Clara Kalliam lifted an eyebrow in query.
Marcus shook his head, refusing the question, but then answered it anyway. “I saw my wife and daughter dead before me.”
“I see,” Clara said. “I watched my husband executed.”
“By Palliako. I heard. I’m sorry.”
“I am too,” she said. “Dawson was an old-fashioned man, but he was a good one. I miss him, but I also think the world as it has become would have been a hell for him. There are times I’m glad he didn’t live to see this.”
Ah, Marcus thought. The night-before-battle conversation. He hadn’t expected to have one of those, but here he was, sitting in darkness with the things that simmered and stewed in people’s hearts starting to bubble out. Well, she’d opened the bottle because she wanted to. He’d accommodate her and see what she would drink.
“You sound as though you’ve recovered from the loss,” Marcus said.
“No,” Clara said. And then, “Or yes. Yes, I have. I haven’t unmade what happened. It was too ugly an end to something precious. I shall always have the scars of it, I think. But I realized his wife died with him, and I have mourned her, and I am someone new. And I like who I am. If God gave me the option, I couldn’t go back.”
“It’s not like that for me,” Marcus said, his voice lighter and more conversational than the truths he spoke. “I’m the same man I was the night they burned.”
“You haven’t changed at all?”
“Not in any way that matters,” he said. His inflection was like a joke, but she heard past it.
“No scars, then. Only wounds. That must be terrible.”
“It is,” Marcus said. “But it makes me good at the things that keep my mind off it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve intruded.”
“I let you, m’lady,” he said.
“Then thank you for that. I will not undervalue it.”
He looked at her, unsure what weight her words carried. It struck him for the first time what very lucky men her husband and the so-called servant everyone pretended wasn’t her lover might be. She was a singular woman.
Footsteps approached the fire, and Marcus looked up. He’d forgotten to put his back to the fire, and his eyes were poorly adapted to the darkness around them. When Vincen Coe loomed up from the night, it was like he’d stepped into being.
“Word’s come from the scouts. Jorey’s chosen a path.”
“Well then,” Marcus said. “Let’s see if we can pull this off after all.”
The night march began. Everyone’s orders were strict. No voices rose in chatter or song. No scabbard remained unwrapped for the starlight to glint off the metal. The soldiers had rubbed their faces in dirt and ash to keep the sweat from shining. Likely it was more than they need do, but the way to find that out was to try without and fail. The curious thing about war—about so many things—was the number of critically important things that no one could know.
Marcus and Vincen and Clara Kalliam, like the rest of the great army of Antea, abandoned their fire and their tent, their carts and the great majority of the supplies they’d carried, and became ghosts. Silent as the spirits of the dead, they whispered their way to the north, running along deer trails and through thin woods. The air was chill to the point of real cold, but after the pass, it felt like nothing. The thread of dragon’s jade that led from Orsen up into the body of the empire lay somewhere far to their right, unseen. When the last sliver of moon failed them, they went on in darkness without so much as a candle to give them away.
Hours later, the east brightened to charcoal and the figures walking in their silent lines began to have silhouettes. Jorey called the halt, and the army divided. Five groups to the west, to cross the dragon’s road and take shelter separately in the shallow hills and forests of Antea’s southern reaches. Three to stay here and skirt the edges of the Dry Wastes as best they could. One small group with most of the horses to ride north to Camnipol, raising the alarm along the way.
It was in many ways the end of the Lord Marshal’s command. Though Jorey Kalliam would lead the largest of the groups, all would act independently to harass Dannien’s scouts and threaten his supply lines, draw him off the swift path of the dragon’s road into the weeds and dirt of the plains. They would slow the attackers, distract them, and if one group was cornered and slaughtered to a man, there would still be seven more to carry on the job. It was the kind of fighting they did in the Keshet and the wilder edges of Borja, dirty and harsh and thin on honor. It was the kind of battle an army didn’t win so much as indefinitely postpone losing.
None of Jorey’s captains, no matter how noble their blood, objected. That alone, Marcus thought, showed how far Antea had gone down the dragon’s path. No one dreamed of glorious conquest on the field of battle. No one called their sneaking away in the night an act of cowardice. Years in the field and more than half the men who’d marched out to capture Nus dead or scattered back along the path had left the veterans of Antea with fewer illusions about the glories of war than when they’d started.
Which, though Marcus didn’t say it, suggested there was another problem.
They stopped three hours after midday in a shallow valley. Sandstone blocks made a rough wall, the only vestige of some long-vanished structure. There was no snow there, no ice, nothing that could have been made into water. The air had an uncanny salt taste that Marcus had only ever found near the Dry Wastes. But though they were close, these weren’t the wastes.
Jorey’s personal force was a hundred and fifty men, five horses, and his mother. Of the three that had stayed on the east side of the jade road, it had gone farthest north. Even if Dannien wheeled his forces and quick-marched after them—which would have been a first-campaign level of error—they wouldn’t reach here in twice the time Jorey had. The army might be hard to stop, but at the price of speed.
Marcus found Kit on the sun-soaked side of the wall. The actor had grown thinner since they’d left Carse. They all had. His cheekbones seemed ready to cut through his olive skin, and his wiry hair haloed him in brown and grey. He lifted an exhausted hand to Marcus.
“Well,” Marcus said, sitting beside the man. “That was unpleasant.”
“I found it less enjoyable than I expected,” Kit agreed. “And I don’t think my expectations were particularly high. I must admit, I was surprised that our little sidestep was effective.”
“There are advantages to having a name that kings whisper to scare their princes at night. Great warriors don’t traditionally turn tail and sneak out in the dark before a battle. Add to that I challenged him, and he thought we had more men than we did. He believed he’d win, but I didn’t let him think I agreed quite so much.” Marcus laughed and rested his head against the gritty stone. “I won’t be able to pull the trick again.”
Kit made a noise of appreciation deep in his throat and went silent. Marcus shifted the scabbard, unslung it awkwardly, and put it on the ground at his side.
“Noticed something odd. When the forces split, no one was talking about the greater glory of the goddess or how we were all bringing truth to the unwashed or any of that.”
“I suppose I hadn’t paid attention to that,” Kit said.
“No, they dropped their honor-and-glory talk in favor of something practical pretty damned fast. Leaves me wondering.” He looked over at his old friend and companion. They had come through terrible places together, he and Kit. He didn’t want to go on, but it was the job. “Get the feeling you may have been improvising some lines.”