“Maybe they don’t mean anything,” Neb said.
She shook her head. “It is unlikely. Most dreams mean something.” She sighed. “But I hope you’re right.”
Neb saw that the thought of it relieved her. “Why do you hope I’m right?” he asked.
She looked to the idol herself for a moment, then back to Neb. “Because the dreams said that many would go to their second death in the fire for the Androfrancine sin.” She shuddered as she said the words.
“And I had something to do with it?” Neb asked, his voice suddenly small.
“You were in the dreams. If the Marsh King knew why, you would not be here.” She extended her hand to him, and for the second time he took it.
He’d actually never held a girl’s hand before. He’d never really thought much about it. The orphans were discouraged from the opposite sex in the male-dominated Order. Certainly there were some provisions for Androfrancines to marry-but not many, not even when unexpected children were involved. Her hand was gritty and dry and firm-not ever what he would have expected for this first. He let her lead him up through the back door of the cave.
Neb wondered about the girl. She must be the Marsh King’s servant. Perhaps even a daughter, which seemed odd to his sense of the world since the other armies would never think to bring children into the battlefield.
But she wasn’t quite a child. Probably within a year of him. Perhaps even a bit older.
Of course, these were Marshers. Perhaps she was here for darker reasons than he wished to imagine.
Neb followed her as she led him to a lean-to that sheltered a fire and a large steaming kettle of thick stew. She found broken bits of pottery to use as spoons and scooped two wooden bowlfuls out of the sticky mess. It smelled sweetly pungent beneath his nose.
Sitting in the mud beside the Marsh girl, Neb ate his stew and listened to the War Sermon as it bellowed out into the night.
Vlad Li Tam
Vlad Li Tam listened to the voice on the wind and nodded slowly. “He preaches again,” he said. His aide brought a long match to the bowl of the ornate pipe, and Vlad Li Tam inhaled a lungful of the kallaberry smoke.
It cleared his head by slowing down his mind. It bolstered him in a warm sea of euphoria that kept him alive and gave him the edge he needed to do what must be done.
They camped in the open with nothing to hide-a small caravan of wagons ringed around their tents. He fully expected to parley with all parties involved excepting perhaps the Marsh King. House Li Tam had given up that part of the world long before Vlad’s time. He wasn’t sure how many sons or daughters of Tam had been sent north to buy their father’s way into that stunted place. None had been accepted. Some had been killed. At least three hundred years ago, they’d stopped trying. He’d read about it in the archives.
He expelled the purple smoke, watching it disperse into the night air.
“I will wear armor tomorrow,” Vlad Li Tam told his aide and his master sergeant. “And a sword.”
»v h Ro
They both nodded.
“I suspect Petronus will require his hand forced,” he said, looking at them both, his eyes narrow. “I suspect that I will betray my friend.”
“Hail the camp,” a distant voice called out. Vlad Li Tam looked up and nodded as his guards scattered to reinforce their positions.
“Hail, Gypsy Scout. What news do you bring?”
“Lord Rudolfo sends regards and will join your parley on the morrow.”
Vlad Li Tam nodded. “Excellent. Is my daughter with him?”
“She has returned to the Ninefold Forest with the metal man. Your presence here was unexpected. Otherwise, I’m certain she would have delayed her travel.”
Far better for her to stay near the mechoservitor. She could be trusted to watch out for it, to keep it from the wrong hands. It reminded him of another matter. “Tell your general that after the parley we will move quickly against the City States if they do not lay down arms. Our Pope will want the mechoservitors that Sethbert is holding. They are critical for the reestablishment of the library.”
“I will tell him,” the scout said, never staying still yet never entering the camp’s ring of light.
After the scout left, Vlad Li Tam called for a bird and laid his pipe aside to compose a message, coding it in double and triple Whymer loops that only an Androfrancine Pope could read. After he’d finished writing it, he went back over it, layering in yet more code in the slightest brush strokes of his pen, the seemingly hapless smearing of a letter here or there.
He tied it to his strongest, smallest bird and whispered the direction to its tiny head as it fluttered against his hands.
Vlad Li Tam tossed the bird into the sky, watched its wings unfurl as it caught the light breeze and shot east, flying low to the ground.
Jin Li Tam
Jin Li Tam rose early on her first morning back in the seventh forest manor. She slipped into plain cotton trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, pulling a light cloak over both to keep her dry in the cold autumn drizzle. In her absence, they had moved her into the room adjoining Rudolfo’s, outfitting it with everything she could p? keossibly need. She left her hair down and shoved her foot into the low doeskin boots the steward had provided.
In the hall, she paused at the door. Once more her eyes went to the children’s quarters, and she thought again about the one furnished room. Despite the early hour a servant passed, and Jin Li Tam reached out to touch the girl’s arm.
“What is that room?” she asked, pointing.
The servant shifted uncomfortably. “It’s Lord Isaak’s room, Lady Tam.”
She felt herself frown. “I don’t understand. Why would Isaak need a child’s room?”
The girl blushed and stammered. “Not for the-” She struggled, looking for the right word. “Not for the mechanical,” she finally said. Her eyes wandered the hall, only pausing to meet Jin Li Tam’s eyes for the briefest of moments. “I’m not sure it is proper for me to speak of it. You should ask Steward Kember or perhaps Mistress Ilyna.”
Jin Li Tam nodded. “Very well.”
Looking to that closed door one more time, she turned and moved down the hall, her soft boots whispering across the carpet. She took the stairs two at a time, springing lightly, and nodded to the Gypsy Scouts that waited for her at the main doors. They fell in behind her, and she smiled beneath her hood. She’d grown familiar with the half-squad Rudolfo had assigned to her, and most of her life she’d had guards of one kind or another. Sethbert was the first to not assign an escort to her, and she knew it had more to do with the message he sent to her father-like his insistence that she be considered a consort and nothing more.
They were very different men, Sethbert and Rudolfo. Rudolfo carried a certain ruthlessness about him, but it was the carefully chosen path that blended menace with charm in order to achieve a goal. Sethbert’s had been more the meanness of a large bully accustomed to imposing his will for the pleasure it brought him more than to any purpose.
Rudolfo, as she had observed before, was more like her father. Prepared and cautious, but with an aloof and light touch.
Even the men he’d chosen for her escort showcased this. They followed, often just one or two, but they stayed far enough back to not invade her privacy.
As she passed through the gate, a movement on the hill outside of town caught her eye. A lone figure moved along the top of that cleared surface and she knew it was Isaak, pacing out the space there. The structure would be massive and for a moment, she stood still and took it in. How would this sleeping town respond in the shadow of this undertaking? Certainly, Rudolfo had considered this. She was too new to the Ninefold Forest to know what it would mean when the libraA wh inry opened its doors and became the centerpoint of the Named Lands, so far from the centers of commerce and statecraft.