I nodded. The orderly town center, branching out like spokes from a circular green where a small flock of sheep balefully tore at the grass, was quiet. Several tidy little storefronts had apologetic signs hung in their windows—the proprietors had fled or closed shop due to lack of business. The milliner and the haberdasher were both closed.
“I’m sure no one would fault the local army general for a little breaking and entering, but we’ll try the draper first,” Theodor said.
“I doubt either of those stocked fabric in enough quantity, anyway,” I replied. I looked at the little shops with a sense of loss. Shops like mine, proprietors like I had been, their livelihoods overturned by war. “What will they do, the shopkeepers?”
“Not every townsperson or farmer is in support of our aims, Sophie,” he reminded me gently. “There was a bit of a row here, when we first arrived and began massing. The Pommerlys had been run out by the local Red Cap contingent already, but it wasn’t tenable any longer for anyone with Royalist sympathies, not after we showed up.”
“So they were run out of town,” I said. That was an inevitability of a civil war, but seeing how it played out in a picturesque town that still had sheep grazing on the green sobered me.
“Some have followed the Royalist army, some have holed up in Rock’s Ford or other Royalist-held territory. Those with enough money have fled to West Serafe. There’s a regular expatriate community at this point, Royalists who plan to return at the first sign of the king’s glorious victory. Here’s the draper.”
The draper’s small store tended toward linens and wools, with heavy broadcloths and fine worsteds on display in his front window, similar to the drapers who served the working classes of Galitha City. The ones I had frequented had taffetas and brocades proudly swathed across the windows, but no one in Hazelwhite needed anything so fine now.
“To be honest,” the draper said when Theodor inquired about his silk, “it’s been months since I could get a shipment of Serafan silk in, and this bit of Equatorial cotton is the last I expect to see for a good while. Shipping’s all sorts of cockeyed.”
“There is a war on,” Theodor replied with mild humor, which made the draper chuckle. “Anything at all?”
“Gray I’ve got—follow me,” he said, beckoning. “Here, take your pick.”
“We will, of course, pay,” Theodor said, pulling a cipher book from his pocket as I perused the limited selection. I ran my fingers over several bolts of taffeta, thin Serafan silk, and satin weaves in various shades of gray. I pointed out two whose weights were correct—the colors were different, but that didn’t matter now. The only red silk was a tissue weight Serafan silk in a hideous tomato red, but I reasoned that might work, backed with some linen.
Shouts and the unmistakable sound of shattered glass interrupted our tabulations. Theodor’s hand was on his sword as he moved toward the door, a utilitarian officer’s broadsword that replaced the flimsy ceremonial rapier he had carried as a duke and then a crown prince.
“Some trouble at the haberdasher’s,” Theodor said.
The draper snorted. “Man was a damned Royalist. Smash his windows and his nose for good measure, for all I care.”
I stiffened. Maybe the haberdasher had been a patent Royalist, and maybe he had been throwing in his lot for survival with whoever he thought might keep him from starving this winter. I couldn’t bear the weight of hating my enemy any longer, not when he could have been my neighbor. But I had, I acknowledged, been removed from these fights during my months abroad.
“There’s a group of—hold on, now.” Theodor glanced at me with half a smile working its way into a grin. “They’re coming here.”
“Not to worry, then?”
“You needn’t worry over nothin’, Miss Sophie,” a husky but definitively feminine voice asserted from outside. I followed Theodor to the door; the draper’s tinny bell jangled as we left. Before us, a small army of women in red kerchiefs tied around their heads in lieu of caps waited for us.
“I—thank you?” I said. “I confess I’m confused as to the purpose of this assembly,” I added.
The woman who had spoken, with broad shoulders and tow-bright hair, grinned. “We’re what’s left of the Red Caps of Hazelwhite,” she said. “The menfolk mostly all joined up, so keeping the order here is up to us.”
“I see,” I said. There were young women barely older than girls and women with gray hair visible under their kerchiefs, and several had babies on their backs.
“And so’s requisitioning supplies. Bring it out, Sukey.” From the open door of the old haberdasher, a woman tugged a crate toward me. She cracked it open—it was full of scarlet silk, neatly hemmed in squares a yard across. “When Mr. Finney realized we was buying the red kerchiefs for political-like reasons, he stashed ’em. But we figured they was still there, so when we heard you was looking for silk.” She shrugged.
“Thank you,” I said. I hesitated; this Finney was certainly a Royalist, but the part of me that was still a shopkeeper and not a military strategist felt as though I was stealing.
As if sensing my reticence, the woman standing by the crate added gently, “He was old Lady Pommerly’s man through and through.”
“Old Lady Pommerly is—was—Lady Floralette Pommerly, dowager of one of the estates near here. Her son was technically lord of the family estate, but he lived much of the year in Galitha City,” Theodor supplied.
“She was a mean old bat,” added the woman with the blooming kerchief. “And Rafferty Finney did whatever she wanted.”
“What happened to her?”
“Dunno. Heard she ran for Serafe. Heard she maybe didn’t make it.” The tow-haired woman shrugged. “Anyway. These are yours. With a couple requests.”
I knelt and felt the silk—good, brilliant scarlet. “Of course.”
“First, we’ve got a regular corps here sewing and doing laundry for the army. We’re getting paid, but we want assurances of winter rations from your stores. All our men are in your army, and we’re working for your army, and your army has bought our crops at a pretty scraping-bottom price. We’re glad to do it.” She paused. “But we have to eat.” As if on cue, a baby began to fuss. So did their children, I added silently.
I glanced at Theodor. He nodded. “Done. Send your numbers to our quartermaster. With my promise you’ll be included on the ration rolls.”
“And another thing. We’re on your side because it’s not right that people should get to rule other people on account of how they were born. Nobles were just born lucky, that’s all.” She squared her shoulders and levied a hard look at Theodor. “But we don’t much fancy anybody being born lucky. Men included.”
I stood, hedging my response carefully. “I can’t promise what precise rules will govern us after this war ends. But I can say I will advocate for the very thing you ask for.” I didn’t meet Theodor’s eyes—on this, we did not need to agree. “If we can run our businesses and our farms and our towns, why should we not have a stake in running a country?”
Behind me, Theodor shifted uncomfortably, and I knew I was edging close to promising too much. But the women surrounding me grinned and tied a red kerchief in their signature knot over my cap.
16
THERE WAS LITTLE TIME TO DESIGN A COMPLICATED FLAG, AND no one skilled enough to paint an elaborate device on the silk, so I pressed Theodor’s cipher book into service and divided the red and gray as carefully as I could to avoid waste, resulting in a simple gray banner with a red diagonal bar as our ensign. The regimental flags were copied from that design, adding additional thin bars of scarlet on the right-hand edge, one for the First, two for the Second, and so on.
Sianh admired the first completed flag as I finished the hem in the warm stone kitchen. “It will serve well,” he said. “The design is not as complex as the Serafan flags typically are, but there is something quite fitting about simplicity for this homespun army.”
“If we had Viola here, we could have created a paint
ed device,” I said. “But I hadn’t any silk to waste and didn’t trust anyone green with it,” I said.
“They are, I assume, fortified with your abilities?”
“But of course,” I said. “A bit of extra luck stitched into each.”
Theodor joined us. “Looks lovely, of course, Sophie.” He turned quickly to Sianh. “Have we heard from the raiding party we sent northward yet?”
“They came back this morning. They ran afoul of some guards near—oh, what dull name do you have for it?”
“The fort at Dunn Creek,” Theodor replied.
“Yes, the Dunn Creek fortification. They did not manage to return much in the way of supplies, so I confess my disappointment. They were supposed to be on a raid to capture muskets from the magazine there. Instead they got caught up in an exchange of fire—”
I exhaled with near-motherly concern, and Sianh raised an eyebrow as he continued. “Which happens with fair regularity, and which they handled well enough to assuage my confidence in this rag-and-bones army, but I did not wish to risk manpower on sniping at a few Royalist guards.”
“They’re all right?” I asked.
Sianh snorted with almost aristocratic grace. “They are on latrine duty for disobeying my orders to avoid engaging with the Royalists at—what was it—Dunn Creek. We must fight like foxes,” he added. “Swift, flexible, and utilizing the supplies in other people’s chicken coops.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt.” Fig tapped the door frame, shifting his weight in a pair of too-large shoes.
“Go ahead,” Theodor said.
“Something Commander Balstrade and Sastra-set Alba think you need to see. Right away.”
I glanced at Theodor, whose face remained impassive, but newly etched with taut lines of worry. “Very well.”
We followed Fig to where the others waited, at the crest of the hill overlooking the ocean. “Lookout post spotted them about fifteen minutes ago.” Kristos handed Theodor the glass. “It’s a West Serafan vessel.”
“Then they’re showing their hand. Finally!” Alba said. “That’s a relief.”
“You have a strange idea of relief,” Sianh said.
“We assumed that they would be coming into this war on the side of the Royalists. We had all but a writ of guarantee. Now we can see what, precisely, they intend to do.” Alba folded her hands and watched the ship maneuver closer to the harbor, though the artillery placed on the shore and on the high bluff next to us countered any possibility of landing.
Kristos didn’t look relieved, no matter what Alba might say. “From what I can tell, there’s no soldiers on board—at least, none above deck. Just musicians.”
I felt myself go cold, right down to my fingertips. “Musicians.” I took the glass Theodor offered. Three Serafan women stood on the deck of the ship, one harpist, one with a recurved Serafan violin, and one holding a sheaf of paper. Sheet music. “What do they expect to do from there?” I handed the glass back to Theodor, hand trembling.
Theodor looked to the horizon, sweeping his glass in a broad arc. “There’s no one else out there.” Eerie calm stretched on the sea, silent and punctuated only by this one bobbing Serafan vessel.
“This isn’t right,” I murmured. “Sianh, this isn’t how you said the Serafans used casting in battle.”
Sianh grunted in uncomfortable agreement, and Theodor squinted at the ship. “They’re too far out. Anything they’re doing—it can’t reach us.” He looked to Sianh and Kristos. “Right?”
Kristos nodded. “It must be some sort of… rehearsal.”
“No,” Alba said, plucking the glass from Theodor’s hand. “It’s too great a risk to come within range of our cannon for a mere rehearsal.”
“But do we even fire?” Kristos replied. “It doesn’t look well, firing on a civilian ship. And,” he added, countering Sianh’s immediate argument, “there’s nothing we can see that suggests it’s anything but.”
Sianh’s mouth tightened. “I would make the guns ready in any case.”
Theodor sent Fig with the message to the artillery emplacements along the cliff. “Still. What do they expect to do? We’re too far away for their casting to work.”
“What’s that?” Kristos’s question was simple, but it dropped a weight into my stomach. Silently, we passed the glass from hand to hand. I looked through the opening like a keyhole into a door that led to an answer I wasn’t prepared for.
Sailors set panels around the musicians—no, not panels, I understood as I squinted through the glass. Convex shells made of taut canvas on frames. As they worked, the square of the deck began to look more like the front of the cathedral in Fountain Square, or the basilica in the House of the Golden Sphere.
“Acoustics,” Kristos said. “They’re going to project the sound toward us. Amplify it. Using those shapes.”
Fear rose like bile in my throat. Shot and shell I’d been prepared for; this was something different, an unknown horror. I remembered the strange manipulation of my emotions in the Serafan magic show at the summit, the insidious creep of reactions not wholly mine coupled with heightening anxiety. That was what the casters had intended us to feel then; what could the aim of this manipulation be?
Theodor chewed on his lip. “We need to get back to the camp. To warn everyone.”
“And say what?” Kristos ran a hand through snarled hair. “We don’t know what this is, what to expect—”
The musicians began to play.
The melody, thin and sweet like a slow-oozing line of treacle, flowed toward us. It was simple at first, not complex or layered, but almost pretty. Repetitive. It grew stronger, and my head began to throb. The harpist and the violinist played together while the third woman—some sort of caster-conductor, I surmised through the growing haze behind my eyes—directed them as they deftly drew black curse magic into the strains of music. It glittered in a sickly black fog, and I could see the path of the sound in its billowing folds.
“Back to camp, now,” Theodor said. Kristos didn’t argue. As we climbed away from the lookout point, the syrup-sweet melody intensified, plucked on the harp strings and echoed by the increasingly aggressive strain of the violin. Kristos narrowed his eyes, fighting the same dizzying whirl in his skull that I felt. Like turning too fast, like falling, but without moving at all. Next to me, Alba leaned over, face paling and beads of sweat glistening at her temples. She stumbled and gripped a tree for support, then doubled over, heaving.
Nausea gripped me, too. Theodor held my arm and helped me toward the officers’ tent even as his lips grew pale and he swallowed, hard. I bit back bile.
Sianh stumbled toward the officers’ tent. I thought he might have some plan, but instead he fell to all fours in the grass and vomited. I turned away, already sick.
“How—how can they do this?” I trembled. “They can make us feel—not only emotions but—” I stopped, overcome by a wave of nausea. This was a vertigo of confusion and fear, heightened, made visceral and sustained.
Up and down the rows of canvas, soldiers gripped their bellies and upended their stomachs, burrowed heads in hands and closed their eyes. Those who tried to stand promptly stumbled and fell or were overtaken by the persistent, rolling nausea. I sank, shaking, to the ground. It helped to avoid movement, to hold perfectly still. I closed my eyes. Better yet, gazing into nothing, into velvet darkness. I started—was this what they wanted? For us to all choose oblivion? Could I drive myself into a self-chosen death this way?
I forced my eyes open and moaned faintly at the brightness, at the shifting world around me that plucked the nerves in my head like a harp. In time with the harp—yes, I could still see the dark curse magic around us, its glitter and shift in time with the music.
Fortunately, it didn’t get any worse. Soldiers realized the same thing I had—that stillness helped—and settled into the grass, leaning against trees or lying flat on their backs. Theodor pulled himself closer to me and reached for my hand. I pulled away—even his touch inte
nsified the vertigo. I recognized my fear that I could kill myself under the direction of the magic for what it was, an illness-induced anxiety. Induced by the thrumming waves of the curse itself.
“There must be a reason for their timing,” Sianh said. He forced the words through a grimly set mouth. He was still trying not to be sick again.
“An attack,” Alba murmured, “and we’re unable to fight.”
“No,” I whispered. “Not now. Or here.” The words tasted like bile, and forming thoughts, let alone the words themselves, through the vertigo made my head swirl like leaves in a stiff fall breeze. “Their own soldiers can’t, either…” Nausea rose too quickly and I clamped my mouth shut.
“Right.” Theodor breathed, carefully, through his nose. “Right. Wait.”
No one argued with him. There was nothing else we could do.
Finally, the music faded. The glittering black cloud dissipated, and the fog over my brain lifted, slowly. My stomach settled back into its usual uncomplaining silence. A vague headache remained, like the ghost of yesterday’s migraine.
“At the ready!” Sianh was up and shouting before I could regain my balance. He hauled a drummer up by the collar. “Beat to quarters!”
The camp erupted into life around me, drums sounding the urgent call to arms, men layering on coats and cartridge boxes and haversacks, tightening bayonet belts and shouldering muskets. Some took swigs from their canteens on the run as they formed their companies.
“If they hoped to catch Sianh off his guard,” Kristos said with a lopsided grin, “they miscalculated.” He rubbed his temples. “They may be preparing to attack. That may have been some kind of diversion.”
“But diversion from what?” I asked. “If they planned an immediate attack, and had troops nearby, their soldiers would have been hit as hard as we are.”
“Or they are attacking somewhere else,” Sianh said, “and we are supposed to be tricked into staying here, anticipating.”
Rule Page 8