, he took me for a long walk, and explained, sort of, how he had spoken with a god—he didn’t say which one, even when I asked—and traded my name for my mother’s healing. I remembered what my mother had told me about gods wanting human names, so it made sense to me. The part about trickery hadn’t really registered. It was a very good thing that I had done, my father told me, even though I hadn’t done anything. Everything would be all right now, he said. I would have a new name when my mother healed.
Then she didn’t heal. She didn’t fade any faster, but by then she was close to the end. Finally she couldn’t breathe at all, and her own lungs drowned her.
There were no more walks with my father. No more gentle explanations. When he gave me my mother’s name after her death he told me it was to
honor her memory, but I knew better. He gave me my mother’s name to punish me for failing to save her.
I don’t know how he adjusted all the records or if he even had to. Ananya’s history was riddled with people who had lost or changed names, so the channelers who administered the records surely had ways to deal with it. If anyone knew anything about my name changing, they never said it to me.
I know I didn’t literally kill my mother. She spent so much time with me that year, and I was so happy. I wonder if she had any time left for herself, or for my father. When the god accepted my name as a sacrifice and then failed to heal my mother, I think it broke my father’s heart. He had to face my mother’s death for the first time. He had already had to face not being able to save her himself. When my name wasn’t enough to save her either, part of him just withdrew from us. He focused on saving the empire because he couldn’t save her.
My father had learned how to speak with gods, but that still wasn’t enough to save the person he loved most in the world. What chance did I have? I didn’t have my mother’s gifts or my father’s wisdom. Why would the gods think my name was worth my mother’s life? It wasn’t, of course. If I’d been a prodigy, or had more of my mother’s raw channeling talent, my name might have been enough. I was only nine years old. What else did he have to trade? They kept the name. But it wasn’t enough.
If I’d been a little more talented I might have saved her. I might have saved our family. Up until that point, I think my father had high hopes for me, but when the god didn’t give him back my mother in return for my name, he must have decided that I didn’t have the potential to become as talented as he and my mother were. I tried to earn back his trust, but what could I do? Every time he looked at me it must have reminded him that my name wasn’t worth enough to redeem the life of the woman he loved.
The Lost Daughters Page 4