“Don’t you need your cloak?” she asked.
He pushed her forward. “It will just get in the way.”
Outside, freezing air blasted them, and the sky pressed down like a lid of pewter. The camp was busy with people. At one fire, a bondsgirl poured a steaming drink for a stagman, her smile shy and her gaze averted as he closed his hands around hers on the mug. Her yellow hair suggested she came from one of Ironbridge’s poorer districts.
Kamoj’s parents had forbidden the Argali army to use bondservants, and Kamoj and Maxard maintained that ban. Although in theory both Jax and the governor of the North Sky Islands allowed it, only Ironbridge could actually afford them. The indenture usually lasted only a few years, but that didn’t change the fundamental nature of the servitude. After what Vyrl had told her, Kamoj understood better where the practice originated and why it made her so uncomfortable. When left to their freedom and their starvation, the slaves had fallen back on the only ways they understood. They enslaved one another.
Across the clearing, a group of greenglass stags stamped their feet while stagmen tended them. By the time she and Jax reached the group, Kamoj was shaking from the cold, her breath coming in puffs of icy white condensation. A boy brought a huge stag forward, Jax’s mount Mistrider. The animal shook his head, his antlers glinting like glass, his opaline scales ghostly in the mist. He stared down at Jax with green eyes slitted by vertical black pupils. Mistrider’s wariness made Kamoj wonder how often he had felt his master’s quirt through his supple hide of jeweled scales.
Using a stool called a stagmount, Jax swung onto Mistrider. The greenglass stamped and snorted, coming so close to Kamoj that she jumped back. When Jax motioned, she stepped up on the stool. Jax helped her up onto the stag, settling himself between the front and middle boneridges so Kamoj could straddle the animal in front of him. Mistrider picked up her tension, prancing beneath her, growing more and more agitated.
Suddenly the stag reared, his front and middle legs pawing the air, his bi-hooves clanging together like crashing symbols. With Mistrider all the way up on his powerful back legs, Kamoj and Jax were high above the ground, at the height of two tall men. Kamoj gasped and clutched the base of his scaled horns, the only “handles” available.
Holding her around the waist, Jax yanked her hands away from the antlers. “Never grab a stag that way!”
Mistrider came down, his bi-hooves pounding the frozen ground. Before Kamoj could catch her breath, the animal reared again, his head thrown back, his iridescent fangs barred. The stag screamed at the sky, a long, high cry that pierced the muted day. He crashed his hooves together again and again, until Kamoj feared they would shatter. Jax kept his arm tight around her, holding his reins with the same hand, his grip the only tether that kept her from flying off the animal.
With his free hand, Jax snapped his whip against Mistrider’s flank. “Hai!” he shouted. “Be still!”
The stag came down and danced furiously to the side, invading the area around four other animals. They skitted away, stamping their feet and keening in quieter versions of the scream Mistrider had used to challenge the clouds.
The call of a flight-horn winged into the sky. Another horn answered, then a third. Moving together, the group headed into the forest, the animals falling into the intricate, complex rhythm of their six-legged trot. The riders took the traditional formation, half in front of Jax, half in back. Ever restless with tradition, Jax prodded Mistrider to the head of the company.
As they penetrated deeper into the woods, the noises of the camp faded. The mist suffocated sound, curling around the ancient trees. Drops of water clung to the needles. Scale dust glittered everywhere, in the air, in the mist, on the plants. Vines hung in great loops, draped over branches and twisted around trunks and fallen logs. Scaled ferns grew among the trees, their lacy heads nodding under the shifting weight of the bud-lizards that clung to the underside of their leaves, a motion all the more eerie because no wind disturbed the woods.
Kamoj saw the other riders before she heard them. She caught glimpses of stags and diskmail among the trees. Jax called out and the Ironbridge company halted, fanning out in a semi-circle several rows deep, with Jax at its center.
The Lionstar company emerged from the mist and stopped twenty paces away, greenglass stags mingled with prismatic scale-trees. Vyrl’s two bodyguards flanked him, clad in black, from their boots to their heavy jackets. Both Jagernauts rode stags, huge animals big enough to support their bulk. They sat on their mounts with an ease that unsettled Kamoj, another indication of how Vyrl’s people so easily bent her way of life to theirs. Dazza and Azander rode on either side of the bodyguards, and the rest of Vyrl’s stagmen fanned out from them in a much smaller semicircle than the one formed by Jax’s men.
Neither Vyrl nor his people wore breathing masks. Light sheathed their bodies instead, like the shimmer curtains. Vyrl’s clothes were gray with soot and his hair fell in disordered curls to his shoulders.
Kamoj’s vision blurred in a haze born of fatigue, hunger, exposure, and lack of breath. She clenched her teeth against the cold. Vyrl was watching her, his face strained as if he were struggling to hear a distant song in the trees. She tried to make her thoughts placid so he wouldn’t feel them.
Azander spoke. “Lionstar acknowledges Ironbridge.”
The stagman on Jax’s right answered. “Ironbridge acknowledges Lionstar.”
“Lionstar invokes the Right of Inquiry,” Azander said.
Behind Kamoj, Jax’s hair rustled as he nodded his agreement to the Inquiry. His arm tightened around her waist and he shifted the quirt until its tip rested on her thigh. She understood the warning.
“Proceed with the Inquiry,” Jax’s stagman said.
Vyrl spoke directly to her. “Kamoj, was it really your choice to go with Ironbridge?”
Her choice? Like ice water on her face, she realized how it must look: at the first chance, she returned to the people who had been at her side for most of her life.
“Do not presume to speak to my wife,” Jax said.
“She isn’t your wife,” Vyrl said.
“The papers were signed this afternoon,” Jax said. “Your contract is annulled.”
Vyrl stared at him. “You can’t annul an Imperial contract.”
“Perhaps you should read your own laws. A merger made through coercion is not legally binding.”
“She wants to stay with me,” Vyrl said. “She told me.”
“You have witnesses to this?” Jax asked.
Vyrl looked at her. “Tell them.”
Kamoj wanted to disappear. She tried to take a deep breath, but the boning of her underdress cut into her ribs.
“You have your answer,” Jax said.
Anger sparked in Vyrl’s voice. “That’s because you have her too terrified to speak.”
“If you came to this Inquiry to throw insults,” Jax said, “I don’t see much point in continuing.”
Dazza spoke quietly. “Vyrl, perhaps we should—”
“I won’t leave without her,” Vyrl said.
“We can discuss this more privately.”
“No.
“Vyrl—”
“I said no.”
Dazza exhaled. “All right. Kamoj told me herself. Her marriage to you puts her in an almost impossible position. If she signed an annulment, then given her history with Ironbridge and the circumstances surrounding your merger with her, no Imperial court in its right mind will honor your claim to Argali.”
He clenched Greypoint’s reins. “I’m not ‘claiming Argali,’ damn it. I want my wife back.”
“Legal won’t see it that way,” Dazza said.