Chains of the Earth, page 17
“Her time will come,” he said. “I swear it. I swear, I will stand beside you and help you cut the rope when we introduce her to Lady Guillotine. But for now, this threat is real, and our people must rise to meet it. The price of freedom’s fire is—”
“—is vigilance against those who would snuff it out,” Victoire finished for him. “I’m not afraid to bleed for liberty, and neither is any of those sworn to our cause. But bleeding alongside that monster turns my stomach, Reyne. She’s as terrible as any de l’Arraignon King.”
“I know,” he said. “But we must have patience. Change comes slower than we would wish, even with the winds of history at its back.”
Victoire frowned. “You have me there. I don’t recognize it. Is that Gallemond? Or de Frees?”
“That one’s mine,” he said. “And it’s truth, as sure as any other philosophy or dogma. We have to be patient, and we have to fight. Are our people ready?”
Green, Xeraxet thought to him.
“They’re ready,” Victoire said. “We still have muskets and powder from the campaign we’d planned against Louis-Sallet.”
“Good,” he said. “Past time they be put to use.”
Green, Xeraxet thought again, a touch of irritation in his tone.
“Of course there’s Green at work here,” he said. “Why should it matter?”
“Green at work?” Victoire asked. “Is there a problem?”
Not one of us, Xeraxet thought. My youngest sister. She’s here.
He sat up, scanning the room. “Your sister? Which of us has the bond? You never told me you had a sibling among our number.”
Victoire relaxed, a sign that he’d recognized Reyne switching to speak to his kaas. Victoire had never found the gift in all the hours they’d spent studying the Codex together, but Reyne had explained as many of the kaas’ secrets as Saruk had allowed.
She isn’t sworn to one of yours.
A commotion sounded from one of the entrances, a clatter and a thud, and suddenly Sarine stood beside one of the statues of a muse. The Goddess herself, her kaas wrapped around her forearm. Fury shone in her eyes as she swept the room, settling on him.
“You’re behind it, aren’t you?” Sarine said. “You burned the ships in the harbor.”
The other four kaas-mages in attendance each looked toward him, and conversation throughout the room stilled to quiet.
“Sarine,” he said. “Good of you to join us. As always, I would rather have had you with us from the beginning.”
“The Nameless take your courtesies,” Sarine snapped. “Did you do it? I thought you understood what was at stake here, but Erris was right. You’re a rabid dog.”
He forced himself to maintain a veneer of calm. “Join me, please. We can speak in private, and I will explain.”
“Answer me first. Confirm everything Erris fears you’ve done, everything I’ve always known you are.”
“Yes,” he said. “We burned the ships in every port from here to the Thellan isles. It’s done, and no amount of rage or wrath will bring them back. So perhaps, instead of whatever display you imagined you’d put on here, you’d care to come with me and hear the reason why.”
She glared at him, the righteous stare she’d fixed on him since their first meetings turned sour. A great regret, that he’d never managed to turn her to their cause. For all her failings, Sarine was a woman who understood justice and rightness in the world, the sort of instincts that had driven him and Victoire and all the rest. A sister-in-arms, for all she’d never admit it, even to herself.
He gestured toward a side room adjoining the main chamber, and she followed. Victoire came along, too, rising to accompany them and simultaneously reassuring the rest of the room that all was well, that they should return to their debates and revelry.
“Well?” Sarine said as soon as Victoire closed the door behind them. “I’m here, and I’m listening. Though what possible reason you think you could have for destroying dozens of ships, I can’t begin to imagine.”
“Hundreds, I think,” he said, smiling. He meant it as a lighthearted comment, to soften the mood between them, but she took it with ice. “You know d’Arrent meant to use them to evacuate her armies. She meant to abandon our people; the very crime Louis-Sallet intended to perpetuate, the crime that earned him a knife in his back.”
“Your knife in his back,” Sarine said. “I remember; I was there.”
“And I’d do it again,” he said. “Have you been watching her, Sarine? Have you witnessed her descent from common general to tyrant?”
“Erris? She’s fighting to do what’s best for our people.”
“She’s all but enslaved our people, or hadn’t you noticed she’s been using her Need to force oaths of fealty from every priest, every magistrate, every officer in her army? Personal oaths, loyalty to her, not to the state.”
Sarine frowned. “I’m sure she’s using it to put vessels in place wherever she might need them.”
“And what of those who refuse the oath, or those with whom Need doesn’t work, for whatever reason? She’s had them imprisoned. Hundreds of them. Imprisoned, replaced, and forgotten. Branded traitors, and never mind what it’s done to their families, to their children, to the communities who had supported them and put them in place. Now we have loyalists to d’Arrent in every avenue of power. She doesn’t give a damn about our people, or their will. She doesn’t give a damn about égalité. She has to be put down, and if there was time to revolt against her before these Jun armies arrive, we’d already be rallying our people in the streets. As it is, we had to burn the ships to keep her armies here, but her time will come as soon as our homeland is secure, make no mistake.”
Sarine fell quiet, looking between him and Victoire, her righteous anger softened, though it still smoldered underneath.
“There’s a larger war going on here,” she said finally. “We don’t have time or energy to spend fighting with each other. You hurt us today, Reyne. Whatever Erris’s failings, we needed those ships.”
“Reyne has told me about you,” Victoire said. “You’re the one who can use the leylines and the kaas, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Sarine said. “But that doesn’t—”
“You’re one of us,” Victoire said. “Properly you always should have been. You understand that sometimes, doing what’s right means sacrifice. From all I’ve heard of you, you should be the first to believe that our people must be empowered to fight for themselves, for their homes. The ships are burned; we saw to it. It’s done. But I wager when we make our stand here, defending New Sarresant, you’ll be standing at the front lines, shoulder to shoulder with every citizen who will take up arms beside you.”
Once again she fell quiet, this time studying Victoire as though she’d met him before, but couldn’t quite place the face.
“She will,” Reyne said. “Sarine has always shared our ends, for all we’ve disagreed on methods to attain them. And I hope, my dear, that you will carry a message from us to Erris d’Arrent. Our militias stand ready to defend these colonies, and our kaas-mages, too. We are at her service, for now, until these Jun invaders are turned back. Politics will follow, when the time is right. For now, we fight, together, as the trueborn children of the New World.”
Sarine turned to him. It was a gamble; he knew firsthand what she was capable of, if she decided to turn this salon into a slaughterhouse. But that had never been her way. He’d bet on it again and again, just as he bet his life on it now.
“You’ll fight?” she said finally. “You and all your people?”
“We will,” he said. “When the hour arrives, our militias will make common cause with the tyrant’s soldiers. And then again I hope, when the time comes to put her head on a spike.”
“Fine,” Sarine said. “See to it they’re ready. You’re a Gods-damned fool, Reyne d’Agarre, and you always have been. But I’ll tell Erris your people will be there for the fight.”
“Count on it,” he said, smiling. Another victory, if this was all the tyrant meant to send at him today. The rest would come, with patience and diligence. He’d long since learned there was nothing inevitable about this path, however right the cause. Only blood could buy the future. A phrase he needed to remember, when next he found time to write. Then young men would quote him, too, alongside the rest. That thought did as much as anything else to broaden his smile, and spread the flush of victory.
19
SARINE
Verrain River
Riverways District, New Sarresant
She crossed the Louis-Toullard Bridge at a brisk pace. Since she’d learned the secrets of Tigai’s gift the world had grown smaller. What had once been an afternoon’s walk through the Riverways, the Gardens, or Southgate was now a hurried rush. New Sarresant had been all she’d ever known; now it was a single point of glowing light, among a field of countless others. And all of them had demands on her, every star and vortex of blue sparks, every leyline, every spirit, every colored emotion through her kaas.
You’re being melodramatic today, Anati thought.
“I am not either being melodramatic,” she said. “Or didn’t you notice I just had to deal with one of the most pigheaded idiots on this side of the Divide?”
Reyne d’Agarre, Anati thought, as though they hadn’t left his salon only moments before. A powerful soul, the sort that twists events around him.
“I don’t need you singing his praises,” she said, keeping her head down as she crossed the iron gate that marked the entrance to the Maw. A fellow pedestrian eyed her as they crossed paths, keeping a wary distance for all the man was twice her size.
I’m not singing. I don’t think kaas can sing, can we?
“I’m not in the mood,” she said. “You know what I meant.”
Come to think on it, I don’t believe I’ve ever tried singing. What was the song we heard the other night? “I knew a lad with skin like cream, lips as soft as silk; tried to give him home and hearth; all he gave me was his milk.”
Her cheeks flushed. “That’s not the sort of song you should be singing. Where did you hear that?”
At the Pig’s Roost, night before last, in Villecours, before we went looking for Reyne. You were busy making faces at the man in the dark green trousers.
“I wasn’t making faces!”
You looked like this. Anati lowered the slope of her head, fluttering her eyelids and flushing the scales over her nose a bright shade of pink.
It earned a snorting laugh, and a second glare from the man passing her on the otherwise empty street.
I wasn’t trying to be humorous, Anati thought to her.
“Yes you were.”
Maybe a bit.
She shook her head, trying to fight down the smile Anati had managed to coax through the fog of her mood. There wasn’t time for humor; the quiet on the city’s streets attested to it, with no small measure of real fog besides. Thick clouds hung low over the Gardens and Southgate, leaving the southern side of the Verrain cloaked in mist. It felt as though her last glances of the city were being stolen. Battle was coming here again. She might not see the city again, or at least, not as it was, not as she remembered it. It brought a wave of sadness, as quick as Anati’s levity had dredged a smile.
Sulking now? Anati asked.
“Stop it,” she said. “I just… there isn’t time to sketch the city, is there?”
No. Probably not.
She kept walking. For a moment she could almost feel her world as it had been, what felt like so many years before: the straps of her pack, the weight of fresh paper and charcoal and nothing else in the world on her shoulders. Her and Zi and untapped stores of Faith on the leylines. She hadn’t needed anything else.
The last streets of the Maw at least still felt like home. Her feet knew the way without thought, past broad thoroughfares of warehouses, three- and four-story housing blocks packed so tight it seemed one building ran into the next. The little garden surrounding her uncle’s chapel, the rows of gravestones in the yard. The main steps and the Sacre-Lin’s ornate wood doors, the stained-glass windows set in rows facing the street, and the side entrances no one but her, her uncle, and the occasional peddler ever used.
“Uncle?” she called, pushing open the service door that let straight into the kitchens. She’d have known at once if Father Thibeaux had been conducting a sermon, silhouettes and activity visible through the chapel’s stained glass. Though now she heard the sound of laughter coming from the main hall.
A cauldron of soup had been put on, filling the kitchens with the scent of bubbling carrots, poultry, spices, and broth.
“Sarine, my child, is that you?” her uncle called back. It put more warmth in her belly than any soup or hearth to hear his voice. “Come, help me greet our guests.”
She pushed through the kitchen doors into the chapel, emerging behind the dais where her uncle conducted his services. Rows of pews stretched into the main hall, empty save for where a small group rose to their feet. Her uncle, Father Thibeaux, in familiar brown robes, though his gray mustaches had sprouted growth to cover his jaw and cheeks in the beginnings of a full beard. Behind him Rosline Acherre stood, Colonel Marquand behind her, and Tigai, Yuli, and all four of her Natarii sisters.
“Uncle,” she said again, and he met her with open arms, engulfing her in a tight embrace. “You seem to have lost your razor.”
Her uncle smiled, fingering the growth on his jaw. “Do you like it? I thought it time for a change.”
“It’s lovely,” she said. “Or it will be, when it’s grown. When it stops looking like a patch of weeds in need of tending.”
He laughed, his eyes shining. “You know Major Acherre and Colonel Marquand,” her uncle said. “And the rest. Quite the company you’ve been keeping since you’ve been away.”
She turned to them, giving Acherre the same embrace she gave her uncle, and Yuli. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“We came for the sermons, of course,” Acherre said. “Word around the district is no one preaches the Chronicles of Wrath and Mercy quite so well as Father Thibeaux.”
“We’re here for you, sister,” Yuli said. “We’ve been planning a great attack, and we need you at our head.”
“An attack?” she said. “How did you know I’d be here? I haven’t been back since we left the Gods’ Seat.”
Tigai shrugged. “Seemed the likeliest place to find you, given you weren’t at the hunting lodge. It was this or hop around the stars, and risk drawing attention from their Dragons. We’d have started doing that if you hadn’t shown up by nightfall.”
“I figured Erris would have you taking soldiers across the ocean,” she said.
“I figured the same,” Tigai replied. “But Marquand impressed on her the danger, and he’ll do the same for you. We can’t risk using the Dragons’ gift with their armies so close. May as well hang a sign around our necks telling them where we are.”
“Is that what this is about?” she asked. “Assassins?”
“After a manner of speaking,” Acherre said. “By which I mean we’re going to be the assassins this time. Seems right bloody proper, given we’ve got the reincarnated Veil on our side and so far we’ve done little more than spring their traps.”
“All right,” she said. “But you know the Jun are almost here. I’d intended to help Erris and Reyne defend the city.”
“What’s this about the Veil?” her uncle said, still smiling as though waiting for them to explain the joke. “I’ll not tolerate blasphemy in my church.”
“It’s… it’s nothing, uncle,” she said. “I’ll explain later.”
“Last reports have the Jun armies two, maybe three days out,” Marquand said. “There’s time. And with bloody Dragons on our enemy’s side, there’s no guarantee two days will stay two days for long. We have to strike soon. Tomorrow, while the soldiers on both sides are forming up. Gods damn us all if they’ve moved already.”
Her uncle harrumphed, eyeing Marquand with a glare. “I meant what I said about blasphemy in these halls, Colonel.”
“Err… sorry, Father,” Marquand said.
“Who is ‘they’?” she asked. “The target of your assassination?”
“We’re attacking Lin Qishan,” Tigai said. “She has to be one of the Regnant’s champions, to have survived what she did, and to be at the head of their army. Whatever else is going on with her, or with the Regnant’s armies, that’s our plan.”
“You said Lin was in Gantar Baat,” she said. “On the Regnant’s side of the world.”
“Gantar Baat,” Tigai said. “Yes.”
“We need you at our side, sister,” Yuli said. “Come with us.”
She glanced back at her uncle. She longed for all of them to go away, to leave her alone for even a few minutes with the man who had raised her.
“What does Erris think of this plan?” she asked. “I was with her this morning, not six hours ago. She didn’t say anything about an attack.”
“She doesn’t know about it,” Acherre said. “But she put Marquand in command. It’s his prerogative to deploy us. And this is how we’re going to win this war. Not with armies, and not by defending our cities and people. We find their champions and kill them, before they find ours. It’s ugly, but this is how it has to be. You said it all yourself.”
Tigai and Yuli and her sisters nodded along as Acherre spoke.
“I just met with Reyne,” she said. “He’s gathering kaas-mages and rallying his militias. If we’re going to do this, I need time to see to his people first. With Tigai’s help we could ferry most of them into action in a matter of hours, before the Jun armies arrive.”
Acherre grinned. “So you’re with us?”
“I’m with you,” she said. “I agree; Lin has to be a champion. Let’s grab some bowls and help my uncle serve soup and you can explain the rest of this plan.”
