“I need her, too,” Adare snarled. She could feel the heat seared into her skin at the Everburning Well, could trace the scar. But what good were heat and scar in defending a city? Where were the bolts of lightning stabbing down out of the sky to scatter their unnumbered foes? Where was the strength to melt rock and level armies? Adare’s own glowing eyes were just that … glowing. They could barely illuminate a manuscript in a pitch-dark room, let alone save a whole city from destruction. “I need her, too,” she said again, shaking her head.
“The goddess will guard us,” Lehav said. “Think of the Everburning Well. It was only in your last, most dire moment, when you had committed yourself fully to the cause, that she showed herself.”
Adare nodded. The memory was still vivid as a dream from which she had only just awoken-the spear in her hand, a scream sharp on her lips, lightning carving apart the sky, and that single command offered in a voice larger than the whole world: Win.
I’m trying, she’d argued back almost every day since. I’m fucking trying.
Nira spat onto the stones. “Far as I’ve seen, faith’s about as much use as a piss bucket with a hole punched in the bottom. Ya need something people can see. When the faith wears out, people believe what they’ve seen. Sometimes, girl, ya gotta make your own miracles.”
Lehav’s face hardened at the old woman’s outburst, but he knew better than to take the bait. Instead, he turned back to Adare.
“Another question remains. We have yet to determine the structure of command.”
Adare glanced around the tower’s top. The sad fact was that these were the only people in the city she came anywhere close to trusting. Lehav, Kegellen, and Nira. A religious zealot, the queen of all thieves, and an undying leach teetering on the verge of madness. It hardly made for a reassuring coalition, but then, even this unstable alliance was better than the council. When the council fled, Adare didn’t even bother trying to stop them. At least the small group assembled on the tower’s top was willing to fight. The problem was that they didn’t trust each other.
“You have the command,” Adare replied, nodding to Lehav. “You’re the closest thing we have to a general, so you’re in charge.”
Kegellen pursed her lips. “While I appreciate this young man’s fine…” She let her eyes rove over his legs and chest. “… qualities, I’m afraid that many of Annur’s less savory characters might chafe if they are told to take their orders from him. It is a sad fact that many of the most dangerous men and women in this city, men and women whose help we will dearly want if the horsemen come to call-they are dissolute, anarchic, unaccustomed to true military discipline. If I ask them to salute, and march in step, I fear they will rebel.”
Adare looked at the woman. Kegellen smiled blithely back.
“What do you want?” Adare asked, voice tight.
“Want?” Kegellen asked. She blinked once, as though shocked by the question.
“This is a negotiation. You know it, and so do I. So what do you want?”
Lehav stepped forward, addressing himself to Kegellen. “The prophet of Intarra does not negotiate, nor does the Emperor of Annur. I know the scum of Annur as well as you do, woman. I grew up on your streets.” He turned to Adare. “We don’t need thousands of killers and thieves playing havoc up here on the battlements. They’re scavengers, not warriors. We’re better off without them.”
Kegellen raised her brows, but Adare cut in before she could respond.
“Yes,” she said flatly. “We do need them. Look at this wall.” She gestured to the stone walkway stretching away into the distance, the bustle of normal commerce to the south, a smoking, blackened wasteland to the north. “The Sons cannot hold it all. The Sons cannot hold one-tenth of it. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but the Urghul broke past the entire Army of the North.”
“Only after il Tornja left,” Lehav pointed out. “The legions were compromised.”
Adare stared at him. “And you don’t think we’re compromised?” She swept a hand over the smoking rubble. A quarter mile to the north, well out of bowshot, men and women were picking through the wreckage. Adare had given orders against it, but there was no time to enforce those orders, no men. If the scavengers got too close to the wall, the soldiers would take a shot. Otherwise, they were free to pore over the destruction, to search for something left in the wreckage.
“We are miserably compromised,” she said again, more quietly. “We do not have il Tornja. The only fighters on these walls will be the fighters we put there, and I will not leave whole sections undefended because we were too squeamish to make use of Kegellen’s people.”
“Oh,” the woman replied, pressing a palm on her broad chest. “They are not my people. I am just a fat, slow woman.…”
“Save it,” Adare growled. “We know what you are. We need the bodies you can put on this wall. So what do you want?”
To Adare’s surprise, Kegellen’s smile, when it finally came, was almost sad.
“You’re a smart woman, Your Radiance. But you’re young. It would be well for you to remember that you don’t understand the world as well as you think.”
As Adare blinked, Nira stepped into the gap. “And just what the dolled-up fuck’s that supposed ta mean?”
Kegellen kept her eyes on Adare. “It means I don’t want anything. Not for myself. I only ask that the women and men I send to this wall operate in their own groups in their own ways. They are not accustomed to military structure, military discipline. It will get them killed, will keep them from killing.”
“Impossible,” Lehav said.
“No,” Adare said, shaking her head. “It is not impossible. Here is what will happen. I’ve named you general, and so you will decide the deployment of Kegellen’s people. You will give them their position and their orders, then you will leave them to carry out those orders in their own way.”
Lehav shook his head. “You don’t understand how an army functions, Your Radiance. Units shift in battle, cover for one another, reinforce one another.”
“And that would be wonderful,” Adare said, “if Annur’s cutthroats and thugs were organized into units. They are not. You might train them if we had three months, but we have three days. You will give them a clear task and you will let them fight in their own way.”
The soldier’s lips tightened, then he offered a stiff salute. “As you say, Your Radiance.”
Adare turned to Kegellen, who was watching her between narrowed eyes. “Is that enough for you?”
The woman nodded slowly. “I will get all those who can carry a sword.”
“Do better,” Adare said. “Get me anyone who can still bite.”
Before the woman could respond, a commotion erupted down below. Men were protesting on the wall to the west. Protesting, then shouting, angry, then afraid. Steel rang against stone. In all the madness of soldiers and masons coming and going, it took Adare a moment to find the cause of this new disturbance.
“There,” Lehav said, leveling a finger at three figures in black advancing down the walkway at the wall’s top. As he spoke, he dropped his hand to the sword at his belt. Even Kegellen had formed her lips into a pout, had slipped a fan from her jeweled belt and snapped it open. The black-clad figures were still a hundred paces distant, but the caution seemed more than warranted.
The leader was a woman Adare had never seen before-young, muscular beneath her blacks, red hair caught in the northern wind and streaming out behind her like flame. The Sons stationed on the walkway had moved to block her approach, barking orders and baring swords, squaring up across the path. The red-haired woman ignored them, if ignored was the right word.