Rule

by Rowenna Miller

  “Benefit of the job,” I replied softly.

  “If this doesn’t—if we don’t—” Kristos cleared his throat. “I’ve made arrangements for you. Annette is holding back a ship, she’ll meet you at Farrow’s Cove, just south of—”

  “Kristos,” I said, shaking my head. “No. You shouldn’t have—we need all the ships.”

  “Too late now.” He forced half a smile. “It was a little clipper, not much good for a firefight anyway. But she’ll get you out of the country.”

  “That’s not what we promised,” I said with a wry smile. I looked back over the field. The dragoons were readying to deploy. I loosed the charm I held spooled and waiting for my command, settling speed and luck over the dragoons, who began to thunder toward the nearest gun emplacement.

  Kristos raised a confused brow. “What did we promise?”

  “We promised that we’d all hang together,” I said. Lines of troops advanced onto the field, the complicated game of battle begun. “Now—this is where I have to start paying attention. You go run along and—what are you doing? Commanding a wing or some such?”

  Kristos laughed. “Babysitting the artillery wagons.”

  I grabbed his hand and squeezed it, briefly, then began the more delicate work of balancing charm and curse at the same time. Soon dark pockets of jet-sparkle shadow engulfed the redoubts still firing on the city, and I drove needles of curse toward the guns themselves, as though I could spike the touchholes of the guns with magic.

  I couldn’t, of course—but I could etch the curse into the bronze itself and bury it in the wooden carriages they sat on within the redoubts. They fired, one after the other, and at first I didn’t notice a change in the rhythm. I steadied my breath. I knew that curse and charm, both, were not fail-safe spells, but part of me had expected to see something dramatic immediately, like the curse I had flung at the Royalist navy ship. Then, slowly, guns stopped firing regularly. One crew worked at a misfire; another was suddenly quite invested in getting something unstuck from the gun’s touchhole. A third crew found itself halved by rifle fire. By the time the blockage was cleared in the first gun, another two guns were misfiring, and finally, one cannon ruptured in a burst of smoke and flame.

  I allowed myself a small smile—this was a minor victory, but it was helping. Slowly. I held the dark over the remaining artillery battery, and pressed more light toward the dragoons who closed in on a redoubt. The field looked nothing like I would have expected; the large forces were divided into small-scale skirmishes as units converged and clashed, bayonets flashing and every foot of the field fought for and bloodied.

  Section by section, foot by foot, the Royalists yielded more and more of the field. We were pressing them back, but they had nowhere to go; the city walls prevented retreat from one direction. From the direction of the river, unseen from my vantage point but ready, a combined regiment of Pellians and Galatines cut off the only other avenue of retreat.

  Then an echoing tattoo of drumbeats broke across the field, and I looked toward the sound, holding the strings of my charms and curses like the leashes of unruly dogs. From the forest’s edge, lines of men in Royalist uniforms marched toward the fray. My stomach sank—we thought we were engaging the full force of the Royalists, but they had held what appeared to be a dozen companies in reserve, and now they challenged us, forcing our men to split and fight in both directions at once.

  I scanned the lines of advancing Royalists, but I didn’t see any Serafans. I had doubted they could be used here; the fight was too close, too tightly packed together for their casting to influence only one side or another. But behind the advancing Royalists I heard the wan shadow of music. Serafan pipes. The Royalists were marching away from the influence of the musical casting, but they would be fortified with additional luck, courage, and energy for the first vital moments of engagement.

  Then, from the thick wall of forest hedge, coarse brambles not thinned by winter, I saw something else. Rose-pink uniforms. The riflemen.

  I knew where my attention had to go, what I had to do, even as it turned my stomach. The riflemen were the most dangerous strategy that the Royalists could deploy against us. Trained to pick off officers, dragoons, even the musicians whose drumbeats relayed orders, a few well-placed shots could throw our troops into chaos. Fortunately, their finely tuned rifles took over a minute to load per shot. And that gave me time to work.

  With a bracing exhale, I pulled fresh dark magic from the ether, thicker and deeper than I had ever attempted to draw out before. Black, dim, and veined with flashes of jet-like sparkle, it surged with a life of its own, a force unused to being manipulated. Still, it yielded to my direction, and I sent it in wide bands across the field to where the rose-uniformed riflemen were taking their positions along the tree line.

  I snipped a length of curse from a band like clipping thread from a spool, and wound it around the first rifleman, then another, then the man next to him, all down the line. The magic fought against constraint, but I pressed it into the fibers of uniforms, holding it fast in wool and linen and felted hats. I forced back revulsion in myself as the curse magic began to affect them, one man clapping a hand to his befuddled head like a caricature of confusion. Yet most of them continued to press on, working their recalcitrant hands on weapons that now seemed to rear against them. One man sliced clean through his thumb with his flint, blood staining his coat cuffs as it poured down his wrist.

  I found the next rifle unit, and repeated the process, and again, but it wasn’t enough. The first unit, even cursed, continued working, and the first rifle shots, louder and sharper than the musket fire, echoed over the field, making my heart constrict in my chest. I couldn’t see if they had hit anyone, not yet. But I pulled back to the first unit I had laid curses on, and not only strengthened the magic, but tightened it, sinking it into rifle wood, sinking it deep into cloth until I could feel the resistance of skin and muscle to the invasion of curse magic.

  I turned away from the painful horror at what I was doing and pushed deeper.

  The first of the riflemen clutched his head in visible pain. His neighbor vomited into the high weeds. Tears streaked my cheeks and nausea rose in my gut, but I continued, tightening the ring of curse around each man, hoping against my own fear that my control was good enough to incapacitate them.

  The sharp cracks of the rifles grew sporadic and then disappeared, but I held firm to the darkness, not allowing it to grow any stronger, to siphon any more ill luck out of the ether that could begin to encroach on our own men. I teased it back, thoughts of decaying lilies in cursed water sticking thick in my memory.

  Then a shout from behind me, several rapid footfalls, and something broad and solid made contact with the back of my head. I saw black.

  51

  THE FIRST THING I NOTICED WHEN I WOKE WAS A ROAR OF PAIN, nothing like the needlepoint tapestry of headache after casting too much. I inched a hand up the back of my skull, locating an exquisitely tender egg. I opened my eyes. I was in a tent—no, an officer’s marquee. My fingers closed over the blanket beneath me—fine cashmere, not coarse wool.

  “They weren’t supposed to harm you.”

  I started, and the pain increased to the point of nausea.

  “Help her sit.” The voice was familiar, pale and feminine and elegantly precise. Someone stood beside the bed, and I craned my head carefully to see her. A girl in a pink worsted wool gown and large pinner apron—sturdy hands and sun-browned nose, and certainly not the speaker. She looked at me sympathetically as she offered an arm. I waved her off and struggled upright on my own.

  Polly sat at the foot of the bed. She watched me impassively, wide blue eyes neither remorseful nor hostile. She wore a riding habit of deep, rich blue, slim gilt braid winking at the seams and buttonholes. The bright flash of sun on her gold buttons made my eyes water.

  “Dicey, you can leave. The patient appears at least acceptably recovered.” The girl dipped a curtsy and scurried from the tent as quick
ly as she could.

  “What happened?” I asked. I furtively checked myself—still dressed in my gray-and-red traveling suit, not harmed beyond the goose egg on my head.

  “Isn’t it clear? You were a threat to the Royalist enterprise, and so you were taken captive. A brilliant maneuver by the Third Light Infantry, I’m to understand, undercut your men’s defenses at the base of your hill and had you in hand before any resistance on the other side.”

  “But they weren’t supposed to harm me,” I repeated with more than a little cynicism.

  She met my eyes, level and honest. “I think someone was a bit concerned to have to fight a witch.”

  “I’m—” But I couldn’t make that argument anymore. I had been harming men, directly, with my magic. Did Polly know? Surely by now they must have worked out that the sudden illness of the rifle companies wasn’t coincidental.

  “Someone will, I am sure, be disciplined. Father didn’t want violence on a woman, even a curse-casting Reformist, even in the midst of battle. It felt unseemly.”

  Polly shifted in her seat, and I realized, with thick foreboding settling in my stomach, that the guns had fallen silent. The field was quiet. No musket fire. No reports of cannons. No shouts. There was no way we were so far removed we could not hear the echoes of battle, if battle still raged. No, silence had descended on the field.

  “You didn’t go to Serafe.”

  “No, I did not go to Serafe.” Polly’s smile was absurdly apologetic. “I feared you would set men to follow me to my father, were I honest about my plans.”

  “I hadn’t even considered it,” I said.

  “I am in no way surprised you hadn’t. Now. I do wish you weren’t trying to have this conversation through what I imagine is a wretched headache,” Polly said, “but it’s imperative we speak of your immediate future.”

  “With you?” I pressed a hand against my throbbing temple. “That is, you’re… authorized to… what is this, a negotiation?”

  “The Royalist leadership has given me the authority to open these negotiations with you, given that everyone else is occupied with far greater concerns at the moment.”

  Carefully, deftly spoken. Nothing revealed about the outcome of the battle.

  “What do they want to negotiate? I’m in no position to accept your surrender.” The attempt at bravado was weak and I felt its absurdity. No point in bluffing or even joking. I had no leverage here—or did I? Why negotiate with me at all? “What is there to discuss?”

  “Your defection.” I started, but Polly merely smiled. “Come, you must have considered the reality, that your skill set would benefit anyone who possessed your loyalty.”

  “There is no way for the Royalists to possess my loyalty,” I retorted. “I—I’ve only employed my skills for the benefit of a cause I believe in.”

  “Is that so? Because I’d understood you to be rather lukewarm on the subject of revolution until quite recently. Only after my brother took up the cause. You were never a Red Cap alongside your own brother.”

  “I didn’t want my brother to be hurt! I was never in favor of violence. I believed in reform. Is that truly so impossible to comprehend?”

  “No. But I suggest something else, that your loyalty is not only to a cause but to people you care for. Your brother. Theodor.” She narrowed her eyes. “It’s not so easy, always, to speak only in terms of ethics, to act only in the service of causes. Is it?”

  My fingers worried the soft weave of the blanket under me. “No, it isn’t.”

  “I think we understand that better than most, you and I.” She sighed. “But now. The subject of your loyalties. We would be willing to consider a bargain. You know full well that the lives of your Reformist leadership are forfeit, traitors under the rule of rightful law. Spoken plainly, Theodor and Kristos will both be sentenced to an ignominious death by hanging, to be carried out quite promptly.”

  Now it was my turn to stare at her impassively, not letting the yawning horror in my gut speak plainly across my face.

  “Unless.” She leaned forward. “We would give them parole, to leave Galitha immediately, of course, if you pledged your loyalty to the Royalists and to the Galatine Crown.”

  “You want me to fight for you?”

  “In the immediate future, yes. We anticipate difficulty routing the last of the revolutionaries from the city, and in that you would promise to aid us. But after that—no, I don’t think your talents are suited for overseas deployments and defensive maneuvers. You would be granted lodging, access to any library or assistants you needed, and given charge to develop casters for the Crown, for Galitha. To rival any adversary.”

  I wanted nothing more than to spit in her eye, but my dry mouth wouldn’t allow for that, and I knew it was unwise, regardless. If Polly and I were here, at parlay, clearly the battle had been won—

  I stopped. Had it? The guns were silent, but that did not mean that the Royalists had won. It didn’t mean anyone had won. Parlay. Perhaps the two sides had merely come to parlay.

  If I agreed to her terms, I would be loosed on my countrymen. That much was clear—she and her fellows would hold the lives of my brother and my beloved over me until I had spun enough dark magic to effect a surrender. They had Serafan casters who could confirm my work, who I would likely work alongside. But—the thought crept in, I could be deployed against the city and never know who held the field.

  Still, insidious and ugly—if the Reformists had been beaten on the field, refusal meant the lives of those dearest to me. I took a shaky breath, knowing the gamble I had to take.

  52

  “I’M SORRY,” I SAID WITH A TREMBLING VOICE, “BUT WE ALL promised to hang together.”

  Her breath hiccupped slightly, surprised, and before she could recover, I knew—I had guessed correctly. The Royalists had not won, and their gambit was to not only remove me from the battlefield calculus but turn me against my own.

  “Well. If that’s your choice, I’m sure you’ll get your wish. But you might reconsider—”

  “I won’t. The guns will recommence momentarily, I imagine. Unless your brother and mine have accepted the surrender of your father.”

  The carefully controlled mask cracked, and she scowled. “You are cleverer than I gave you credit for. No. We have not surrendered. This was merely a parlay—well, the gambit failed. They’ll try the same shoe on the other foot, of course, if it comes to it—see if they’re willing to accept some forfeit for your return.”

  “They won’t,” I said, confident. I could trust Sianh to stay strong in that regard even if the others buckled. “Tell me honestly, who has the upper hand now?”

  She stood and shook out her deep indigo skirts. “You. But you’re counting on the participation of the men still inside the city walls.” She didn’t wait for confirmation. “You won’t get it.” She plucked her hat from a finely carved table, its balance wobbly on the uneven ground. “Perhaps you would be interested in watching,” she added as she perched the petite tricorne on her rolls of fair hair.

  I hesitated, but the rumble of the guns resuming convinced me. The war still waged. I couldn’t play my part unless I stayed present and ready.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and let the tent swim around me for a moment as I regained my bearings. Then I followed Polly outside.

  I quickly ascertained our position—encamped between the advancing Royalists and the city, but closer to the sea than the battlefield. If the Reformists took the day, it wouldn’t matter; Annette’s ships were closing in on the harbor and would not permit retreat. But Polly didn’t know that—none of the Royalists did.

  “Our best view would be from a bit higher up,” Polly said, her crisp, conversational tone returned as though she were welcoming dignitaries to tea instead of escorting a hostage. “But I think that unwise—it would be in view of the fracas back there, and in view is in range.” She essayed a slight smile. I eyed her, suspicious of her courtesy. Did she still think I might abandon
my decision and fight for the Royalists?

  Not likely, I ventured. This was the game she knew well, a game of polite faces and silent deception, a game of cordial words and hidden blades. I kept my distance, even though I felt sure another attempt at knifing me was unlikely. She didn’t usually have to bloody the weapons herself, and I doubted it benefited her now.

  “There. The harbor.” I saw it, not too distant, the water reflecting golden sunlight as the day arched across the sky. Packed with Royalist ships, ready to fight or to flee. I didn’t smile—even though they didn’t know that they were lying in a trap.

  “You already know what our Serafan allies can do,” she said. “But we have not yet shown the Reformists in the city. We felt it best to save that, to hold it in reserve.”

  “We?” I asked. “Do you help make the martial decisions for the Royalist army?”

  She tugged her skirt away from a fallen branch with a sharp jerk of her hand. “No, we don’t need women and nuns to do that.” I felt the keen knife-edge of grief—and knew Alba could have leveled Polly with one look. “Or disgraced Serafans—I heard he was a prostitute. Is that true?” She turned to me with a sardonic smile.

  I returned it with a pert grin. “He was. Quite highly sought after. Excellently talented,” I added, letting her color around the ears. Go ahead and try to embarrass me, I bid her silently. I grew up among the trash bins and gutters, I can win that game.

  But then a faint echo from the harbor stopped any words in my throat. Music. Serafan harp and violin, their tones thicker, wilder than Galatine instruments. We could hear only the echoes, only the remnant of the music they plied, but I knew full well—it was rife with curse magic, and it was bombarding the city.

  I searched it out, trying to pinpoint which ship carried the curse casters. I found the black cloud of glittering magic emanating from a space in the center of the harbor. “They must be on a very small ship,” I said.