Читать книгу Schisms - James Wolanyk - Страница 11

Chapter 4

Anna sat on the edge of a cliff, high along the ridges between Tas Hassan and Karawat, where shifting fog revealed valleys blotted with cypresses and red anemones and tall, swaying grass. It was curious to watch the world shifting below her, to sense the divide between her ankles and scorching rock blurring until her body was the heat, the shrub-dotted fissures, the streams and flats snaking out under a midday sun. Soon she was also the wind, the very same that was dancing through her hair, and the starlight that darkened her skin. She was time, weathering the hillsides and worming roots through soil.

She was a fighter’s gentle steps over stone.

“I’m listening, Yatrin,” Anna said, her awareness sinking back into her body.

“They want to rendezvous four leagues to the east,” Yatrin replied. He moved closer, but kept a generous distance from the edge. “It’s not too late to break off our arrangements.”

Anna shut her eyes against the light. “Do you trust your people?”

“I want to.”

From Anna’s observations, Yatrin was one of the few fighters—within the Nest or deployed in the field—who held any reservations about making contact. It was natural, considering the birthplace of nearly half her forces. Even those who’d turned their backs on the state still traded Orsas in the corridors, practiced their calligraphy by transcribing sacred mandates, and found themselves gazing to the northeast with every sunset. But Yatrin was his own oak, his roots severed from the state and its ploys. Or so it seemed. Anna considered that it was merely a ruse held in her presence, but Mesar and his men had shown the truth of things when they nudged Yatrin’s ribs in the bunks.

Afraid of a little homecoming, Yatroshu?

It’s our first chance to take real ground. Don’t grind your heel upon it.

She joined her fighters, thirty-five in all, in the fold between granite crests. Her southern fighters had donned their camouflage smocks, which were knotted with mud-soaked burlap strips and withered moss, while the northerners and easterners rested in loose shawls and cotton tunics. Being unarmored seemed to induce dread. The caution and exhaustion and bitterness were bare on their faces, as bare as their mounds of vests, ruji, tins, wrapped rations, rope, and spare boots, some of which had been plucked from the dead at Sadh Nur Amah and still smelled of vinegar. But her fighters were arranged in radiating knots around Mesar, and only those with southern blood—part of Jenis’s unit, or the sister unit they’d recruited from Kowak—glanced at Anna as she appeared. There was always a nexus to morale, a center of balance shifting and swaying hearts below the immediate terror of killing.

The afterglow of Anna’s meditation lingered, and she envisioned herself as empty wind once more, her body dissolving into Mesar’s. . . .

“Once we pass Karawat, the sentiment should soften,” one of Jenis’s fighters was saying to Mesar. They were both squatting on loose earth, their water-soaked wrappings draped over their heads and upper backs. “Even so, you ought to be the spearhead.”

Mesar rubbed his stubble, examining the lines they’d scrawled into the dirt. “Nothing outruns mistruth, it seems.”

“They’ve made up their minds.” The fighter shrugged. “Golyna’s got a different eye than the stick-dwellers.”

“It needs to be an introduction, not a surrender.”

“Eh?”

“Enemies surrender,” Mesar said. “Every bit of chatter feeds their perception, regardless of whose lips are moving. It simply isn’t about figureheads, you see. This isn’t the north, nor the south. The state’s ears are keen on all voices, and once this war begins in earnest, you’ll see that.”

Jenis’s fighter gave a throaty laugh. “Did one spot of good, though. They took half the horses’ worth. Probably worried we’d scalp them if they turned it down.”

His southern comrades chuckled under their damp shade.

“What happened?” Anna asked Yatrin quietly, maintaining her distance from Mesar’s inner circle.

“Khutai and his men were fighting uphill,” Yatrin said with folded arms. “Volna’s emissaries passed through this morning.”

“Are they trying to buy out their garrison?”

“Not quite. They were passing on the news about Sadh Nur Amah.”

“A warning, then.”

Yatrin shook his head. “They told the governor it was our doing. Not just here, either. They probably sent riders to every notch of central Hazan.”

An old vein of anger flared up in Anna, burning and tight across her face, but she was quick to settle it. It wasn’t the first time they’d polished their own devastation into something noble, but it was the most egregious. They were becoming bolder, more brash, more certain in their ability to control minds as easily as trade routes. They were winning. They’d proven as much through semantics alone.

No longer Patvor, the monsters.

They were Volna, the liberators.

Khara rested on the outskirts of the gathering, still working on her aspen carving. Her vest and outer wrappings were piled beside her, revealing the dark, slick sheen of her shoulders in the sunlight. She glanced up and met Anna’s eyes.

“Watch her,” Anna said to Yatrin, turning away to conceal her lips. It was impossible to predict how she’d act without her partner. That was the trouble of pairing, Anna supposed. Lovers fought like wild dogs, but the bereaved resigned themselves to death.

“Are you sure she’s the one to watch?” Yatrin asked. The question begged itself: They were both staring at Ramyi, who’d garnered her own flock of fighters under the shade of a crooked juniper tree.

The girl wore her bruise like a pendant, smirking as she tossed stones with the younger men and women from Jenis’s unit. As far as Anna could read, it was all a mask. Drifting, vapid behavior was a ruse she knew too well. The night before, Ramyi had shambled off to the lower bunks with shuddering legs, forming a mirrored memory of walking endlessly in some autumn sprawl. But it was better if she didn’t break. Not around the others.

“She’ll do fine,” Anna said. “I did. She has to prove herself, and she’ll suffer until it happens.”

“She’s not the only one who suffers,” Yatrin said.

“It was panic.” A twinge of pity flashed through her as she studied Ramyi. “Don’t lash the world to her shoulders, Yatrin. She’s a child.”

“The world crashes down on all of us, doesn’t it?”

Anna blinked at the Nahoran and his shadows of truth. You cannot be broken by what you are, she recalled from the Kojadi tomes. But being was no simple task.

“Are we prepared to mobilize?” Mesar called out, ceasing the pockets of conversation that sprouted beneath shade and sweeping branches.

“Mesar,” Anna said, “pay them in full for the horses.”

Jenis’s fighters glanced at one another with pinched brows. The unit’s quartermaster, lugging a sack of amber and Rzolkan alloy over his smock, narrowed his eyes. They all looked expectantly at the Alakeph commander.

“Vying for some peddlers’ hearts?” Jenis’s captain said with a sneer.

Mesar, still squatting and regarding the scarred dirt before him, drew a hard breath. “You heard her.”

* * * *

At dusk they convened with the horse peddlers in the crux of a gentle gully. Yatrin, Khara, and several of Mesar’s men circled the mass of swishing tails and hot dust and leather reins, confirming their order of fifty-two horses and six mules. A group of Nahoran children waited with wagons on the crest of the slope, silhouetted against a bruising sky, keeping watch over heaps of saddles and stirrups the northerners had scoffed at.

“Look at them,” Anna said to Yatrin, pointing at the clump of peddlers dealing with Mesar. They kept their arms crossed, their eyes low, their legs rigid. It was more severe than mistrust of strangers. Their village was three days’ ride from salvation—be it kator railways, a frontline garrison, or a mesa holdout—and their fate, whether delivered as blades or alloy bars, had already been sealed. That was why Mesar and Jenis had chosen it, Anna realized during their descent from the ridge. A border garrison with kator lines would’ve been easier, but given them less leverage. Less terror, in plainer terms.

“They’re as hardy as they look,” Yatrin said. “My father bought a gelding from this region after my first campaign. It could clear two fields before its hooves slowed. The heat sits well with them.”

Anna hummed as though she’d been speaking of the beasts. “Impressive breeders.”

“They’re part of the state too,” he replied. “Beasts or men, it’s all the state. It resides in everything here.”

She eyed Yatrin sidelong. It was an old maxim, as useless as any other.

But Yatrin’s stare was mired in his truth of the world. “The grain in their bellies, the water in their troughs, the whips on their flesh. Their mother’s wombs were formed by the state too. So was every kind word and every lump of sugar.”

“And you think that’s what plays through their minds when they run?”

“Not through their minds, really,” Yatrin said. “It is their mind. That’s what Malchym never understood about our ranks. We weren’t afraid to lose something we didn’t own.”

Baqir’s body, loaned from Golyna and its shimmering towers, played through Anna’s mind with vivid clarity. The parched soil of Hazan drank and drank, never sated. Nahora’s only divergence was its gift for glamorizing its thirst.

“Do you really believe it?” Anna asked.

Yatrin’s lids sank over his eyes, aging him in an instant. “If Nahora didn’t, they would already have been subjugated. Courage sustains them.”

“My father told it differently,” Anna replied. “He said the forests are lined with brave bones. When leaves show their bellies, the clever seek shelter. The brave flatten their tongues and wait for the rain.”

“And yet there’s no rain in the flatlands.”

Anna watched their quartermaster lug two sacks of alloy from a pile, dragging them over crumbling earth and tossing them at the peddlers’ feet. “Nor are there any leaves.”

One of the peddlers stooped down and sifted through his take. He rubbed his chin, mumbled something in Orsas, listened to Jenis’s fighters as they bickered and pointed at him. Soon Mesar’s men joined in, their rising flatspeak drowning out the horses’ whinnies.

Seeds of conflict were simple to spot, if one knew where to look. Anna led Yatrin down the slope in a wash of dust, straining to hear the dispute.

“. . . and it’s unfair,” one of the peddlers was saying. “It’s just not enough.”

“First we offered fifty, and you took it,” Jenis’s captain barked.

“And then you came to your senses. It’s dishonorable to rescind your price.”

“It’s enough,” a hooded peddler said to his companion. “We can go.”

“These are the best of the herds,” the first peddler grunted.

“We can arrange to deliver the other ten agir tomorrow,” Mesar suggested. His even tone was a token gesture, buried beneath the growing sea of shouts and accusations.

“We can leave some of the pack horses,” Anna said. Her presence stilled the men, though only for a moment. She forced her voice beyond comfort to stamp out the last of their mutters. “Go and fetch some of our cloths, Khutai. Bring whatever we can spare.”

Before Mesar’s captain could move, the first peddler threw up his hands. “We have all the cloth we want. We’re not beggars.”

“Jersuh,” his companion hissed. His eyes were bulging. “Do you know who that is?”

“A foolish girl,” the peddler said.

“Fifty is enough.”

“It’s not and you know it. Straighten your spine, would you?” The peddler’s companions were shifting away from him, glancing at Anna and the dark, wandering scars across her neck. But he was a brave man with no mind for leaves. He was studying Yatrin, Khara, and a dozen others in their press of shadowed blades. “I see eastern sun on your faces, brothers and sisters. But you march with such butchers.”

“Butchers?”

A girl’s delicate whisper had never put so much fear in Anna.

Ramyi slid through the crowd, her splotchy purple welt bathed in the dying light from the east. Her Hazani eyes, so much narrower than their southern counterparts, had widened enough to reveal bloodshot tendrils. There was no Kojadi veil over the girl’s expression, only wrath. “You think my people are butchers?”

“It’s all right, Ramyi,” Mesar whispered. “Remember the mothers’ words of clarity.”

“I have no mother,” Ramyi said. “The eastern saviors made sure of that.”

“He meant nothing by it. Our people share common aims.”

“I meant it,” the peddler said, spitting on the burlap sacks near Ramyi. “Look at this little animal you carry around.” He shook his head at the Nahorans around Anna. “What is this girl here for, ah? Is she some reward for the throats you slit in the flatlands? Do you share her, or is she somebody’s property? Is she married to her brother?”

Ramyi’s fists curled within her sleeves.

“That’s enough,” Anna said, culling the rage she saw blooming in the crowd. Most of the Hazani and pale-skinned northerners had, at the very least, stiffened their shoulders and pursed their lips. But several among them, especially those with henna-dyed eyes and pins arrayed in ladder-like columns under the skin of their forearms—recruited from cartel networks and sanctuary encampments—were on the cusp of killing. Ramyi’s eyes were hardest to disarm, but memories of violence lingered like their own instructor. “Leave ten pack horses. I urge you to accept my offer. It’s the fairest you’ll receive.”

The peddlers mulled about in contemplative silence. Finally, their leader cleared his throat. “An interesting view on fairness.” He looked at his horses, all stamping around in a hazy circle. “Very well, then. It seems to be Hazani fairness.”

“I’ll gut you,” Ramyi snapped, breaking any sense of reprieve.

“Me?” the peddler asked. “What—”

“Don’t you dare speak about me or my family.” But the girl’s anger rested beneath a press of hurt, of swollen eyes and quivering brows.

“Nahora has seen your breed before,” the peddler chuckled. “Northern children with foul tongues and foul blood. The state can endure far more than you.”

Ramyi’s lower jaw shook, rattling with words she couldn’t channel into a blade or a fresh vessel for hayat. She glanced at Anna, nearly flinching as she did so, then gazed at the mound of burlap. “We’ll see about that,” she whispered.

“Forty-two horses and six mules, then,” Mesar said to his men. “Help them load their wagon.”

By the time they’d saddled half of the horses—including Anna’s—and lashed their equipment to the pack animals, it was full dark. Anna stood with Yatrin and the others on the highest rise of the slopes, gazing out at the bruise-blue hills and flats and gorges to the north, her hands grasping the reins of her black mare. Far below, the lantern-like baubles dangling from the herders’ wagon wormed toward the shelter of watchtowers and mud walls. At every moment, Anna expected Ramyi’s markings to burst out of one of her fighters, sundering the earth beneath distant wagon wheels or consuming the peddlers’ flesh in a wreath of silver flame.

Ramyi was still, thoughtful, as she sat behind Khara on a circling horse. With her arms wrapped around the easterner and eyes bold with glossy lamplight, her gaze calmly tracking the wagon’s course, it appeared that Mesar’s short bout of circle meditation had settled her temper.

That was the worrying way of it, Anna knew: Anger formed and fell away with every breath, but hatred simply learned to sleep.

* * * *

The days passed slowly, sweeping by as a pall of droning crickets and dry heat and blue skies over valleys of moss and rust. Despite the fur-lined saddle, Anna’s legs were chafed and smeared with rosy blood by the end of the first day. That was the cost of existing beyond the hardships of the true world, perhaps. Between measured riding stretches Anna had paused and signaled for Ramyi to mark Khutai, who had the thickest, yet fairest, neck among her fighters. Ramyi’s meditation had uncovered countless runes, some more useful than other, but during this ride, the girl added a rune she’d come to term sprout. When Khutai tensed properly, the sand shot up around them in an immense, crackling dome, its walls firmer than iron, encasing them in lightless silence for an instant. Then it dissolved into a rain of powder-soft grit, as gentle as winter’s first flurry. Or so Anna had seen in training. Khutai had sharp reflexes, but ruji shavings rarely announced their arrival.

Their caravan had passed several farmers, but the only domestic troops—Chayam— they spotted along their procession were shadows upon the hilltops. In each of their seven encounters, Anna’s fighters had glinted a single mirror signal:

We seek negotiations in Golyna.

Each time, it was received without reply.

When Anna meditated within her tent on the low side of a windswept rise, burrowed into the ground and encircled by heated rocks like any skillful Gosuri shelter, the storm was deafening. She heard the wind shearing apart grass and sun-dried branches, chilling the horses as they snorted and stomped about, rattling the makeshift paddock formed by the tent poles that jutted up through the soil. It was difficult to focus without seeing the girl’s blooming golden pupils or envisioning Shem in the hallway of some distant palace. Soon she rose, pacing around the ring of cushions and hanging candle cages with air screeching and aching into her chest. Can I really control her? Should I? Shadows of truth. After some time she hung a kettle to boil over their hearth, crept past Yatrin, and climbed up the tent’s ladder, emerging into the moaning blackness of the palisade. Frigid air howled across the darkness, joined by flurries of glittering sand and the sound of watchmen’s boots raking over packed earth. She hurried to the tent housing Ramyi and Khara, peeled back its upper flap, and leaned her head into the candlelight alongside a flurry of mica and glittering sand.

“Ramyi, come with me,” Anna called out.

Khara stirred in her bundled quilts, but kept her eyes sealed.

Screeching wind was the immediate reply. Anna waited, rocking on her haunches and staring into the patchwork of shadows and candlelight, till Ramyi wandered forth in tan robes with eyes tucked low.

Déjà vu was more chilling than the next gust.

They sat in Anna’s tent with legs crossed, drinking mint and quince teas like the courtiers from Nur Sabah. Candlelight sifted through patterned iron boxes and danced upon the walls in orange, thorny swirls. It was rare to spend time with the girl outside of meditative sessions or schooling, but it hadn’t always been that way. Once Ramyi had been shy and tender and receptive to Anna’s knowledge of making bone-broth and tying knots. She’d never been much of a friend—Anna had few of those and wanted even less—but she was a vessel for kindness, for wisdom, for everything Anna had accumulated through steady breaths and murder, yet had never been able to pass on. But war had a habit of twisting things. Anna could sense the barrier between them as tangibly as the steam curling up from their cups: Two beings, more attuned to their interconnection than the countless masses around them, were unable to make amends or shave down the calluses upon their hands. They were both girls, after all. Again, war had obscured that simple truth. It felt so foolish to Anna, but she wouldn’t be the first to disarm. There was too much hurt in surrender. Perhaps the pain was just too immediate, too intense. Over time, separation brought its own suffering. Especially when Anna contrasted her life with the Claw’s virtues, sensing the roots of her legacy drying and blackening below a mighty oak…

Yatrin slept in the darkness at the edge of the tent, his quiet breaths a reflection of a shallow slumber. His presence seemed to unnerve Ramyi, who kept glancing at his covers, almost as though safeguarding a captive. There was understandable reproach, if not lurking envy, in the girl’s pursed lips. It must’ve been maddening for her to find the enlightened Kuzalem stocking her chambers with young men, then being forced under the cane of a female shepherd.

But reality was always a distortion of the truth, bending and fracturing through separate minds.

“How are your legs?” Anna asked in flatspeak.

Holding her tea near her lips, Ramyi glanced up. They’d spent the better part of an hour without speaking. “My legs?”

“All the riding,” she said. “The herbmen gave me something for blisters.”

“I don’t need it.” Ramyi sipped her tea. “But thank you.”

Anna had seen the way the girl carried herself, with a wide stance and gritted teeth whenever her thighs brushed together. Maybe stubbornness, not the clarity of a scribe, was their binding thread. “Do you feel guilty when people die?”

Ramyi resettled the blankets around her knees and ankles. “The past is immutable.”

“I’m not trying to teach you now,” Anna said. “Tell me how you feel. Leave out the proverbs.”

“I’m just so tired, Anna.”

“It was a hard day.”

“No,” Ramyi said. “I’m tired.” This time she’d opted for the word jashel’na, which left the stitches of time across the root adjective. It was a word usually found upon the lips of riders and old weavers.

“You must miss the hall-mothers,” Anna said.

“Sometimes,” Ramyi said. “We all miss people.”

A knot of discomfort formed in Anna’s throat. “Death is only a burden, Ramyi. Don’t bear it across your shoulders.” She softened her eyes. “My anger was misguided. Events occur beyond our permission, I know.”

The girl flattened her brow and flared her nostrils, meeting Anna’s gaze head-on. But she was well-trained, a product of Halshaf meditation from the time of swaddling, and she held back whatever retort was prickling on her lips. That muted veil came over her. “I understand.”

“And I’m proud of you,” Anna said. “Do you know that?”

“I appreciate it.”

“Ramyi,” she whispered.

“What? What do you want?”

“Be here with me,” Anna said, patting the quilt near her kettle.

“I am here,” she said sharply.

“If you’re truly present—”

“I’m here, I’ve always been here,” Ramyi interrupted. “But you don’t understand how quickly we aren’t here. Some people are here, then they’re gone. But I’m still here.” Her last sentence was softer, riding the crest of a breaking voice.

“We won’t always be,” Anna said. “I forgot what it’s like to have your years.”

Ramyi tucked her hands into the folds of her shawl and bowed her head. Again she was burying spiteful words, tucking away the obvious protest that Anna was barely her senior.

“You spoke of cleaning up my mess,” Anna said. Noting Ramyi’s discomfort, she teased a smile. “You were right.”

“I don’t want to speak about it.”

“Does it frighten you?”

Ramyi set her teacup down and picked at her nails. “Sometimes everything is scary,” she explained. “Blood used to make me sick, you know. But now, at times, nothing frightens me at all. When I was angry with that horse peddler, I wasn’t afraid of what he’d do to me. He could’ve torn out my eyes, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Is that how you feel?”

Anna studied the endless depths in the girl’s eyes. At times. Fearlessness was a sheer drop, a nudge over some precipice where time and death and life were concepts, not constraints. When such moments occurred within Anna, the winds of the world had always managed to cushion her fall and sew her back into her body. But she’d known minds that had taken the leap and never regressed, never scrambling or clawing at the cliff’s vanishing edge.

Ramyi’s feet already knew the ecstasy of weightlessness. In times of war, it was a threatening addiction.

“If you stay aware,” Anna said, “you’ll know how to act. Fear won’t sway you.”

“I can still fail.”

“You won’t. We’ll both do our best to focus, won’t we?” Anna grinned at Ramyi, but was met with flitting, wounded eyes. She reached out, ignoring the girl’s instinctive recoil, and touched her smooth black hair. “This isn’t our fight, but nobody else will do it for us.”

She nodded, coaxing a smile out of crooked lips. Compassion was still a foreign thing to her, a doe apt to be startled and set to flight by a careless breath.

“And when this is over, we’ll have a life,” Anna said.

Ramyi’s eyes dimmed. “I’m not sure it’ll end.”

“We’ll end it,” she said, stroking her hair. “By any means.”

“We.” Spoken like a foreign word, bitter and vague on Ramyi’s tongue.

Anna embraced the back of the girl’s skull, pressed their foreheads together, and nodded. Their breaths slowed till they cycled in tandem, their warm exhales and shallow inhales bleeding together, smudging the threshold of separate selves. Soon Anna had the sense of holding herself, of issuing and receiving kindness she’d once craved so dearly. “We.”

* * * *

By the end of the second day, the railway at Zakamun was well within reach. Mesar’s trailcarver led their procession into the wide, sloping bowl of a grass valley as dusk fell, spurred by Anna’s order to reach the kator by midday. It was a practical decision, all things considered: The horses rode well in the day’s heat, but they became tireless in the final stretch of day, when the air cooled and the sun was ragged on the horizon. Everybody mulled about as the horses fed, drinking plum wine and sharing jokes unsuited to Ramyi’s ears, growing unexpectedly animated with a dose of rest and conversation. Throughout their ride, the roads and causeways spanning the mountains had grown more desolate and worrisome with the risk of ambushes or full assaults.

The land spoke its warnings, Anna supposed, but isolation screamed them.

Most of the riding posts they passed had been abandoned recently, with overturned buckets and the deep impressions of hooves littering the grazing strips. Those who’d remained in spite of evacuation warnings—Huuri groomers, fatherless children, scattered southern settlers—were quick to fetch bales of hay, brush the horses down, and collect their keep, rarely offering anything beyond the most functional greetings and idle chatter.

“Speak with them,” Anna had suggested to Jenis’s fighters as they gathered along a fence. They were hard, scar-shrouded men, but they’d listened. They sensed the fields and their slowness as well as Anna. Slowness—that was truly what heralded war. “Right now, they treat you like outsiders, and yes, that’s what you’ll always be. But they can trust outsiders. They’ll need to.” She’d watched two Huuri children chasing their sheep around the yard, giggling and imitating its baa-baa call. “Ask them if they know how to dig a trench.”

But when Zakamun and its garrison grew near, there was no terror around the outlying manor complexes and sprawling estates. At dawn the gatherers paced through apple orchards, children splashed one another at the watering holes, and dogs slept within the shade of the mud walls hemming in dirt paths. Some of the older boys even gathered on stilted porches and whistled down at the passing women, including Ramyi, though the girl’s glares were enough to ward off most attention. It all seemed akin to a parade, not a military maneuver. Even as they entered Zakamun’s commercial district, filing past the windows of curious bakers and seamstresses, there was an air of normalcy. Violence had once been a potential tool for Anna’s unit, but now, as they were close enough to smell the burning grit of the kator lines, it was a wick they were unprepared to light.

In fact, the polish and radiance of the Nahoran city lured most of Anna’s attention. She hadn’t examined nor appreciated the world’s beauty in a long while, perhaps ever. Zakamun made it natural, made her lose herself in the azure roofing and hanging gardens and narrow archways, which featured such precise masonry that Anna rarely noticed the fissures between white slabs.

“Have you been here?” Anna asked Yatrin as they passed a public bath and its canopy shroud of vines and woven branches. Children ran past, giggling and pointing at the Alakeph brothers’ white coverings, which surely hadn’t graced their streets in years. There was history in their presence, almost a playful aura, and Mesar’s unit reflected it in their smiles.

“My sister—by blood, I mean—was ordained at the monastery atop the northern hill.” Yatrin gestured to a collapsed dome on the nearby rise. “We’ll see it repaired in time, I hope.”

“Perhaps someday,” Anna said. “I think there will be more demanding tasks to come.”

“In Nahora, parts reflect a whole, you understand. Structures form a city, and cities form the state. The morale of our people is bound to this truth.”

Ramyi hummed, breaking her longstanding silence. “The state’s about to have its spine broken, then.”

Anna didn’t offer any reproach, nor did she even glance at the girl. There was some truth in her words, after all. War broke everything, and there was no sense in mourning rubble to avoid the bodies pinned beneath it. Perhaps Nahora had forgotten the agony of domination, of invasion, of massacre. But life was a patient tutor.

Yatrin’s lips tensed into a hard line. He looked past Ramyi, instead focusing on a group of young men splitting pomegranates in the shade. “It’s good to return.”

Some of Jenis’s men muttered to one another in river-tongue and garbled grymjek, training their eyes on the limestone balconies that jutted out over the road.

“They’re watching us,” one said.

“There, just behind the cart,” another said.

“Get ready for them,” a third added.

Anna halted and spun around, glaring at the southern troops. “Mind your weapons,” she said in the river-tongue. “We didn’t come here to fight.” Mesar’s men slowed at the sound of her voice, and some even complied with the command, having acquired the southern tongue during their time in the Nest or plains monasteries. Anna studied the motionless fighters, including Mesar, before switching to flatspeak. Memories of Nahora—its little mechanical bird, its savage fighters, its incessant hunting—played through Anna’s head. “If they cast stones at us, you have my permission to destroy them.”

Mesar nodded back at her, seemingly content with the approach.

A warm, high laugh echoed across the square. It was familiar in the worst way, so ingrained in Anna’s dreams that her awareness collapsed for an instant, buckling under the weight of the impossible. But the laughter carried on, rushing to meet Anna with its mutated eastern register and violet thorns. “Casting stones won’t be necessary, panna.”

Konrad emerged from a slender green doorway on the unit’s right, trailed by a detachment of Nahoran fighters wearing spring combat sets: thin, sand-shaded plating, draping olive cloth, and hanging stomach pouches loaded with spare ammunition. His features were unchanged, but he was no longer a charming foreigner sprinkled with northern dust. His youth was an old tree, its bark unchanged, but its core hollow and withering.

Yet as Anna stared at him, ignoring the soft twist of his lips and his hand’s beckoning curl, she wondered whether there had ever been a core to him. Perhaps he’d always been a maelstrom of half-truths and scheming, more cunning beast than man.

Whatever the case, he was here.

At once Anna observed the remainder of his men. Some were perched in the high towers and rooftop gardens ringing the square, while others readied themselves at the ritual spring walls, slipping boots over their just-washed feet and lifting yuzeli from the basins below dribbling spouts. She wagered that they hadn’t installed any explosive charges in the area; after all, the civilians themselves were still largely unaware of the threat at hand, wandering between their formations and haggling over clay jugs of oil.

“Nothing sudden,” Anna said in flatspeak.

Konrad stopped halfway through his approach, stilling his men with a wave. He’d preserved the easy walk of a man beyond death’s clutches. “Welcome to Nahora,” he said with a sweeping bow.

She still pictured him as she’d left him in Malijad. A blade through his forehead, blood and sweat dripping off Bora and running down his face, flames scorching the air itself and creeping toward his body.

“Konrad,” Mesar said warmly, shouldering past his men and taking his place with Anna and Yatrin. The stiffness of days on the open road had faded, now replaced by eager eyes and a rare grin. He returned the southerner’s bow.

Konrad had never truly slighted the Alakeph, certainly not as much as Patvor had, but Mesar’s formality was puzzling nonetheless. It had no roots in friendship nor kinship. Manufactured sincerity was the lifeblood of politics, she supposed. Under the watch of loaded ruji, it was the cost of survival.

“As of last autumn, it’s Ga’mir Konrad Asiyalar,” the southerner corrected.

“My apologies, Ga’mir,” Mesar said quickly. Even if the rank was unwarranted, it was a quick and wise impulse to bow down—a captain of his stature could level a settlement without a word of dissent. But the order that had inducted him, Asiyalar, carried even more considerable clout.

Konrad squinted at the patchwork assortment of Alakeph brothers, southern fighters, northern recruits, and eastern deserters, who were marked by spines as rigid as the marble statues lining the square. “This is all you brought?”

Anna met his eyes, but they belonged to a stranger. Malijad was a distant specter in their minds. Perhaps Konrad was even younger now, having let death race ahead of him. But Anna could feel her age, her wisdom birthed through pain, her resolve to be anybody except a pawn for wicked men. “They’re well-trained.”

“They have interesting looks,” Konrad said, narrowing his eyes at Yatrin and Khara. “Orsas’afim nester agol?”

Yatrin nodded. “This is our birthplace.”

“Haven’t lost my sight yet.” Konrad grinned. “I had no idea you kept such varied company, Anna.”

Anna looked at the gathering of bronze-skinned, green-eyed fighters gathered by the nearby archway. They were likely Borzaq, plucked from Nahora’s standard regiments and forged into something inhuman. Konrad must’ve selected them with care.

But who had chosen him?

“Curious that you didn’t materialize in our magistrates’ bathhouse,” Konrad continued.

“Decorum,” Anna said. There was no sense in ceding the truth of the situation: Shem’s tunnels could only link the Nest with territory he knew intimately, places he’d surveyed exhaustively and recognized as an extension of himself and his pristine memory. Golyna was little more than a name to him.

“It’s just quite a surprise, turning up in the flesh,” Konrad replied. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“We’ve come to you with open palms, Ga’mir,” Mesar said.

Konrad arched a brow and gestured at the rows of horses being led into the square. “If we sifted through their packs, what would we find?”

“Nothing to be used against you,” Mesar replied.

“Blades can have curious shapes,” Konrad said, smirking at Anna.

“We’re not here for you,” Anna said. “We’ve come to see the Council in Golyna. I urge you to offer us safe passage.” Her awareness became snagged on her periphery, where Ramyi was balling up her fists and forcing hard, short breaths. The girl was too young to understand diplomacy, but too old to ignore threats.

Konrad studied Ramyi with faint amusement. “And who is this?”

Nausea crept over Anna, worsening as she abandoned herself to memories of the violet flower, the bright eyes among parched flats, the man who loved something other than her. The same man who’d leveled his gaze on a scared, angry girl. “Leave her be,” Anna warned. “We’re not seeking war.”

“It must feel like a proper rest after the business near Sadh Nur Amah,” Konrad said.

“That wasn’t our doing.”

“My, my, the story grows richer.” Leering, he turned to face his fighters. “Not that it matters much, panna. That overgrown pit was a flag in the wind. One day our colors, Volna’s the next . . . it gets tiresome.”

“Perhaps one of your garrisons received our glints along the way,” Mesar said.

“They did.” Konrad lowered his hands to his hips and rocked back and forth, considering something that never reached his lips. Crowds of women and children in ruby fabric ran behind him, oblivious to the scent of imminent violence. “The Council gave me full discretion in dealing with this incursion.”

Mesar cleared his throat, glancing back at his own men for some mesh of assurance. “Well, I ought to begin by—”

“If I want your words, I’ll ask for them.”

The Alakeph captain’s eyes widened as though he’d been struck. As though he were a child who’d forgotten the rules of his favorite game.

“Going by principle,” Konrad said, his gaze sweeping back to Anna, “Perhaps I’ll look each and every one of you over. My unit can read the truth of a twitching hand.”

“We won’t beg for our lives,” Anna said.

“Beg?”

“Do what you wish.” Sweat coalesced in cool pockets along Anna’s palms. Her breaths were short, stifling, squeezed through a tightening airway. She’d mastered the art of bluffing with wicked men, but those days were long gone. “You’ll be giving us a merciful gift, cutting us down before Volna ever has the chance to drag us out of our fighting holes. We can offer more than our blades, and your masters surely know that. But we won’t be toyed with, and we won’t bare our bellies. Choose wisely, Konrad.”

Mesar’s long, aching exhale was lost to the sound of children’s laughter.

And in the crystallizing silence, stranded between Konrad’s blank stare and the expectation of countless ruji tearing into the tender flesh around her, Anna held her pointed gaze. It was a taunt, an invitation to the bloodshed Konrad surely craved. All it would take was his raised fist, or perhaps a coin flipped up in the air, glinting as bursts of metal shavings reduced Anna to the nameless flesh Bora had once been.

Fear is just an impulse, she reminded herself.

She hoped.

“Oh, Anna,” Konrad sighed at last. “How I’ve missed you. Come, pull your unit together—tea and cakes ought to be ready on the kator.”

Hoarse chuckles broke out among the northern irregulars and southern conscripts within earshot. Brushing past Yatrin, Mesar hurried to Konrad’s side in a bid to converse during their walk to the kator. But he resembled an overzealous schoolboy, as sycophantic and hamstrung by ideals as any of the students Anna had known in the kales.

Anna simply wrapped her arm around Ramyi’s shoulder and pulled the girl closer, warding off the glances and grins that Konrad flashed her.

If Mesar had forgotten the rules of the game, Anna would craft her own.