A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  “No,” said Portolés, then repeated it, to her own mutinous body, “No, no, no…”

  That heat spreading through her, numbing the pain, had begun creeping up her throat, and she tried to stay still, so as not to succumb to vertigo. Closed her eyes, but that only made it worse. She was so close, she could feel the warmth of salvation… but it was cooling now, drifting away, leaving her to steam in the frozen black center of the earth, where only devils dwell…

  “Sister!” Heretic was shouting from above. “Sister!”

  “Gods below, she’s bleeding!” came another voice, from yet higher still. “What did you do…”

  “Didn’t hit her that hard.” Zosia’s voice was muted by the warm water as Portolés sank down and down, toward the Sunken Kingdom. The last thing she heard was the woman mutter, “Not so hard as she deserved.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  Zosia stormed out of the tent, ignoring the girl shouting after her, but didn’t get ten feet before Ji-hyeon snatched her arm and whirled her around. The little princess almost got a fist to the chin, but then Zosia caught herself and let the arm drop. Good thing, too, for only as she let herself breathe and really take in her surroundings did she notice that Chevaleresse Sasamaso had the drop on her, glaive ready, and Zosia doubted the woman would take kindly to her beating on the general.

  “Captain Zosia, I will have order in my tent, if nowhere else,” Ji-hyeon said, meeting the older woman’s hard eyes with some steel of her own. “Whoever that woman is to you, she is my prisoner. She knows something, maybe lots of things, but we can only make her tell us if she’s alive. Do you understand?”

  Being lectured by this blue-dyed child enraged Zosia almost as much as seeing Sister Portolés had. “That fucking witchborn and me have a history—”

  “I didn’t ask why,” said Ji-hyeon, her fingers digging into Zosia’s arm when she tried to pull free. “I respect you enough not to, just as I didn’t ask why you looked so… interested when you heard the name of the Azgarothian colonel leading the Fifteenth Regiment. Tell me or don’t, in your own time, but for now all I need is for you to tell me you understand.”

  “Oh, I understand,” said Zosia, wrenching her arm free at last and making the Flintlander knight have to sidestep around the general to get a clean thrust at Zosia, if it came to that. Zosia looked past the two women, to where Choplicker came strutting up to her. If she disarmed the chevaleresse and used her own weapon against her, and then the general, her life would get a whole lot simpler—who in the Cobalt Company wouldn’t prefer the real deal to an impostor?

  “Good,” said Ji-hyeon, letting out a big breath. “Good. I know you wouldn’t act without reason, but please appreciate my position. That woman claimed to have valuable information, but now she’s unconscious. This is a problem.”

  “Yeah, it is,” said Zosia, letting out a big breath of her own, along with a shudder at the dark thought that had seemed so reasonable but a moment before. She’d gotten worked up at seeing that piece-of-shit nun Portolés, lost account of herself, but now she’d calmed down enough not to think that murdering her new friends would help her situation. From the way Choplicker was looking back and forth between General Ji-hyeon and Chevaleresse Singh, she supposed that ingenious notion might’ve had a little help slipping through her admittedly leaky sense of morality. “That woman’s an agent of the queen, directly responsible for murdering hundreds of innocent people.”

  “She freely admitted to coming here on the queen’s orders, to talk to you, Zosia, and you alone.” Ji-hyeon rubbed her temples, and it occurred to Zosia that this brat was trying not to lose her patience—how was that for a change of pace? “I would very much appreciate it if you could get any pertinent information out of her when she recovers. If she recovers.”

  “Oh, I’ll get it out of her, all right,” said Zosia. “But I can tell you plenty about her now. She’s the guard dog of Colonel Hjortt—you know, the asshole leading the Imperial army we’re about to throw down on?”

  “They are about to throw down on us, you mean—wasn’t that the plan?” said Ji-hyeon, and Zosia felt another pang of guilt at encouraging the girl to go ahead with meeting the Fifteenth Regiment in open combat… but then it passed like an unwelcome burp. As soon as she’d heard which regiment was bearing down on the Lark’s Tongue, and that Colonel Hjortt indeed led them, the temptation was too great for her to dismiss—she’d been overconfident to let the boy off with only a dethumbing at Kypck, and couldn’t pass up a second chance to settle the debt he and his cavalry owed her. Besides, with her help, the Cobalt Company could probably take the Azgarothians. Probably.

  “If there’s nothing else, then?” said Ji-hyeon, and Zosia realized she’d been daydreaming of all the things she’d do to Efrain Hjortt once she met him on the battlefield.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I’ll interrogate Portolés as soon as she’s up.”

  “Delightful. Now, though, I need to send terms to the Imperial camp that’s sprung up overnight—if you would excuse me?”

  “Sure, don’t let me keep you,” said Zosia, not feeling abashed so much as… thirsty. Both the prospect of a vicious fight to the death and the niggling sensation of regret parched her something awful, always had. A drink and a smoke to wind down what might be her last day on the Star, a talk with the asshole who had helped assassinate her people, and then a good night’s sleep before taking the fight directly to her old pal Colonel Hjortt, who’d evidently learned how to hold his reins without thumbs. That order.

  “They’ve sent an owlbat, sir?” said Captain Shea, as though common practice was the most outlandish thing she had ever heard.

  “And?” said Domingo, even the ordinarily pleasant thought of leaping off of his padded cart to assault her too painful to contemplate. Just sitting upright made him queasy and faint, but at least his subordinates hadn’t tried to force him out of it into another tent. Sleeping under the stars to the lullaby of marching boots was an experience Domingo counted among the few unexpected pleasures of his return to command. “Surely the extent of the message is not This is our owlbat, we await your reply?”

  “And they wish to have your agreement that at noon tomorrow we meet them in the valley for… um… a combat both fair and honorable?”

  “Those riders who evaded our sentries must have delivered news of the Thaoan regiment’s approach,” said Brother Wan from his seat on the riding board of the small wagon. “Small wonder they want us to rush in before reinforcements arrive. They must think you very simple indeed, to—”

  “Wheatley’s people will be on the backside of the mountain by now,” said Domingo, talking to himself more than the war monk or captain. Scowling at the map he had spread over his lap and legs like a blanket, he looked west to where the Lark’s Tongue brooded over his camp and the countryside beyond. Not more than a single league to his reunion with Cold Zosia, and despite being wheeled up on a hillock overlooking the whole of the Fifteenth Regiment, a shiver went up his good leg, and a bolt of misery drizzled down the other. “Assuming Wheatley follows my one simple command and sends us no messages, there’s no way the Cobalts will predict an ambush at their rear. Not one of such magnitude.”

  “It does look a good deal steeper on the face than it did from the mountains,” agreed Brother Wan. “Presuming the Myurans don’t have overmuch difficulty navigating those ridges on either side, they’ll start down when they see us cresting the last hill into the valley?”

  “Then, or when the Cobalt horns blow. Simple and elegant, like all the best stratagems,” said Domingo. “This one is called the wolf trap—we snap them between our steel jaws and catch them fast. No escape, once we pour up from the valley and Wheatley’s people come down the mountain.”

  “Wolf trap…” Shea seemed to have a thought stuck in her head like a stringy piece of meat catches in the teeth. He could see her worrying at it, brows knitted, then she said, “Isn’t that the maneuver the Stricken Queen’s rebel army u
sed against the Fifteenth in the Shadow Deserts, at Wild Throne?”

  “That was the place,” said Domingo, remembering the battle like it was… like it was twenty-some-odd years ago, but he remembered the broad strokes. Said strokes were not pretty, not pretty at all. Unrefined, was the word he would use. Yet effective. “Our best tutor is often our enemy.”

  “Lord Bleak is the best, isn’t he?” said Shea, and for the first time Domingo found himself intrigued instead of exasperated by his first captain. “There’s poetry in Ironfist that I’ve not heard in any ballad. Ah. Sir?”

  “Well put, Shea, well put,” Domingo allowed. She was a student of war, then, if nothing approaching a scholar, but we all start somewhere. Efrain had never remembered a word of Bleak, despite Domingo’s frequent quizzes. Alas, neither verbal lashings nor the more traditional sort improved the boy’s memory or whetted his interest, to such an exasperating degree that Domingo had to ask if Efrain was making a mess of his lessons on purpose. Though why ever his son would do such a thing—

  “Just a moment more of your attention, sir?” said Wan, leaning down from his perch over Domingo like a great raven prodding at a dying dog. His beady eyes were on the map. “If we are to agree to this luncheon with the Cobalts, which seems perspicacious, I should think we must do so without further delay.”

  “Excuse me? You think accepting their terms seems perspicacious, Brother Wan?” said Shea, perhaps coaxed into offering an actual opinion from the crumb of approval Domingo had tossed her.

  “You don’t, Shea?” asked Domingo, and when she began to balk he hurried her on with the stick since he never carried a surfeit of carrots. “I know you have a notion, so spit it out, damn you, unless you think a Chainite anathema knows tactics better than a captain of the Fifteenth?”

  “Sir! Even with the rests we took along the way, the regiment’s had over a full night and a day of marching, and with making camp here at the end of it all, most didn’t get to sleep until the late hours of this morning.” Shea’s eyes were so bloodshot, Domingo wondered if she’d rested at all. “Pushing them onto the field less than a full turn of the sun from now seems… rushed? Especially with our holding every advantage save terrain, and the Thaoan regiment only two days out… sir?”

  And he’d lost her again to indecision, but just for a moment there she’d shown some shred of competence. That shred had been thin from neglect and flapped about more as a handkerchief signaling surrender than a pennant flying proudly above an advancing army, but it gave Domingo an unexpected flash of optimism for Azgaroth’s future after he had gone into that horrible endless night where nothing stirs, not even the regrets of a disappointed father…

  “Sir?”

  “Hmmm, yes, quite so, quite so. Excellent reasoning, Captain,” said Domingo, imagining Shea wore much the same expression Efrain would have that fateful birthday, had he received a kitty cat instead of stern steel and a harder lecture. “A pity I cannot put it into practice. Accept their terms, Shea, noon tomorrow it is.”

  Ah, and there was the actual look Efrain had displayed, all resentment and confusion. It looked no better on Domingo’s first captain than it had on his son, and he waved his one responsive hand in front of his face as though he could dispel her like an ill smell. She didn’t question him, however, which was more than he’d been able to say for Efrain when the boy was in one of his moods.

  “We attack at noon, then,” she said. “I will inform the officers to prepare for—”

  “We attack at first light, Captain,” said Domingo irritably. “For the love of the living, don’t go around giving orders I haven’t made. We tell the Cobalts we will meet them at noon, but tell the officers to have everyone moving an hour before dawn.”

  “A fine and auspicious hour,” said Brother Wan, as though Domingo’s motivation stemmed from Chainite mumbo-jumbo and not pragmatism.

  “An early hour, was my thinking,” said Domingo, and, not wanting Shea to go away thinking the war monk steered anything but his command wagon, he added, “It seems underhanded, I know, but the Crimson Codices are quite clear—we’re not officially at war with the Cobalts, which makes them insurrectionists, not combatants worthy of our usual chivalric standards. If I know Cold Zosia, and I do, she’ll have the same notion—yes, come to think it, Captain, have our people ready to go two hours before dawn. Then we might get the drop on her.”

  “And so with your permission, Colonel,” said Wan, “shall I anoint the regiment three hours before dawn, to make sure my people have ample time to complete the ceremony before we march? Everyone must have the holy oil upon their brow before we carry out the ritual, otherwise the effect could be… catastrophic.”

  “Catastrophic?” That was not a word Domingo liked to hear as regarded the safety of his regiment. “Explain yourself plainly so even an old blasphemer like me can understand, Wan. If you can’t guarantee the safety of my people there’s no fucking way we’re using this oil of yours.”

  “The oil, Colonel, is not the weapon,” said Wan patiently. “The oil is what protects our people, when the ritual is completed. The wrath of the Fallen Mother will fall upon the field, and anyone out in that valley who does not bear Her Grace’s mark is at risk of being conflated with the Cobalt Company.”

  “Hmmm,” said Domingo, all his doubts about this plan returning… but the scouts reported the Cobalt Company was even bigger than anticipated, and with Wheatley off on the other end of the Lark’s Tongue, it would be far too dangerous to go forward with the attack and not use the Chain’s weapon. Without it, and with the Cobalts dug in on the high ground across the vale, the battle could go either way, especially if Wheatley’s attack on the rear was somehow delayed.

  “I assure you they will be perfectly safe so long as they receive our blessing and anointment,” said Wan. “All of my brethren will be down on the field with them—I would not ask your soldiers to undergo anything my people would not.”

  “If we waited for Colonel Waits to arrive?” Shea said, a pleading note in her voice, and that irritating doubt was what pushed him into it.

  “Everyone gets the oil, then,” Domingo decided. “We rest today, and three hours before dawn, anoint the troops and carry out your ceremony. We’re using the Chain’s weapon.”

  “Sir, I really think—”

  “Dismissed, Captain Shea,” said Domingo, looking out at the Lark’s Tongue so he wouldn’t have to see Wan’s smug expression. “Get that owlbat headed back to the Cobalts quick as you can. Mustn’t keep my old friends waiting.”

  A pox on every graveworm, and a royal one on Diggelby. Maroto had felt worse—the gods of chance demanded such, given the life he’d led, the beatings he’d endured, the substances he’d abused. Still, he couldn’t rightly remember such an occasion, whatever the gods of chance had to say on the subject. He didn’t think of himself as one given to hyperbole, but he would rather, in all seriousness, be chopped to death by hatchets than feel this way a moment longer. Really dull ones, wielded by blind toddlers. He finally mustered the strength to produce a moan.

  “Somebody drink too much?” Purna poked her head into the tent, delivering a blast of raw, corrosive energy directly into Maroto’s brain, exploding his eyeballs in the process. He pulled the sweaty blanket over his head to block out the sunshine.

  “Something I ate,” he said. “I can handle my drink, woman.”

  “Sure,” said Purna, and through the thin blanket he could tell she’d let the flap fall shut, banishing the hated sun. He poked his face out again as she brought a sloshing jug over to the nest he had made on the floor. “Brought you some millet beer—old Ugrakari cure, hoof of the yak that kicked you.”

  “Uhhhhh.” Maroto shuddered, refusing to believe she could be that vicious.

  “Snowmelt. Just the thing to get you up and ready to face the morning. Or afternoon, as the case may be. Hey, what’s this? Thought you didn’t smoke a pipe anymore—don’t tell me you brought someone home in your state!”


  Pipe? Oh yes, the pipe!

  “That’s the only briar I ever loved, the one I lost,” said Maroto as Purna put the piece back down on his mound of shed clothes. “She made it for me, made one for all of us, and somehow… somehow she brought it back to me.”

  “No way, that’s one of Zosia’s pipes?” Purna whistled. “That’d make smoking one almost worth the trouble. Can you teach me? Can I smoke musk flowers out of it?”

  “No,” said Maroto, something even worse than the evilest hangover of his life welling up at the thought of Zosia, a shadow in his aching skull. “Need something solid in me, Purna, or I’ll fucking die.”

  The words brought another spasm; food was the last thing he wanted, but he knew from voluminous experience that it was a necessary devil.

  “Maybe a nice slice of crow, since I warned you against eating that worm?” Maroto must have looked sufficiently pathetic for her to soften a little. “Choi and Zosia are scaring you up a plate of something hot.”

  “Zosia.” It came out as a moan, the foreboding cloud at the edge of his awareness dispelled by the howling wind of reality. Maroto remembered everything. He dragged himself up into a sitting position, took the offered jug of deliciously cold water. After slurping some down, he tried to focus on Purna. “She’s here?”

  “Just missed her, champion—too busy blowing your guts out on yonder tent wall.” Purna nodded toward the source of the stench Maroto only now realized was not rising from his own clammy body. Hey, he hadn’t thrown up on himself—things were looking up! “Guess you two worked things out, yeah?” she asked.

  “For now.” Maroto shivered. Holy fucking devils, was this really all his doing? Had his sting-addled wish set in motion every bad deed that had led to Zosia coming here? Undoubtedly—this had Crumbsnatcher’s tracks all over it. That rat loved nothing more than whispering in a sleeping ear, making it so you woke up thinking you’d had the greatest notion, or remembering something that had never happened… like receiving an order to execute a certain venerable citizen in a remote mountain town… Devils have mercy, Zosia had said her whole village had been murdered, a husband… That tore it, he was going to be sick again. This time he didn’t make it to the side of the tent.