As Jorey’s army broke its miserable camp and prepared to march through the brown fields of the Birancouri winter, Clara found herself thinking of Cerria. Not reflecting on her, or considering the philosophical implications of her aunt’s passing, but suffering sudden, jolting visual memories. Had she been of a spiritual bent, she knew, she might have interpreted this as a ghost trying to reach her. In point of fact, it was only that so many of the soldiers had the same thinness and pallor, the same pain in their movements, the same sense of a body pushed until it was nearly used up.
And there was still the pass at Bellin to be negotiated. The prospect filled her with dread. So recently these same men had swarmed upon Porte Oliva, a conquering army strong enough to break the strength of dragons. They should have stayed there, in the south. They should have wintered in their captured city where ships could bring grain to the port and fishermen could harvest the seas to feed them. But Geder Palliako’s pride had been hurt, and the inhuman voices of the priests had filled them with lies of invulnerability. They had pushed on, chasing Cithrin bel Sarcour until their strength had almost failed.
In place of food, they had gruel so thin it was more accurate to call it soup. The soldiers hunched over their bowls, empty gazes fixed on nothing in particular. She found it hard to remember that this was the largest part of Antea’s armies. She kept wanting to think there was some other force—in Antea or Elassae or somewhere in the east—where the true strength of her nation lay. That the army that had laid waste to the world had been reduced to these wraiths seemed too terrible to be true. Certainly this could not be what victory looked like.
“Is something wrong, my lady?” Vincen said, and her heart gave its little leap as it did so often when he was involved. The little frisson was complicated—one part schoolgirl joy at her lover’s presence, one part fear that she might somehow reveal their clandestine affair, and perhaps another part the deep frustration that there was nowhere she might conveniently and discreetly take the comfort from him that she craved. From his smile, she guessed that he saw it all in her. She lifted an eyebrow. Until such time as they were free of the army and the field, all their most important exchanges were reduced to such gestures.
“Nothing of importance,” she said, answering his words rather then their deeper meaning. “I am a bit weary.”
Vincen nodded. He had grown thinner since she’d left, though he had less of the emaciation of the other soldiers. He’d spent the time she’d been away recovering from his wounds, and that had meant a slightly less impoverished fodder than the hale and able-bodied among the troops. She shifted to the side, making room on the little shelf of stone she’d chosen for her seat. Vincen hesitated. To sit so near the woman he served would seem uncommonly like taking liberties. He was right, damn the man. Pressing her lips more tightly together, she moved back.
“I’d offer to fetch you better food,” he said, “but I think the wait might be a long one. There’s no good hunting before Asterilhold.”
“It looks to be a long and unpleasant winter,” she said, lifting another spoonful of gruel and then putting her bowl down uneaten.
Vincen hesitated. She could guess what he would say next. He might have saved himself the effort. And yet. “It needn’t be, ma’am. A small escort could take you someplace more comfortable.”
“By which you mean safer?”
“And with decent food and a real bed.”
“To sleep in?” Clara asked.
He looked around before answering. “That too.”
Clara laughed. Hungry as she was, and tired besides, her laughter surprised her. It sounded like something that belonged to a stronger woman. “You are kind to suggest it,” she said. “But no. I began this. I will see it through.”
It was hard to tell. Long days in the field had darkened his skin, but she imagined he was blushing just a bit. He’d embarrassed himself to bring her a moment’s amusement. She wondered whether the gratitude she felt for that might define love as well as anything else did. Part of it, perhaps, though love in general was a vague enough target that she might not be able to define it in any consistent or useful way, had anyone occasion to ask.
“It’s odd, don’t you think,” she said, “how a word can seem so very clear until one gets close, and then it all goes as solid as fog?”
“Such as?” Vincen said. She could still hear the trailing mischievousness in his voice. She didn’t think before she answered.
“Love.”
He went very still, and she realized what she’d said. Where she’d said it. She looked up at him. There were tears in his eyes, and in hers as well. If they won this war, how long would she be able to draw out this utterly inappropriate alliance? How long before she was forced back into the ill-fitting chair of Lady Clara Kalliam, Dowager Duchess of whatever holding Geder, or perhaps Aster, saw fit to bestow on Jorey? Or perhaps the empire would fall into chaos, and she would live her life as Lady Nothing of Nowhere. Vincen’s heartbroken eyes made that last seem the grandest title imaginable.
“I was speaking of love,” she said.
Their progress was slow and painful. Her short time in the field following the army from the Free Cities to Porte Oliva had taught her something about the movement of a military force. She had walked in the swaths they cut through the flesh of the land. The ruin they left behind them now seemed less only because the land around them already felt dead, a landscape of dry grass and old snow and crows. There were few horses left. She suspected that most had been eaten.
They rose before dawn, often to the cajoling and hectoring of Wester’s actor-priest. He walked through the tents with assurances and broad smiles, much as his predecessors had. The soldiers took comfort in the words—All will be well, you will see your homes again soon enough, your efforts shall meet great reward—and that gave them strength enough to pack their things another time, walk for another day. Or often it did. Two men had died in their sleep since they’d broken camp, exhausted beyond their ability to wake.
When he was not spreading cheerful lies, the old actor walked alone, his eyes shadowed. Clara understood the price that Captain Wester paid for carrying his poisoned sword, and it struck her more than once that Master Kit bore a similar burden. She recalled all the times she’d lied to her own children: promising Vicarian that his favorite toy would be found, telling Elisia that her fever would break the next day. Caring for the innocent wounded involved a surprising amount of deceit, and she could not keep from thinking of the emaciated men staggering through the short winter days as innocent.
Yes, they had slaughtered Timzinae, razed towns, sacked cities. They had torn children from their homes and sent them as hostages to Camnipol. Jorey and his men had blackened the Antean Empire. She was aware of the senseless violence they had conducted in the name of the Severed Throne. But to see a thin face light with hope, to see them leaning on each other as they stumbled up one last hill before the sunset turned the red to grey, was also to give up her ability to stand judge over them.
They were soldiers, but many had been farmers before that. Crofters and merchants and huntsmen like Vincen. The highest among them were the sons of noble houses who should have been chasing stags through the wood, drinking and boasting and singing songs until morning rolled around again. It was as if fragility absolved them. Fragility and the knowledge that they had been betrayed by their kingdom.
Dawson would have loathed it all. The stupidity of the war, the pettiness of Palliako’s vendetta against the banker girl, the failure of the nobility to tend to their vassals. Not that he would have cared for the men themselves. She hadn’t romanticized him that much. He would have shaken his head at the winter-thinned army the way he would have at a dueling sword left un-cleaned after a fight. One took care of one’s tools. Oiled one’s swords. Saw to the well-being of those born too low to see to themselves. To do anything less was to not be fully adult.