“The glyph cards told us.”
“It was a divination?” Mabin sounded appalled.
Zanja rose abruptly to her feet. “Madam, Emil surely is better qualified to explain our method. I know you will excuse me, for I feel quite dizzy and must go lie down.”
But as she returned to her blankets, Zanja heard Emil utter a grunt of surprise from atop the pile of boulders where he kept watch. She reached him in a few strides, in time to see the fading aftermath of a rocket’s faraway explosion.
“Oh,” Emil said, “it was beautiful. Did you see it? That Annis is a genius.”
Mabin had come up behind Zanja, too late to see the fireworks. “What happened?”
Emil said, “One of the scouts set off a rocket. Not over trees, but over the river. That explains why we’ve seen no sign of the Sainnites on the road. They came up the river.”
“By boat?”
“No, not against the current, surely. More likely they simply walked up the riverbank.“ Emil’s teeth showed in the darkness; he was grinning with relief. ”The Sainnites are nervous now, I’d wager, after seeing that rocket. What do you think they’ll do, Zanja?“
“I don’t know,” Zanja said. She was sick of her talent, sick of being asked questions and then being challenged for knowing the answers.
“Well, let’s pretend they continue onward and find the camp empty. They’ll take the road home, won’t they, rather than walk home on rocks?”
“Then they’d follow the edge of the fen and come out just below where we are,” she said.
“So we’ll get a good look at them, anyway, and be able to see how they’re judging our strength.”
Perhaps just to be certain that the message had been received, or perhaps out of sheer delight, the scout set off another rocket over the river. “Oh,” Mabin said when it exploded, “that is a sight. We could set those off just for show. A waste of good gunpowder, though.”
The sun had fully risen when the soldiers finally appeared. They had not fled the woods in panic at the prospect of an ambush, and instead they seemed to have spent the time since dawn scouring the woods.
Mabin, peering at them through a spyglass, muttered as they marched away, perhaps repeating to herself the advice in Warfareto never make a direct attack on a large company in broad daylight. She turned on Zanja a glance that was almost a glare. “Well, your prescience seems reliable enough. So perhaps this business of a Sainnite seer is also to be believed.”
Emil rescued Zanja, taking her to the fire where camp porridge cooked in several porringers tucked into the hot ashes. Emil used his own porringer to mix up a horrid, bitter concoction that he made Zanja drink.
“I dared not give this to you last night,” he said, “for if it’s your old injury doing this to you, I feared you would sleep so deeply you would never wake up. I’ve seen it happen.”
They were sitting by themselves, so Zanja said in a low voice, “Did you hear my conversation with Mabin?”
“Most of it. Apparently, she’s got some kind of hornet in her hat.”
“Is it so bizarre to practice divination?”
“Not at all. Mabin probably played at it herself when she was a girl.”
Zanja was beginning to feel very odd, as though her head were separating itself from her shoulders. The nearby Paladins seemed very distant, and the birdsong seemed to come from another world entirely. “Emil,” she said, carefully shaping the words lest they come out strangely, “I think she wants me dead. Since I will not come with her.”
“I think that you’re delirious,” Emil said gently.
“She wants me out of South Hill. I don’t know why.” The pain abruptly drained out of her and she stared at Emil, stunned by the suddenness of it.
“Finally!” he said.
“This is a very strong potion.” Her words came out like polished jewels. “Sometimes your knee hurts a great deal, doesn’t it?”
Emil pretended he hadn’t heard, or else Zanja was so confused she hadn’t actually said anything out loud, but only in her head. Emil said. “I have to tell you, I see nothing sinister in Mabin wanting to snatch you away from me. I wish I had a hundred more like you, myself.”
“A frightening prospect,” Zanja said seriously, but Emil laughed out loud.
They traveled through the forested heart of South Hill. As she walked, Zanja imagined the ambush they could have planned. In her mind, they killed some twenty soldiers. Those twenty could never be replaced. And now that she thought of it, Zanja realized she had never seen a Sainnite child, and precious few soldiers who were younger than Medric. Were the Sainnites, like katrim, forbidden to bear or beget? If so, then they depended upon outsiders to bear and raise their children for them. Of course, the whores of Lalali were one example of how to make this happen, though a brothel village was hardly the place to raise soldiers. The babies would be taken away somewhere, perhaps to a garrison operated by disabled and retired Carolins whose job it was to raise and train the next generation of soldiers.
If the Paladins could find and kill those children then that, surely, would destroy the fighting spirit of the Sainnites.
“Dear gods,” Zanja whispered.
“Careful.” Emil, who had not been out of arm’s reach all morning, caught her, for she had nearly fallen.
“Do the Paladins make war on children?”
“Of course not.”
“The thoughts I’m having.”
“Here.” He moved her aside so that others in their party could pass. “The potion I gave you to drink sets the thoughts askew, like a fever.”
The black‑garbed dignitaries, with their audacious earrings and upright attitudes pushed past them, one by one. How simple life must be for them, Zanja thought. To never have to distinguish right from wrong, and simply follow the law.
She and Emil walked behind them, side by side. Theirs was a far more complicated path.
Chapter Seventeen
Mabin and her entourage left with Annis in tow, and Zanja, despite her presentiments, remained unmurdered. Neither pain nor disordered delirium returned to trouble her.
It soon became apparent that Mabin had mobilized all of Shaftal to the defense of South Hill, and the steady tribute of food, supplies, and hardened veterans from all across the country rapidly transformed their rebel band into an army that Emil was hard put to organize or command. These were not soldiers, but guerrilla fighters, and Emil, though he could convince anyone to do anything, was no general. Nor, he complained rather wearily to Zanja, had he ever aspired to be one.
Zanja traveled ceaselessly among the five units of thirty that Emil, who needed no longer be so fearful of the Sainnites’ greater numbers, positioned on the high ground that rimmed the river valley. Whenever the Sainnites left their garrison, South Hill Company knew of it almost immediately, because Emil’s spies set off signal rockets that could be seen for miles around. Always conscious that each time she bloodied her blade Karis knew about it, Zanja fought in the three clashes that proved the Paladins’ new strategic dominance. What followed might have been called a siege, except that between the Paladin encampments and the Sainnite garrison lay some of the richest farmland m South Hill. The Sainnites began to do what they seemed best at: methodical, thorough, mindless destruction. While the ancient orchards were toppled and the farmsteads and fields were burned, the valley farmers, bitterly angry at Paladin and Sainnite alike, hauled their children and animals and what belongings could be salvaged out of danger. Wagons crowded the roads of South Hill. The farmsteads outside of danger were overwhelmed with refugees and their belongings. At a time when only steady, careful attention to the crops could prevent the coming year from being a hungry one, all of South Hill lay in chaos.
Though South Hill Company could not prevent the Sainnites from razing the valley’s rich farmlands, they also could not endure to stand by and do nothing. Despite their disadvantage at direct, hand‑to‑hand combat, scarcely a day passed without at least one skirmish in which the Paladins crept up on Sainnites under cover of waist‑high corn or drainage ditches choked with rushes, exchanged gunfire, and then fled in much the same way. The Paladins who spent their days crawling through the weeds took to calling these engagements hide‑and‑seek raids. It was no game, though, but a deadly, dangerous business that put Jerrell’s bone saw in high demand.