Refreshed, renewed, and confirmed in his task, he would fly to the south until he unearthed the workshop or discovered it definitively to be a mirage. He would gather all that he could of dragon-nature from the world, distill it, and call it forth to its true and purer form. He would redeem his error. All his errors.
Only first, he would sleep a while. Not for long, though. Not again.
Marcus
They left the permanent green of the dragon’s road behind them in the middle morning, where it curved north along the track toward Kaltfel and Anninfort. The little villages that clung to the jade path, making their keep from the traffic of merchants and farmers and all human trade like ticks on a dog’s ear, vanished quickly behind them. The roads turned to gravel or mud or two strips of crushed grass running parallel across the fields, a cart’s width apart. The last march of the war was to be on human paths. That seemed like an omen, though Marcus was damned if he could say if it was a good one or bad.
The farmhouses and stream-run mills they passed weren’t only Firstblood homes. The men and women and children who came out to gawk as they passed were also fur-pelted Kurtadam shaved to the skin for summer, Jasuru with scales that looked more like a dragon’s now that he’d seen a dragon up close, reed-thin Cinnae, even a family of tusk-jawed Yemmu. No Timzinae, though. Or at least none the company hadn’t brought itself.
The land itself was lush with the high summer. Tall grasses hummed with insect life. The sun’s heat would have been stifling if a breeze hadn’t stirred the air. The trees had traded the peapod-green leaves of spring for deeper, more mature foliage that, in ten weeks or so, would shrivel and brown and fall. There were no flowers on the branches and few on the bushes, but green nuts and acorns, ripening berries and seedpods. They rode through a deep scent of growth and decay, the complex perfume of every summer ever. They weren’t a day outside the city, and already the jays and sparrows here were unaware there’d been a war on. Would have been astonished to hear it.
Jorey’s scouts met them in the early afternoon; bone-thin men whose eyes registered neither grief nor wonder at seeing them there, hearing the news of the Lord Regent’s death and the slaughter of the spider goddess. They only nodded, accepting what they heard because the strength it would have taken to feel anything was beyond them. They wouldn’t be called heroes when this was done. Just soldiers, and maybe not even that. It didn’t seem right.
Aster rode at the column’s head on a silver mare that might have been bred to the task of looking regal and being calm. The boy himself sat his mount like he’d been born to it. Maybe he had. Marcus didn’t know much about the tradition of horsemanship in Antea, but it was a common enough way to make a leader seem greater than those around him. And Aster would need all of that he could muster. Someone had convinced him to shave off the peach-fuzz moustache he’d been attempting and Cithrin had reminded him a bit of how to seem older than he truly was. Better to look youthful than young, she’d said. Odd, the way tricks and skills once learned cycled back to be useful again in strange circumstances.
And, as if in echo of the boy at the column’s head, the Timzinae children rode behind, tended by Clara Kalliam and a dozen other women of the court. Eight carts of girls and boys, most too young for heavy labor, and each with a fresh new toy to cling to, each fed with raisin cakes and lemon bread. Each in bright new clothing that had belonged to a Firstblood child not long ago, or else had been newly sewn for the occasion. The contents of Geder Palliako’s gaol. The ones who’d survived. They’d wrapped them up like wedding presents, as though acting as if it were a celebration could forgive the gaps in their lines. The ones who wouldn’t come home.
For himself, Marcus tried to ignore the pain. A young Southling cunning man had done her best to patch his opened arm back together, and all in all she’d done a serviceable job. Apart from a hole the size of a coin near his shoulder, he wasn’t bleeding anymore, and even that was only weeping. The poisoned sword was back in the city, which likely helped as well. It was hard to believe that any wound, however well tended, would mend in that thing’s presence.
Yardem rode at his side, and by the time they reached the little confluence of streams that was their goal, he’d almost stopped checking whether Marcus was about to fall off his horse every third breath. Not that the concern wasn’t appreciated in spirit. It was the practice that annoyed. In the end it mattered that his armor fit him, which it did well enough, that the soldiers who rode with him looked more an honor guard than a fighting force, and that Cithrin rode by Aster’s side. Cithrin bel Sarcour of the Medean bank, who’d risked life and fortune for the Timzinae in occupied Suddapal, and was about to trade her reputation and eight cartfuls of children for peace. Assuming she could find a buyer.
God knew she looked the part. She didn’t wear mail, but she managed to make a well-cut dress and a hunter’s leathers seem as imposing. Her Cinnae mother’s blood left her seeming elegant more than frail, her Firstblood father having given her a strength about the spine and shoulders. Or maybe that was unfair. Maybe Cithrin was only Cithrin, and her virtues and flaws her own. She was old enough to have earned them. If he could still see the amateur smuggler called Tag when he looked at her, it didn’t matter. How she seemed to him wasn’t the point. What mattered was how she—how all of them—impressed Karol Dannien. Or failed to.
The field of parley wasn’t actually a field this time. Low, sharp hills marked the path like the landscape stuttering. The curve of one made a natural amphitheater, open to the south so that when Dannien and his men arrived, Lord Emming, Cithrin, Aster, and Marcus himself were all waiting at the table. It was the kind of staging Kit would approve of. Or no. Would have approved of. Marcus still couldn’t quite believe the old actor had walked into the flames that way…
The banner of Antea and Aster’s personal sigil hung above them. The blood-red banner of the priests was absent. The carts stood a little apart, but not so far that the opposing force could overlook them. The presence of children alone argued against violence, or Marcus hoped it did. Seemed rude to slaughter anyone else where the little ones could see, but worse things had happened in the world. And he could tell from the way Dannien walked that he was angry.
Cep Bailan strode at Dannien’s side bare-chested, rolls of blubber shifting as he walked and his ornate blue tattoos brightened by sweat like stones in water. Summer in Antea couldn’t be a pleasant place for a Haaverkin, but Bailan had chosen to take work in the south. And if the heat exhausted him, maybe he wouldn’t talk much. The man was an ass. Behind them, Timzinae soldiers stood in ranks, swords at their sides, and stared across the gap at the children. Even at this distance, Marcus saw the focus—as strong as hunger—that fought against their discipline. How many of those men there had children among the hostages? Nephews, nieces, daughters, and sons. As many as Geder had hauled up north, it didn’t seem any family in Suddapal could have gone untouched.
Dannien sat at his chair, his gaze roving across the opposing group, lingering on each in turn. Bailan only collapsed onto his stool and panted, waving a hand at his face like a fan. Aster’s expression was calm. Either the boy didn’t understand he was facing a man who’d sworn to kill not just him but everyone who served him or else he had the makings of a better-than-average king. Ignorance and bravery could be hard to distinguish with only one experience to judge from. Dannien’s gaze skipped over Emming like he wasn’t there, but lingered on Cithrin and stopped at Marcus with a nod.