A light in the garden below the library shifted. Some servant walking in the night. Or a member of the court. Or Basrahip and his priests. Or the goddess herself. Or Cithrin. Geder didn’t know, and he didn’t want to. As long as he wasn’t certain, there was hope that it might be something astounding. Something that would heal him.
Far Syramys wasn’t actually so far, really. Ships left for it every year from Narinisle and Herez and Cabral. The blue-water trade carried the highest risk in the world, but it was done. Geder closed his eyes and imagined himself on the deck of a ship cutting through the vast waves of the open sea without so much as an island in sight. It was supposed to be a vision of comfort, of possibility, but his mind kept turning to how it would feel to be lost there. Lost in a hostile emptiness without any sense of how to go back home or else forward to safety.
It would feel, he thought, very much like being Lord Regent.
Marcus
As the sky slid from blue to indigo, Jorey and Marcus walked the defenses, Jorey ahead and Marcus behind. Barricades and low, improvised walls stood on either side of the dragon’s road. Mud and stone and uprooted hedge, they were often little more than the idea of cover. But it gave the Antean archers places to hold and fall back to as Dannien’s soldiers moved in. They’d even managed a scout’s perch on an outcropping of rock where someone with younger eyes than Marcus could shout back reports of the enemy movements and Kit could use a speaker’s trumpet to call out assertions about the outcome of the fight in hopes of making them true. Night birds began their songs, trilling to each other and the Antean soldiers. The sun, already vanished behind the mountains to the west, sent streaks of red across the thin, scudding clouds. The smoke of the first campfires rose up like it aspired to being a cloud itself.
Marcus watched more than the battleground. Jorey moved among his men with an ease that wasn’t quite easy yet. Like an actor new to the troupe, he made the gestures without entirely making them his own. He had potential, though. Marcus had seen more than one great general rise to power with less compassion for the men who followed him. Jorey Kalliam understood the importance of commanding loyalty. It would serve him well if any of them managed not to be killed on this blighted stretch of jade. Jorey called an end to the day’s building, as they’d agreed he would, and the men put up a ragged cheer. During the long, terrible days of the march, Marcus had kept as much as he could to himself, but he still knew some of them.
Durin Caust was the one with two missing fingers who’d been the first to learn how to make a shelter out of cut snow. Alan Lennit and Sajor Sammit were the lieutenants under one of Jorey’s bannermen who held each other’s hand during the march. The one with the flaming red beard and eyes dark as a Southling’s was called Mer, and he had a good singing voice.
Trivial, meaningless bits of information that took them from being a single organism—the army of Antea—and made them into a company of men that Marcus didn’t particularly look forward to watching die. It occurred to him as they walked back to the main camp that holding himself apart hadn’t only been so that his already thin disguise as a servant wouldn’t be seen through. He also hadn’t wanted to see them as anything more than meat on legs, extensions of Geder Palliako and the priests and Imperial Antea. So he’d cocked that up too.
“Double fires tonight,” Marcus reminded Jorey. “If we have wood or twigs or dried dung. Anything that’ll burn, burn it. Let their scouts think we’re more than we are.”
“Last fires we’ll see for a good while too,” Jorey said. “Might as well enjoy them.”
“That’s truth.”
The attack would come in the morning with the rising sun low on the horizon, blinding the Antean forces. Depending on how the enemy was stocked, Marcus guessed that it would be a hammer blow of horsemen coming down the road in hopes of scattering them quickly or a foot assault swooping south and taking them in the right flank. Or both. Dannien likely had enough men for both. Jorey had laid out the camp to make that plan seem the sound one. More fires in the north, closer together. Fewer and more widely spaced in the south. Likely, Dannien would be using banners or flares to signal his men. Their ears would be stopped against Kit’s voice. As advantages went, it was thin, weak, and insufficient.
It wasn’t only that Marcus didn’t want the battle in the first place. It was also that there was no chance that he could win it. Weak as they were and without the morale-breaking voices of the priests, they had effectively lost already. The Timzinae forces would break the exhausted, underfed, road-weary Anteans like a dry twig, wheel north, and burn a pathway from there to Camnipol.
And so, when Karol Dannien led his men out of Orsen, Jorey and his army would need to be elsewhere.
As the last grey of twilight settled to black, the Antean scouts went out. The moon hung over the horizon at just less than a quarter. It would be below the horizon before midnight. Jorey and his captains went to the men at their fires and checked each group personally. Their packs had to be filled with dried meat and hardtack and the sticky, dense waybread they’d taken from Bellin. That and their swords and bows. No armor. It was too heavy for what they were doing. Boiled leather and worked scale were all burned or ripped down at the seams so that the enemy couldn’t make use of them. Marcus sat with Clara Kalliam beside the Lord Marshal’s tent, waiting for word to come that something had gone awry. That the enemy scouts had seen them or that Dannien had somehow stolen a march and blocked their way. If they’d done it right, there wouldn’t be many scouts to the north of the camp. They’d be marking out ways to lead the attacking forces to the south of the road, but few plans were so graceful as to match the world.
“Are you well, Captain?” Clara Kalliam asked.
“Am I fidgeting?”
“A bit, yes.”
“Sorry. I’m told I do that when I’m annoyed. Isn’t something I’m aware of at the time.”
She shifted, drawing deeply on her pipe and letting the smoke out through her nose. The firelight played across her face. She was handsome, in a solid, well-bruised way. More than looking like a beautiful woman, she looked like an interesting one.
“You’re thinking this may not work,” she said, her voice low.
“I’m not thinking one way or the other,” he said. “I’m waiting to see what happens. If it’s interesting, I don’t want to spend the time then getting ready to make a call, so I’m just anxious and cranky now. Gets me out ahead of it.”
“Your burden seems to be bothering you less,” she said.
“My burden?”
“Your blade,” she said.
Marcus glanced back at the hilt rising above his shoulder. When he thought about it, the skin across his shoulder still itched and burned a little. The muscles where the scabbard rode against him ached. The weird taste in his mouth that came of carrying the poisoned thing too long had become so familiar, he’d have noticed more if it left. And still, he knew what she meant.
“It hasn’t changed,” Marcus said. “It’s only that I’m more distracted. There are a thousand things I’m bad at. This one, I’m good at.”
She smiled. “You’re good at being annoyed and anxious?”
“The way I’ve heard it put is that my soul’s a circle. I’m best at the bottom, heading up. The top of things is just the first part of down. At least for me. Being caught in a storm keeps me from thinking about other things, and when it’s too quiet, I do. And then I’m not as good.”