To the west, high mountains rose, blued by distance and height. Clara knew that on the far side, there would be Birancour. She’d never been that far to the west or south. All she really knew about it was that it was a nation of grassy plains and busy ports, that it divided Princip C’Annaldé, Herez, and Cabral from the rest of the continent, that those smaller nations sometimes resented the tariffs the throne of Birancour exacted for the privilege of passing through its roads, and that Cithrin bel Sarcour was there. Those mountains and the long, treacherous pass through them were the last barriers between her son’s army and the war they shouldn’t be fighting in the first place.
The day passed all too quickly. The local traffic on the road was slight. A few carts, a handful of travelers, and most of them heading the other way. The springtime sun was just above the highest snowcapped peaks when they found the bodies.
Four men, all Firstbloods, swung by their necks from a rough scaffold built of sapling trees. Flies danced and swarmed around their eyes and mouths. Their strangled faces were swollen in death beyond any recognizable human emotion. They wore the colors of Antea in their cloaks. The banner of the spider goddess, red as blood with a pale spot in the center and the eightfold sigil of the goddess within it, hung from the top bar between the hanging ropes. Clara stopped her horse, sorrow rising in her breast, and with it an anger that was almost pride.
Vincen stopped beside her. His expression was apologetic, as if she shouldn’t have had to see such a thing. As if atrocity were not part of the world she’d chosen.
“They weren’t killed by the enemy,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “They were deserters.”
Dawson had told her of this too. Of the custom of taking captured deserters, sending them ahead of the army to be executed on the path, so that the whole force would march past them on the following day. Sometimes officers were set to stand by the bodies and watch the faces of the sword-and-bows as they went by. Dawson had stood that duty himself once.
She looked at the dead men and wondered who they had been. Likely she knew all the officers in the army now, by reputation and family if not on sight. These were not of that class. They’d been low men. Conscripted farmers, perhaps. Or the sort of man that lived on the sides of the Division and eked out a living doing whatever work came to hand. They had been like her, skeptical of the glory of Geder Palliako, and driven to act.
“Cut them down,” she said.
“Ma’am,” Vincen began, and she interrupted him.
“Don’t ma’am me. Cut them down or wait here and I’ll do it myself.”
“Do we have time to bury them? If we want to join the army’s tail before Bellin, we need to keep moving.”
“We’ll make up the time. I won’t leave them on display.”
Vincen sighed, then passed her his reins and dropped to the ground. It took the better part of an hour to slash the ropes and pull the dead men to the side. Vincen was right. They didn’t have time to dig graves or raise cairns, but at least the corpses weren’t raised like a sign outside a taphouse any longer. She left them lying side by side in the green under the trees, as if they were only resting. The banner of the goddess, they dropped in the mud. Let that be a statement and a symbol. There were still some who stood against the goddess. No one might ever see it, and of those who did, few if any would care. It didn’t matter.
Resisting Geder’s power and the corruption he had brought to the Severed Throne was like shouting into a storm wind. She didn’t know—couldn’t know—if half the things she did had any effect at all. Undermining Ternigan, of course, she had accomplished. But the letters and reports she sent? The little acts of rebellion like putting deserters on the roadside to rest? They might be wastes time and of effort with no lasting effect on the world.
But that did not make them meaningless.
“Clara,” Vincen said again. She realized he’d been trying to catch her attention for some few moments. “We should continue on.”
Should we, she thought, or should we turn our back to all of this and find some pretty farmhouse by the sea to live in together until we die? Even in the privacy of her mind, she didn’t mean it.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s do.”
They reached Bellin just before nightfall four days later. It was a strange little city. If she didn’t know to look, it might only have been a few scattered buildings by the roadside, hardly more than a farming hamlet. At night, though, the mountainside glowed like a Dartinae’s eyes. Dots of brightness the color of fire all up and down the face of the cliffs. The real city was carved from the stone, and the people lived in the flesh of the mountain like moles. Vincen also pointed out the great runes cut into the mountainside. They were hard to see in the morning with the sun behind them or the afternoon when the sun had passed above the mountains and cast the city and its approach into shadow. For an hour near midday, though, the shapes of the letters were written in light and darkness across the stone. She did not recognize the script, and could not guess what they meant.
The army of Antea—Jorey’s army—was camped at the mountain’s base where the dragon’s road passed in among the peaks. Even from a distance, she could see the movement at the edge. The forces of Imperial Antea lining up like schoolchildren, waiting their turn to go on. The others, the hangers-on like herself, would go last, of course. And so she and Vincen caught up with a ragged, unsanctioned caravan squatting in a field of wildflowers and watching men in armor and swords as they marched into the gap in the mountains and disappeared. The caravan master was a Cinnae man, thin as a stick and pale as ice, with a beard like lichen.
“Can I help you, then?” he asked as Clara walked up to him. Days in the saddle had left her thighs aching and chapped, and her gait was wide and rolling, her cloak filthy, her hair pulled back in a tight, greasy bun. She couldn’t imagine looking less like a baroness of the imperial court.
“You’re following them?” she asked, pointing at the army with her thumb the way she imagined her lower-class acquaintances from the Prisoner’s Span might have done.
“Am, so long as the officer class don’t run me off. Most of my trade’s with the lower ranks, and I’m not always so appreciated as I’d hope. What’s it to you?”
“Going to see my sister in Carse,” Clara said. “That’s the way through, only it’s chock full of men with blades and opinions.”
“So passage, then?”
“My man’s decent with a bow,” Clara said, nodding back toward Vincen. “Put him in your guard. We’ll buy any food we eat.”
The ’van master leaned against his blackwood cart and scratched his neck. “You mind traveling with whores?”
“No.”
“You a religious?”
“Not so much that it matters.”
“Well. I’m Imbert. This is my ’van, and these are my rules. You travel with us, you do your share. Meals are two coppers each, no credit. You need money, maybe I’ll hire you to do something. If you didn’t bring enough coin, it’s your own damn fault. You steal from me, I’ll kill you. No offense, it’s just the way. Bring me trouble, I’ll leave you in a ditch and keep your horses.”
“Fair enough.”
“Fair enough,” he echoed. “And you are?”
“Annalise,” Clara said. “That’s Coe.”
“Married?”
“Not to him,” she said, and the old Cinnae grinned. “How long before we get moving?”
The ’van master shrugged. “They’ve been moving through all morning and down by maybe a third. I’d guess our turn could come in a day, maybe two.”