A Crown for Cold Silver

by Alex Marshall

  As they reached the upper edge of camp, the runner she’d sent to alert Ji-hyeon of the ambush came huffing around a tent and waved her down. He didn’t look like he had good news.

  “Let me guess,” Zosia called, “our fearless general’s decided to lead from the front?”

  “Uh-huh,” panted the runner. “But I found these two, looking confused, in front of the command tent, so I brought ’em, ’cause you said bring any able hands.”

  The tallest figure Zosia had ever seen caught up to the runner, looking a sight less winded. Zosia grinned up at them, and called out in the Flintland tongue, “Well, you don’t get more able than four hands on two legs, do you?”

  “Uh,” said Sullen, not meeting Zosia’s gaze. “It’s you.”

  “Manners, laddie,” said old man Ruthless, resting his hands on his grandson’s bulb of hair like it was a pulpit for his oration. “Anyone to lay out my son the way she did is worth a nod, if not a drink. What shall we call you, madam, since we’ve not been formally introduced? On the road we heard a lot of titles, so let’s see, is it Cold Cobalt Zosia, Forsook Queen, Captain of Cobalts and Banshee of Blades, First Among—”

  “Zosia is fine,” she said, seeing where Maroto had inherited his love for the sound of his own voice. “I’ll just call you Ruthless and Sullen, since I hear those are your names. Fair?”

  “More than,” said Ruthless.

  “What…” Sullen was staring at Choplicker, who’d come over and rubbed his head against the man’s leg. “What’s your devil’s name?”

  “A devil’s true name is a powerful thing, Sullen.” A few concerned murmurs came from behind Zosia, but she didn’t really mind his outing the fiend—if she didn’t get to enjoy anonymity anymore, neither should her devil. “I just call him Choplicker.”

  “Huh,” said Sullen, scratching behind the monster’s ear to an appreciative yowl.

  “I’m more concerned with mortal affairs than my grandson,” said Ruthless. “Your errand boy said swords were needed to meet a pack of Crimson cowards stealing down the hill, that the shape of it?”

  “Fa,” said Sullen quietly, looking up from Choplicker but still keeping his eyes off Zosia. “We’re supposed to fight with Uncle, help out Ji… General Ji-hyeon.”

  “And they weren’t where they said they’d be,” said Ruthless, “and the lady wants further proof against cowardice. What’re you moaning about?”

  “It’s a big battle, Sullen,” said Zosia. “You’ll do more good for your uncle and friends by thwarting an attack on their rear than you will by wandering out into the field, hoping to find two fighters amidst twenty thousand.”

  “That many?” said Ruthless gleefully. “Oh, this ought to be a fine sendoff!”

  “Yeah, all right.” Sullen looked bashful as a virgin asked to dance by the most notorious rake in the room, and it gave Zosia a petty pleasure to see him squirm. Whatever Maroto thought about his motivations, it was plain to Zosia the boy either wanted her dead or in bed, or maybe he didn’t even know which he wanted.

  “I’m trusting you to watch my back, Sullen,” she said, unable to resist, and that finally did it—he looked her in the eyes, and she saw the last thing she’d expect from a hard-looking Horned Wolf: he was scared of her.

  “Yeah. All right.”

  “Yeah, all right,” his grandfather mimicked, and, reaching behind the boy’s head, he pulled out one of the crazy-looking knives certain Flintland tribes used to throw at one another. “We’ve snapped and snarled enough, now let’s put our teeth to some use!”

  “Up we go, then,” said Zosia. Raising her voice to address the archers and foot assembled behind her, she shouted, “I’ll whittle a pipe for the first one of you to draw Crimson blood!”

  A handful of huzzahs, and whole lot of confused stares. What was the Star coming to?

  “Or a bottle of the best booze in camp, your choice!” That got a proper showing out of the ignorant blackguards, and Zosia set off up the escarpment, trying not to be too annoyed that the one skill she took actual pride in commanded such little regard. Oh well, a bottle was a lot easier to procure than briar and a lot less work once she had it; her hands would be busy enough in the days to come.

  First Sullen and Da were a no-show at Diggelby’s tent, and when Purna got tired of waiting and dragged the Moochers to the command tent they found Ji-hyeon had left without them. Suggestions that they stop off for another round were shot down by Purna, who had her meanest face on. Maroto didn’t see what the rush was, considering that the swirling patterns of blue and red that flowed across the valley floor didn’t show any signs of fading. Around that time, though, Maroto stopped being able to hear anything Purna or the others said, his one good ear filled with the grinding of insects beneath the earth, graveworms stirring from here to the far valley, rising to the surface to feed…

  Purna led them down, but Maroto couldn’t look at her anymore, couldn’t look at Diggelby or Hassan or Din, because when he did he saw right through the garish makeup and the skin beneath it, saw all the way to their yammering skulls. He put all his attention on Prince, because Diggelby’s lapdog kept looking up at him with this weird little smile as he trotted along beside the crew, and while he didn’t look much like a dog anymore, at least he didn’t look like a walking corpse with its face all chewed away by scavengers, and by Old Black’s loose tooth, Maroto had never had a sting trip him out this bad. He was bugging balls.

  “Will you stop!” Purna said. Maroto looked up from Prince, relieved to find the grinding riot in his ear had quieted, replaced by the good old-fashioned ruckus of countless people murdering each other. “Thank you.”

  “Eh?” But the sound returned as soon as he said it, and Purna’s skull snapped at him again, a blackened skeletal finger pointing to her jawbone. “Oh.”

  Maroto stopped grinding his teeth, and the sound stopped, too. Funny how that worked. He closed his eyes, told himself when he opened them again the world would be back to normal. He gave it a go, and saw they’d come down the hill and were less than a hundred paces from the back of the press, bodies fucking everywhere, people wandering around them holding their limbs and where their limbs used to be and weeping and dying and sometimes both, blood welling out of the very earth, and Purna popped him in the cheek, like that ever worked except in the songs.

  “Maroto!” The skull under the horned wolf hood sounded just like Purna.

  “That’sdefinitelyme,” he said, hoping he sounded convincing.

  “Some people saw her ride in around there, but it’s going to be a mess just getting through our people to the front—you wait right here until we come back with Ji-hyeon, all right? Don’t. Move.”

  Purna was gesturing off into the cloud of whizzing weapons and splattering gore that floated in front of them. As he squinted, it was like his confused brain thought he was already in the mix, because things started getting all precise the way they did when he was in real trouble, the incoherent blur of the battle coalescing into a hundred thousand crystal clear images: An ax cleaving an arm off. A woman bringing a shield up too slow to intercept the spear that was going to puncture her heart. A horse brained with a mace. The rider swinging his sword into another man before his horse even knew it was dead.

  “Right, good. Stay. If you have to move, go back to the tent,” said Purna, turning away, but before she’d taken a step an arrow launched from two hundred yards deep in the melee came hurtling down to skewer her face. Well, hurtling was selling the song a little hard; it just kind of drifted down, like it didn’t have a care in the world, leaving a shimmering trail in the dawn sky, and so Maroto wasn’t in a hurry, either; he just bumped past Hassan, apologized for the slight, and then long-stepped up beside Purna, raising one of his shields to neatly catch the arrow before it killed her. The point shivered on his side of the shield, having penetrated both steel and wood just above his sweaty grip. Could’ve planned that better; an inch lower and it would’ve gone right through his hand! He’d h
ave to be more careful.

  The human eyes in Purna’s skull face wobbled at him, Hassan gasped in belated shock, and Din said, “Fallen Mother’s mercy, I’ve never seen a mortal move like that.”

  “I’maVillainyeahdidn’tgetmyreputationleadingnoguidedtoursofthePanteranfuckingWastes,” said Maroto, and Diggelby laughed and laughed, swooping Prince up in one arm and waving his crystalline cutlass around in the other like this one actor Maroto had run with who had this great mad pirate character he’d play, and Purna patted Maroto on the shoulder and sounded a little freaked out when she thanked him but didn’t try to make him stay behind anymore, and they all started running to some quarter of the world-encompassing battle that was supposedly better than the rest of it. Leave it to the nobles to know where the best party is happening.

  “Question,” Maroto hissed back at Diggelby as they wove through the throng, not wanting to alarm the others. “We’rethebluesandthey’retheredsyeah?”

  Diggelby was still laughing when another arrow arced down from the clear morning sky, too fast for even Maroto to stop, an evil black tracer wavering in the air behind it, and it was a queer thing, to be looking at a laughing friend and know they were dead even before they were, to see them acting alive and hale but know they were a ghost and just didn’t realize it yet. Yet instead of spitting the fop’s lace-ruffled neck, the arrow was nudged over at the last moment by a breeze, the missile hitting some poor bastard behind them, snuffing out some stranger’s friend instead of his. Maroto started laughing right along with Diggelby, because when you got right down to it, there wasn’t anything more hilariously random than war.

  Sullen had fought against the tide of the camp, a flood of eager, frightened, and resigned faces flashing past him as he made for his uncle’s tent. It was empty, and when nobody returned after a few minutes he hustled Grandfather over to Ji-hyeon’s tent, but he’d just missed them, too. It seemed smartest to wait there until someone came to tell him what to do, even with Grandfather harassing him to just run down the hill with the rest of the Cobalts and see what they could find at the bottom. The truth was, Sullen couldn’t bear the thought of his leaving the command tent only for Ji-hyeon or maybe Uncle Maroto to wander over just after they’d left, so he made Grandfather promise to wait ten minutes, since the clashing armies in the valley wouldn’t be going anywhere.

  And once again, he should have listened to his grandfather, because the sweaty guy who had run up, poked his head in the tent, and then told Sullen to follow him back to some fight that was happening ended up delivering him right to Zosia. And now he’d gone and told her he’d watch her back, so there was another fool thing he’d blundered into—after giving his word, he wouldn’t feel right carrying out the will of the Faceless Mistress. Not today, anyway. So that was maybe a good thing, gave him one less thing to worry about… Unless she’d somehow figured out he’d been sent to do her mischief, and meant to use the confusion of battle to move on him before he could move on her. Unless that.

  “You watching that back?” whispered Grandfather as Sullen scrambled up the steep, grit-slippery slope. Above them, the ridgeline they’d called a “hump” poked out like the mountain’s potbelly, but they still had a climb ahead of them to reach it. Zosia was a few lengths ahead of them, and yeah, being real with himself, he had been watching her back a bit; hard not to, from this angle, leather britches taut against her posterior.

  “Shut it, Fa,” said Sullen, but that must have answered the old man’s question well enough, because he brayed with laughter.

  Glancing back, Sullen promptly stubbed his toe and went down on one knee, gashing it open on a shelf of rock. He barely noticed, gawping out at the valley beyond the camp. Big a host as the Cobalt Company had seemed, the Imperials were bigger by half, at least—he’d only seen glimpses of the Crimson army after he and Grandfather had met Ji-hyeon in the mountains, when the Cobalts would get a vantage point to look back on their pursuers, and those peeks had barely hinted at their true mass. The two armies had collided right at the base of the mountain, stirring up dust, and while no ground seemed to have been given yet, the mass of red-dressed soldiers stretched back and back from the front, blanketing the valley clear to the next hill.

  Impressive a sight as it all was, what had put the slack in his chin was the shadow following fast behind the Imperials, a shadow that persisted even when the slowly rising sun was obscured by plumes of dust. Devils. The incorporeal ones that Ji-hyeon called “spirits,” but still, a dire host of them, and Sullen prayed to Old Black and Boldstrut that they were merely scavengers looking for an easy meal. The only time he had seen so many swarm at once was when the Faceless Mistress had used them as her doorway into the world of mortals, and a dreadful thought slapped his heart into a gallop: what if she had come for retribution, to punish Sullen for siding with Zosia instead of carrying out her desire? They didn’t appear to be congealing together, though, so perhaps it wasn’t as bad as that…

  A tumult from just below reminded him of his immediate concerns, and he saw that the foot soldiers and archers were clumping up around and beneath him on the rock- and cactus-spined slope, shiny faces staring anxiously up at him… no, past him, to the lip of the escarpment that now obscured the rest of the mountain. Zosia had also paused her climb, flat on her stomach just below the summit, her devil slinking sideways along the crest of the scarp with a decidedly uncanine grace. Setting his boots in the slippery rock dust, Sullen hauled himself up beside her as she turned back to the trailing troops and put a finger to her lips before waving them up.

  “They’re here,” she whispered to Sullen and Grandfather, eyes shining like her hair in the cold autumn sunlight. “Be on top of us any moment. Their archers catch us here, we’re all dead. You ready?”

  “Um,” said Sullen, trying to think something nice, since it might be the last thing he thought. He tried to picture’s Ji-hyeon’s sly smile, but she melted into the Faceless Mistress. “Yeah. Okay.”

  Below them, one of their soldiers slipped, dislodged a stone, and it bounced down to camp, clattering all the way. Nothing stirred above them, most of their soldiers still a hard minute’s climb from the top, minimum.

  “You ready to see your ancestors, Fa?” Sullen whispered over his shoulder as Zosia nocked an arrow in her bow, her hammer strapped to her back.

  “Hells no!” muttered Grandfather. “So make sure you keep that worthless melon of yours between me and the arrows—you’re the only protection I got.”

  “Horned Wolves don’t wear armor, Fa,” said Sullen, and, glimpsing their shadow on the slope above, he saw that the old man had a sun-knife in each hand.

  “Horned Wolves? In case you ain’t noticed, boy, you and me been Possum People for well on twelve thaws—now move that pouch, boy, and let’s show these red dogs how it’s done!”

  When charging any hill there’s a dreadful uncertainty of where and when the curve of the earth will reveal you to those at a higher vantage. The operative word being “vantage”; the high ground was contested for good reason. As she rose slowly from her crouch, bow ready, what had seemed like such a sharp edge above her now became a gentle curve, the tops of a few pines coming into sight as she rose. Sullen stayed lower, taking those last few uncertain steps up to where the ground leveled off, his grandfather craning his neck for a peek from his own personal high ground.

  There, across the grass and rocks of the plateau, was a shaded stand of pine, and Zosia let out her breath, relaxed her bowstring. Despite Choplicker’s wariness, there were no Imperials. Yet.

  She waved her troops up, and at her signal a shout came from the trees, followed by a half dozen arrows—Sullen had already broken into a zigzagging charge and they whipped past him; the one that would have struck Zosia’s leg kicked up dirt at her feet thanks to Choplicker. Zosia steadied herself, drew, and fired on one of the silhouettes that had stepped out from the cover of the trees. It was easy to play hard with a devil minding your interest, but Sullen and his grandfath
er didn’t seem to miss the advantage, both men howling as they quickly crossed the narrow plateau.

  “Up and fire, up and fire!” cried Zosia, Choplicker whining as he ambled in front of her to take any more arrows that might come her way. A few more of them did as Zosia’s troops stormed the hump, but went wide with a bark from Choplicker. One struck a young boy from Rawonam who had told Zosia he’d brought his own hunting bow when enlisting with the Cobalts. He died screaming on the ground as his comrades spread out on the ridge and drew beads on the pack of Imperials hiding in the dozen stunted pines that curtained the back of the plateau.

  Their task was made infinitely harder by Sullen, who ran ahead, crashed into the pines, and fell among the Imperial archers like a panther that had been caged too long, only to be released into a paddock of red deer. A panther with a furious, armed monkey riding its back. The boy’s spear was a wet, ruddy blur between the trees, and from his back the old man hurled a giant, multibladed knife at the startled archers. The two men resembled one of the Ugrakari gods Zosia had seen on the old headwoman’s shrine in Blodtørst, a hulking, four-armed scourge of the iniquitous.

  Blades alone rarely prevailed in a bowfight, though, and even as Zosia’s arrow struck the crotch of one Imperial, another dozen arrows flew from her Cobalts, making a choice fucking mess of what would otherwise be a rather scenic grove. The situation managed, she hustled across the plateau, motioning her soldiers after her.

  Sullen and his grandfather looked bewildered to be alive and unharmed as the last archer writhed screaming on the ground, a sun-knife in her stomach, and Sullen finished her with his spear before retrieving the old man’s throwing weapon and passing it up to him. The wind rustled through the pines as she stepped into the copse, and all of a sudden Zosia remembered the musty smell of Leib’s hair when that awful Azgarothian colonel had plunked his head down on the table where they had eaten nigh every meal for twenty years, and she stumbled, steadied herself against a tree. She gagged, and swatted Choplicker away as he pranced around her feet, merry as one of Maroto’s fop friends.