As the first sunlight struck the round keep, Dawson sounded the charge. His farmers and peasants and landless soldiery surged forward across the bridge, their voices blending into a single roar that shouted down the water. For a moment, Dawson let himself believe that the enemy had been stunned into inactivity, paralyzed by the sight of them. Then arrows began to rain down. He watched a man struck in the shoulder stumble and fall into the river and be swept away. More arrows. More screams.
And then the thud of the battering ram began. His mount danced beneath him, frightened by the chaos or feeling his own anxiety or both. The three priests stood by the open mouth of the white keep, huddled in their brown robes looking sleepy and worn.
If we fail, I will send Palliako their heads, he thought.
The press of bodies on the far side of the bridge seemed to breathe, a great, half-formed giant. The ram was its elephantine heart. They weren’t scattered. The arrows weren’t breaking the formation, and while there had been a few torches dropped from the merlons above, the ram hadn’t taken fire. They were doing well. Even if they died, they died bravely.
Something changed. The thud and thud and thud became a crack. And then a splintering. And then a shout went up and the men before him were pushing into the round keep through broken doors.
“Take them!” Dawson shouted. “Knights of Antea, to me! To me!”
Leaning close to his horse’s back, he flew across the bridge, his lips pulled back in a grimace of rage and joy and the lust of battle. The clot of bodies he struck on the other side was as much his own side as the others, but they scattered all the same. And then all of them were there, inside the keep’s round courtyard, breaking over the enemy like a wave and washing them away. Something was burning, the smoke acrid and dense and invigorating. The screams of the soldiers was music.
By midday, even the last of it was over. Sixty soldiers of Asterilhold dead. Twice that captured. He could only guess the number scattered to the winds and the waters. Most of all, the dragon’s jade road was his, cleared and opened into the heart of the enemy’s kingdom.
He stood on the ramparts of this, his new keep, the first soil west of the Siyat that an Antean had unquestionably held for a generation. The courier that he’d meant to take his refusal to Palliako stood by, waiting. Dawson handed the boy seven letters, folded and sewn and marked with his seal. The orders to all his commanders in the field, telling each of them the same thing. The war is won. Leave the swamps and come to me.
It should have been glorious. It should have been the finest moment in a life rich with them.
Below him, in the courtyard of the keep, the men were laughing and dancing. Two of the farmers were kicking the head of an Asterilhold soldier between them like a ball until the garrison commander saw them and put a stop to it. Wine flowed, and things stronger than wine. The banners of Asteril hold were put to the flame, and the banners of Antea-lifted.
The banners of Antea, and also one other. Red, with an eightfold sigil. And in the courtyard, the three sparrows laughed and shook hands and received the gratitude of the men. Palliako’s pet cultists. This wasn’t his victory. It wasn’t the Severed Throne’s or even Palliako’s. It was the foreign priests’, and even if none of the others knew it, he did. He knew it, and more than that, he knew what it meant.
He had let himself be perverted.
Clara
News of the victory spread through Camnipol like a soft wind; very little changed, and everything did. Clara saw it in a hundred small things. The baker put a wider strip of honey across the top of her buns. The fashion for dark leather cloaks of too generous a cut had been on the verge of fading, and now surged again. The conversations at the gatherings of the wives of the great nobles began to shift from dreading their husbands’ being away to dreading their return. It was, Clara thought, very much like watching a winter tree take the first rush of sap into its bark, greening slightly even before the first leaf came out.
Word kept coming day by day, as much of it rumor as truth. The armies had taken Kaltfel or they had been driven back. One of the soldiers had seen Simeon’s ghost in the midst of the melee or striding across the battlefield or standing beside the Lord Marshal. Clara had lived through other times of strife and battle, and the fascination with the spirits of the dead was new. She wondered whether there were fashions in wartime rumor just as in anything else. Put that way, she couldn’t imagine why there ought not be.
The letters from Dawson, however, were worrying.
They came almost twice a week. Often, but not with the regularity that left her worried if one was late. He related few solid facts to her—she might be his wife, but she wasn’t on the war council—relying more on general statements and impressions. With every new victory, he seemed a bit more angry. Often he would meditate upon the political and filial connections Antea had with Asterilhold; like two fighting brothers, he said. Also, his opinion of foreigners, which God knew had never tended toward charity, was darker than ever. She felt, reading his words, as if he were writing the messages more to himself than to her. Perhaps the ghost of Simeon was riding with him, even if it was only as a metaphor.
The other notable shift in the life of the court was the growing popularity of Geder Palliako’s private priesthood. After he’d celebrated his victory over Maas by founding a temple, there had been a certain morbid curiosity among the court. Then, after he’d become regent, the courtiers had descended on the place, looking for new ways to curry favor. But even beyond that, there seemed to be a growing interest for the temple in its own right. She wasn’t sure yet what she thought of that, but she was hesitant to go without talking to Dawson about it. Better to judge his mood first and then decide whether broadening her piety was worth the effort.
With the road to Kaltfel open and the armies of Asteril-hold struggling up from the southern marshlands, she expected Dawson home by midsummer. Sooner than that if the inevitable peace talks were held in Camnipol. And before that happened, she had an armistice of her own to negotiate.
Marriage had been good for Elisia. Clara would never have said it aloud, but her daughter had always seemed too thin growing up, sharp-featured and narrow-hipped. In truth, Elisia Kalliam had been a cruel girl. As with anyone living in the royal court—man or woman, boy or girl—Elisia had had her clique, and as an adolescent, she’d ruled it ruthlessly. Now she was Elisia Annerin, wife of Gorman Annerin. Her face and bust had a softness in them that made her look more her mother’s daughter. And she had hips, and thank God she had or birthing her son would have been even worse. There was confidence in her body, and an ease.
Sabiha, by contrast, seemed almost more tentative than she had during the courtship.
The three of them sat in the summer garden under the shade of a great catalpa. Clara, Elisia, Sabiha. The daughter she’d lost and the daughter she’d gained. The two girls—well, women now, really—looked at each other across the table with a brittle politeness that told Clara exactly how large the chasm was between them. From the little pond just beyond the rose bushes, little Corl Annerin, not yet five years old, shrieked with delight and was hushed by his nurse.
“I had the flux just before my thirteenth name day,” Sabiha said. “I still remember it. I thought I was going to die.”
“It is terrible,” Clara agreed. “But you seem to have recovered nicely, dear. I’m only sorry that you missed the wedding and of course the funeral so close after that. Odd how the world seems to pair things that way. Something pleasant right up against something awful.”