“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. For next time, to know what to do, what not to attempt—”
“It does mean we shouldn’t bury ourselves in it. Now. You warned us, time and again, that when you cast a curse, you can’t control the outcome. Damn my eyes, but I understood it well enough and chose to ignore it.” He paused. “I remember—I asked you if the curse on the queen’s shawl would mean that any ill luck could befall her or those around her, be it assassination or bad prawns.”
“I remember. And that’s just it. The curse is just—there. I could try to control it better, hold it over just the enemy more tightly, but this—this proved to me if I ever doubted it that I can’t have perfect control.”
“If it’s any consolation, the Serafans seem to be limited in similar ways. They didn’t use their casting until they weren’t going to affect the Royalist troops’ progress. Until they were only holding us back so their leadership could retreat.”
I sighed through my nose, headache still gripping my temples in a tight band. “It’s precious little consolation. They could win without their damned casting.”
Theodor’s hands stopped their rhythmic pressure on my shoulders and he wrapped his arms around me instead. “Maybe they can’t. Or believe they can’t. Have we considered that?”
“No,” I replied. “And it’s a poor wager to lay, if you ask me.”
“But it’s worth considering, and I hadn’t considered it before. Why indebt themselves to the Serafans and dabble in magic they surely aren’t too keen on unless they’ve their doubts? We’ve proven those doubts right.”
“This is quite nearly too comfortable,” I sighed, leaning into him and toward the glowing coals of the fire. Complacency could settle into my exhausted bones here, the promise of warm food and a comfortable bed almost dangerous.
“It is too comfortable. Which is why I’m not staying. The men are encamped on the lawn for now; they’ll be barracked in the military school eventually. I shouldn’t have a feather bed and a fireplace while they shiver.” He stood and tested his stockings and breeches with his fingers, judging them dry.
I gathered myself to stand. “Then I’ll dress and—”
“You will not. Didn’t Hamish say you needed rest?”
“I can rest as well as you can, as well as the soldiers.”
“Which is to say not well at all.” He sighed.
“I don’t want”—I struggled to admit it, even now—“to be parted, even for one night. I—I’m scared,” I confessed.
“No one will harm you here. The whole place is under guard, the estate firmly occupied—why, you can’t be worried over Polly, she’s more snap than blade—”
“I’m scared of what I did.” I quaked. “I—it’s become so natural, when it felt so wrong before.” I folded my hands as I realized they were shaking. “What else might I do?”
Theodor set his breeches down on the chair by the fire. “What are you afraid of doing?”
“I’ve killed people,” I whispered. “I was ignoring that, I suppose, somehow. The Galatine ship that sank, the men on the field under my cloud of curses. I didn’t stab them or shoot them so I felt somehow removed…”
“This is war, Sophie, and it’s not—”
“I know that! But I’ve become comfortable with it somehow, the thing that turned my stomach to even consider last winter. It’s proved itself practical and I’ve made it my companion!”
I struggled to force words past the rising panic in my throat. “I caused people to die. At the very least, participated in their deaths.”
“As did every soldier on the field. As did I.”
“I know! I know, but I… there’s no other use for a musket and bayonet, is there? It’s not like that for me.” I felt a hollowness yawning in me, a blackness staring me down when I considered, truly, my participation. “They died… so horribly. Truly, Theodor, to burn to death? To drown on a sinking ship? What kind of monster am I? The cartoons this summer were right about me. They were prophecy, not propaganda.”
“They were no such thing!” Theodor’s eyes blazed. “You wouldn’t have chosen the manner of their deaths. But they are our enemies, and they would have us all killed.”
“You needn’t lecture me on the pragmatism. I’m an expert scholar in that.” But I couldn’t quite reconcile it, not with the screams of the horses in the fire, not with the bodies of the dead still awaiting burial outside. Not with the men downstairs, who, without their Royalist uniforms, looked identical to our own soldiers. “I know what has to be done. But I’m terrified of what it’s making me into.”
Theodor pulled a silk quilt from the bed and draped it over my shoulders, which were trembling with tears I couldn’t quite manage to shed. “It was unfair,” he said quietly, “to push you into all of this. No—I’m not saying it was the wrong choice or that you were forced. I know you made this choice and I know, practically speaking, it was possibly a very necessary part of our strategy. But no one—no one!—has ever done this before.” He bundled me in the quilt, my shaking body beside his staid one. “You’re bearing a greater burden than any of us. Your brother, me, Niko—no one knows what this is like. We can’t pretend to try.”
My strength went out of me and I wilted into him. His body, more sinewy with muscle now than before, still soft enough to accommodate my form, now racked with sobs.
39
THEODOR WATCHED ME CAREFULLY AS I UNFOLDED MYSELF FROM around him the next morning and began tugging my stockings over my calves. “I’m fine,” I replied to his unspoken question. “Really.”
“I usually feel better the morning after a good night’s sleep,” Theodor hedged, still not convinced.
I forced a smile. “And I slept like a baby.”
“Have you ever been in a house with a baby?” Theodor laughed. “They’re awake squalling every few hours.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Trust me, I remember all too well—Jeremy was colicky and screamed like he was being flayed.” He paused, a strange smile shadowing his face. “Funny, that the next squalling baby in my house will likely be my own.”
I dropped my shoe. “You’re thinking about that now?” I said.
“I suppose. Being here—it brings back memories, happier times. My family was happy, Sophie. My brothers playing together, Polly ordering us around—I make no mistake, she was in charge—and two loving parents.” He sighed. “Not every noble house was like that—unhappy mothers, philandering fathers, siblings who set to fighting early as though preparing for feuds over land or inheritance later.”
I slowly buckled my shoe, the leather too stiff after repeated dryings in front of fires the past month. “You want a chance at having that again,” I said quietly.
“I hadn’t realized how much I’d lost. Polly and I were best friends for years when we were young. I didn’t like the rough and tumble games the neighboring boys all liked to play, and she didn’t like playing tea party with the Pommerly girls, so we would spend hours avoiding them when they visited, exploring the woods. She indulged my silly passion for plants when no one else did—she had this little sketchbook, and when I found a new flower or root she’d draw it and we’d name it together.
“They already had names, of course. We weren’t discovering anything but cowslip and sow’s ear. It was just… it was our way of pretending we were important.”
“Pretending?” I almost snorted but stopped myself. “You were the children of the heir to the throne.”
“But we never saw it that way, not as children.” He shook his head and closed his eyes. “Now we can’t avoid it. I had managed to forget, for a while, that I’d lost this.” I knew he meant more than his grand family estate. “No more pretending for us now.” He cleared his throat. “But yes, someday, I very fondly hope to have a new family.”
“I’m not having six boys,” I countered with a faint smile.
“I should say not!” He laughed in earnest now. “I�
��that doesn’t frighten you, does it?”
“Once, it would have.” I repeated what I’d said to myself, to my brother, to Jack, dozens of times. “Children would have meant giving up my shop, and my shop was who I was. My identity, my fondest ambitions. I have something more now. I’ve had it for a while.”
Theodor grinned and struck a pose.
“Not you, you pompous ass,” I joked. “I have a country.”
“That we do,” Theodor replied. “And now we have to move quickly, to push northward and finish this war.”
“We’ll have the capital by first snowfall, I can move into my old row house again, set the council up in the old Stone Castle?” I joked. There was little chance our luck would hold for such a quick victory.
“I’m not counting on it,” Theodor said. “Given that we’ve secured Rock’s Ford and this will become our primary base of operations for the time being, the council will join us here. Along with Kristos and Alba and more wagonloads of grain and dried beef than I care to think about.” He finished dressing and hurried away to oversee the morning roll call and inspection on the fields in front of the military school.
In the following weeks, the troops that had been held in reserve and wagons of supplies poured into Rock’s Ford, along with the Council of Country. The first decision put to the council was Kristos’s idea, pitched before his horse had even been properly stabled. I waited for him on the broad lawn in front of Westland Hall as soon as our pickets reported that the caravan of wagons and men was spotted on the road from the south.
“Sophie!” he called as he swung down from the saddle with an awkward stiffness and a graceless thud. “I’ve been thinking about it the whole ride up—when I wasn’t thinking of my poor ass. We need a new name.”
Theodor joined us. “Good to see you, Kristos,” he said, extending a hand, and as Kristos took it for a hearty shake, I was pleasantly shocked to see that both meant it. Kristos would never quite get over Theodor’s noble upbringing, and there would always be the bitter memory of how my brother had used me, but the two had become comrades in arms and stood shoulder to shoulder as leaders. As they briefly discussed the events of the past weeks, cracking jokes and sharing moments of concern, I saw two friends.
“A name?” I prodded.
“Yes. The first thing the council should deliberate on—what ought our new nation be called?” Kristos grinned.
“Isn’t it still just Galitha?” Theodor asked, brow wrinkling. “We aren’t forming a new country.”
“True,” I said. “But I like this suggestion—that we ought to formalize the break with the old regime. Some minor change, perhaps, could have a significant meaning. And a significant effect on morale.”
“I had thought to suggest the Democratic Union of Galitha,” Kristos said, gathering me into a bear hug. “You’ve gotten thinner.”
“It’s all the peas porridge,” I said. “The DUG? That’s a terrible idea.”
Kristos paused. “Fair point. But the first lesson of writing a country from scratch, there are no bad ideas in a first draft. One must trust one’s comrades to provide commentary and editing.”
“Duly noted,” I said, “and edited.”
“I’d say that our council’s first session in Rock’s Ford, not to mention Kristos joining us, is worth a celebration,” Theodor said with a strained smile. Very little was yet worthy of celebration, but we had to elevate the moments that we could. “And all of us together, for a little while at least. I’ll have Alba requisition us a chicken to roast and some wine.”
“A chicken?” I grinned. “An actual, real live chicken?”
“It won’t be alive for long,” Theodor quipped.
40
THE NEXT WEEK WAS SPENT IN PREPARATIONS FOR THE PUSH NORTH. Sianh and Theodor were in agreement—with the Royalists on the run, now was the time to press toward Galitha City. Supplies made their way from Hazelwhite, along with messages from Annette. She was ready, she said, to engage with the Royalist navy at Galitha City, opening the port and, we hoped, cutting off a route of retreat for the Royalists. Alba tallied the northbound supplies, perched on top of wagons with a logbook as she ran calculations on the fly.
Meanwhile, detachments left Rock’s Ford moving north, securing the routes we would use for the main contingent of the army. Sianh put Gregory, Jeremy, and the rest of the rebellious military school students to use, assigning the oldest, who had been ready to commission, as advisors to our untrained officers. The younger ones joined Fig as aides-de-camp and Alba as quartermaster’s assistants, and served as runners. Sianh grumbled about his fleet of mosquitoes, but he was so attentive in his mentorship that I knew his complaints were more habit and show than truth.
I did everything I could to fill the long hours between dawn and dusk with useful additions to the war effort. I cast charms in the field hospital—and pushed a broom and ferried sheets and shirts to the laundresses when Hamish didn’t notice me. I made sure any new recruits joining us, both the young military school officers and recruits from the adjacent countryside, had charmed uniforms.
It was inadequate, and I found myself with little to do too many long hours. Even when I was working, my mind was churning in a thousand unhelpful ways, and when I wasn’t working, the feeling of inane uselessness folded itself into every crease and wrinkle of my worries. I wasn’t helping. I wasn’t doing enough. The march north could fail and I didn’t even do anything to help. Finally, I set to making as many health-charmed rollers and bandages for Hamish as I could before the march north.
“You do realize what you’ve the opportunity for here, don’t you?” Hamish interrupted me as I worked in the formal parlor, which he and the entire medical and clerical staff had adopted as an office. He sat next to me, marveling at the stacks of linen rollers.
“The opportunity?” I asked.
He swung one leg up and balanced it on the window frame. I imagined Polly’s reaction at seeing his dirty shoe marring the woodwork and winced. “Real scientific study, girl!” When I didn’t respond, he added, enthusiastically, “Study on your casting. You told me you don’t know for sure when it’s done some good, what degree it’s affected the outcome.”
“That’s true, it’s… it’s influence more than anything,” I replied carefully.
“And if you could measure the outcomes of those under that ‘influence’ against those who aren’t, with time and numbers, you’d have some real statistics.”
“Treat some of them and not others?” I asked, brow knitting. “But I—I couldn’t. That seems positively unethical—presuming it’s doing some good.”
He huffed in frustrated agreement. “I suppose not. It is, I do believe, doing some good. My survival rate is far better than usual.”
“You usually kill more people?” I teased with a lilting smile.
“I try to avoid killing people, though I could be persuaded to consider the habit if Grove over there doesn’t quit squeaking his pen.” He stared at the back of the clerk’s bobbing head. “It struck me, though, that this is right fascinating stuff. I’m no scholar, I’m just an ordinary barber surgeon. But someone who was learned, who could write well—he’d have a book in him, most certainly.”
“You can write.” I laughed. “I’ve seen your logbook.”
Hamish flushed. “Logbook, bah. That’s not real writing. That’s scratches about the day, what worked, what failed. What I tried for various troubles.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And you may be no scholar, but I’ve also seen the books stuffed in between the bottles in your medicine case.”
“Unbound pamphlets and treatises, all of them. Bought cheap or bought used,” he deflected.
“I don’t think that leather binding makes a scholar,” I said. “My brother reads more than anyone I know—and I know quite a few people with libraries full of custom-bound books.”
“Nonsense,” he grumbled, but I noticed he began to make notes about my work, who I cast good health for, when I did my ca
sting, and who got charmed bandages.
A year ago, I thought as I pressed health charms into lengths of linen bands destined to be bandages, I had been deeply uncomfortable when someone suggested studying my practices. It wasn’t merely that Pyord was untrustworthy; I hadn’t appreciated the attention on my gift. A year ago, I allowed, I wouldn’t have been comfortable with most of what my casting was becoming.
The linen glowed with a deep gold health charm, and I rolled it. I never would have chosen to push the limits of casting like this, I acknowledged. Even knowing that the Serafans had employed casting to their gain, there was still something about what I had done with the charmed fabric and the charms on the ships that ran counter to the way casting had, to my knowledge, always been. It was rolled into a commodity now, as clearly as the good health charm was rolled up in the linen I held. What did that mean for the rest of the world, for how nations would interact? I shook my head. That was beyond me, at any rate. I gathered the bandages and delivered them to the ward.
“Miss Balstrade?” I started. No one usually talked to me while I worked in the surgery. Even when I sat within arm’s reach of the nearest pallet while I rolled bandages, the patients seemed, somehow, to know I wasn’t a nurse posted to fetch them water or change their wound dressings. “I don’t know that you’d remember me,” the young man on the nearest mattress said.
I tried to place him—he had a thick dressing over a shoulder wound, and another lapped over his forehead. “Victor. I don’t recall the last name, but from Havensport, yes? And you helped with my fire, when we camped on the march north.”
He grinned sheepishly. “Vernon. Vernon Harrel,” he said. “But yes, I helped dig your firepit.”
“When did you end up in here? I don’t recall seeing you.”
“I was on a northbound detachment. Sent back, wounded in a skirmish.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Was anyone else hurt?”
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