“And the queen?”
Pyk shrugged. “Noble blood’s always disappointed when we tell them to screw off. Can’t see this will be any different. Since it’s you and your pet lizard driving Antea back to its huts, I can’t see that she’ll have much room to complain, though. And if there’s a way to stay on Inys’s good side once the war’s done, well, even better.”
Once the war’s done. There was a phrase. So much of her life had been tied to Antea and to violence even before the cult of the spider goddess had come that the thought of after seemed like a thing from a children’s rhyme. Once, a terrible war ripped the land. Once, children were thrown into prisons to be killed if their parents tried to throw off the slavers’ yoke. Once, innocent people burned with their cities because men with power decided that they should. Once, but not now.
She could barely imagine what that world would be like. She wanted to believe that all the refugees of Suddapal would go back to their homes. All the enslaved Timzinae would leave the Antean farms that had become their prisons. All the children would find their mothers and fathers again, and everything would be made right and whole. But, of course, it wouldn’t. Once the war’s done could only ever be about what came next. Hoping to go back to what the world had been was trying to build wood from ashes.
“Look at her, Isadau,” Pyk said and spat between her teeth. “I ask her to do one damned thing for the bank, and she starts pouting.”
“I wasn’t pouting,” Cithrin snapped. “I was thinking. Of course I’ll cultivate Inys if I can. When this is all over.”
“Pyk didn’t mean it, dear,” Isadau said. “Barking is her way of showing love.”
“The fuck it is,” Pyk said with a laugh.
“And we all love you too,” Isadau said, and Pyk laughed louder.
Cithrin stepped over to Pyk’s table, looking at the numbers her notary was working. They were good. The branch was healthy. Less risk, and more money. Everything Pyk had called success. She found herself thinking about what of her plans the influx of gold could have supported. With what she had now, she could have hired a solid mercenary company. Or built a new bounty exchange in Borja. Or bought out the iron ore from the mines in Hallskar to see that it never reached the forges of Antea. Anything. But not all of it. She wondered, if she’d tried, if she could have won it all on her own. Her bank against Geder’s empire. Would she have been enough? Or would that have been a very different once the war’s done?
When she looked up, Isadau caught her gaze. The older Timzinae woman smiled, but there was a hardness to it, and always would be. Cithrin felt a little tug of shame. She was not going to let herself be sorry that she’d won the battle one way and not another. None of this was about whether she was clever enough. It wasn’t about her. Or Geder. This was the war of the dragons resurrected, and nothing more. Or if not nothing, only a little.
“Rumor is the queen’s forces had their fingers handed back to them at the pass from Bellin,” Pyk said.
“I’d heard that too,” Cithrin said. “I expect the Antean army is marching south as we speak.”
“Will we be ready when they come?” Isadau asked.
“We’re ready now,” Cithrin said. “We have a dragon.”
Clara
She had heard songs, of course, about the grasses of Birancour. It was a cliché of the poets and composers, like the dust storms of the Dry Wastes or the ice coasts of Hallskar. The grasslands were an image meant to evoke a sense of unending summer and sensual languor, the high blades shifting in the sun. Her experience of them was less impressive, but that owed something to the hooves, wheels, and boots that reduced the famous grasses to a mud-caked mat that stank of shit and rotting vegetation before she passed over it. Perhaps in some other context, Birancour might have been as beautiful as its reputation.
After the battle, the armies of the queen had pulled back, not quite in retreat. They lurked in the west, blocking the paths to Sara-sur-Mar and Porte Silena like Southlings making a wall around their queen. The army turned south, toward Porte Oliva, as the queen must have known it would. Riding on her horse, her spine stiff and aching, her mind lulled by the monotony of the day’s passage, Clara half dreamed it. An attacker kicking in the door of a home and bloodying the mouth of the father, the defeated man standing between the intruder and the two children he hadn’t come for, and clearing the way to a third. It was an ugly dream, and surely not true. The small, domestic ways of thinking didn’t apply to the grand vision of nations at war. Violence between village thugs was base and bestial. War was the field of glory, where the nobility of men was tested. Dawson had always said so, and she had thought at the time she understood. Men fought, and the victors were celebrated. She could still recall the triumph when Dawson had returned from reclaiming Asterilhold.
Only now that she had seen some of it firsthand, she did wonder. Perhaps the nobility of war came not from victory, but from accepting an enemy’s surrender. Not from taking the day, but from stopping short of absolute and unending slaughter. If so, she still thought less of it than she once had. She expected better of the world.
At midday, they passed a farmhouse with flames still licking at its eaves. The walls had fallen to ash and embers, and a Cinnae man and woman hung by ropes from a wide-branched cottonwood. A plow horse lay dead on its side by a little stone well. The caravan master sent a couple of his people into the ruins to search out anything the army had overlooked. The air stank of smoke that stung Clara’s nose and roughened her throat. She looked at the bodies, fighting to make the thickness in her throat be only with the dead.
They’d fought, she told herself. They’d tried to stand against the armies of Antea. They were dead because they were stupid, because they’d tried to do something foolish and doomed. It was their fault that they hung there, their bodies shifting slightly in the breeze, the motion impossible to mistake for life. Jorey’s men had killed these farmers because it was war, and this was what war was built from. Not only screaming, frightened boys bleeding into a mud-churn of a meadow. Also burning farmhouses and besieged cities poisoned with plague. It was made of a thousand species of the dead, and all of them—all of them—ought to have known better. Even her.
“They should have run,” Clara said as they passed.
“This was their home,” Vincen said.
“They still should have run.”
“Yes, they should.”
The horse under her stumbled a bit, surprised by a little ditch that the fallen grass had covered, and the unexpected motion sent pain through her hips and back like a shower of sparks rising from a bonfire. She cried out, and Vincen was at her side in an instant. She waved him back sharply.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re in pain.”
“I’m saddle-sore,” she said. “It’s nothing real.”
“That’s real.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. And then a moment later, “You think we should make camp for a day and rest.”
“No, I think we should ride to the front and tell your sons that you’ve followed them.”
Clara shifted in her saddle, her eyebrows rising toward her hairline. Vincen’s expression was closed, his shoulders tight, a man preparing for a blow.
“And why in the world would I do that?” she asked.
“We can’t stop here. The locals won’t bother us with the main force so near, but if we lag too far behind… well, those two back there likely had family. It would be hard not to take a bit of revenge if we hand it to them.”