Hall refocused his spyglass on the foot of the hill, where the Mort had piled their dead in an enormous pyre. This pyre had burned for the past week; even now, wisps of smoke still drifted into the air from the charred remains. The smell had been bad, and Hall had been forced to change shifts at double time. But now the camp was entirely cleared of the dead, and Mort soldiers leaned against tents, chatting, their shirts off to absorb the June sunlight. Three separate groups of soldiers were hunched over tables, downing pint after pint of ale while they played cards. Hall even saw one soldier sunbathing atop a supply wagon. Still excursionists on vacation. The Mort had tried several assaults on the foot of the hill, but found themselves repelled by Hall’s archers each time. In the absence of Genot or another general, these attacks were poorly planned, disorganized in execution. Hall could see them coming a mile away, but that would not last. He turned his spyglass east and found the party easily: a clutch of dark-clad figures moving slowly and steadily across the flats. He couldn’t make out their features, but there was no reason to doubt Llew, who’d been born with a built-in spyglass of his own. Hall had never fought Ducarte himself, but he’d heard plenty from Bermond, whose reminiscences about the Mort general could chill the blood.
“Ducarte will be more inventive,” Hall remarked. “And much more trouble.”
“If they try to flank us to the north, we can’t hold them,” Blaser cautioned. “It’s too much ground to cover.”
“They won’t flank.”
“How do you know, sir?”
“The Mace has a source in the Palais. The Mort have orders to avoid the Fairwitch, even the foothills. It’s this stretch or nothing.” Hall set down his spyglass. His palms were sweating, but he hoped that Blaser hadn’t noticed. “Put fresh men in the trees and tell them not to let their eyes wander. Any changes in the Mort sentry line come directly to me.”
Blaser left, humming to himself, and Hall began to shave again, though his hand wasn’t quite as steady this time; he drew the razor down his bare jaw and felt the blade slice through his skin. Hall had no people; his parents had died several years ago, victims of a winter fever that had swept through all of the villages on the hillside. But what faced the Tear now was infinitely worse, and Ducarte’s arrival only darkened the outlook further. In the last invasion, according to Bermond, Ducarte had liked to throw his Tear prisoners into pens with starving bears. There would be no mercy for the taken, not even the wounded, and part of Hall could not help wondering whether the Queen had considered these eventualities before she had violated the treaty and opened the door wide. The Queen had brought this upon them, and for a rogue moment Hall cursed her, sitting safely on her throne back in New London. There was some Bible story Hall remembered vaguely from his childhood, something of a little man who took on a giant and emerged victorious … yet the Mort were ten giants. Even after Hall’s victory two weeks ago, the Mort army still had more than four times the men, enough to divide and crush the Tear army from multiple angles. The Queen had not thought of her soldiers, only of principle, and principle was cold comfort to men who were going to die. Hall wondered if she truly had magic, as the rumors said, or whether that was simply a fairy tale that the Mace had allowed to spread. The rumors were difficult to reconcile with the woman who sat on the throne, the child-adult with the gaze of an owl. Hall had already made his military assessment—all was lost—but intuition was not logical, and his gut would not allow him to give up.
She could save us, he thought stubbornly. She could.
C
HAPTER
4
M
ATTERS OF
C
ONSCIENCE
Flee, we are in the hands of a wolf.
—Giovanni de’ Medici, upon the ascension of Rodrigo Borgia, POPE ALEXANDER VI
FATHER TYLER SHOULD have been at ease. He was reading, sitting in the comfortable chair at his desk, and reading usually calmed him, reminded him that there was a world beyond this one, a better world that seemed almost tangible. But this was the rare day when reading calmed nothing. Tyler had covered the same two pages several times before he finally put down his book and gave up. The candle on his desk was covered with dried drips of wax, and without thinking, Tyler began to peel them off. His fingers worked independently of his brain, peeling and peeling, as he stared out the window.
The Holy Father had died two weeks ago, on the last day of May. Cardinal Anders had succeeded him, in a conclave so short that a few of the more distant cardinals arrived to find him already in the Holy Father’s seat. The Holy Father, recognizing a political mind as sharp as his own, had handpicked Anders as his successor years ago, and everything had proceeded as it should.
But Tyler was afraid.
The new Holy Father had attended to many things since taking the robes. He immediately fired five cardinals, men with known reformist sympathies, men who’d spoken against Anders during his tenure. Their sees went to nobles’ sons for more than a thousand pounds each. The new Holy Father had also hired sixteen new bookkeepers for the Arvath, increasing the total to forty. Some of these new bookkeepers were not even ordained men; several of them looked and sounded as though the Holy Father had plucked them right off the streets of the Gut. Tyler and his brothers had heard nothing, but the conclusion was clear: more money would be coming in.
Then there was Tyler’s own position. The old Holy Father had been too preoccupied with fighting death to take Tyler to task, but Tyler knew that he would not escape the new Holy Father’s housecleaning attentions for long. Already, last Sunday, Tyler had found Anders’s eyes seeking him out in the crowd during the convocation. Anders wanted information on Queen Kelsea, damning information, and Tyler had given him nothing. The Queen had already made several moves that presaged trouble for the Church, beginning with a proscription on the use of underage clerical aides to satisfy tithing debts. Tyler, who had been one of these aides himself, had enjoyed his childhood¸ but he understood the argument; not all priests were Father Alan. Now parishes would have to hire real aides, aides whose salaries would be paid from money already earmarked for the Arvath treasury.
But worse had followed: the Queen had announced that the Church’s property tax exemption would end in the coming year. Starting in January, the Church would have to pay tax on all of its holdings up and down the Tearling, including the big prize: thousands of acres of high-producing farmland in the northern Almont. For the Arvath, this was a financial cataclysm. With the help of her foulmouthed but undeniably clever Treasurer, the Queen had also preempted the Holy Father’s protests by decreeing that the Crown’s private landholdings would no longer be exempt either. The Queen would pay property tax alongside the Church, and the money would be earmarked for public works and social services.
Without enforcement, these decrees would mean nothing. But from overheard conversation in the Keep, Tyler also knew that the Queen and Arliss had begun to quietly convert a large portion of the Census Bureau over to the business of tax assessment and collection. It was a clever move. Census men were already entrenched in every village of the Tearling, tracking the population, and it would not be a stretch for them to track income as well. Arlen Thorne would have screamed bloody murder, but Thorne was nowhere to be found, and without him, the Census was a far more malleable animal. There would be plenty of Crown employees to make sure that God’s Church forked over every last pound due.