“We received more information last night,” Tanays said. “The rabble out of Old Galind is a group of the Thief Queen’s lot.”
“Thought I’d killed them all,” Saradyn said. His circle was one of the last to hold to the Thief Queen’s old moniker – Quilliam of the Mountain Fortress; Quill of Galind; Quill the Thief Queen. He supposed he was one of the few old enough to remember she had a real name once before she tried to take his power and he killed her for it.
Tanays leaned over the fire pan and pushed a sizzling slab of boar bacon with a charred stick. Above his peppered-gray beard, lines etched the corners of his eyes. He kept his brow perpetually furrowed. He was always squinting.
“I’m assuming this group of rebels wants autonomy,” Saradyn said.
“They want to call themselves Rohandar,” Tanays said, “after some dead city.”
“Just what Tordin needs,” Saradyn said. “Another country.”
“That’s their thought.”
“Let’s sweep the village of dissidents, then,” Saradyn said.
“I haven’t told you everything,” Tanays said.
“Sweep it clean. I don’t want it butchered completely.” He liked Tanays, but Tanays had always been too hesitant, too willing to sit on his heels and let events run their course. Saradyn had not gotten this far by sitting back from the fray. Tordin had been in disarray since the murder of the Empress of Dorinah’s sister, Penelodyn, twenty years before when she was burned out by the Thief Queen. Saradyn had taken full advantage of the chaos. Now the whole region was nearly his, from the northern mountains to the southern sea. Nearly.
Saradyn gazed out at the camp and saw a cluster of figures at the edge of the trees, insubstantial, like fog. He whistled to Dayns and Sloe. The dogs loped toward him.
“See,” he said, and pointed to the tree line. The dogs galloped through the camp. They smashed through the line of hazy figures. The dogs did not howl, and did not bark.
So the figures were just ghosts. The older he became, the wider his influence, the more invaluable the dogs. They had saved his life more times than his own men. They had often saved him from his own men. The dogs always knew who to fear, and who was just some wandering specter broken loose from Laine’s sons in the sky.
Saradyn whistled the dogs back. He looked down at Tanays.
“We run a sweep,” Saradyn said. “Tordin has just one ruler.”
They went house to house. They dragged men from their beds, from closets, from lofts, from stone cellars. They gathered the men in the big wooden church at the center of town. Saradyn wanted every drop of blood dedicated to Laine.
“Keep your heads high,” he told his men before they swept the town for insurgents. And they did. They left the women – crying or defiant or fighting – untouched in their homes, left the children screaming, but took every boy over ten. They interrogated them, one by one. They took them into church boxes, alcoves. They left the priest unscathed, and did not even touch his fingers. Saradyn knelt before the old man and asked for absolution from Laine, and the priest gave it, though his voice trembled and his hands shook.
Saradyn had not underestimated the women of northern Tordin, though by asking that they remain untouched, he was not surprised when they marched out of their houses and tried to storm the church.
Saradyn had his men open the big doors. They cleared the stairs with a smattering of arrows. He grabbed up the village headwoman’s eldest son and dragged him onto the stair. Tanays was just behind them, and a half dozen of his best fighters. Dayns and Sloe paced the lip of the lower stairs, hackles raised, growling at the mob of women.
“We come to do no violence,” Saradyn told them. “Any violence done will be in response to your actions. Go back to your houses, or you’ll see death on these steps.”
The women screamed at him. Surged forward. Saradyn cut the boy’s throat. He pushed the gurgling body down the steps, and called behind him, without taking his eyes from the women – “Give me someone they care about!”
He saw a hundred screaming ghosts at the women’s shoulders – dead children, bloody babies with dark lips, and the ghosts of their own pasts; old women and matrons in their youth, all paths open to them, before their roads grew shorter, before pregnancies and abortions, nursing, husbands, obligation, sacrifice; before binding their blood to another and giving over their passions for it.
Saradyn stared out at their ghosts and said, “Go back to your houses. I don’t want to threaten your children, but your children have threatened my rule. You are good women. Good mothers. It’s your hand that keeps me here or keeps me away. Don’t teach your boys defiance. Don’t teach your girls swordplay. That only brings more violence here.”
The ghosts stirred.
“You’re a fool!” one of the women cried.
“Maybe so,” Saradyn said, “but it’s not my children bleeding on these steps.”
The surge of women heaved a collective breath. Saradyn watched the ghosts. The ghosts wailed and thrashed. Flickered. Two women near the back of the mob turned away.
“This is your power,” Saradyn said. “Stay here, and you condemn me and my men to stay with you. Go home, and we finish and go our way. Keep weapons out of your children’s hands, and you need not see my face again. I’m here to unite this country, not destroy it.”
A few more women broke away. Then others. Slowly, in small groups. They dropped their stones, smoothed at their hair. Their children clung to their apron strings.
Saradyn did not turn his back until the ghosts of those left had ceased to scream, and whispered to themselves instead. When he turned, Tanays was watching him.
“I never pegged you as a man who knows how to talk to women.”
“I talk to them like men,” Saradyn said, “men who are bound to their bodies. But I know where women belong in my country, and it’s not in public spaces. They know it, too. It’s why they listen to me.”
“Now?”
“Now I find my troublemakers, and show them Laine’s mercy.”
Saradyn sat in on a half dozen interrogations. He took the fingers off a boy of twelve whose father would not speak.
The old man burst into tears. He clutched at his screaming boy. The two had a stir of ghosts around them, misty figures – sobbing torsos, women with streaming hair.
Saradyn did not look at either of them, but at the lonely fingers lying on Laine’s altar. His ax had made a deep groove in the silver-painted wood.
Tanays sat on the steps just below Saradyn, speaking with a hysterical young boy who was spilling names and wild stories.
Saradyn set his ax on the altar and pulled the old man away from his son. “Tell me where the troublemakers are,” Saradyn said. “End this.”
The man collapsed in front of Saradyn. His hair was a white tangle. Red dust filled the seams of his face. “Liege, they don’t mean harm. Not one of them. They’re just girls. Young. They don’t know better.” His big hands clung to Saradyn’s trousers.
Tanays pulled a pipe out of his long coat, lit it with a scorch pod. The pod was one of the few precious Dhai resources that made it through the blockade of Dhai’s harbor. “Down here, Saradyn,” Tanays said.
Saradyn shook the old man off. He stepped around the bloody pool growing around the boy’s fingerless hand. The boy lay slumped against the altar. Saradyn’s surgeon attended him.
“Who?” Saradyn asked, crouching next to Tanays and the boy.
“Rosh started it,” the boy bawled. He was very young, younger than ten. He’d likely lied about his age when they swept the houses.
“Where can I find Rosh?”
The boy pointed with his good hand. A misty halo rode his right shoulder, the beginnings of a face.
Saradyn looked over at the pews where a group of boys huddled.
“Which one, boy?” Tanays said.
The boy wiped his face with his grubby remaining hand. He scrambled to his feet and turned on the other boys waiting in the pews. They st
ared at him. A stir of jeers started.
Pol pointed to a skinny youth at the center of the bunch. Saradyn took the youth for a boy, at first – narrow and smooth cheeked, with big, dark eyes and cropped dark hair the color of old blood.
Saradyn told the youth to stand up. “You’re being accused,” Saradyn said.
The youth glared at him. He expected more fear. But then he saw the ghosts, and decided she was female. The ghosts were as defiant as she – two boyish figures and the torso of a deathly pale woman with a halo of black hair. They were mute ghosts, and static.
“He’s a stupid boy,” she said. “You listen to fool boys?”
“Stand up, Rosh,” Saradyn said.
The girl stood, though he couldn’t mark her as a girl, even knowing it, looking for it because of her ghosts. She was the sort of androgyne who had passed through his army in the old days. These days, he tried to pick them out and send them home. He couldn’t grow a country with half its women fucking about in the army instead of having babies at home.
“There are worse things we can do, to a girl,” Saradyn said.
She spat at him. “It’s no different, no matter who you do it to.”
Saradyn hauled her out by the collar. She struck at him. He twisted her arm behind her and pushed her against the altar. “We need to know the rest of your little band of dissidents,” Saradyn said. “You ran with the Thief Queen? You don’t look old enough.”
“My mother did.”
“And where’s she?”
“Dead, fuck you,” the girl said.
Saradyn gripped her cropped hair, and smashed her head on the altar. “Again?”
“Dead,” she gasped. Blood dripped from her mouth.
The old man was gripping his son’s arm at the behest of the surgeon.
“You brought all this on us!” the old man cried at the girl. The misty faces around him contorted. “You brought the hound up from the south, you fool!”
“Who else?” Saradyn leaned into the girl and murmured in her ear. She kicked back at him, and nearly caught him in the groin. One of his men stepped in and helped keep her still.
“You can’t scare me,” she said. Her ghosts hovered around the altar. They stared stoically back at Saradyn.
“You’d prefer I give you over to my men?” Saradyn said.
“What? Fucking me? Fucking doesn’t scare me, you old fool. I’ll still be here. I’ll just be more pissed off.”
The ghost with the black hair moved. She hissed. Perhaps that was her mother’s ghost.
“How many parts need to be here,” Saradyn said, “and still keep you speaking? Not many.” Saradyn released her into the hold of the other men at the altar. “Bind her and take her with us.”
They took a handful of the village boys as well, the midwife’s son, the headwoman’s youngest, and an assortment of her cousins. The boys were sworn to Saradyn and to Laine. Saradyn left two dozen of his fighters in residence to root out the rest of Rosh’s rebels.
The remaining men trudged back south with Saradyn. They camped that night with a double guard. Errant villagers had been known to come after their kin.
Saradyn sat in his tent with the dogs and broke open his old copy of Penelodyn’s On Governance. He’d had all of her work translated from the original Dorinah. His copy was dog-eared, the spine broken twice. He followed the writing with his finger, mouthing the words.
Tanays’ voice came from without. “Permission to enter?”
“Enter,” Saradyn said.
Tanays ducked in. He knelt back on his heels across from Saradyn. His ghost tailed him, a pace behind. She was clasping and unclasping her hands. A new affectation. Saradyn did not often see her move. She was usually a static ghost.
Sloe nudged his big nose toward Tanays. Tanays scratched the dog’s ears.
“Any trouble?” Saradyn asked.
“That girl isn’t easy dealing.”
“The men will soften her up.”
“Not really.”
“Nothing worse than a talkative woman,” Saradyn said.
“No man would believe you married,” Tanays said.
“But they might believe she’s dead.”
Tanays did not look at him. He kept scratching behind Sloe’s ears. The dog wagged his enormous tail, nearly tumbling over the lantern. Saradyn pulled the lantern out of the way.
“You’re too hard on that girl, I think,” Tanays said. “She might be more useful if you turned her. Try kindness. Convince her of your vision as you convinced us. Any girl who leads a rebellion is–”
“Too much like the Thief Queen,” Saradyn said. “I knew Quill before she was Queen. And she was just like that girl. Dirty, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, following no god but her own black conscience.”
“She’s dangerous because there’s no place for her,” Tanays said.
Saradyn closed his book. He felt a stirring of anger, a tightening in his chest. He had run with Tanays for over twenty years, and the man had only gotten softer with age. Since Tanays’ daughter’s death, he’d seen her in every ragged girl they tracked down, every girlish boy who’d tried to join their ranks because of some foolish peasant story about the Thief Queen.
The ghost at Tanays’ elbow stared forlornly at Saradyn.
“There’s no place for women here,” Saradyn said. “She’ll bleed and get pregnant, and then we’ll have squalling pups to deal out. She’ll make jealousy in–”
“You know as well as I about jealousy in the ranks. That Morran boy–”
“Is too pretty for his own good,” Saradyn said. “I have him set for the next scout. I’d toss him out altogether if he wasn’t our best archer.”
“My point–”
Saradyn eyed him sharply. “Have you forgotten what I’ve done for this title? This vision? A united Tordin. No one comes in the way of it. Not women. Not my own wife. Not my own children.”
“Must they all pay for your mistakes?”
“Get out,” Saradyn said.
Tanays bowed and left him.
Saradyn glared at Sloe, who looked mournfully after Tanays and his big-eyed ghost. Sloe’s tail thumped.
“Be still,” Saradyn said.
The dog whined.
Saradyn and his company arrived at his seat in Gasira eight days later. Itague, his steward at the Gasiran hold, met him just inside the gate. Itague was a big man, heavily bearded. He took Saradyn into a meaty embrace and kissed the backs of his hands.
“You brought those dissidents to heel?” Itague asked. A twisting morass of ghostly figures contorted just behind him – a woman screaming, a blind old man with hands like claws, three boys with bloody faces.
“That’s yet to see,” Saradyn said. “Has Thorne arrived? I heard word of him in the north.”
They started together up the curve of the outer stair and into the hold. Inside was little warmer than without. Saradyn’s dogs trod behind him. Their nails clicked on the stone.
“Natanial Thorne came in just this morning from Aaldia,” Itague said, “carrying a motley bunch with him. Don’t know where he picks them.”
“Hostages?”
“I assumed.”
“Tell him I want him in my quarters.”
Saradyn went up to his quarters and unbolted the big iron banded door. He sent the dogs in. Some drudge had lit the hearth and lantern above the bed. Saradyn saw furtive shapes near the slit window, and another in the chair amid a stir of shadows.
Dayns and Sloe paced the room. Sloe snuffled under the bed, and nosed open the wardrobe. Dayns went straight to the figures at the fire. He paused at the far chair. His hackles rose. A low growl came from deep in his throat. Sloe bounded over and paced in a wide circle around the chair, whining.
Saradyn shut the door and whistled the dogs away. Dayns shook off his stance and settled in front of the fire. Sloe lolled beside him. The big dogs took up all the space in front of the hearth, blocking the heat.
Saradyn yanked a knife from his hip a
nd threw it at the chair. The knife buried itself in the leather arm of the seat. The figure sitting there didn’t flinch. Saradyn grunted and began unbuckling his leather armor.
“You’re tardy,” Saradyn said, “by a large margin. I should murder you for it.”
“Don’t you have a boy to help you with all that dressing and undressing?” Natanial asked. His voice was a quiet rumble. He pulled the dagger from the arm of the chair and regarded it. “You keep your blade far too dull,” he said. “Blunt instrument.” He sat with one leg hooked over the other. He rolled a lump of sen between thumb and forefinger, staining his hands crimson. The hands had been the first thing Saradyn noticed about Natanial, after his lack of substantial ghosts. The shadows that rode Natanial’s shoulders were just that – voiceless patches of darkness without solid form. They carried no names, no faces, no past. Natanial was the only man he’d met whose ghosts had no faces, as if Natanial had never marked them in life. He wasn’t a man to hang onto his regrets. Saradyn appreciated that.
“A blunt knife to the eye is as effective,” Saradyn said, “if thrown with enough force.”
Natanial shrugged. “Surely you have more experience with such things than I.”
Foul-mouthed little sarcastic shit, that one. Saradyn pulled off his stiff, dirty tunic and tossed it next to his bed. He washed himself with cloth and water from the basin near the wardrobe. He watched Natanial’s figure in the polished bronze above the basin.
Natanial was long and lean, his face the rugged, angular cast of some handsome house. Natanial’s face and form were nearly as valuable as his wit. Nearly. Saradyn would have dismissed the man for looks alone if not for his shadows. Saradyn didn’t trust beauty, but it roused him. Natanial’s mix of beauty and arrogance never failed to stir him.
“Tell me of Dorinah,” Saradyn said. He pulled a clean black tunic from his wardrobe, “and this dalliance in Aaldia.”
“You look as if you need help,” Natanial said.
Saradyn recognized the invitation. He tugged open his trousers and let his cock free. He sat on the chair opposite Natanial, spread his legs, and met Natanial’s look, daring him to act.
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